degrees; a cloud had gone over the moon, fleecy, silver-edged, but
still a cloud. The waning of the light seemed to her significant; she
feared lest some bitter change might befall the moment; and went in,
bolting the door behind her. Once within her own little bedroom, she
loosened her hair, and moved about aimlessly, for a time, careless of
sleep, because it seemed so far. Then a sudden resolve nerved her, and
she stole back again to the front door, and opened it. The night was
blossoming there, glowing now, abundant. It was so rich, so full! The
moonlight here, and star upon star above, hidden not by clouds but by
the light! Need she waste this one night out of all her unregarded
life? She stepped forth among the flower-beds, stooping, in a
passionate fervor, to the blossoms she could reach; but, coming back to
the southernwood, she took it in her arms. She laid her face upon it,
and crushed the soft leaves against her cheeks. It made all the world
smell of its own balm and dew. The fragrance and beauty of the time
passed into her soul, and awakened corners there all unused to such
sweet incense. She was drunken with the wine that is not of grapes. She
could not have found words for the passion that possessed her, though
she hugged it to her heart like another self; but it was elemental,
springing from founts deeper than those of life and death. God made it,
and, like all His making, it was divine. She sat there, the
southernwood still gathered into her arms, and at last emotion stilled
itself, and passed into thought; a wild temptation rose, and with its
first whisper drove a hot flush into her cheeks, and branded it there.
Love! she had never named the name in its first natal significance. She
had scarcely read it; for romance, even in books, had passed her by.
But love! she knew it as the insect knows how to spread his new
sun-dried wings in the air for which he was create. Sitting there, in a
happy drowse, she thought it all out. She was old, plain, unsought; the
man she exalted was the flower of his kind. He would never look on her
as if she might touch the hem of wifehood's mantle; so there would be
no shame in choosing him. Just to herself, she might name the Great
Name. He would not know. Only her own soul would know, and God who gave
it, and sent it forth fitted with delicate, reaching tentacles to touch
the rock set there to wound them. She began to feel blindly that God
was not alone the keeper of eternal Sabbaths, but the germinant heat at
the heart of the world. If she were a young girl, like Phoebe, there
would be shame. Even a thought of him would be a stretching forth her
hand to touch him, saying, "Look at me! I am here!" but for her it was
quite different. It would be like a dream, some grandmother dreamed in
the sun, of rosy youth and the things that never came to pass. No one
would be harmed, and the sleeper would have garnered one hour's joy
before she took up her march again on the lonesomest road of all,--so
lonesome, although it leads us, home! Thus she thought, half sleeping,
until the night-dews clung in drops upon her hair; then she went in to
bed, still wrapped about with the drapery of her dreams.
Next morning, when Dorcas carried in her father's breakfast, she walked
with a springing step, and spoke in a voice so full and fresh it made
her newly glad.
"It's a nice day, father! There'll be lots of folks out to meeting."
"That's a good girl!" This was his commendation, from hour to hour; it
made up the litany of his gratitude for what she had been to him. "But
I dunno's I feel quite up to preachin' to-day, Dorcas!"
"That'll be all right, father. We'll get somebody."
"You bring me out my sermon-box after breakfast, an' I'll pick out
one," said he, happily. "Deacon Tolman can read it."
But, alas! Deacon Tolman had been dead this many a year!
A little later, the parson sat up in bed, shuffling his manuscript
about with nervous hands, and Dorcas, in the kitchen, stood washing her
breakfast dishes. That eager interest in living still possessed her.
She began humming, in a timid monotone. Her voice had the clearness of
truth, with little sweetness; and she was too conscious of its
inadequacy to use it in public, save under the compelling force of
conscience. Hitherto, she had only sung in Sunday-school, moved, as in
everything, by the pathetic desire of "doing her part;" but this
morning seemed to her one for lifting the voice, though not in Sunday
phrasing. After a little thought, she began thinly and sweetly,--
"Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,
I heard a maid sing in the valley below:
'O don't deceive me! O never leave me
How could you use a poor maiden so?'"
A gruff voice from the doorway broke harshly in upon a measure.
