Chapter XIX

Part Third--Life-everlasting

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

_PART

FIRST_

BROOMSEDGE

"_A girl in an orange-colored shawl_. . . ."

BARREN

GROUND

I

A girl in an orange-coloured shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store

and looked, through the falling snow, at the deserted road. Though she

watched there without moving, her attitude, in its stillness, gave an

impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life.

Bare, starved, desolate, the country closed in about her. The last train

of the day had gone by without stopping, and the station of Pedlar's

Mill was as lonely as the abandoned fields by the track. From the bleak

horizon, where the flatness created an illusion of immensity, the

broomsedge was spreading in a smothered fire over the melancholy brown

of the landscape. Under the falling snow, which melted as soon as it

touched the earth, the colour was veiled and dim; but when the sky

changed the broomsedge changed with it. On clear mornings the waste

places were cinnamon-red in the sunshine. Beneath scudding clouds the

plumes of the bent grasses faded to ivory. During the long spring rains,

a film of yellow-green stole over the burned ground. At autumn sunsets,

when the red light searched the country, the broomsedge caught fire from

the afterglow and blazed out in a splendour of colour. Then the meeting

of earth and sky dissolved in the flaming mist of the horizon.

At these quiet seasons, the dwellers near Pedlar's Mill felt scarcely

more than a tremor on the surface of life. But on stormy days, when the

wind plunged like a hawk from the swollen clouds, there was a quivering

in the broomsedge, as if coveys of frightened partridges were flying

from the pursuer. Then the quivering would become a ripple and the

ripple would swell presently into rolling waves. The straw would darken

as the gust swooped down, and brighten as it sped on to the shelter of

scrub pine and sassafras bushes. And while the wind bewitched the

solitude, a vague restlessness would stir in the hearts of living things

on the farms, of men, women, and animals. "Broomsage ain't jest wild

stuff. It's a kind of fate," old Matthew Fairlamb used to say.

Thirty years ago, modern methods of farming, even methods that were

modern in the benighted eighteen-nineties, had not penetrated to this

thinly settled part of Virginia. The soil, impoverished by the war and

the tenant system which followed the war, was still drained of fertility

for the sake of the poor crops it could yield. Spring after spring, the

cultivated ground appeared to shrink into the "old fields," where scrub

pine or oak succeeded broomsedge and sassafras as inevitably as autumn

slipped into winter. Now and then a new start would be made. Some

thrifty settler, a German Catholic, perhaps, who was trying his fortunes

in a staunch Protestant community, would buy a mortgaged farm for a

dollar an acre, and begin to experiment with suspicious,

strange-smelling fertilizers. For a season or two his patch of ground

would respond to the unusual treatment and grow green with promise. Then

the forlorn roads, deep in mud, and the surrounding air of failure,

which was as inescapable as a drought, combined with the cutworm, the

locust, and the tobacco-fly, against the human invader; and where the

brief harvest had been, the perpetual broomsedge would wave.

The tenant farmers, who had flocked after the ruin of war as buzzards

after a carcass, had immediately picked the featureless landscape as

clean as a skeleton. When the swarming was over only three of the larger

farms at Pedlar's Mill remained undivided in the hands of their original

owners. Though Queen Elizabeth County had never been one of the

aristocratic regions of Virginia, it was settled by sturdy English

yeomen, with a thin but lively sprinkling of the persecuted Protestants

of other nations. Several of these superior pioneers brought blue blood

in their veins, as well as the vigorous fear of God in their hearts; but

the great number arrived, as they remained, "good people," a

comprehensive term, which implies, to Virginians, the exact opposite of

the phrase, "a good family." The good families of the state have

preserved, among other things, custom, history, tradition, romantic

fiction, and the Episcopal Church. The good people, according to the

records of clergymen, which are the only surviving records, have

preserved nothing except themselves. Ignored alike by history and

fiction, they have their inconspicuous place in the social strata midway

between the lower gentility and the upper class of "poor white," a

position which encourages the useful rather than the ornamental public

virtues.

With the end of free labour and the beginning of the tenant system,

authority passed from the country to the towns. The old men stayed by

the farms, and their daughters withered dutifully beside them; but the

sons of the good people drifted away to the city, where they assumed

control of democracy as well as of the political machine which has made

democracy safe for politics. An era changed, not rudely, but as eras do

change so often, uncomfortably. Power, defying Jeffersonian theory and

adopting Jeffersonian policy, stole again from the few to the many. For

the good people, conforming to the logic of history, proceeded

immediately to enact their preferences, prejudices, habits, and

inhibitions into the laws of the state.

At Pedlar's Mill, where the old wooden mill, built a hundred years

before by the first miller Pedlar, was now a picturesque ruin, a few

stalwart farmers of Scotch-Irish descent rose above the improvident

crowd of white and black tenants, like native pines above the shallow

wash of the broomsedge. These surviving landowners were obscure branches

of the great Scotch-Irish families of the upper Valley of Virginia.

Detached from the parent tree and driven by chance winds out of the

highlands, they had rooted afresh in the warmer soil of the low country,

where they had conquered the land not by force, but by virtue of the

emphatic argument that lies in fortitude.

James Ellgood, whose mother was a McNab, owned Green Acres, the

flourishing stock farm on the other side of the railroad. It is true

that an uncle in the far West had left him a small fortune, and for five

years he had put more into the soil than he had got out of it. But in

the end Green Acres had repaid him many times, which proved, as old

Matthew, who was a bit of a philosopher, pointed out, that "it wa'n't

the land that was wrong, but the way you had treated it."

On the near side of the station, secluded behind a barricade of what

people called the back roads, which were strangled in mud from November

to June, stood Five Oaks, the ruined farm of the Greylocks. Though the

place was still held insecurely in the loose clutches of old Doctor

Greylock, who resembled an inebriated Covenanter, the abandoned acres

were rapidly growing up in sumach, sassafras, and fife-everlasting. The

doctor had been a man of parts and rural prominence in his day; but the

land and scarcity of labour had worn on his nerves, and he was now

slowly drinking himself to death, attended, beyond the social

shadow-line, by an anonymous brood of mulatto offspring.

Adjoining Five Oaks, and running slightly in front of it on one side,

with a long whitewashed house situated a stone's throw from the main

road, there was Old Farm, which belonged to Joshua Oakley and Eudora

Abernethy, his wife. The Oakleys, as the saying ran in the

neighbourhood, were "land poor." They owned a thousand acres of scrub

pine, scrub oak, and broomsedge, where a single cultivated corner was

like a solitary island in some chaotic sea.

Early in the nineteenth century, John Calvin Abernethy, a retired

missionary from India and Ceylon, came from the upper Valley into the

region of the Shenandoah, with a neat Scotch-Irish inheritance in his

pocket. His reputation, as historians remark, had preceded him; and his

subsequent career proved that he was not only an eloquent preacher of

the Gospel, but a true explorer of the spirit as well, the last of those

great Presbyterian romantics whose faith ventured on perilous

metaphysical seas in the ark of the Solemn League and Covenant. Since

there was no canny bargain to be driven, at the moment, in the

Shenandoah Valley, John Abernethy regretfully left the highlands for the

flat country, where he picked up presently, at a Dutch auction, the

thousand acres of land and fifty slaves which had belonged to one

William Golden Penner. One may charitably infer that the fifty slaves

constituted a nice point in theology; but with ingenious Presbyterian

logic and circumscribed Presbyterian imagination, John Calvin reconciled

divine grace with a peculiar institution. The fifty slaves he sold

farther south, and the price of black flesh he devoted to the redemption

of black souls in the Congo. Dramatic, yet not altogether lacking in

delicate irony. For he had observed in foreign fields that divine grace

has strange gestures; and life, as even Presbyterians know, is without

logic. To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there

are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting. From which it must

not be concluded that the first Virginian Abernethy was unworthy of his

high calling. He was merely, like the rest of us, whether theologians or

laymen, seasoned with the favourite fruit of his age. Though he might

occasionally seek a compromise in simple matters of conduct, realizing

the fall of man and the infirmity of human nature, where matters of

doctrine were concerned his conscience was inflexible. His piety,

running in a narrow groove, was deep and genuine; and he possessed

sufficient integrity, firmness, and frugality to protect his descendants

from decay for at least three generations. A few years after he had

settled near Pedlar's Mill, a small Presbyterian church, built of brick

and whitewashed within and without, rose on the far side of the

railroad, where it stands now at the gate of Green Acres. Conversion,

which had begun as a vocation with John Calvin Abernethy, became a

habit; and with the gradual running to seed of the Methodists in the

community, the Presbyterian faith sprang up and blossomed like a Scotch

thistle in barren ground.

In his long white house, encircled by the few cultivated fields in the

midst of his still-virgin acres, John Calvin Abernethy lived with

learning, prudence, and piety until he was not far from a hundred. He

had but one son, for unlike the Scotch-Irish of the Valley, his race did

not multiply. The son died in middle age, struck down by an oak he was

felling, and his only child, a daughter, was reared patiently but

sternly by her grandfather. When, in after years, this granddaughter,

whose name was Eudora, fell a victim of one of those natural instincts

which Presbyterian theology has damned but never wholly exterminated,

and married a member of the "poor white" class, who had nothing more to

recommend him than the eyes of a dumb poet and the head of a youthful

John the Baptist, old Abernethy blessed the marriage and avoided, as

far as possible, the connection. Knowing the aptitude of the poor for

futility, he employed his remaining years on earth in accumulating a

comfortable inheritance for his great-grandchildren. When he was dead,

his granddaughter's husband, young Joshua Oakley, worked hard, after the

manner of his class, to lose everything that was left. He was a good man

and a tireless labourer; but that destiny which dogs the footsteps of

ineffectual spirits pursued him from the hour of his birth. His wife,

Eudora, who resembled her grandfather, recovered promptly from the

natural instinct, and revealed shortly afterwards signs of suppressed

religious mania.

Of this union of the positive and the negative virtues, three children

survived. Two of these were sons, Josiah and Rufus; the other was a

daughter, Dorinda, the girl who, having thrown the orange shawl over her

head, had come out of the store, and stood now with the snow in her face

and her eager gaze on the road.

II

She was a tall girl, not beautiful, scarcely pretty even according to

the waxen type of the 'nineties; but there was a glow of expression, an

April charm, in her face. Her eyes were her one memorable feature.

Large, deep, radiant, they shone beneath her black lashes with a clear

burning colour, as blue as the spring sky after rain. Above them her

jutting eyebrows, very straight and thick, gave a brooding sombreness to

her forehead, where her abundant hair was brushed back in a single dark

wave. In repose her features were too stern, too decisive. Her nose,

powdered with golden freckles, was a trifle square at the nostrils; her

mouth, with its ripe, bee-stung lower lip, was wide and generous; the

pointed curve of her chin revealed, perhaps, too much determination in

its outward thrust. But the rich dark red in her cheeks lent vividness

to her face, and when she smiled her eyes and mouth lighted up as if a

lamp shone within. Against the sordid background of the store, her head

in the brilliant shawl was like some exotic flower.

Straight, tranquil, thin and fugitive as mist, the snow was falling.

Though the transparent flakes vanished as soon as they reached the

earth, they diffused in their steady flight an impression of evanescence

and unreality. Through this shifting medium the familiar scene appeared

as insubstantial as a pattern of frost on the grass. It was as if the

secret spirit of the land had traced an image on the flat surface,

glimmering, remote, unapproachable, like the expression of an animal

that man has forced into sullen submission. There were hours at

twilight, or beneath the shredded clouds of the sunrise, when the winter

landscape reminded Dorinda of the look in the faces of overworked farm

horses. At such moments she would find herself asking, with the

intellectual thrill of the heretic, "I wonder if everything has a soul?"

The country had been like this, she knew, long before she was born. It

would be like this, she sometimes thought, after she and all those who

were living with her were dead. For the one thing that seemed to her

immutable and everlasting was the poverty of the soil.

Without knowing that she looked at it, her gaze rested on the bare

station; on the crude frame buildings, like houses that children make

out of blocks; on the gleaming track which ran north and south; on the

old freight car, which was the home of Butcher, the lame negro who

pumped water into the engines; on the litter of chips and shavings and

dried tobacco, stems which strewed the ground between the telegraph

poles and the hitching-rail by the store. Farther away, in the direction

of Whippernock River, she could see the vague shape of the ruined mill,

and beyond this, on the other side of the track, the sunken road winding

in scallops through interminable acres of broomsedge. Though the snow

had fallen continuously since noon, the air was not cold, and the white

glaze on the earth was scarcely heavier than hoar-frost.

For almost a year now, ever since Mrs. Pedlar had fallen ill of

consumption, and Dorinda had taken her place in the store, the girl had

listened eagerly for the first rumble of the approaching trains. Until

to-day the passing trains had been a part of that expected miracle, the

something different in the future, to which she looked ahead over the

tedious stretch of the present. There was glamour for her in the

receding smoke. There was adventure in the silver-blue of the distance.

