Aunt Mehitable Green had assisted at Dorinda's birth, which had been

unusually difficult, and there was a bond of affection, as well as a

sentimental association, between them. Mrs. Oakley, with her superior

point of view, had always been friendly with the negroes around her.

During Dorinda's childhood both mother and daughter had visited Aunt

Mehitable in her cabin at Whistling Spring, and the old midwife had

invariably returned their simple gifts of food or wine made from

scuppernong grapes, with slips of old-fashioned flowers or "physic"

brewed from the mysterious herbs in her garden. She still bore the

reputation, bestowed half in fear, half in derision, of "a conjure

woman," and not a negro in the county would have offended her. Though

there was a growing scepticism concerning her ability to "throw spells"

or work love charms, even Mrs. Oakley admitted her success in removing

moles and warts and in making cows go dry at the wrong season. She was a

tall, straight negress, with a dark wrinkled face, in which a brooding

look rippled like moonlight on still water, and hair as scant and grey

as lichen on an old stump. Her dress of purple calico was stiffly

starched, and she wore a decent bonnet of black straw which had once

belonged to Mrs. Oakley. The stock she came of was a good one, for, as a

slave, she had belonged to the Cumberlands, who had owned Honeycomb Farm

before it was divided. Though that prosperous family had "run to seed"

and finally disappeared, the slaves belonging to it had sprung up

thriftily, in freedom, on innumerable patches of rented ground. The

Greens, with the Moodys and Plumtrees, represented the coloured

aristocracy of Pedlar's Mill; and Micajah Green, Aunt Mehitable's eldest

son, had recently bought from Nathan Pedlar the farm he had worked, with

intelligence and industry, as a tenant.

"I hope you didn't walk over here," said Dorinda, for Whistling Spring

was five miles away, on the other side of the Greylocks' farm, beyond

Whippernock River.

The old woman shook her head, while she began unwrapping the strips of

red flannel on the legs of the ducks. "Naw'm, Micajah brung me over wid

de load er pine in de oxcyart. I ain' seen you en yo' Ma; fur a mont' er

Sundays, honey," she added.

"I've wanted to get down all winter," answered Dorinda, "but the back

roads are so bad I thought I'd better wait until the mud dried. Are any

of your children living at home with you now?"

Aunt Mehitable sighed. "De las oner dem is done lef' me, but I ain't

never seed de way yit dat de ole hen kin keep de fledglin's in de

chicken coop. Dey's all done moughty well, en dat's sump'n de Lawd's

erbleeged ter be praised fur. Caze He knows," she added fervently, "de

way I use'n ter torment de Th'one wid pray'r when dey wuz all little."

"Pa says Micajah is one of the best farmers about here."

"Dat's so. He sholy is," assented the old midwife. "En Micar he's

steddyin' 'bout horse sickness along wid Marse Kettledrum, de horse

doctah," she continued, "en Moses, he's gwineter wuck on de railroad

ontwel winter, en Abraham, he's helpin' Micajah, en Eliphalet, he's

leasin' a patch er ground f'om Marse Garlick over yonder by Whippernock,

en Jemima, de one I done name arter ole Miss, she's wuckin' at Five Oaks

fur ole Doctah Greylock----"

"I thought she'd left there long ago," Dorinda broke in.

"Naw'm, she ain' left dar yit. She wuz fixin' ter git away, caze hit's

been kinder skeery over dar sence de ole doctah's been gittin' so

rambunctious; en Jemima, she ain' gwineter teck er bit er sass f'om dat

ar yaller huzzy, needer. Yas'm, she wuz all fixin' ter leave twell de

young doctah come back, an he axed 'er ter stay on dar en wait on him.

Huh!" she exclaimed abruptly, after a pause, "I 'low dar's gwinter be

some loud bellowin's w'en de young en de ole steer is done lock dere

horns tergedder." With a gesture of supreme disdain, she thrust the two

ducks away from her into Dorinda's hands. "Dar, honey, you teck dese yer

ducks," she said. "I'se moughty glad to lay eyes on you agin, but I'se

erbleeged ter be gittin' erlong back wid Micajah. You tell yo' Ma I'se

comin' ter see 'er jes' ez soon ez de cole spell is done let up. I sholy

is gwineter do hit."