"Yes! yes! Well! well! Tunin' up a larrady, ain't ye?"
Dorcas knew who it was, without turning round,--a dark, squat woman,
broad all over; broad in the hips, the waist, the face, and stamped
with the race-mark of high cheekbones. Her thick, straight black hair
was cut "tin-basin style;" she wore men's boots, and her petticoats
were nearly up to her knees.
"Good morning, Nancy!" called Dorcas, blithely, wringing out her
dishcloth. "Come right in, and sit down."
Nance Pete (in other words, Nancy the wife of Pete, whose surname was
unknown) clumped into the room, and took a chair by the hearth. She
drew forth a short black pipe, looked into it discontentedly, and then
sat putting her thumb in and out of the bowl.
"You 'ain't got a mite o' terbacker about ye? Hey what?" she asked.
Dorcas had many a time been shocked at the same demand. This morning,
something humorous about it struck her, and she laughed.
"You know I haven't, Nancy Pete! Did you mend that hole in your skirt,
as I told you?"
Nance laboriously drew a back breadth of her coarse plaid skirt round
to the front, and displayed it, without a word. A three-cornered tear
of the kind known as a barn-door had been treated by tying a white
string well outside it, and gathering up the cloth, like a bag.
Dorcas's sense of fitness forbade her to see anything humorous in so
original a device. She stood before the woman in all the moral
excellence of a censor fastidiously clad.
"O Nancy Pete!" she exclaimed. "How could you?"
Nance put her cold pipe in her mouth, and began sucking at the
unresponsive stem.
"You 'ain't got a bite of anything t' eat, have ye?" she asked,
indifferently.
Dorcas went to the pantry, and brought forth pie, doughnuts and cheese,
and a dish of cold beans. The coffee-pot was waiting on the stove. One
would have said the visitor had been expected. Nance rose and tramped
over to the table. But Dorcas stood firmly in the way.
"No, Nancy, no! You wait a minute! Are you going to meeting to-day?"
"I 'ain't had a meal o' victuals for a week!" remarked Nance,
addressing no one in particular.
"Nancy, are you going to meeting?"
"Whose seat be I goin' to set in?" inquired Nance, rebelliously, yet
with a certain air of capitulation.
"You can sit in mine. Haven't you sat there for the last five years?
Now, Nancy, don't hinder me!"
"Plague take it, then! I'll go!"
At this expected climax, Dorcas stood aside, and allowed her visitor to
serve herself with beans. When Nance's first hunger had been satisfied,
she began a rambling monologue, of an accustomed sort to which Dorcas
never listened.
"I went down to peek into the Poorhouse winders, this mornin'. There
they all sut, like rats in a trap. 'Got ye, 'ain't they?' says I. Old
Sal Flint she looked up, an' if there'd been a butcher-knife handy, I
guess she'd ha' throwed it. 'It's that Injun!' says she to Mis' Giles.
'Don't you take no notice!' 'I dunno's I'm an Injun,' says I, 'I dunno
how much Injun I be. I can't look so fur back as that. I dunno's
there's any more Injun in me than there is devil in you!' I says. An'
then the overseer he come out, an' driv' me off. 'You won't git me in
there,' says I to him, 'not so long's I've got my teeth to chaw
sassafras, an' my claws to dig me a holler in the ground!' But when I
come along, he passed me on the road, an' old Sal Flint sut up by him
on the seat, like a bump on a log. I guess he was carryin' her over to
that Pope-o'-Rome meetin' they've got over to Sudleigh."
Dorcas turned about, in anxious interest.
"Oh, I wonder if he was! How _can_ folks give up their own meeting for
that?"
Nance pushed her chair back from the table.
"Want to see all kinds, I s'pose," she said, slyly. "Guess I'll try it
myself, another Sunday!"
"Anybody to home?" came a very high and wheezy voice from the doorway.
Dorcas knew that also, and so did Nance Pete.
"It's that old haddock't lives up on the mountain," said the latter,
composedly, searching in her pocket, and then pulling out a stray bit
of tobacco and pressing it tenderly into her pipe.