The glimpse of a rapidly disappearing face; a glance from strange eyes

that she remembered; the shadowy outline of a gesture; these tenuous

impressions ran like vivid threads in her memory. Her nature, starved

for emotional realities, and nourished on the gossamer substance of

literature, found its only escape in the fabrication of dreams. Though

she had never defined the sensation in words, there were moments when it

seemed to her that her inner life was merely a hidden field in the

landscape, neglected, monotonous, abandoned to solitude, and yet with a

smothered fire, like the wild grass, running through it. At twenty, her

imagination was enkindled by the ardour that makes a woman fall in love

with a religion or an idea. Some day, so ran the bright thread of her

dream, the moving train would stop, and the eyes that had flashed into

hers and passed by would look at her again. Then the stranger who was

not a stranger would say, "I knew your face among a thousand, and I came

back to find you." And the train would rush on with them into the

something different beyond the misty edge of the horizon. Adventure,

happiness, even unhappiness, if it were only different!

That was yesterday. To-day the miracle had occurred, and the whole of

life had blossomed out like a flower in the sun. She had found romance,

not in imagination, not in the pallid fiction crushed among the tomes in

her great-grandfather's library, but driving on one of the muddy roads

through the broomsedge. To the casual observer there was merely a

personable young man, the son of old Doctor Greylock, making the

scattered rural calls of a profession which his father was too drunk to

pursue. A pleasant young man, intelligent, amiable, still wearing with a

difference the thin veneer of the city. Though he was, perhaps, a trifle

too eager to please, this was a commendable fault, and readily

overlooked in an irreproachable son who had relinquished his ambition in

order to remain with his undeserving old father. Filial devotion was

both esteemed and practised in that pre-Freudian age, before

self-sacrifice had been dethroned from its precarious seat among the

virtues; and to give up one's career for a few months, at most for a

possible year, appeared dutiful rather than dangerous to a generation

that knew not psychoanalysis.

And he was not only an admirable young man, he was, what admirable young

men frequently are not, attractive as well. His dark red hair, burnished

to a copper glow, grew in a natural wave; his sparkling eyes were

brown-black like chinkapins in the autumn; his skin was tanned and

slightly freckled, with a healthy glow under the surface; his short

moustache, a shade lighter than his hair, lent mystery to a charming, if

serious, mouth, and his smile, indiscriminating in its friendliness, was

wholly delightful. To Dorinda, meeting him in the early morning as she

was walking the two miles from Old Farm to the store, it was as if an

April flush had passed over the waste places. She recognized love with

the infallible certainty of intuition. It was happiness, and yet in some

strange way it was shot through with a burning sensation which was less

pleasure than pain. Though her perceptions were more vivid than they had

ever been, there was an unreality about her surroundings, as if she were

walking in some delicious trance. Beautiful as it was, it seemed to be

vanishing, like a beam of light, in the very moment when she felt it

flooding her heart. Yet this sense of unreality, of elusiveness, made it

more precious. Watching the empty roads, through the veil of snow, she

asked herself every minute, "Will he come this way again? Shall I wait

for him, or shall I let him pass me in the road? Suppose he goes back

another way! Suppose he has forgotten----"

The door behind her opened, and old Matthew Fairlamb came hobbling out

with the help of his stout hickory stick. Though he was approaching

ninety, he was still vigorous, with a projecting thatch of hair as

colourless as straw and the aquiline profile of a Roman senator. In his

youth, and indeed until his old age, when his son William succeeded him,

he had been the best carpenter at Pedlar's Mill. His eyes were bleared

now, and his gums toothless; but he had never lost his shrewd

Scotch-Irish understanding or his sense of humour, which broke out in

flashes as swift and darting as dry weather lightning.

"You'd better be startin' home, Dorinda," he remarked as he passed her.

"The snow means to keep up, and yo' Ma will begin to worry about you."

Turning, he peered at her with his cackling laugh. "Yo' face looks like

a May mornin' to my old eyes," he added. "I ain't seen you about here

fur a couple of weeks."

With her gaze still on the distance, Dorinda answered impatiently, "No,

Ma had one of her bad spells, and I had to help out at home. But no

matter how sick she is she never gives up, and she never worries about

anything smaller than eternal damnation."

"Yes, she's a pious one," old Matthew conceded. "It's faith, I reckon,

that's kept her goin', sence the Lord must know He ain't made it none

too easy for her."

"Oh, it's hard work that she lives on," replied Dorinda. "She says if

she were to stop working, she'd drop down dead like a horse that is

winded. She never stops, not even on Sundays, except when she is in

church."

Old Matthew's hilarity dwindled into a sigh. "Well, thar ain't much rest

to be got out of that," he rejoined sympathetically. "I ain't contendin'

against the doctrine of eternal damnation," he hastened to explain, "but

as long as yo' Ma is obleeged to work so hard, 'tis a pity she ain't got

a mo' restful belief." Then, as he observed her intent gaze, he inquired

suspiciously, "You don't see nary a turnout on the road, do you?"

The dark red in the girl's cheeks brightened to carnation. "Why, of

course not. I was just watching the snow."

But his curiosity, once aroused, was as insatiable as avarice. "I don't

reckon you've seen whether young Doctor Greylock has gone by or not?"

She shook her head, still blushing. "No, I haven't seen him. Is anybody

sick at your place?"

"It ain't that," returned the old man. "I was just thinkin' he might

give me a lift on the way. It ain't more'n half a mile to my place, but

half a mile looks different to twenty and to eighty-odd years. He's a

spry young chap, and would make a good match for you, Dorinda," he

concluded, in merciless accents.

Dorinda's head was turned away, but her voice sounded smothered. "You

needn't worry about that." (Why did old age make people so hateful?) "I

haven't seen him but once since he came home."

"Well, he'll look long befo' he finds a likelier gal than you. I ain't

seen him more than a few times myself; but in these parts, whar young

men are as skeerce as wild turkeys, he won't have to go beggin'. Geneva

Ellgood would take him in a minute, I reckon, an' her Pa is rich enough

to buy her a beau in the city, if she wants one. He! He!" His malicious

cackle choked him. "They do say that young Jason was sweet on her in New

York last summer," he concluded when he had recovered.

For the first time Dorinda turned her head and looked in his face. "If

everybody believed your gossip, Mr. Fairlamb, nobody at Pedlar's Mill

would be speaking to anybody else."

Old Matthew's mouth closed like a nut-cracker; but she saw from the

twinkle in his bleared eyes that he had construed her reprimand into a

compliment. "Thar's some of 'em that wouldn't lose much by that," he

returned, after a pause. "But to come back to young Jason, he's got a

job ahead of him if he's goin' to try farmin' at Five Oaks, an' he'll

need either a pile of money or a hard-workin' wife."

"Oh, he doesn't mean to stay here. As soon as his father dies, he will

go back to New York."

The detestable cackle broke out again. "The old man ain't dead yit. I've

known some hard drinkers to have long lives, an' thar ain't nothin' more

wearin' on the young than settin' down an' waitin' fur old folks to die.

Young Jason is a pleasant-mannered boy, though he looks a bit too soft

to stand the hard wear of these here roads. I ain't got nothin' to say

aginst him, but if he'd listen to the warnin' of eighty-odd years, he'd

git away before the broomsage ketches him. Thar's one thing sartain

sure, you've got to conquer the land in the beginning, or it'll conquer

you before you're through with it."

It was all true. She had heard it before, and yet, though she knew it

was true, she refused to believe it. Whether it was true or not, she

told herself passionately, it had no connection with Jason Greylock. The

bright vision she had seen in the road that morning flickered and died

against the sombre monochrome of the landscape.

"I must go in," she said, turning away. "I haven't time to stand

talking." Old Matthew would never stop, she knew, of his own accord.

When his cackle rose into a laugh the sound reminded her of the distant

_who_--_who_--_whoee_ of an owl.

"Well, I'll be gittin' along too," replied the old man. "My eyes ain't

all they used to be, and my legs ain't fur behind 'em. Remember me to

yo' Ma, honey, and tell her I'll be lookin' over jest as soon as the mud

holes dry up."

"Yes, I'll tell her," answered the girl more gently. Old Matthew had

known her great-grandfather; he had added the wings to the house at Old

Farm and built the Presbyterian church on the other side of the track.

In the prime of his life, forty years ago, he had been the last man at

Pedlar's Mill to see Gordon Kane, her mother's missionary lover, who had

died of fever in the Congo. It was old Matthew, Dorinda had heard, who

had broken the news of Kane's death to the weeping Eudora, while she

held her wedding dress in her hands. Disagreeable as he had become, it

was impossible for the girl to forget that his long life was bound up

with three generations of her family.

When she entered the store, she felt for a moment that she should

suffocate in the heated air from the wood stove at the far end. The

stuffy smell, a mingling of turpentine, varnish, bacon, coffee, and

kerosene oil, was so different from the crystal breath of the falling

snow that it rushed over her like warm ashes, smothering, enveloping.

Yet there was nothing strange to her in the scene or the atmosphere. She

was accustomed to the close, dry heat and to the heavy odours of a place

where everything that one could not raise on a farm was kept and sold.

For eleven months she had worked here side by side with Nathan Pedlar,

and she was familiar with the usual stock-in-trade of a country store.

In a minute she could put her hand on any object from a ploughshare to

a darning needle.

"You'd better be going home early," said Nathan Pedlar, looking round

from the shelf he was putting in order. "The snow may get heavier toward

sunset."

He was a tall, lank, scraggy man, with a face that reminded Dorinda of a

clown that she had once seen in a circus. Only the clown's nose was

large and red, and Nathan's looked as if it had been mashed in by a

blow. Aunt Mehitable Green, the coloured midwife, insisted that his

features had been born like other children's, but that his mother had

rolled on him in her sleep when he was a baby, and had flattened his

nose until it would never grow straight again. Though he possessed a

reserve of prodigious strength, he failed to be impressive even as an

example of muscular development. Dorinda had worked with him every day

for eleven months, and yet she found that he had made as little

impression upon her as a pine tree by the roadside. Looking at him, she

saw clearly his gaunt round shoulders beneath the frayed alpaca coat,

his hair and eyebrows and short moustache, all the colour of dingy

rabbit fur, and his small grey eyes with blinking lids; but the moment

after he had passed out of her sight, the memory of him would become as

fluid as water and trickle out of her mind. A kind but absurd man, this

was the way she thought of him, honest, plodding, unassuming, a man

whose "word was as good as his bond," but whose personality was

negligible. The truth about him, though Dorinda never suspected it, was

that he had come into the world a quarter of a century too soon. He was

so far in advance of his age that his position inspired ridicule instead

of respect in his generation. When his lagging age had caught up with

Nathan Pedlar, it had forgotten what its prophet had prophesied. Though

he made a comfortable living out of the store, and had put by enough to

enable him to face old age with equanimity, he was by nature a farmer,

and his little farm near the mill yielded a good harvest. Unlike most

Southern farmers, he was not afraid of a theory, and he was beginning to

realize the value of rotation in crops at a period when a cornfield at

Pedlar's Mill was as permanent as a graveyard. Already he was

experimenting with alfalfa, though even the prosperous James Ellgood

made fun of "the weed with the highfalutin' name from the Middle West."

For it was a part of Nathan's perverse destiny that people asked his

advice with recklessness and accepted it with deliberation.

"I am going as soon as I speak to Rose Emily," Dorinda replied. "Did the

doctor say she was better this morning?"

Nathan's hands, which were fumbling among the boxes on the long shelf,

became suddenly still.

"No, he didn't say so," he answered, without turning. Something in his

tone made Dorinda catch her breath sharply. "He didn't say she was

worse, did he?"

At this Nathan pushed the boxes away and leaned over the counter to meet

her eyes. His face was bleak with despair, and Dorinda's heart was wrung

as she looked at him. She had often wondered how Rose Emily could have

married him. Poverty would have been happiness, she felt, compared with

so prosaic a marriage; yet she knew that, according to the standards of

Pedlar's Mill, Nathan was an exceptional husband.

"Perhaps she'll pick up when the spring comes," she added when he did

not reply.

Nathan shook his head and swallowed as if a pebble had lodged in his

throat. "That's what I'm hoping," he answered. "If she can just get on

her feet again. There's nothing this side of heaven I wouldn't do to

make her well."

For an instant she was afraid he would break down; but while she

wondered what on earth she could say to comfort him, he turned back to

the boxes. "I must get this place tidied up before night," he said in

his usual tone, with the flat, dry cough which had become chronic.

While she watched him, Dorinda threw the shawl back on one arm and

revealed her fine dark head. The heavy eyebrows and the clear stern line

of her features stood out as if an edge of light had fallen over them,

leaving the rest of her face in shadow. She was wearing an old tan

ulster, faded and patched in places, and beneath the hem her brown

calico dress and mud-stained country shoes were visible. Even at

Pedlar's Mill the changing fashions were followed respectfully, if

tardily, and in the middle 'nineties women walked the muddy roads in

skirts which either brushed the ground or were held up on one side. But

shabbiness and a deplorable fashion could not conceal the slim, flowing

lines of her figure, with its gallant and spirited carriage.

"I'm going to say a word or two to Rose Emily before I start," she said

in a cheerful voice. "I don't mind being late." Walking to the end of

the store, beyond the wood stove, which felt like a furnace, she pushed

back a curtain of purple calico, and turned the knob of a door. Inside

the room a woman was sitting up in bed, crocheting a baby's sacque of

pink wool.