When the old woman had gone, with the coffee and Jamaica ginger in her

basket, Dorinda hurried into the room at the back of the store, where

Rose Emily and the children were waiting for her.

"I couldn't get here any sooner," she explained as she entered. "First

Miss Seena Snead and then Aunt Mehitable stopped me. Are you feeling

easier to-day, Rose Emily?"

Mrs. Pedlar, wrapped in a pink crocheted shawl, with her hectic colour

and her gleaming hair, reminded Dorinda of the big wax doll they had had

in the window of the store last Christmas. She was so brilliant that she

did not look real.

"Oh, I feel like a different person this morning," she answered. It was

what she always said at the beginning of the day. "I'm sure I shall be

able to get up by evening."

"I'm so glad," Dorinda responded, as she did every morning. "Wait and

see what the doctor says."

"Yes, I thought I'd better stay in bed until he comes." She closed her

eyes from weakness, but a moment later, when she opened them, they shone

more brightly than ever. "He said he would stop by."

For an instant Dorinda hesitated; then she answered in a hushed voice.

"I met him in the road, and he drove me over."

Rose Emily's face was glowing. "Oh, did he? I'm so glad," she breathed.

"I'm afraid things aren't going well at Five Oaks," Dorinda pursued in a

troubled voice. "He looked dreadfully worried. It's the old man, I

suppose. Everybody says he's drinking himself to death, and there's that

coloured girl with all those children."

"Well, he can't live much longer," Rose Emily said hopefully, "and then,

of course, Jason will send them all packing." She reflected, as if she

were trying to recall something that had slipped her memory. "Somebody

was telling me the other day," she continued, "it must have been either

Miss Texanna or Miss Tabitha. Whoever it was thought Jason had made a

mistake to come back. Oh, I remember now! It was Miss Tabitha, and she

called Jason a fool to let his father manage his life. She said he had a

sweet nature, but that he was as light as a feather and a strong wind

could blow him away. Of course she didn't know him."

"Of course not," Dorinda assented emphatically.

"Well, I haven't seen him often, but he didn't seem to me to lack

backbone. Anyhow, I'd rather be married to a sweet nature than to a

strong will," she added. Ever since Jason's return, she had hoped so

ardently that he might fall in love with Dorinda that already, according

to her optimistic habit of mind, she regarded the match as assured.

They were still discussing young Doctor Greylock when Minnie May ran in

to say that Bud "would not mind what she told him," and Mrs. Pedlar

shifted her feverish animation in the direction of her daughter.

"Tell him if he doesn't do what you say, I'll make his Pa whip him as

soon as the store is closed," she said sternly, for she was a

disciplinarian; and the capable little girl ran out again, wiping her

red and shrivelled hands on the towel she had pinned over her short

dress.

"I declar that child's a born little mother," Rose Emily continued. "I

don't see how I could ever have pulled through without her."

Trivial as the incident was, Dorinda never forgot it. Years afterwards

the scene would return to her memory, and she would see again the

sturdy, energetic little figure, with the two thick wheaten red braids

and the towel pinned about her waist, hurrying out of the room. A born

little mother, that was the way Minnie May always appeared to her.

"Nathan needs me to help. I'd better go back," she said. "I'll look in

every now and then to see how you are." Smoothing her hair with her

hand, she hastened into the store.

As the morning advanced a line of white and coloured farmers, assembled

by the counter, with the chickens, eggs, and pats of butter which they

had brought to exchange for coffee, molasses, sugar, or simple household

remedies such as Jamaica ginger and Sloan's liniment. Tea was used only

in case of illness, and the brown tin canister on the shelf sometimes

remained empty for weeks.