An old man, dressed in a suit of very antique butternut clothes, stood
at the sill, holding forward a bunch of pennyroyal. He was weazened and
dry; his cheeks were parchment color, and he bore the look of an active
yet extreme old age. He was totally deaf. Dorcas advanced toward him,
taking a bright five-cent piece from her pocket. She held it out to
him, and he, in turn, extended the pennyroyal; but before taking it,
she went through a solemn pantomime. She made a feint of accepting the
herb, and then pointed to him and to the road.
"Yes, yes!" said the old man, irritably. "Bless ye! of course I'm goin'
to meetin'. I'll set by myself, though! Yes, I will! Las' Sunday, I set
with Jont Marshall, an' every time I sung a note, he dug into me with
his elbow, till I thought I should ha' fell out the pew-door. My voice
is jest as good as ever 'twas, an' sixty-five year ago come spring, I
begun to set in the seats."
The coin and pennyroyal changed ownership, and he tottered away,
chattering to himself in his senile fashion.
"Look here, you!" he shouted back, his hand on the gate. "Heerd
anything o' that new doctor round here? Well, he's been a-pokin' into
my ears, an' I guess he'd ha' cured me, if anybody could. You know I
don't hear so well's I used to. He went a-peekin' an' a-pryin' round my
ears, as if he'd found a hornet's nest. I dunno what he see there; I
know he shook his head. I guess we shouldn't ha' got no such a man to
settle down here if he wa'n't so asthmy he couldn't git along where he
was. That's the reason he come, they say. He's a bright one!"
Dorcas left her sweeping, and ran out after him. For the moment, she
forgot his hopeless durance in fleshly walls.
"Did he look at 'em?" she cried. "Did he? Tell me what he said!"
"Why, of course I don't hear no better yit!" answered old Simeon,
testily, turning to stump away, "but that ain't no sign I sha'n't! He's
a beauty! I set up now, when he goes by, so's I can hear him when he
rides back. I put a quilt down in the fore-yard, an' when the ground
trimbles a mite, I git up to see if it's his hoss. Once I laid there
till 'leven. He's a beauty, he is!"
He went quavering down the road, and Dorcas ran back to the house,
elated afresh. An unregarded old man could give him the poor treasure
of his affection, quite unasked. Why should not she?
Nance was just taking her unceremonious leave. Her pockets bulged with
doughnuts, and she had wrapped half a pie in the Sudleigh "Star,"
surreptitiously filched from the woodbox.
"Well, I guess I'll be gittin' along towards meetin'," she said, in a
tone of unconcern, calculated to allay suspicion. "I'm in hopes to git
a mite o' terbacker out o' Hiram Cole, if he's settin' lookin' at his
pigs, where he is 'most every Sunday. I'll have a smoke afore I go in."
"Don't you be late!"
"I'm a-goin' in late, or not at all!" answered Nance, contradictorily.
"My bunnit ain't trimmed on the congregation side, an' I want to give
'em a chance to see it all round. I'm a-goin' up the aisle complete!"
Dorcas finished her work, and, having tidied her father's room, sat
down by his bedside for the simple rites that made their Sabbath holy.
With the first clanging stroke of the old bell, not half a mile away,
they fell into silence, waiting reverently through the necessary pause
for allowing the congregation to become seated. Then they went through
the service together, from hymn and prayer to the sermon. The parson
had his manuscript ready, and he began reading it, in the pulpit-voice
of his prime. At that moment, some of his old vigor came back to him,
and he uttered the conventional phrases of his church with conscious
power; though so little a man, he had always a sonorous delivery. After
a page or two, his hands began to tremble, and his voice sank.
"You read a spell, Dorcas," he whispered, in pathetic apology. "I'll
rest me a minute." So Dorcas read, and he listened. Presently he fell
asleep, and she still went on, speaking the words mechanically, and
busy with her own tumultuous thoughts. Amazement possessed her that the
world could be so full of joy to which she had long been deaf. She
could hear the oriole singing in the elm; his song was almost
articulate. The trees waved a little, in a friendly fashion, through
the open windows; friendly in the unspoken kinship of green things to
our thought, yet remote in their own seclusion. One tall, delicate
locust, gowned in summer's finest gear, stirred idly at the top, as if
through an inward motion, untroubled by the wind. Dorcas's mind sought
out the doctor, listening to the sermon in her bare little church, and
she felt quite content. She had entered the first court of love, where
a spiritual possession is enough, and asks no alms of bodily nearness.