"I thought you'd gone, Dorinda," she said, looking up. "The snow is

getting thicker."

Propped up among her pillows, winding the pink wool through her fragile

hands, Mrs. Pedlar faced death with the courage of a heroic illusion.

Before her marriage, as Rose Emily Milford, she had taught school in the

little schoolhouse near Pedlar's Mill, and Dorinda had been her

favourite pupil. She was a small, intelligent-looking woman, pitiably

thin, with prominent grey eyes, hair of a peculiar shade of wheaten red,

and a brilliant flush on her high cheek bones.

Ball after ball of pink wool unwound on the patchwork quilt, and was

crocheted into babies' sacques which she sold in the city; but

crocheting, as she sometimes said, "did not take your mind off things as

well as moving about," and it seemed to her that only since she had been

ill had she begun to learn anything about life. The nearer she came to

death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living. If

death ever entered her mind, it was as an abstraction, like the doctrine

of salvation by faith, never as a reality. Every afternoon she said, "If

it is fine, I shall get up to-morrow." Every morning she sighed happily,

"I think I'll wait till the evening."

The room was a small one, divided off from the brick store, which

adjoined the new frame house Nathan had built for his bride; and there

was a confusion of colour, for Mrs. Pedlar's surroundings reflected the

feverish optimism of her philosophy. The rag carpet and the patchwork

quilt were as gay as an autumn flower-bed; the kerosene lamp wore a

ballet skirt of crimson crape paper; earthen pots of begonias and

geraniums filled the green wooden stands at the windows. On the

hearthrug, before the open fire, three small children were playing with

paper dolls, while the fourth, a baby of nine months, lay fast asleep in

his crib, with the nipple of a bottle still held tight in his mouth.

"I'm glad I chose that orange colour for your shawl," said Mrs. Pedlar,

in the excited manner that had come upon her with her rising

temperature. "It goes so well with your black hair. You ought to be glad

you're a big woman," she continued thoughtfully. "Somehow life seems to

go easier with big women. I asked young Doctor Greylock if that wasn't

true, and he said small women seemed to think so."

Dorinda laughed, and her laughter contained a thrill of joy. Some inward

happiness had bubbled up and overflowed into her voice, her look, and

her shy dreaming movements. There was sweetness for her in hearing of

Jason Greylock; there was ecstasy in the thought that she might meet him

again in the road. Yet the sweetness and the ecstasy were thin and far

off, like music that comes from a distance. It seemed incredible that

anything so wonderful should have happened at Pedlar's Mill.

In front of the fire, the three children (Minnie May, the eldest, was

only ten) were busy with their paper dolls. They had made a doll's house

out of a cracker box, with the frayed corners of the rug for a garden.

"Now Mrs. Brown has lost her little girl, and she is going to Mrs.

Smith's to look for her," Minnie May was saying impressively.

"You've got your hands full with those children," remarked Dorinda

because she could think of nothing else that sounded natural. Her mind

was not on the children; it was miles away in an enclosed garden of

wonder and delight; but some casual part of her was still occupying her

familiar place and living her old meaningless life.

"Yes, but they're good children. They can always amuse themselves.

Minnie May cut those paper dolls out of an old fashion book, and the

younger children are all crazy about them."

"Minnie May is a great help to you."

"Yes, she takes after her father. Nathan is the best man that ever

lived. He never thinks of himself a minute."

"He gave me some sugar for Ma," Dorinda sighed as she answered, for the

thought had stabbed through her like a knife that Rose Emily was dying.

Here we are talking about sugar and paper dolls when she won't live

through the summer.

"There's a pat of butter too," said Rose Emily. "I told Minnie May to

put it in your basket. I don't see how your mother manages without

butter."

"We've had to do without it since our cow died last fall. I'm saving up,

after the taxes are paid, to buy one in the spring." Again the thought

stabbed her. "As if cows made any difference when she has only a few

months to live!" Were the trivial things, after all, the important ones?

"And Mrs. Brown found that her little girl had been run over and killed

in the middle of the road," Minnie May whispered. "So she decided that

all she could do for her was to have a handsome funeral and spend the

ten dollars she'd saved from her chicken money. That's the graveyard,

Bud, down there by the hole in the rug. Lena, stop twistin', or you'll

pull it to pieces."

"Nathan says you can get a good cow from old Doctor Greylock for thirty

dollars," said Mrs. Pedlar. "He's got one, that Blossom of his, that he

wants to sell." Then an idea occurred to her and she concluded

doubtfully, "Of course, everything may be changed now that Jason has

come back."

"Yes, of course, everything may be changed," repeated Dorinda, and the

words, though they were merely an echo, filled her with happiness. Life

was burning within her. Even the thought of death, even the knowledge

that her friend would not live through the summer, passed like a shadow

over the flame that consumed her. Everything was a shadow except the

luminous stillness, which was so much deeper than stillness, within her

heart.

"He is just the same pleasant-mannered boy he used to be when I taught

him," resumed Mrs. Pedlar. "You remember how mischievous he was at

school."

Dorinda nodded. "I was only there a year with him before he went away."

"Yes, I'd forgotten. I asked him to-day if he remembered you, and he

said he knew you as soon as he saw you in the road this morning." She

paused for an instant while a vision flickered in her eyes. "It would be

nice if he'd take a fancy to you, Dorinda, and I'm sure you're handsome

enough, with your blue eyes and your high colour, for anybody to fall in

love with, and you're better educated, too, than most city girls, with

all the books you've read. I sent Minnie May to find you while he was

here, but she brought Nathan instead; and the doctor had to hurry off to

old Mrs. Flower, who is dying."

So they were all pushing them together! It was no wonder, thought

Dorinda, since, as old Matthew said, young men were as scarce as wild

turkeys, and everybody wanted to marry off everybody else. Almost

unconsciously, the power of attraction was increased by an irresistible

force. Since every one, even the intelligent Rose Emily, thought it so

suitable!

"I've seen him only once since he came home," said the girl.

"Well, I told him about you, and he was very much interested. I believe

he's a good young man, and he seems so friendly and kindhearted. He

asked after all the coloured people he used to know, and he was so

pleased to hear how well they are getting on. His father couldn't

remember anything about anybody, he told me. I reckon the truth is that

the old doctor is befuddled with drink all the time." She laughed

softly. "Jason has picked up a lot of newfangled ideas," she added. "He

even called broomsedge 'bromegrass' till he found that nobody knew what

he was talking about."

"Is he going to stay on?"

"Just for a little while, he says, until he can get the place off his

hands. What he meant but didn't like to say, I suppose, was that he

would stay as long as his father lives. The old man has got Bright's

disease, you know, and he's already had two strokes of paralysis. The

doctor up at the Courthouse says it can't be longer than six months, or

a year at the most."

Six months or a year! Well, anything might happen, anything did happen

in six months or a year!

On the floor the children were busily pretending that the oblong hole in

the rug was a grave. "Mrs. Brown bought a crape veil that came all the

way down to the bottom of her skirt," Minnie May was whispering, alert

and animated. "That paper doll in the veil is Mrs. Brown on the way to

the funeral."

"Well, I'd better be going," Dorinda said, throwing the orange shawl

over her head, while she thought, "I ought to have worn my hat, only the

snow would have ruined my Sunday hat, and the other isn't fit to be

seen."

Picking up the basket by the door, she looked over her shoulder at Rose

Emily. "If the snow isn't too heavy, I'll be over early to-morrow, and

help you with the children. I hope you'll feel better."

"Oh, I'm planning to get up in the morning," responded Rose Emily in her

eager voice, smiling happily over the pink wool.

III

Outside, there was a little yard enclosed in white palings to which

farmers tied their horses when the hitching-rail was crowded. Everything

was bare now under the thin coating of snow, and the dried stalks of

summer flowers were protruding forlornly from heaps of straw. Beyond the

small white gate the Old Stage Road, as it was still called, ran past

the cleared ground by the station and dipped into the band of pine woods

beyond the Haney place, which had been divided and let "on shares" to

negro tenants. Within the shadow of the pines, the character of the soil

changed from the red clay on the hills to a sandy loam strewn with pine

needles.

As Dorinda walked on rapidly, the shawl she wore made a floating orange

cloud against the dim background of earth and sky. The snow was falling

in larger flakes, like a multitude of frozen moths, and beneath the

fluttering white wings the country appeared obscure, solitary, vaguely

menacing. Though the road was quite deserted, except for the scarecrow

figure of Black Tom, the county idiot, who passed her on his way to beg

supper and a night's lodging at the station, the girl was not afraid of

the loneliness. She had two miles to walk, and twilight was already

approaching; but she knew every turn of the road, and she could, as she

sometimes said to herself, "feel her way in the dark of the moon."

To-night, even if there had been wild beasts in the pines, she would not

have turned back. A winged joy had risen out of the encompassing poverty

and desolation. Though the world was colourless around her, there was a

clear golden light in her mind; and through this light her thoughts were

flying like swallows in the afterglow. Her old dreams had come back

again, but they were different now, since they were infused with the

warm blood of reality. She had found, in her mother's religious

phraseology, a "kingdom of the spirit" to which she could retreat. She

had only to close her eyes and yield herself to this clear golden light

of sensation. She had only to murmur, "I wonder if I shall meet him

again," and immediately the falling snow, the neglected fields, and the

dark pines melted away. She was caught up, she was possessed, by that

flying rapture which was like the swiftness of birds. With a phrase,

with a thought, or by simply emptying her mind of impressions, she could

bring back all the piercing sweetness of surrender.

And she had discovered the miracle for herself! No one, not even Rose

Emily, had ever hinted to her of this secret ecstasy at the heart of

experience. All around her people were pretending that insignificant

things were the only important things. The eternal gestures of milking

and cooking, of sowing and reaping! Existence, as far as she could see,

was composed of these immemorial habits. Her mother, her father, her

brother, Nathan and Rose Emily, all these persons whom she saw daily

were engaged in this strange conspiracy of dissimulation. Not one of

them had ever betrayed to her this hidden knowledge of life.

Beyond the old Haney place and the stretch of pines there were the

pastures of Honeycomb Farm, where three old maids, Miss Texanna Snead,

the postmistress, and her sisters Seena and Tabitha, who made dresses,

lived on the ragged remnant of once fertile acres. Recently the younger

brother William had returned from the West with a little property, and

though the fortunes of the sisters were by no means affluent, the fields

by the roadside were beginning to look less forlorn. A few bedraggled

sheep, huddled together beyond the "worm" fence, stared at her through

the hurrying snowflakes. Then, springing to their awkward legs, they

wavered uncertainly for a minute, and at last scampered off, bleating

foolishly. An old horse rested his head on the rails and gazed

meditatively after her as she went by, and across the road several cows

filed slowly on their way from the pasture to the cow-barn.

"That's a nice cow, that red one," thought Dorinda. "I wish she belonged

to us," and then, with the inconsequence of emotion, "if I meet him, he

will ask if he may drive me home."

There was the steady _clop-clop_ of a horse's hoofs, and the rapid turning

of wheels in the road behind her. Not for the world would she have

slackened her pace or glanced over her shoulder, though her heart

fluttered in her throat and she felt that she was choking.

She longed with all her soul to stop and look back; she knew, through

some magnetic current, that he was pursuing her, that in a minute or two

he would overtake her; yet she kept on rapidly, driven by a blind

impulse which was superior to her will. She was facing the moment, which

comes to all women in love, when life, overflowing the artificial

boundaries of reason, yields itself to the primitive direction of

instinct.

The wheels were grinding on a rocky place in the road. Though she

hurried on, the beating of her heart was so loud in her ears that it

filled the universe.

"I am going your way," he said, just as she had imagined he would.

"Won't you let me drive you home?"

She stopped and turned, while all the glimmering light of the snow

gathered in her orange shawl and deepened its hue. Around them the steep

horizon seemed to draw closer.

"I live at Old Farm," she answered.

He laughed, and the sound quickened her pulses. She had felt this way in

church sometimes when they sang the hymns she liked best, "Jesus, Lover

of My Soul" or "Nearer, My God, to Thee."

"Oh, I know you live at Old Farm. You are Dorinda Oakley. Did you think

I'd forgotten you?"

For an instant a divine dizziness possessed her. Without looking at him,

she saw his eyes, black in the pallid snowflakes, his red hair, just the

colour of the clay in the road, his charming boyish smile, so kind, so

eager, so incredibly pathetic when she remembered it afterwards. She saw

these disturbing details with the sense of familiarity which events

borrow from the dream they repeat.

"I can't get out," he said, "because the mare is hungry and wants to go

on. But you might get in."

She shook her head, and just as in every imaginary encounter with him,

she could think of nothing to reply. Though her mind worked clearly

enough at other times, she stood now in a trance between the rail fence,

where the old horse was still watching her, and the wheel ruts in the

road. By some accident, for which nothing in her past experience had

prepared her, all the laws of her being, thought, will, memory, habit,

were suspended. In their place a force which was stronger than all these

things together, a force with which she had never reckoned before,

dominated her being. The powers of life had seized her as an eagle

seizes its prey.