Until yesterday Dorinda had regarded the monotonous routine of the store

as one of the dreary, though doubtless beneficial, designs of an

inscrutable Providence. A deep-rooted religious instinct persuaded her,

in spite of secret recoils, that dullness, not pleasure, was the

fundamental law of morality. The truth of the matter, she would probably

have said, was that one did the best one could in a world where duty was

invariably along the line of utmost resistance. But this morning, even

while she performed the empty mechanical gestures, she felt that her

mind had become detached from her body, and was whirling like a

butterfly in some ecstatic dream. Flightiness. That was how it would

have appeared to her mother. Yet, if this were flightiness, she thought,

who would ever choose to be sober? Beauty, colour, sweetness, all the

vital and radiant energy of the spring, vibrated through her. Her ears

were ringing as if she moved in a high wind. Sounds floated to her in

thin strains, from so great a distance that she was obliged to have

questions repeated before they reached her ears. And all the time, while

she weighed chickens and counted eggs and tasted butter, she was aware

that the faint, slow smile clung like an edge of light to her lips.

VII

The morning was well over when Minnie May came running into the store to

ask Dorinda to come to her mother.

"The doctor is with her," said the child, "and he wants to leave some

directions."

"Hadn't your father better see him?" Dorinda inquired, longing yet

hesitating.

"No, you go," answered Nathan before the child could reply. "You're so

much quicker at understanding," he explained, "and you can tell me what

he says after he's gone."

He looked, for all his immense frame, more bent and colourless and

ineffectual, she thought, than she had ever seen him. What a mean life

he had had! And he was good. There wasn't a better husband and father in

the world than Nathan Pedlar, and for the matter of that, there wasn't a

more honest tradesman. Yet everybody, even his own children, pushed him

aside as if he were of no consequence.

A few minutes later she was in Rose Emily's room, and her bright gaze

was on the clean-cut youthful figure leaning over her friend. Though she

had known that he would be there, her swift impression of him startled

her by its vividness. It was like this every time that she saw him.

There was an animation, a living quality in his face and smile which

made everything appear lifeless around him. Long afterwards, when she

had both remembered and forgotten, she decided that it was simply the

glamour of the unknown that she had felt in him. In those first months

after his return to Pedlar's Mill, he possessed for her the charm of

distant countries and picturesque enterprises. It was the flavour of

personality, she realized, even then, not of experience. He had

travelled little, yet his presence diffused the perilous thrill of

adventure.

"This is Dorinda," Rose Emily said; and he looked up and nodded as

casually as if he had never seen her before, or had just parted from

her. Which impression, Dorinda wondered, did he mean to convey?

"I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a hammock?" he inquired.

"What we need is to get her out on the porch. I've told her that every

time I've seen her."

"There are several hammocks in the store." As she answered his question,

Dorinda glanced at him doubtfully. In the sickroom he appeared to have

shed his youth as a snake sheds its skin. He might have been any age. He

was brisk, firm, efficient, and as sexless as a machine.

"Wouldn't it be safer to wait until the weather is milder?" Rose Emily

asked, with an anxious smile. "Cold is so bad for me."

"Nonsense!" He shook his head with a laugh. "That's the whole trouble

with you. Your lungs are starving for air. If you'd kept out of doors

instead of shutting the windows, you wouldn't be where you are now."

At this his patient made a timid protest. "Your father always said----"

He interrupted her brusquely. "My father was good in his generation, but

he belongs to the old school."

After this he talked on cheerfully, flattering her, chaffing her, while

he made fun of her old-fashioned hygiene and asked innumerable

questions, in a careless manner, about her diet, her medicine, her

diversions, and the deformity of the baby, John Abner, who was born with

a clubfoot. Though it seemed a long time to Dorinda, it was in fact not

more than a quarter of an hour before he said good-bye and nodded to the

girl to follow him out on the porch.

"I'll show you the very place to hang that hammock," he remarked as he

led the way out of doors.

Rose Emily stretched out her thin arm to detain him. "Don't you think

I'm getting better every day, Doctor?"

"Better? Of course you're better." He looked down at her with a smile.

"We'll have you up and out before summer."

Then he opened the door, and Dorinda obediently followed him outside.