When she came to the end of the sermon, her hands fell in her lap, and
she gave herself up without reserve to the idle delight of satisfied
dreaming. The silence pressed upon her father, and he opened his eyes
wide with the startled look of one who comprehends at once the
requirements of time and place. Then, in all solemnity, he put forth
his hands; and Dorcas, bending her head, received the benediction for
the congregation he would never meet again. She roused herself to bring
in his beef-tea, and at the moment of carrying away the tray, a step
sounded on the walk. She knew who it was, and smiled happily. The
lighter foot keeping pace beside it, she did not hear.
"Dorcas," said her father, "git your bunnit. It's time for
Sunday-school."
"Yes, father."
The expected knock came at the door. She went forward, tying on her
bonnet, and her cheeks were pink. The doctor stood on the doorstone,
and Phoebe was with him. He smiled at Dorcas, and put out his hand.
This, according to Tiverton customs, was a warm demonstration at so
meaningless a moment; it seemed a part of his happy friendliness. It
was Phoebe who spoke.
"I'll stay outside while the doctor goes in. I can sit down here on the
step. Your father needn't know I am here any more than usual. I told
the doctor not to talk, coming up the walk."
The doctor smiled at her. Phoebe looked like a rose in her Sunday
white, and the elder woman felt a sudden joy in her, untouched by envy
of her youth and bloom. Phoebe only seemed a part of the beautiful new
laws to which the world was freshly tuned, Dorcas coveted nothing; she
envied nobody. She herself possessed all, in usurping her one rich
kingdom.
"All right," she said. "The doctor can step in now, and see father.
I'll hurry back, as soon as Sunday-school is over." She walked away,
glancing happily at the flowers on either side of the garden-path. She
wanted to touch all their leaves, because, last night, he had praised
them.
Returning, when her hour was over, she walked very fast; her heart was
waking into hunger, and she feared he might be gone. But he was there,
sitting on the steps beside Phoebe, and when the gate swung open, they
did not hear. Phoebe's eyes were dropped, and she was poking her
parasol into the moss-encrusted path; the doctor was looking into her
face, and speaking quite eagerly. He heard Dorcas first, and sprang up.
His eyes were so bright and forceful in the momentary gleam of meeting
hers, that she looked aside, and tried to rule her quickening breath.
"Miss Dorcas," said he, "I'm telling this young lady she mustn't forget
to eat her dinner at school. I find she quite ignores it, if she has
sums to do, or blots to erase. Why, it's shocking."
"Of course she must eat her dinner!" said Dorcas, tenderly. "Why, yes,
of course! Phoebe, do as he tells you. He knows."
Phoebe blushed vividly.
"Does he?" she answered, laughing. "Well, I'll see. Good-by, Miss
Dorcas. I'll come in for Friday night meeting, if I don't before.
Good-by."
"I'll walk along with you," said the doctor. "If you'll let me," he
added, humbly.
Phoebe turned away with a little toss of her head, and he turned, too,
breaking a sprig of southernwood. Dorcas was glad to treasure the last
sight of him putting to his lips the fragrant herb she had bruised for
his sake. It seemed to carry over into daylight the joy of the richer
night; it was like seeing the silken thread on which her pearls were
strung. She called to them impetuously,--
"Pick all the flowers you want to, both of you!" Then she went in, but
she said aloud to herself, "They're all for you--" and she whispered
his name.
"Dorcas," said her father, "the doctor's been here quite a spell. He
says there was a real full meetin.' Even Nancy Pete, Dorcas! I feel as
if my ministration had been abundantly blessed."