"Come, get in," he urged, and dumb with happiness, she obeyed him.

"I remember you very well," he said, smiling into her eyes. "You were

little Dorinda Oakley, and you once poured a bottle of ink on my head to

turn it black."

"I know--" If she had been talking in her sleep, it could not have

seemed more unreal. At this moment, when of all the occasions in her

life she longed to be most brilliant and animated, she was tongue-tied

by an immobility which was like the drowsiness, only far pleasanter,

that she felt in church on hot August afternoons.

"You've grown so tall," he resumed presently, "that at first I wondered

a bit. Were your eyes always as big as they are now?"

Though she was drowning in bliss, she could only gaze at him stupidly.

Why did love, when it came, take away all your ability to enjoy it?

"I didn't know you were coming back so soon," she said after a struggle.

"Well, Father got in such a fix I had to," he answered, with a slight

frown which made his face, she thought, more attractive. The haunting

pathos, which she detected but could not explain, looked out of his

eyes; the pathos of heroic weakness confronting insurmountable

obstacles. "Of course it isn't for ever," he said in a surprisingly

cheerful voice. "Father had a second stroke a few weeks ago, and they

sent for me because there was nobody to see that he was taken care of.

But as soon as he gets better, or if he dies," his tone was kind but

impersonal, "I'll go back again and take up my work. I had just got my

degree, and was starting in for a year's experience in a big hospital.

Until I came I thought it was for a few days. The doctor telegraphed

that Father wouldn't last out the week; but he's picked up, and may go

on for a while yet. I can't leave him until he is out of danger, and in

the meantime I'm trying to enlighten the natives. God! what a country!

Nobody seems to ask any more of life than to plod from one bad harvest

to another. They don't know the first principles of farming, except of

course Mr. Ellgood, who has made a success of Green Acres, and that

clownish-looking chap who owns the store. I wonder what the first

Pedlar's were like. The family must have been in the same spot for a

hundred and fifty years."

"Oh, they've been there always. But most of the other farmers are

tenants. Pa says that's why the land has gone bad. No man will work

himself to death over somebody else's land."

"That's the curse of the tenant system. Even the negroes become thrifty

when they own a piece of land. And I've noticed, by the way, that they

are the best farmers about here. The negro who owns his ten or twelve

acres is a better manager than the poor white with twice the number."

"I know," Dorinda assented; but she was not interested in a discussion

of farming. All her life she had heard men talk of farming and of

nothing else. Surely there were other things he could tell her! "I

should think it would be dreary for you," she added, with a woman's

antipathy to the impersonal.

Turning to her suddenly, he brushed the snow-flakes from the fur robe

over her knees. His gestures, like his personality, were firm,

energetic, and indescribably casual. Against the brooding loneliness of

the country his figure, for all its youthful audacity, appeared trivial

and fugitive. It was as if the landscape waited, plunged in melancholy,

for the passing of a ray of sunshine. Though he had sprung from the

soil, he had returned to it a stranger, and there could be no

sympathetic communion between him and the solitude. Neither as a lover

nor as a conqueror could he hope to possess it in spirit.

"If I thought it was for ever, I'd take to drink or worse," he replied

carelessly. "One can stand anything for a few weeks or even months; but

a lifetime of this would be--" He broke off and looked at her closely.

"How have you stood it?" he asked. "How does any woman stand it without

going out of her head?"

Dorinda smiled. "Oh, I'm used to it. I even like it. Hills would make me

feel shut in."

"Haven't you ever wanted to get away?"

"I used to think of it all the time. When I first went to the store, I

was listening so hard for the trains that I couldn't hear anything

else."

"And you got over it?"

Her lashes fluttered over the burning blue of her eyes. If only he could

know how recently she had got over it! "Yes, I don't feel that way now."

"You've even kept your health, and your colour. But, of course, you're

young."

"I'm twenty. When I'm forty I may feel differently. By that time I

shan't have any books left to read."

He laughed. "By that time you'll probably begin listening again, harder

than ever." He thought for a moment, and then added, with the optimism

of inexperience, "While I'm here I'll try to get a few modern ideas into

the heads of the natives. That will be worth while, I suppose. I ought

to be able to teach them something in a few weeks."

If she had been older or wiser, she might have smiled at his assurance.

As it was she repeated gently, innocent of ironical intention, "Yes,

that will be worth while."

It was enough just to sit near him in silence; to watch, through lowered

lashes, the tremor of his smile, the blinking of his eyelids, the way

the pale reddish hair grew on the back of his neck, the indolent grasp

with which he was holding the reins. It was enough, she felt, just to

breathe in the stimulating smell of his cigarettes, so different from

the heavy odour of country tobacco. And outside this enchanted circle in

which they moved, she was aware of the falling snow, of the vague brown

of the fields, of the sharp freshness of the approaching evening, of the

thick familiar scents of the winter twilight. Far away a dog barked. The

mingled effluvia of rotting leaves and manure heaps in barnyards drifted

toward her. From beyond a fence the sound of voices floated. These

things belonged, she knew, to the actual world; they had no place in the

celestial sphere of enchantment. Yet both the actual and the ideal

seemed to occur within her mind. She could not separate the scent of

leaves or the sound of distant voices from the tumult of her thoughts.

They passed Honeycomb Farm, and sped lightly over a mile of rutted track

to the fork of the Old Stage Road, where a blasted oak of tremendous

height stood beside the ruins of a burned cabin. On the other side of

the way there was the big red gate of Five Oaks, and beyond it a sandy

branch road ran farther on to the old brick house. The snow hid the view

now; but on clear days the red roof and chimneys of the house were

visible above the willow branches of Gooseneck Creek. Usually, as the

mare knew, the doctor's buggy turned in at the big gate; but to-day it

passed by and followed the main road, which dipped and rose and dipped

again on its way to Old Farm. First there was a thin border of woods,

flung off sharply, like an iron fretwork, against the sky; then a strip

of corduroy road and a bridge of logs over a marshy stream; and beyond

the bridge, on the right, stood, the open gate of Dorinda's home. The

mare stumbled and the buggy swerved on the rocky grade to the lawn.

"That's a bad turn," remarked Jason.

"I know. Pa is always hoping that he will have time to fix it. We used

to keep the gate shut, but it has sagged so that it has to stay open."

"They ought to mend the bridge first. Those holes are dangerous for

horses."

Again she assented. Why, she wondered vaguely, did he emphasize the

obvious?

Within its grove of trees, in the midst of last summer's weeds, which

were never cut, the long whitewashed house wore a forlorn yet not

inhospitable air. Through the snow the hooded roof looked close and

secretive; but there was the glimmer of a lamp in one of the lower

windows, enormous lilac bushes, which must lend gaiety in April,

clustered about the porch, and the spreading frame wings, added by old

John Calvin Abernethy, still gave an impression of comfort. It was the

ordinary Virginian farm-house of the early nineteenth century, built for

service rather than for beauty; and retaining, because of its

simplicity, a charm which had long since departed from more ambitious

pieces of architecture.

"So we're home again," said Jason, glancing about him.

The buggy had come to a stop by the front steps, and regardless of the

mare's impatience, he sprang to the ground and helped the girl to

alight.

"Yes, it looks bare, doesn't it?"

She lifted her face to his as she answered, and while he looked down

into her eyes, a quiver passed over his mouth under the short red

moustache.

"Do you go over every day?" he asked. "Why haven't I met you before?"

She looked down. "Oh, I had to help out at home. But I've worked in the

store ever since Mrs. Pedlar was taken ill. I get there about eight

usually and stay until just before sunset."

"For which, I suppose, you receive an extravagant salary?"

She blushed at his whimsical tone. "They pay me ten dollars a month."

"Ten dollars a month!" A low whistle escaped his lips. "And you walk

four miles a day to earn it."

"I don't mind the walk. In good weather I'd rather be out of doors.

Besides somebody usually picks me up."

"Exactly. As I did this evening. If I hadn't, it would have been after

dark when you got home. Well, I can help you while I'm here," he added

carelessly. "I go that way every day, and I'll look out for you."

Again the dumbness seized her, and she stood there rooted like a plant,

while he looked at her. For a moment, so intent was his gaze, she felt

that he had forgotten her presence. It was not in the least as if he

were staring at her shawl or her mud-stained ulster, or her broken

shoes; it was not even as if he were looking at her eyes and thinking

how blue they were. No, it was just as if he were seeing something

within his own mind.

"I've known so few girls," he said presently, as if he were talking to

himself, "but, somehow, you seem different." Then with delightful

irrelevance, he added playfully, "Don't forget me. I shall see you

soon."

After he had driven away, she stood gazing after him. Again the mare

hesitated, again the wheels crunched on the rocky place. Then the buggy

rolled over the bridge; she heard the sound of his voice as he avoided a

hole; and a minute later the vehicle had disappeared in the border of

leafless woods.

"_Don't forget me. I shall see you soon._"

Eight words, and the something different had at last happened to her!

Everything around her appeared fresh and strange and wonderful, as if

she were looking at it clearly for the first time. The snow wrapped her

softly like a mist of happiness. She felt it caressing her cheek, and it

seemed to her, when she moved, that her whole body had grown softer,

lighter, more intensely alive. Her inner life, which had been as bare as

a rock, was suddenly rich with bloom. Never again could she find the

hours dull and empty. "_Don't forget me. I shall see you soon_," sang her

thoughts.

IV

As she stepped on the porch, Rambler, an old black and yellow hound,

with flapping ears and the expression of a pragmatic philosopher, stole

out of the shadows and joined her.

"You'd better come in or Pa will begin to worry about you," she said,

and her voice startled her because it did not sound as if it were her

own. "I know you've been chasing rabbits again."

She wondered if the suppressed excitement showed also in her face, and

if her mother, who noticed everything, would detect it. After she had

entered the hall, which smelled of bacon and dried apples, she stopped

and tried to rub the bloom of ecstasy off her cheeks. Then, followed

sedately by Rambler, she passed the closed door of the parlour, which

was opened only for funerals or when the circuit minister was visiting

them, and went into the kitchen at the back of the house. The family

must have heard the wheels, and it was a mercy, she told herself, that

Rufus or Josiah had not come out to meet the buggy.

"Ma, Rose Emily sent you a pat of butter," she said, "and Nathan gave me

two pounds of brown sugar."

Her eyes blinked in the light; but it was not the smoky flare of the

lamp on the table that made the big kitchen, with its rough whitewashed

walls, its old-fashioned cooking-stove, its dilapidated pine table and

chairs, its battered pots and pans suspended from nails, its unused

churn standing in the accustomed place on the brick hearth--it was not

the lamp that made the room appear as unfamiliar as if she had never

seen it before. Nor was it the lamp that cast this peculiar haziness,

like a distant perspective, over the members of her family.

Mrs. Oakley, a tall, lean, angular woman, who had been almost beautiful

for a little while forty years before, placed the coffee-pot on the

table before she turned to look at her daughter. Under her sparse grey

hair, which was strained tightly back and twisted in a small knot on her

head, her face was so worn by suffering that a network of nerves

quivered beneath the pallid veil of her flesh. Religious depression,

from which she still suffered periodically, had refined her features to

austerity. Her pale grey eyes, with their wide fixed stare, appeared to

look out of caverns, and endowed her with the visionary gaze of a

mystic, like the eyes of a saint in a primitive Italian painting. Years

ago, while Dorinda was still a child, her mother had been for weeks at a

stretch what people called "not quite right in her mind," and she had

talked only in whispers because she thought the country was listening.

As long as the spell lasted, it had seemed to the child that the

farm-house crouched like a beaten hound, in the midst of the brown

fields, beneath the menacing solitude. Since then she had never lost the

feeling that the land contained a terrible force, whether for good or

evil she could not tell, and there were hours when the loneliness seemed

to rise in a crested wave and surge over her.

As she took the basket from her daughter, Mrs. Oakley's features

softened slightly, but she did not smile. Only very young things,

babies, puppies, chickens just out of the shell, made her smile, and

then her smile was more plaintive than cheerful.

"Rufus can have his buckwheat cakes for breakfast," she said, without

stopping in her movements from the table to the safe and from the safe

to the stove.

She had worked so hard for so many years that the habit had degenerated

into a disease, and thrift had become a tyrant instead of a slave in her

life. From dawn until after dark she toiled, and then lay sleepless for

hours because of the jerking of her nerves. She was, as she said of

herself, "driven," and it was the tragedy of her lot that all her toil

made so little impression. Though she spent every bit of her strength

there was nothing to show for her struggle. Like the land, which took

everything and gave back nothing, the farm had drained her vitality

without altering its general aspect of decay.

"That's good!" exclaimed Rufus, a handsome boy of eighteen, with

straight black hair, sparkling brown eyes, and the velvety dark red of

Dorinda's lips and cheeks. He was the youngest child, and after he had

been nursed through a virulent attack of scarlet fever, he had become

the idol of his mother, in spite of a temperamental wildness which she

made the subject of constant prayer. There was ceaseless contention

between him and his elder brother, Josiah, a silent, hardworking man of

thirty, with overhanging eyebrows and a scrubby beard which he seldom

trimmed. After the birth of her first child there had been a sterile

period in Mrs. Oakley's life, when her mental trouble began, and Dorinda

and Rufus both came while she was looking ahead, as she told herself, to

a peaceful middle age unhampered by childbearing.

"Sit down, Ma," said Dorinda, throwing her shawl on a chair and slipping

out of her ulster, while Flossie, the grey and white cat, rubbed against

her. "You look worn out, and it won't take me a minute. Have you been

helped, Pa?" she asked, turning to the hairy old man at the end of the

table.

"I ain't had my coffee yet," replied Joshua, raising his head from his

plate. He was a big, humble, slow-witted man, who ate and drank like a

horse, with loud munching noises. As his hair was seldom cut and he

never shaved, he still kept his resemblance to the pictures of John the

Baptist in the family Bible. In place of his youthful comeliness,

however, he wore now an air of having just emerged from the

wilderness. His shoulders were bent and slightly crooked from lifting

heavy burdens, and his face, the little that one could see of it, was

weatherbeaten and wrinkled in deep furrows, like the fissures in a red

clay road after rain. From beneath his shaggy hair his large brown eyes

were bright and wistful with the melancholy that lurks in the eyes of

cripples or of suffering animals. He was a dumb plodding creature who

had as little share in the family life as had the horses, Dan and

Beersheba; but, like the horses, he was always patient and willing to do

whatever was required of him. There were times when Dorinda asked

herself if indeed he had any personal life apart from the seasons and

the crops. Though he was not yet sixty-five, his features, browned and

reddened and seamed by sun and wind, appeared as old as a rock embedded

in earth. All his life he had been a slave to the land, harnessed to the

elemental forces, struggling inarticulately against the blight of

poverty and the barrenness of the soil. Yet Dorinda had never heard him

rebel. His resignation was the earth's passive acceptance of sun or

rain. When his crop failed, or his tobacco was destroyed by frost, he

would drive his plough into the field and begin all over again! "That

tobacco wanted another touch of sun," he would say quietly; or "I'll

make out to cut it a day earlier next year." The earth clung to him; to

his clothes, to the anxious creases in his face, to his finger nails,

and to his heavy boots, which were caked with manure from the stables.

The first time Dorinda remembered his taking her on his knee, the

strong smell of his blue jeans overalls had frightened her to tears, and

she had struggled and screamed. "I reckon my hands are too rough," he

had said timidly, and after that he had never tried to lift her again.

But whenever she thought of him now, his hands, gnarled, twisted, and

earth-stained like the vigorous roots of a tree, and that penetrating

briny smell, were the first things she remembered. His image was

embalmed in that stale odour of the farm as in a preserving fluid.

"It's snowing faster," Dorinda said, "but it doesn't stay on the

ground." Bending over her father, she covered the corn pone on his plate

with brown gravy. "Maybe it will be clear again by to-morrow," she

went on smoothly. "It's time spring was beginning."

Joshua's hand, which no amount of scrubbing could free front stain,

closed with a heavy grip on the handle of his knife. "This brown gravy

cert'n'y does taste good, honey," he said. "Yo' Ma's made out mighty

well with no milk or butter."

A deep tenderness pervaded Dorinda's heart, and this tenderness was but

a single wave of the emotion that flooded her being. "Poor Pa," she

thought, "he has never known anything but work." Oh, how splendid life

was and how hard! Aloud, she said, "I've saved up enough money to buy a

cow in May. After I help you with the taxed and the interest on the

mortgage, I'll still have enough left for the cow. Rose Emily says old

Doctor Greylock will sell us his Blossom!"

"Then we can have butter and buttermilk with the ash cake!" exclaimed

Rufus.

"I ain't so sure I'd want to buy that red cow of Doctor Greylock's,"

observed Josiah in a surly tone. That was his way, to make an objection

to everything. He had, as his mother sometimes said of him, a good

character but a mean disposition. At twenty he had married a pretty,

light woman, who died with her first child; and now, after a widowerhood

of ten years, he was falling in love with Elvira Snead, a silly young

thing, the daughter of thriftless Adam Snead, a man with scarcely a

shirt to his back or an acre to his name. Though Josiah was hardworking,

painstaking, and frugal, he preferred comeliness to character in a

woman. If it had been Rufus, Dorinda would have found an infatuation for

Elvira easier to understand. Nobody expected Rufus to be anything but

wild, and it was natural for young men to seek pleasures. The boy was

different from his father and his elder brother, who required as little

as cattle; and yet there was nothing for him to do in the long winter

evenings, except sort potatoes or work over his hare traps. The

neighbours were all too far away, and the horses too tired after the

day's work to drag the buggy over the mud-strangled roads. Dorinda could

browse happily among the yellowed pages in old Abernethy's library,

returning again and again to the Waverley Novels, or the exciting Lives

of the Missionaries; but Rufus cared nothing for books and had inherited

his mother's dread of the silence. He was a high-spirited boy, and he

liked pleasure; yet every evening after supper he would tinker with a

farm implement or some new kind of trap until he was sleepy enough for

bed. Then he would march upstairs to the fireless room under the eaves,

where the only warmth came up the chimney from the kitchen beneath. That

was all the life Rufus had ever had, though he looked exactly, Dorinda

thought, like Thaddeus of Warsaw or one of the Scottish Chiefs.

In the daytime the kitchen was a cheerful room, bright with sunshine

which fell through the mammoth scuppernong grapevine on the back porch.

Then the battered pots and pans grew bright again, the old wood stove

gave out a pleasant song; and the blossomless geraniums, in wooden

boxes, decorated the window-sill. Much of her mother's life was spent in

this room, and as a child Dorinda had played here happily with her

corncob or hickory-nut dolls. Poor as they were, there was never a

speck of dust anywhere. Mrs. Oakley looked down on the "poor white"

class, though she had married into it; and her recoil from her husband's

inefficiency was in the direction of a scrupulous neatness. She knew

that she had thrown herself away, in youth, on a handsome face; yet she

was just enough to admit that her marriage, as marriages go, had not

been unhappy. Her unhappiness, terrible as it had been, went deeper than

any human relation, for she was still fond of Joshua with the maternal

part of her nature while she despised him with her intelligence. He had

made her a good husband; it was not his fault that he could never get

on; everything from the start had been against him; and he had always

done the best that he could. She realized this clearly; but all the

romance in her life, after the death of the young missionary in the

Congo, had turned toward her religion. She could have lived without

Joshua; she could have lived even without Rufus, who was the apple of

her eye; but without her religion, as she had once confessed to Dorinda,

she would have been "lost." Like her daughter, she was subject to

dreams, but her dreams differed from Dorinda's since they came only in

sleep. There were winter nights, after the days of whispering in the

past, when the child Dorinda, startled by the flare of a lantern out in

the darkness, had seen her mother flitting barefooted over the frozen

ground. Shivering with cold and terror, the little girl had crept down

to rouse her fathers who had thrown some garments over his nightshirt,

and picking up the big raccoon-skin coat, had rushed out in pursuit of

his demented wife. A little later Josiah had followed, and then Dorinda;

and Rufus had brought sticks and paper from the kitchen and started a

fire, with shaking hands, in their mother's fireplace. When at last the

two men had led Mrs. Oakley into the house, she had, appeared so

bewildered and benumbed that she seemed scarcely, to know where she had

been. Once Dorinda had overheard Joshua whisper hoarsely to Josiah, "If

I hadn't come up with her in the nick of time, she would have done it";

but what the thing was they, whispered about the child did not

understand till long afterwards All she knew at the time was that her

mother's "missionary" dream's had come back again; a dream of blue skies

and golden sands, of palm trees on a river's bank, and of black babies

thrown to crocodiles. "I am lost, lost, lost," Mrs. Oakley had murmured

over and over, while she stared straight before her, with a prophetic

gleam in her wide eyes, as if she were seeing unearthly visions.

They ate to-night, after Joshua had asked grace, in a heavy silence,

which was broken only by the gurgling sounds Joshua and Josiah made over

their coffee-cups. Mrs. Oakley, who was decently if not delicately bred,

had become inured to the depressing tablet manners of her husband and

her elder son. After the first disillusionment of her marriage, she had

confined her efforts at improvement to the two younger children. They

had both, she felt with secret satisfaction, sprung from the finer

strain of the Abernethys; it was as if they had inherited from her that

rarer intellectual medium in which her forbears had attained their

spiritual being. There were hours when it seemed to her that the gulf

between the dominant Scotch-Irish stock of the Valley and the mongrel

breed of "poor white" which produced Joshua was as wide as the abyss

between alien races. Then the image of Joshua as she had first known him

would appear to her, and she would think, in the terms of theology which

were natural to her mind, "It must have been intended, or it wouldn't

have happened."

While the others were still eating, Mrs. Oakley rose from the food she

had barely tasted, and began to clear the table. The nervous affection

from which she suffered made it impossible for her to sit in one spot

for more than a few minutes. Her nerves jerked her up and started her on

again independently of her will or even of any physical effort. Only

constant movement quieted the twitching which ran like electric wires

through her muscles.

"Go and lie down, Ma. I'll clear off and wash up," Dorinda said. Her

pity for her mother was stronger to-night than it had ever been, for it

had become a part of the craving for happiness which was overflowing her

soul. Often this starved craving had made her bitter and self-centred

because of the ceaseless gnawing in her breast; but now it was wholly

kind and beneficent. "If you would only stop and rest," she added

tenderly, "your neuralgia would be better."

"I can't stop," replied Mrs. Oakley, with wintry calm. "I can't see

things going to rack and ruin and not try to prevent it." After a

minute, still moving about, she continued hopelessly, "It rests me to

work."

"I brought the butter for you," returned Dorinda, in hurt tones, "and

you didn't even touch it."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I don't mind going without," she responded.

"You must keep it for the boys."

It was always like that. The girl had sometimes felt that the greatest

cross in her life was her mother's morbid unselfishness. Even her

nagging--and she nagged at them continually--was easier to bear.

"I've got the water all ready," Mrs. Oakley said, piling dishes on the

tin tray. "I'll get right through the washing up, and then we can have

prayers."

Family prayers in the evening provided the solitary emotional outlet in

her existence. Only then, while she read aloud one of the more

belligerent Psalms, and bent her rheumatic knees to the rag carpet in

her "chamber," were the frustrated instincts of her being etherealized

into spiritual passion. When the boys rebelled, as they sometimes did,

or Dorinda protested that she was "too busy for prayers," Mrs. Oakley

contended with the earnestness of a Covenanter: "If it wasn't for the

help of my religion, I could never keep going."

Now, having finished their meal in silence, they gathered in the

chamber, as the big bedroom was called, and waited for evening prayers.

It was the only comfortable room in the house, except the kitchen, and

the family life after working hours was lived in front of the big

fireplace, in which chips, lightwood knots, and hickory logs were burned

from dawn until midnight. Before the flames there was a crooked brass

footman, and the big iron kettle it supported kept up an uninterrupted

hissing noise. In one corner of the room stood a tall rosewood bookcase,

which contained the romantic fiction Dorinda had gleaned from the heavy

theological library in the parlour across the hall. Between the front

windows, which looked out on a cluster of old lilac bushes, there was

the huge walnut bed, with four stout posts and no curtains, and facing

it between the windows, in the opposite walls, a small cabinet of

lacquer-ware which her great-grandfather had brought from the East. In

the morning and afternoon the sunlight fell in splinters over the

variegated design of the rag carpet and the patchwork quilt on the bed,

and picked out the yellow specks in the engravings of John Knox

admonishing Mary Stuart and Martyrs for the Covenant.

"_The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his

handywork_," read Mrs. Oakley in her high thin voice, with her mystic

gaze passing over the open Bible to the whitewashed wall where the

shadows of the flames wavered.

Motionless, in her broken splint-bottom chair, scarcely daring to

breathe, Dorinda felt as if she were floating out of the scene into some

world of intenser reality. The faces about her in the shifting firelight

were the faces in a dream, and a dream that was without vividness. She

saw Joshua bending forward, his pipe fallen from his mouth, his hands

clasped between his knees, and his eyes fixed in a pathetic groping

stare, as if he were trying to follow the words. The look was familiar

to her; she had seen it in the wistful expressions of Rambler and of Dan

and Beersheba, the horses; yet it still moved her more deeply than she

had ever been moved by anything except the patient look of her father's

hands. On opposite sides of the fireplace, Josiah and Rufus were dozing,

Josiah sucking his empty pipe as a child sucks a stick of candy, Rufus

playing with the knife he had used to whittle a piece of wood. At the

first words of the Psalm he had stopped work and closed his eyes, while

a pious vacancy washed like a tide over his handsome features. Curled on

the rag carpet, Rambler and Flossie watched each other with wary

intentness, Rambler contemplative and tolerant, Flossie suspicious and

superior. The glow and stillness of the room enclosed the group in a

circle that was like the shadow of a magic lantern. The flames

whispered; the kettle hummed on the brass footman; the sound of Joshua's

heavy breathing went on like a human undercurrent to the cadences of the

Psalm. Outside, in the fields, a dog barked, and Rambler raised his

long, serious head from the rug and listened. A log of wood, charred in

the middle, broke in two and scattered a shower of sparks.