Then, in that strangest summer in Dorcas's life, time seemed to stand
still. The happiest of all experiences had befallen her; not a
succession of joys, but a permanent delight in one unchanging mood. The
evening of his coming had been the first day; and the evening and the
morning had ever since been the same in glory. He came often, sometimes
with Phoebe, sometimes alone; and, being one of the men on whom women
especially lean, Dorcas soon found herself telling him all the poor
trials of her colorless life. Nothing was too small for his notice. He
liked her homely talk of the garden and the church, and once gave up an
hour to spading a plot where she wanted a new round bed. Dorcas
had meant to put lilies there, but she remembered he loved
ladies'-delights; so she gathered them all together from the nooks and
corners of the garden, and set them there, a sweet, old-fashioned
company. "That's for thoughts!" She took to wearing flowers now, not
for the delight of him who loved them, but merely as a part of her
secret litany of worship. She slept deeply at night, and woke with calm
content, to speak one name in the way that forms a prayer. He was her
one possession; all else might be taken away from her, but the feeling
inhabiting her heart must live, like the heart itself.
By the time September had yellowed all the fields, there came a week
when Phoebe's aunt, down at the Hollow, was known to be very ill; so
Phoebe no longer came to care for the parson through the Sunday-school
hour. But the doctor appeared, instead.
"I'm Phoebe," he said, laughing, when Dorcas met him at the door. "She
can't come; so I told her I'd take her place."
These were the little familiar deeds which gilded his name among the
people. Dorcas had been growing used to them. But on the' next Sunday
morning, when she was hurrying about her kitchen, making early
preparations for the cold mid-day meal, a daring thought assailed her.
Phoebe might come to-day, and if the doctor also dropped in, she would
ask them both to dinner. There was no reason for inviting him alone;
besides, it was happier to sit by, leaving him to some one else. Then
the two would talk, and she, with no responsibility, could listen and
look, and hug her secret joy.
"I ain't a-goin' to meetin' to-day!" came Nance Pete's voice from the
door. She stood there, smoking prosperously, and took out her pipe,
with a jaunty motion, at the words. "I stopped at Kelup Rivers', on the
way over, an' they gi'n me a good breakfast, an' last week, that young
doctor gi'n me a whole paper o' fine-cut. I ain't a-goin' to meetin'!
I'm goin' to se' down under the old elm, an' have a real good smoke."
"O Nancy!" Dorcas had no dreams so happy that such an avalanche could
not sweep them aside. "Now, do! Why, you don't want me to think you go
to church just because I save you some breakfast!"
Nance turned away, and put up her chin to watch a wreath of smoke.
"I dunno why I don't," said she. "The world's nothin' but buy an' sell.
You know it, an' I know it!' 'Tain't no use coverin' on't up. You heerd
the news? That old fool of a Sim Barker's dead. The doctor, sut up all
night with him, an' I guess now he's layin' on him out. I wouldn't ha'
done it! I'd ha' wropped him up in his old coat, an' glad to git rid on
him! Well, he won't cheat ye out o' no more five-cent pieces, to
squander in terbacker. You might save 'em up for me, now he's done
for!" Nance went stalking away to the gate, flaunting a visible air of
fine, free enjoyment, the product of tobacco and a bright morning.
Dorcas watched her, annoyed, and yet quite helpless; she was outwitted,
and she knew it. Perhaps she sorrowed less deeply over the loss to her
pensioner's immortal soul, thus taking holiday from spiritual
discipline, than the serious problem involved in subtracting one from
the congregation. Would a Sunday-school picnic constitute a bribe worth
mentioning? Perhaps not, so far as Nance was concerned; but her own
class might like it, and on that young blood she depended, to vivify
the church.
A bit of pink came flashing along the country road. It was Phoebe,
walking very fast.
"Dear heart!" said Dorcas, aloud to herself, as the girl came hurriedly
up the path. She was no longer a pretty girl, a nice girl, as the
commendation went. Her face had gained an exalted lift; she was
beautiful. She took Miss Dorcas by the arms, and laughed the laugh that
knows itself in the right, and so will not be shy.
"Miss Dorcas," she said, "I've got to tell you right out, or I can't do
it at all. What should you say if I told you I was married?--to the
doctor?"
Dorcas looked at her as if she did not hear.