Prayers were over. Mrs. Oakley rose from her knees; Joshua prodded the

ashes in his pipe; Josiah drew a twist of home-cured tobacco from his

pocket, and cutting off a chew from the end of it, thrust it into his

cheek, where it bulged for the rest of the evening; Rufus picked up a

fishing pole and resumed his whittling. Until bedtime the three men

would sprawl there in the agreeable warmth between the fireplace and the

lamp on the table. Nobody talked; conversation was as alien to them as

music. Drugged with fatigue, they nodded in a vegetable somnolence. Even

in their hours of freedom they could not escape the relentless tyranny

of the soil.

After putting away the Bible, Mrs. Oakley took out a dozen damask

towels, with Turkey red borders and fringed ends, from her top bureau

drawer and began to look over then. These towels were the possession she

prized most, after the furniture of her grandfather, and they were never

used except when the minister or a visiting elder came to spend the

night.

"They're turning a little yellow," she remarked presently, when she had

straightened the long fringe and mended a few places. "I reckon I might

as well put them in soak to-night."

Rufus yawned and laid down his fishing-rod. "There ain't anything for me

to do but go to bed."

"We all might as well go, I reckon," Joshua agreed drowsily. "It's

gittin' on past eight o'clock, an' if the snow's off the ground, we've

got a hard day ahead of us."

"I'll put these towels in soak first," his wife responded, "and I've got

a little ironing I want to get through with before I can rest."

"Not to-night, Ma," Dorinda pleaded. While she spoke she began to yawn

like the others. It was queer the way it kept up as soon as one of them

started. Youth struggled for a time, but in the end it succumbed

inevitably to the narcotic of dullness.

"I ain't sleepy," replied Mrs. Oakley, "and I like to have something to

do with my hands. I never was one to want to lie in bed unless I was

sleepy. The very minute my head touches the pillow, my eyes pop right

open."

"But you get up so early."

"Well, the first crack of light wakes your father, and after he begins

stirring, I am never able to get a wink more of sleep. He was out at the

barn feeding the horses before day this morning." Dorinda sighed. Was

this life?

"I don't see how you keep it up, Ma," she said, with weary compassion.

"Oh, I can get along without much sleep. It's different with the rest of

you. Your father is out in the air all day, and you and the boys are

young."

She went back to the kitchen, with the towels in her hand, while Dorinda

took down one of the lamps from a shelf in the back hall, removed the

cracked chimney, and lighted the wick, which was too short to burn more

than an hour or two.

The evening was over. It was like every one Dorinda had known in the

past. It was like every one she would know in the future unless--she

caught her breath sharply--unless the miracle happened!

V

The faint grey light crept through the dormer-window and glimmered with

a diffused wanness over the small three-cornered room. Turning

restlessly, Dorinda listened, half awake, to the sound of her mother

moving about in the kitchen below. A cock in the henhouse crowed and was

answered by another. "It isn't day," she thought, and opening her eyes,

she gazed through the window at the big pine on the hill. The sun rose

over the pine; every morning she watched the twisted black boughs,

shaped like a harp, emerge from obscurity. First the vague ripple of

dawn, spreading in circles as if a stone had been cast into the

darkness; then a pearly glimmer in which objects borrowed exaggerated

dimensions; then a blade of light cutting sharply through the pine to

the old pear orchard, where the trees still blossomed profusely in

spring, though they bore only small green pears out of season. After the

edge of brightness, the round red sun would ride up into the heavens and

the day would begin. It was seldom that she saw the sunrise from her

window. Usually, unless she overslept herself and her mother got

breakfast without waking her, the men were in the fields and the two

women were attending to the chickens or cleaning the house before the

branches of the big pine were gilded with light.

"Poor Ma," Dorinda said, "she wouldn't wake me." But she was not

thinking of her mother. Deep down in her being some blissful memory was

struggling into consciousness. She felt that it was floating there, just

beyond her reach, dim, elusive, enchantingly lovely. Almost she seized

it; then it slipped from her grasp and escaped her, only to return,

still veiled, a little farther off, while she groped after it. A new

happiness. Some precious possession which she had clasped to her heart

while she was falling asleep. Then suddenly the thing that she had half

forgotten came drifting, through unclouded light, into her mind. "_Don't

forget me. I shall see you soon._"

The sounds in the kitchen grew louder, and the whole house was saturated

with the aroma of coffee and frying bacon. Beyond these familiar scents

and sounds, it seemed to her that she smelt and heard the stirring of

spring in the fields and the woods, that the movement and rumour of life

were sweeping past her in waves of colour, fragrance, and music.

Springing out of bed, she dressed hurriedly, and decided, while she

shivered at the splash of cold water, that she would clean her shoes

before she went back to the store. The day was just breaking, and the

corner where her pine dressing-table stood was so dark that she was

obliged to light the lamp, which burned with a dying flicker, while she

brushed and coiled her hair. Beneath the dark waving line on her

forehead, where her hair grew in a widow's peak, her eyes were starry

with happiness. Though she was not beautiful, she had her moments of

beauty, and looking at herself in the greenish mirror, which reminded

her of the water in the old mill pond, she realized that this was one of

her moments. Never again would she be twenty and in love for the first

time.

"If only I had something pretty to wear," she thought, picking up her

skirt of purple calico and slipping it over her head. The longing for

lovely things, the decorative instinct of youth, became as sharp as a

pang. Parting the faded curtains over a row of shelves in one corner,

she took down a pasteboard box, and selected a collar of fine needlework

which had belonged to Eudora Abernethy when she was a girl. For a minute

Dorinda looked at it, strongly tempted. Then the character that showed

in her mouth and chin asserted itself, and she shook her head. "It would

be foolish to wear it to-day," she murmured, and putting it back among

the others, she closed the box and replaced it on the shelf.

"I'll black my shoes, anyway," she thought, as she hurried downstairs to

breakfast. "Even if they do get muddy again as soon as I step in the

road."

That was with the surface of her mind. In the depths beneath she was

thinking without words, "Now that he has come, life will never again be

what it was yesterday."

In the kitchen the lamp had just been put out, and the room was flooded

with the ashen stream of daybreak. Mrs. Oakley was on her knees, putting

a stick of wood into the stove, and the scarlet glare of the flames

tinged her flesh with the colour of rusty iron. After a sleepless night

her neuralgia was worse, and there was a look of agony in the face she

lifted to her daughter.

"Why didn't you wake me, Ma?" Dorinda asked a little impatiently. "You

aren't fit to get breakfast."

"I thought you might as well have your sleep out," her mother replied in

a lifeless voice. "I'll have some cakes ready in a minute. I'm just

making a fresh batch for Rufus."

"You oughtn't have made cakes, as bad as you feel," Dorinda protested.

"Rufus could have gone without just as well as the rest of us."

Mrs. Oakley struggled to her feet, and picking up the cake lifter,

turned back to the stove. While she stood there against the dull glow,

she appeared scarcely more substantial than a spiral of smoke.

"Well, we don't have butter every day," she said. "And I can't lie in

bed as long as I've got the strength to be up and doing. Wherever I

turn, I see dirt gathering."

"No matter how hard you work, the dirt will always be there," Dorinda

persisted. It was useless, she knew, to try to reason with her mother.

One could not reason with either a nervous malady or a moral principle;

but, even though experience had taught her the futility of remonstrance,

there were times when she found it impossible not to scold at a

martyrdom that seemed to her unnecessary. They might as well be living

in the house, she sometimes thought, with the doctrine of

predestination; and like the doctrine of predestination, there was

nothing to be done about it.

With a sigh of resignation, she turned to her father, who stood at the

window, looking out over the old geraniums that had stopped blooming

years ago. Against the murky dawn his figure appeared as rudimentary as

some prehistoric image of man.

"Do you think it is going to clear off, Pa?" she asked.

He looked round at her, prodding the tobacco into his pipe with his

large blunt thumb. "I ain't thinkin', honey," he replied in his thick,

earthy drawl. "The wind's settin' right, but thar's a good-size bank of

clouds over toward the west."

"You'd better make Rufus take a look at those planting beds up by Hoot

Owl Woods," said Josiah, pushing back his chair and rising from the

table. "One of Doctor Greylock's steers broke loose yesterday and was

tramplin' round up there on our side of the fence."

Rufus looked up quickly. "Why can't you attend to it yourself?" he

demanded in the truculent tone he always used to his elder brother.

Josiah, who had reached the door on his way out, stopped and looked back

with a surly expression. With his unshaven face, where the stubby growth

of a beard was just visible, and his short crooked legs, he bore still

some grotesque resemblance to his younger brother, as if the family

pattern had been tried first in caricature.

"I've got as much as I can do over yonder in the east meadow," he

growled. "You or Pa will have to look after those planting beds." Rufus

frowned while he reached for the last scrap of butter. There would be

none for his mother and Dorinda; but if this fact had occurred to him,

and it probably had not, he would have dismissed it as an unpleasant

reflection. Since he was a small child he had never lacked the courage

of his appetite.

"What's the use of my trying to do anything when you and Pa are so set

you won't let me have my way about it?" he asked. "I'd have moved those

tobacco beds long ago, if you'd let me."

"Well, they've always been thar, son," Joshua observed in a peaceable

manner. He stood in the doorway, blowing clouds of smoke over his pipe,

while he scraped the caked mud from his boots. His humble, friendly eyes

looked up timidly, like the eyes of a dog that is uncertain whether he

is about to receive a pat or a blow. "Besides, we ain't got the manure

to waste on new ground," Josiah added, with his churlish frown. "We need

all the stable trash we can rake and scrape for the fields."

Mrs. Oakley, bringing a plate of fresh cakes as a peace offering, came

over to the table. "Don't you boys begin to fuss again," she pleaded

wearily. "It's just as much as I can do to keep going anyway, and when

you start quarrelling it makes me feel as if I'd be obliged to give up.

You'd just as well take all these cakes, Rufus. I can make some more for

Dorinda by the time she is ready."

Dorinda, who was eating dry bread with her coffee, made a gesture of

exasperated sympathy. "I don't want any cakes, Ma. I'm going to start

washing up just as soon as you sit down and eat your breakfast. If you'd

try to swallow something, whether you want it or not, your neuralgia

would be better."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head, while she dragged her body like an empty

garment back to the stove. From the way she moved she seemed to have

neither bone nor muscle, yet her physical flabbiness was sustained,

Dorinda knew, by a force that was indomitable.

"I don't feel as if I could touch a morsel," she answered, pressing her

fingers over her drawn brow and eyes.

"Oh, Rufus can eat his head off, but he'll never work to earn his keep,"

Josiah grumbled under his breath.

"Well, I'm not a slave, anyway, like you and Pa," Rufus flared up. "I'd

let the farm rot before it would be my master."

Josiah had pushed past his father in the doorway. A chill draught blew

in, and out of the draught his slow, growling voice floated back.

"Somebody's got to be a slave. If Ma didn't slave for you, you'd have

to, I reckon, or starve."

He went out after his father, slamming the door behind him, and Dorinda,

hurriedly finishing her breakfast, rose and began to clear the table.

The sallow light at the window was growing stronger. Outside, there was

the sound of tramping as the horses were led by to the trough at the

well, and the crowing in the henhouse was loud and insistent. The day

had begun. It was like every other day in the past. It would be like

every other day in the future. Suddenly the feeling came over her that

she was caught like a mouse in the trap of life. No matter how

desperately she struggled, she could never escape; she could never be

free. She was held fast by circumstances as by invisible wires of steel.

Several hours later, when she started to the store, the trapped

sensation vanished, and the gallant youth within her lifted its head.

There was moisture that did not fall in the air. A chain of sullen

clouds in the west soared like peaks through a fog. Straight before her

the red road dipped and rose and dipped again in the monotonous brown of

the landscape. A few ragged crows flapped by over the naked fields.

Turning at the gate, which was never closed, she looked back at the

house huddled beneath its sloping shingled roof under the boughs of the

old locust trees. The narrow dormer-windows stared like small blinking

eyes, shy and furtive, down on the square Georgian porch, on the flagged

walk bordered by stunted boxwood, on the giant lilac bushes which had

thriven upon neglect, and on the ruined lawn with its dead branches and

its thicket of unmown weeds. In recent years the whitewashed walls had

turned yellow and dingy; the eaves were rotting away where birds nested;

and in June the empty chimneys became so alive with swallows that the

whole place was faintly murmurous, as if summer stirred in the dead wood

as well as in the living boughs.

Whenever she looked back upon it from a distance, she was visited again

by the image of the house as a frightened thing that waited, shrinking

closer to the earth, for an inevitable disaster. It was, as if the place

had preserved unaltered a mood from which she herself had escaped, and

occasionally this mood awoke in her blood and nerves and flowed through

her again. Recollection. Association. It was morbid, she told herself

sternly, to cherish such fancies; and yet she had never been able

entirely to rid her memory of the fears and dreads of her childhood.

Worse than this even was the haunting thought that the solitude was

alive, that it skulked there in the distance, like a beast that is

waiting for the right moment to spring and devour.

Bleak, raw, windswept, the morning had begun with a wintry chill. The

snow of yesterday was gone; only an iridescent vapour, as delicate as a

cobweb, was spun over the ground. Already, as she turned and went on

again, the light was changing, and more slowly, as if a veil fluttered

before it was lifted, the expression of the country changed with it. In

the east, an arrow of sunshine, too pallid to be called golden, shot

through the clouds and flashed over the big pine on the hill at the back

of the house. The landscape, which had worn a discouraged aspect,

appeared suddenly to glow under the surface. Veins of green and gold,

like tiny rivulets of spring, glistened in the winter woods and in the

mauve and brown of the fields. The world was familiar, and yet, in some

indescribable way, it was different, shot through with romance as with

the glimmer of phosphorescence. Life, which had drooped, flared up

again, burning clear and strong in Dorinda's heart. It had come back,

that luminous expectancy, that golden mist of sensation. "_Don't forget

me. I shall see you soon_," repeated an inner voice; and immediately she

was lost in an ecstasy without words and without form like the mystic

communion of religion. Love! That was the end of all striving for her

healthy nerves, her vigorous youth, the crown and the fulfilment of

life! At twenty, a future without love appeared to her as intolerable as

the slow martyrdom of her mother.

Beyond the gate there was the Old Stage Road, and across the road, in

front of the house, ran the pasture, with its winding creek fringed by

willows. Though this stream was smaller than Gooseneck Creek on the

Greylocks' farm, the water never dried even in the severest drought, and

a multitude of silver minnows flashed in ripples over the deep places.

For a quarter of a mile the road divided the pasture from the wide band

of woods on the left, and farther on, though the woods continued, the

rich grass land was fenced off from several abandoned acres, which had

been once planted in corn, but were now overgrown with broomsedge as

high as Dorinda's waist. Sprinkled over the fields, a crop of scrub

pine, grown already to a fair height, stood immovable in the ceaseless

rise and fall of the straw. Though her eyes wandered over the waste

ground as she passed, Dorinda was blind to-day to the colour and the

beauty. What a pity you could never get rid of the broomsedge, she

thought. The more you burned it off and cut it down, the thicker it came

up again next year.

For a quarter of a mile the road was deserted. Then she came up with a

covered wagon, which had stopped on the edge of the woods, while the

mules munched the few early weeds in the underbrush. She had seen these

vehicles before, for they were known in the neighbourhood as Gospel

wagons. Usually there was a solitary "Gospel rider," an aged man,

travelling alone, and wearing the dilapidated look of a retired

missionary; but to-day there were two of them, an elderly husband and

wife, and though they appeared meagre, chilled and famished, they were

proceeding briskly with their work of nailing texts to the trees by the

wayside. As Dorinda approached, the warning, "Prepare to Meet Thy God,"

sprang out at her in thick charcoal. The road to the station was already

covered, she knew, and she wondered if the wagon had passed Jason at the

gate by the fork.

Hearing her footsteps, one of the missionaries, a woman in a black poke

bonnet, turned and stared at her.

"Good morning, sister. You are wearing a gay shawl."

Dorinda laughed. "Well, it is the only gay thing you will find about

here."

With the hammer still in her hand, the woman, a lank, bedraggled figure

in a trailing skirt of dingy alpaca, scrambled over the ditch to the

road. "Yes, it's a solemn country," she replied. "Is there a place near

by where we can rest and water the mules?"

"Old Farm is a little way on. I live there, and Ma will be glad to have

you stop."

Such visitors, she knew, though they made extra work, were the only

diversion in her mother's existence. They came seldom now; only once or

twice in the last few years had the Gospel wagon driven along the Old

Stage Road; but the larger trees still bore a few of the almost

obliterated signs.

"Then we'll stop and speak a word to her. We'd better be going on,

Brother Tyburn," observed the woman to her companion, who was crawling

over the underbrush. "This don't look as if it was a much travelled

road. Brother Tyburn is my husband," she explained an instant later. "We

met when we were both doing the Lord's work in foreign fields."

Golden sands. Ancient rivers. Black babies thrown to crocodiles. Her

mother's missionary dream had come to life.

"Were you ever in Africa?" asked Dorinda.

"Yes, in the Congo. But we were younger then. After Brother Tyburn lost

his health, we had to give up foreign work. Did you say your house was

just a piece up the road?"

"A quarter of a mile. After that you won't find anything but a few negro

cabins till you come to the Garlicks' place, three miles farther on."

The man had already climbed into the wagon and was gathering up the

reins; the mules reluctantly raised their heads from the weeds; and the

woman lifted her skirt and stepped nimbly up on the wheel. After she had

seated herself under the canvas, she leaned down, gesticulating with the

hammer which she still held.

"Thank you, sister. Have you given a thought to your soul?" Wrapped in

her orange shawl, Dorinda lifted her head with a spirited gesture.

"I joined the church when I was fifteen," she answered.

While she spoke she remembered vividly the way grace had come to her, a

softly glowing ecstasy, which flooded her soul and made her feel that

she had entered into the permanent blessedness of the redeemed. It was

like the love she felt now, only more peaceful and far less subject to

pangs of doubt. For a few months this had lasted, while the prosaic

duties of life were infused with a beauty, a light. Then, suddenly, as

mysteriously as it had come, the illumination in her soul had waned and

flickered out like a lamp. Religion had not satisfied.

The wagon joggled on its way, and floating back, above the rumble of the

wheels, there came presently the words of a hymn, at first clear and

loud, and then growing fainter and thinner as the distance widened.

Often Dorinda had sung the verses in Sunday School. The hymn was a

favourite one of her mother's, and the girl hummed it now under her

breath:

"Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,

Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;

Weep o'er the err-ing one, lift up the fall-en,

Tell them of Je-sus, the migh-ty to save.

Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,

Je-sus is mer-ci-ful, Je-sus will save."

No, religion had not satisfied.

She was still humming when she reached the fork of the road. Then,

glancing at the red gate of Five Oaks, she saw that Jason Greylock stood

there, with his hand on the bar.

"I'd just got down to open the gate, when I looked up the road and saw

you coming," he said. "I knew there wasn't another woman about who was

wearing an orange shawl, and if there were, I'd wait for her just out of

curiosity."

Though he spoke gaily, she felt, without knowing why, that the gaiety

was assumed. He looked as if he had not slept. His fresh colour had

faded; his clothes were rumpled as if he had lain down in them; and

while she walked toward him, she imagined fancifully that his face was

like a drowned thing in the solitude. If she had been older it might

have occurred to her that a nature so impressionable must be lacking in

stability; but, at the moment, joy in his presence drove every sober

reflection from her mind.

"Is there anything the matter?" she asked, eager to help.

He looked down while the gate swung back, and she saw a quiver of

disgust cross his mouth under the short moustache. Before replying, he

led his horse into the road and turned back to lower the bar. Then he

held out his hand to help her into the buggy.

"Do I look as if I'd had no sleep?" he inquired. "Father had a bad

night, and I was up with him till daybreak."

Then she understood. She had heard tales from Aunt Mehitable, whose

daughter worked at Five Oaks, of the old man's drunken frenzies, and the

way his mulatto brood ran shrieking about the place when he turned on

them with a horsewhip. Would Jason be able to rid the house of this

half-breed swarm and their mother, a handsome, slatternly yellow woman,

with a figure that had grown heavy and shapeless, and a smouldering

resentful gaze? Well, she was sorry for him if he had to put up with

things like that.

"I am sorry," she responded, and could think of nothing to add to the

words, which sounded flat and empty. In front of her on the blasted oak

she saw the staring black letters of the Gospel riders, "After Death

Comes the Judgment." Depression crept like a fog into her mind. If only

she could think of something to say! While they drove on in silence she

became aware of her body, as if it were a weight which had been fastened

to her and over which she had no control. Her hands and feet felt like

logs. She was in the clutch, she knew, of forces which she did not

understand, which she could not even discern. And these forces had

deprived her of her will at the very moment when they were sweeping her

to a place she could not see by a road that was strange to her.

"I suppose my nerves aren't what they ought to be," he said presently,

and she knew that he was miles away from her in his thoughts. "They've

always been jumpy ever since I was a child, and a night like that puts

them on edge. Then everything is discouraging around here. I thought

when I first came back that I might be able to wake up the farmers, but

it is uphill ploughing to try to get them out of their rut. Last night I

had planned a meeting in the schoolhouse. For a week I had had notices

up at the store, and I'd got at least a dozen men to promise to come and

listen to what I had to tell them about improved methods of farming. I

intended to begin with crops and sanitation, you know, and to lead off

gradually, as they caught on, to political conditions;--but when I went

over," he laughed bitterly, "there was nobody but Nathan Pedlar and that

idiot boy of John Appleseed's waiting to hear me."

"I know." She was sympathetic but uncomprehending. "They are in a rut,

but they're satisfied; they don't want to change." He turned to look at

her and his face cleared. "You are the only cheerful sight I've seen

since I got here," he said.

The light had changed again and her inner mood was changing with the

landscape. A feeling of intimate kinship with the country returned, and

it seemed to her that the colour of the broomsedge was overrunning the

desolate hidden field of her life. Something wild and strong and vivid

was covering the waste places.

"I am glad," she answered softly.

"It does me good just to look at you. I ought to be able to do without

companionship, but I can't, not for long. I am dependent upon some human

association, and I haven't had any, nothing that counts, since I came

here. In New York I lived with several men (I've never been much of a

woman's man), and I miss them like the devil. I was getting on well with

my work, too, though I never wanted to study medicine--that was Father's

idea. At first I hoped that I could distract myself by doing some good

while I was here," he concluded moodily; "but last night taught me the

folly of that."

Though he seemed to her unreasonable, and his efforts at philanthropy as

futile as the usual unsettling processes of reform, she felt

passionately eager to comfort him in his failure. That she might turn

his disappointment to her own advantage had not occurred to her, and

would never occur to her. The instinct that directed her was an

unconscious one and innocent of design.

"Well, you've just begun," she replied cheerfully. "You can't expect to

do everything in the beginning."

He laughed. "I knew you'd say that. Even in New York they tell me I try

to hurry nature. I'm easily discouraged, and I take things too hard, I

suppose. Coming back here was a bitter pill, but I had to swallow it. If

I'd been a different sort of chap I might have gone on with my work in

New York, and let Father die alone there at Five Oaks. But when he sent

for me I hadn't the heart or the courage to refuse to come. The truth

is, I've never been able to go ahead. It seems to me, when I look back,

that I've always been balked or bullied out of having what I wanted in

life. I remember once, when I was a little child, I went out with Mother

to gather dewberries, and just as I found the finest briar, all heavy

with fruit, and reached down to pick it, a moccasin snake struck out at

my hand. I got a fit, hysterics or something, and ever since then the

sight of a snake has made me physically sick. Worse than that, whenever

I reach out for anything I particularly want, I have a jumping of the

nerves, just as if I expected a snake to strike. Queer, isn't it? I

wonder how much influence that snake has had on my life?"

Though he laughed, his laugh was not a natural one and she asked herself

if he could be in earnest. She was still young enough to find it

difficult to distinguish between the ironically wise and the incredibly

foolish.

"I wish I could help you. I'll do anything in the world I can to help

you," she murmured in a voice as soft as her glance.

Their eyes met, and she watched the bitterness, the mingling of

disappointment and mortification, fade in the glow of pleasure--or was

it merely excitement?--that flamed in his face.

"Then wear a blue dress the colour of your eyes," he rejoined with the

light-hearted audacity of the day before.

The difference in his tone was so startling that she blushed and averted

her gaze.

"I haven't a blue dress," she replied stiffly, while her troubled look

swept the old Haney place as they went past. In a little while they

would reach the station. Even now they were spinning up the long slope,

white as bone dust, that led to the store.

The change in his tone sent the blood in quivering rushes to her cheeks.

She felt the sound beating in her ears as if it were music.

"Then beg, borrow, or steal one," he said gaily, "before I see you

again."

His smile died quickly, as if he were unable to sustain the high note of

merriment, and the inexplicable sadness stole into his look. Was it

substance or shadow, she wondered. Well, whatever it was, it stirred a

profound tenderness in her heart.

VI

When they parted at the station there was a dreaming smile on her lips;

and though she tried to drive it away as she entered the store, she felt

that the smile was still there, hovering about her mouth. A physical

warmth, soft and penetrating, enveloped her like sunshine. And the

miracle (for it was a miracle) had changed her so utterly that she was a

stranger to the Dorinda of yesterday. Where that practical girl had

been, there was now a tremulous creature who felt that she was capable

of unimaginable adventures. How could she reflect upon the virtues of

the red cow she would buy from old Doctor Greylock when she could not

detach her mind from the disturbing image of Doctor Greylock's son? Over

and over, she repeated mechanically, "Thirty dollars for the red cow";

yet the words might have been spoken by John Appleseed or his idiot boy,

who was lounging near the track, so remote were they from her

consciousness. Thirty dollars! She had saved the money for months. There

would be just that much after the interest on the mortgage was paid. She

had it put away safely in the best pickle-dish in the china press. Ten

dollars a month didn't go far, even if it was "ready money." _Then wear a

blue dress the colour of your eyes. Beg, borrow, or steal one before I

see you again._ From whom or where had the words come? Something within

herself, over which she had no control, was thinking aloud. And as if

her imagination had escaped from darkness into light, a crowd of

impressions revolved in her mind like the swiftly changing colours of a

kaleidoscope. His eyes, black at a distance, brown when you looked into

them. The healthy reddish tan of his skin. The white streak on his neck

under his collar. The way his hair grew in short close waves like a cap.