"It's begun to get round," went on Phoebe, "and I wanted to give you
the word myself. You see, auntie was sick, and when he was there so
much, she grew to depend on him, and one day, when we'd been engaged a
week, she said, why shouldn't we be married, and he come right to the
house to live? He's only boarding, you know. And nothing to do but it
must be done right off, and so I--I said 'yes! And we were married,
Thursday. Auntie's better, and O Miss Dorcas! I think we're going to
have a real good time together." She threw her arms about Dorcas, and
put down her shining brown head upon them.
Dorcas tried to answer. When she did speak, her voice sounded thin and
faint, and she wondered confusedly if Phoebe could hear.
"I didn't know--" she said. "I didn't know--"
"Why, no, of course not!" returned Phoebe, brightly. "Nobody did. You'd
have been the first, but I didn't want the engagement talked about till
auntie was better. Oh, I believe that's his horse's step! I'll run out,
and ride home with him. You come, too, Miss Dorcas, and just say a
word!"
Dorcas loosened the girl's arms about her, and, bending to the bright
head, kissed it twice. Phoebe, grown careless in her joy, ran down the
walk to stop the approaching wagon; and when she looked round, Dorcas
had shut the door and gone in. She waited a moment for her to reappear,
and then, remembering the doctor had had no breakfast, she stepped into
the wagon, and they drove happily away.
Dorcas went to her bedroom, touching the walls, on the way, with her
groping hands. She sat down on the floor there, and rested her head
against a chair. Once only did she rouse herself, and that was to go
into the kitchen and set away the great bowl of _blanc-mange_ she had
been making for dinner. She had not strained it all, and the sea-weed
was drying on the sieve. Then she went back into the bedroom, and
pulled down the green slat curtains with a shaking hand. Twice her
father called her to bring his sermons, but she only answered, "Yes,
father!" in dull acquiescence, and did not move. She was benumbed,
sunken in a gulf of shame, too faint and cold to save herself by
struggling. Her poor innocent little fictions made themselves into
lurid writings on her brain. She had called him hers while another
woman held his vows, and she was degraded. Her soul was wrecked as
truly as if the whole world knew it, and could cry to her "Shame!" and
"Shame!" The church-bells clanged out their judgment of her. A new
thought awakened her to a new despair. She was not fit to teach in
Sunday-school any more. Her girls, her innocent, sweet girls! There was
contagion in her very breath. They must be saved from it; else when
they were old women like her, some sudden vice of tainted blood might
rise up in them, no one would know why, and breed disease and shame.
She started to her feet. Her knees trembling under her, she ran out of
the house, and hid herself behind the great lilac-bush by the gate.
Deacon Caleb Rivers came jogging past, late for church, but driving
none the less moderately. His placid-faced wife sat beside him; and
Dorcas, stepping out to stop them, wondered, with a wild pang of
perplexity over the things of this world, if 'Mandy Rivers had ever
known the feeling of death in the soul. Caleb pulled up.
"I can't come to Sunday-school, to-day," called Dorcas, stridently.
"You tell them to give Phoebe my class. And ask her if she'll keep it.
I sha'n't teach any more."
"Ain't your father so well?" asked Mrs. Rivers, sympathetically,
bending forward and smoothing her mitts. Dorcas caught at the reason.
"I sha'n't leave him any more," she said. "You tell 'em so. You fix
it."
Caleb drove on, and she went back into the house, shrinking under the
brightness of the air which seemed to quiver so before her eyes. She
went into her father's room, where he was awake and wondering.
"Seems to me I heard the bells," he said, in his gentle fashion. "Or
have we had the 'hymns, an' got to the sermon?"
Dorcas fell on her knees by the bedside.
"Father," she began, with difficulty, her cheek laid on the bedclothes
beside his hand, "there was a sermon about women that are lost. What
was that?"
"Why, yes," answered the parson, rousing to an active joy in his work.
"'Neither do I condemn thee!' That was it. You git it, Dorcas! We must
remember such poor creatur's; though, Lord be praised! there ain't many
round here. We must remember an' pray for 'em."
But Dorcas did not rise.
"Is there any hope for them, father?" she asked, her voice muffled.
"Can they be saved?"