His straight red lips, with their look of vital and urgent youth. The

fascinating curve of his eyebrows, which bent down when he smiled or

frowned over his deep-set eyes. The way he smiled. The way he laughed.

The way he looked at her.

Nathan had opened the store and was already sweeping the tracks of mud

from the platform. Somebody was in the store behind him. He talked while

he swept, jerking his scraggy shoulders with an awkward movement. Poor

Nathan, he had as many gestures as a puppet, and they all looked as if

they were worked by strings.

Then, as she hastened up the steps of the store, there occurred one of

those trivial accidents which make history. Miss Seena Snead, attired

for travelling in her best navy blue lady's cloth and her small lace

bonnet with velvet strings, came out of the door.

"I'm runnin' down to Richmond to buy some goods and notions," she said.

"Is there any errand I can do for you or yo' Ma?"

Out of that golden mist, the strange Dorinda who had taken the place of

the real Dorinda, spoke eagerly: "I wonder--oh, I wonder, Miss Seena, if

you could get me a blue dress?"

"A blue dress? Why, of course I can, honey. Do you want gingham or

calico? I reckon Nathan has got as good blue and white check as you can

find anywhere. I picked it out for him myself."

Dorinda shook her head. Her eyes were shining and her voice trembled;

but she went on recklessly, driven by this force which she obeyed but

could not understand. "No, not gingham or calico. I don't want anything

useful, Miss Seena. I want cashmere--or nun's veiling. And I don't want

dark blue. I want it exactly the colour of my eyes."

"Well, I declare!" Miss Seena looked as if she could not believe her

ears. "Whoever heard of matchin' material by yo' eyes?" Then turning

the girl round, she examined her intently. "I ain't never paid much

attention to yo' eyes," she continued, "though I always thought they had

a kind, pleasant look in 'em. But when I come to notice 'em, they're

jest exactly the shade of a blue jay's wing. That won't be hard to

match. I can carry a blue jay's wing in my mind without a particle of

trouble. You want a new dress for spring, I s'pose? It don't matter

whether a girl's a Methodist or an Episcopalian, she's mighty sure to

begin wantin' a new dress when Easter is comin'. Geneva Ellgood ordered

her figured challis yestiddy from one of them big stores in New York.

She picked the pattern out of a fashion paper, and when the goods come,

I'm goin' to spend a week at Green Acres, an' make it up for her. It is

a real pretty pattern, and it calls for yards and yards of stuff. They

say young Doctor Greylock was a beau of hers when she was in New York

last summer, an' I reckon that's why she's buyin' so much finery.

Courtin' is good for milliners, my Ma used to say, even if marriage is

bad for wives. She had a lot of dry fun in her, my Ma had. Geneva is

gettin' a mighty pretty hat too. She's bought a wreath of wheat and

poppies, an' I'm takin' it down to Richmond to put on one of them

stylish new hats with a high bandeau."

For an instant Dorinda held her breath while a wave of dull sickness

swept over her. At that moment she realized that the innocence of her

girlhood, the ingenuous belief that love brought happiness, had departed

for ever. She was in the thick of life, and the thick of life meant not

peace but a sword in the heart. Though she scarcely knew Geneva Ellgood,

she felt that they were enemies. It was not fair, she told herself

passionately, that one girl should have everything and one nothing! A

primitive impulse struggled like some fierce invader in her mind, among

the orderly instincts and inherited habits of thought. She was startled;

she was frightened; but she was defiant. In a flash the knowledge came

to her that habit and duty and respectability are not the whole of life.

Beyond the beaten road in which her ideas and inclinations had moved,

she had discovered a virgin wilderness of mystery and terror. While she

stood there, listening to the gossip of the dressmaker, the passion that

abides at the heart of all desperation inflamed her mind. She had

learned that love casts its inevitable shadow of pain.

"I want a hat too, Miss Seena," she said quickly. "A white straw hat

with a wreath of blue flowers round the crown."

Miss Seena lifted her spectacles to her forehead, and gazed at the girl

inquiringly with her small far-sighted eyes. "I always thought you had

too much character to care about clothes, Dorinda," she said, "but that

jest proves, I reckon, that you never can tell. I s'pose youth is

obleeged to break out sooner or later. But it will cost a good deal, I'm

afraid. Wreaths are right expensive, now that they're so much worn. Yo'

Ma told me the last time I was over thar that you were savin' all you

made to help yo' Pa with the farm."

Her glance was mild, for she was not unsympathetic (when was a

dressmaker, especially a dressmaker who was at the same time a

sentimental spinster, unsympathetic about clothes?) but she wished to

feel sure that Dorinda would not regret her extravagance after it was

too late.

"You mustn't think that you can keep up with Geneva, honey," she added

kindly but indiscreetly. "You're prettier than she is, but her Pa's the

richest man anywhar about here, an' I reckon thar ain't much ugliness

that money ain't able to cure."

The advice was wholesome, but Dorinda frowned and shook her head

stubbornly. The shawl had slipped to her shoulders, and the sunlight,

which was struggling through the clouds, brought out a bluish lustre on

her black hair. Miss Seena, watching her closely, reflected that hair

and eyes like those did not often go together. With this vivid contrast

and the high colour in her lips and cheeks the girl appeared almost too

conspicuous, the dressmaker decided. "It always seemed to me mo' refined

when yo' eyes and hair matched better," she thought, "but I s'pose most

men would call her handsome, even if her features ain't so small as they

ought to be."

"I'm going to have one nice dress, I don't care what happens," Dorinda

was saying. "I don't care what happens," she repeated obstinately. "I've

got thirty dollars put away, and I want you to buy that dress and hat if

it takes every cent of it. I'm tired of doing without things."

"Well, I don't reckon they will cost that much," returned Miss Seena,

after a quick sum in mental arithmetic. "You can buy right nice,

double-width nun's veiling for seventy-five cents a yard, and I can get

you a dress, I reckon, by real careful cuttin', out of nine yards. The

fashion books call for ten, but them New York folks don't need to cut

careful. To be sure, these here bell skirts and balloon sleeves take a

heap of, goods, but I s'pose you'll want yours jest as stylish as

Geneva's?" Since the girl was determined to waste her money, it would be

a pity, Miss Seena reflected gently, to spoil the pleasure of her

improvidence. After all, you weren't young and good-looking but such a

little while!

"I'll do the best I can, honey," she said briskly. "And they'll charge

it to me at Brandywine and Plummer's store, so you don't need to bring

the money till the first of the month. Thar's the train whistlin' now,

and Sister Texanna is waitin' at the track with my basket and things.

Don't you worry, I'll get you jest the very prettiest material I can

find."

Turning away, the dressmaker hurried with birdlike fluttering steps to

the track, where Dorinda saw the stately figure of Miss Texanna standing

guard beside an indiscriminate collection of parcels. Miss Texanna,

unlike her sisters, had been pretty in her youth, and a dull glamour of

forgotten romance still surrounded her. Though she had never married,

she had had a lover killed in the war, which, as Miss Tabitha had once

remarked, was "almost as good." But Dorinda, while she watched the

approaching train, did not think of the three sisters. "I oughtn't to

have done it," she said to herself, with a feeling of panic, and then

desperately, "Well, I'm going to have one good dress, I don't care what

happens!"

A few farmers were taking the early train to town, and Dorinda saw that

Geneva Ellgood had driven her father to the station in her little

dogcart with red wheels. She was a plain girl, with a long nose, eyes

the colour of Malaga grapes, and a sallow skin which had the greenish

tinge of anemia. Her flaxen hair, which she arranged elaborately, was

profuse and beautiful, and her smile, though it lacked brightness, was

singularly sweet and appealing.

As the two girls looked at each other, they nodded carelessly; then

Geneva leaned forward and held out a slip of paper.

"I wonder if you would mind fixing up this list for me?" she asked in a

friendly tone. "I don't like to leave Neddy, and Bob has gone in to see

if there are any letters."

Running down the steps, Dorinda took the list from her and glanced over

it. "We haven't got the kind of coffee you want," she said. "It was

ordered two weeks ago, but it hasn't come yet."

"Well, we'll have to make out with what you have. If you'll wrap up the

things, Bob will bring them out to me."

She was a shy girl, gentle and amiable, yet there was a barely

perceptible note of condescension in her manner. "Just because she's

rich and I'm poor, she thinks she is better than I am," Dorinda thought

disdainfully, as she went up the steps.

While she was weighing and measuring the groceries, Bob Ellgood came

from the post office (which consisted of a partition, with a window, in

one corner of the store) and stopped by the counter to speak to her. He

was a heavy, slow-witted young man, kind, temperate, and good-looking in

a robust, beefy fashion. Because he was the eldest son of James Ellgood,

he was regarded as desirable by the girls in the neighbourhood, and

Dorinda remembered that, only a few Sundays ago, she had looked at him

in church and asked herself, with a start of expectancy, "What if he

should be the right one after all?" She laughed softly over the pure

absurdity of the recollection, and a gleam of admiration flickered in

the round, marble-like eyes of the young man.

"I hope the Greylocks' steer didn't harm your father's plant beds," he

said abruptly.

"No," she shook her head. "I haven't heard that they suffered."

Having weighed the sugar, she was pouring it into a paper bag, and his

eyes lingered on the competent way in which her fingers turned down the

opening, secured it firmly, and snipped off the end of the string with

an expert gesture. Only a week ago his attention would have flattered

her, but to-day she had other things to think of, and his admiring

oxlike stare made her impatient. Was that the way things always came,

after you had stopped wanting them?

"Well, he ought to have a good crop after the work he's put on those

fields," he continued, as she placed the packages in a cracker box and

handed them to him over the counter.

She shook her head. "No matter how hard you work it always comes back to

the elements in the end. You can't be sure of anything when you have to

depend upon the elements for a living."

"That's what Father says." He accepted the fatalistic philosophy without

dispute. "After all, the rain and frost and drought, not the farmer, do

most of the farming." He had had a good education, and though his speech

was more provincial than Jason's, it lacked entirely the racy flavour of

Pedlar's Mill.

With the box under one arm, he was still gazing at her, when the

impatient voice of Geneva rang out from the doorway, and the girl came

hurrying into the store.

"What are you waiting for, Bob? I thought you were never coming." Then,

as her eyes fell on Dorinda, she added apologetically, "Of course I know

the things were ready, but Bob is always so slow. I've got to hurry back

because Neddy won't stand alone."

She turned away and went out, while Bob followed with a crestfallen air.

"As if I cared!" thought Dorinda proudly. "As if I wanted to talk to

him!"

The train to the north had gone by at five o'clock, and the next one,

which Miss Seena had just taken to Richmond, was the last that would

stop before afternoon. The few farmers who had lounged about the track

were now waiting in the store, while Nathan weighed and measured or

counted small change into callous palms. Here and there a negro in blue

jeans overalls stood patiently, with an expression of wistful

resignation which was characteristic less of an individual than of a

race. There was little talk among the white farmers, and that little was

confined to the crops, or the weather. Rugged, gnarled, earth-stained,

these men were as impersonal as trees or as transcendental philosophers.

In their rustic pride they accepted silence as they accepted poverty or

bad weather, without embarrassment and without humility. If they had

nothing to say, they were capable of sitting for hours, dumb and

unabashed, over their pipes or their "plugs" of tobacco. They could tell

a tale, provided there was one worth the telling, with caustic wit and

robust realism; but the broad jest or the vulgar implication of the

small town was an alien product among them. Not a man of them would have

dared recite an anecdote in Pedlar's store that Dorinda should not have

heard. The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by

communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had

roughened the husk.

"Do you want me to wait on Mr. Appleseed?" asked Dorinda, glancing past

Nathan to the genial, ruddy old farmer, who was standing near her, with

his idiot son close at his side. As she spoke she lifted the top from

one of the tall jars on the counter, and held out a stick of striped

peppermint candy. "Here's a stick of candy for you, Billy."

The boy grinned at her with his sagging mouth, and made a snatch at the

candy.

"Say thanky, son," prompted John Appleseed.

"Thanky," muttered Billy obediently, slobbering over the candy.

"No, I'll look after John as soon as I've fixed up this brown sugar," said

Nathan. "I wish you'd take those ducks from Aunt Mehitable Green. She's

been waitin' a long time, and she ain't so young as she used to be. Tell

her I'll allow her seventy-five cents for the pair, if they're good

size. She wants the money's worth in coffee and Jamaica ginger."

"Why, I didn't know Aunt Mehitable was here!" Glancing quickly about,

she discovered the old woman sitting on a box at the far end of the

room, with the pair of ducks in her lap. "I didn't see you come in, or

I'd have spoken to you before," added the girl, hurrying to her.