"How on earth does she breathe in that oven?" he demanded moodily, while

he walked to the far end of the porch. "She'll be dead in three months,

if she doesn't get some fresh air into her lungs. And the children. It's

as bad as murder to keep them in that room."

He frowned slightly, and with his troubled frown, Dorinda felt that he

receded from her and became a stranger. His face was graver, firmer,

harassed by perplexity. It seemed to her incredible that he had looked

at her that morning with the romantic pathos and the imperative needs of

youth in his eyes.

"Will she really be up by summer?" she asked, breathless with hope and

surprise.

"Up?" He lowered his voice and glanced apprehensively over his shoulder.

"Why, she's dying. Don't you know she is dying?"

"I thought so," her voice broke. "But you told her----"

"You didn't expect me to tell her the truth, did you? What kind of brute

do you take me for?"

This new morality, for which neither religious doctrine nor experimental

philosophy had prepared her, stunned her into silence; and in that

silence he repeated, with a gesture of irritation, as if the admission

annoyed him excessively: "She'll be in her grave in six months, but you

couldn't expect me to tell her so."

"You mean there is no hope?"

"Not of a cure. Her lungs are too far gone. Of course, if she gets out

of doors, she may linger a little longer than we expect. Air and proper

nourishment work wonders sometimes."

"But don't you think she ought to have time to prepare?" It was the

question her mother would have asked, and she uttered it regretfully but

firmly.

"Prepare? You mean for her funeral?"

"No, I mean for eternity."

If she had presented some prehistoric fossil for his inspection, he

might have examined it with the same curious interest.

"For eternity?" he repeated.

Dorinda wavered. Though honest doubt was not unknown at Pedlar's Mill,

it had seldom resisted successfully the onslaught of orthodox dogma. To

the girl, with her intelligence and independence, many of her mother's

convictions had become merely habits of speech; yet, after all, was not

habit rather than belief the ruling principle of conduct?

"Will you let her die without time for repentance?" something moved her

to ask.

"Repentance! Good Lord! What opportunity has she ever had to commit a

pleasure?"

Then, as if the discussion irritated him, he picked up his medicine case

which he had laid on the railing of the porch. "I'll be passing again

about sundown," he remarked lightly, "and if you're ready to start home,

I'll pick you up as I go by."

As casually as that! "I'll pick you up as I go by!" Just as if she were

a bag of flour, she told herself in resentful despair. As he went from

her down the path to the gate, she resolved that she would not let him

drive her home if it killed her.

"I shan't be here at sundown," she called after him in the voice of a

Covenanter.

He was almost at the gate. Her heart sank like a wounded bird, and then,

recovering its lightness, soared up into the clouds. "Well, I'll manage

to come a little earlier," he responded, with tender gaiety. "Don't

disappoint me."

The small white gate between the two bare apple trees opened and closed

behind him. He untied the reins from the paling fence, and springing

into his buggy, drove off with a wave of his free hand. "God! What a

life!" he said, looking round while the buggy rolled down the slope in

the direction of the railway track. Standing there, she watched the

wheels rock slightly as they passed over the rails, and then spin on

easily along the road toward Green Acres. After the moving speck had

disappeared in the powder blue of the distance, it seemed to her that it

had left its vivid trail through the waste of the broomsedge. Her face

glowed; her bosom rose and fell quickly; her pulses were beating a

riotous tumult which shut out all other sounds. Suspense, heartache,

disappointment, all were forgotten. Why had no one told her that love

was such happiness?

Then, suddenly, her mind reproached her for the tumultuous joy. Rose

Emily was dying; yet she could not attune her thoughts to the solemn

fact of mortality. Walking the length of the porch, she opened the door

and went back into the close room.

"The doctor insists that you must open the windows," she said gravely,

subduing with an effort the blissful note in her voice.

So far had she been from the actual scene that she was not prepared for

the eagerness in Rose Emily's look.

"Oh, Dorinda," cried the dying woman, "the doctor was so encouraging!"

The girl turned her face to the window. "Yes, he was very encouraging."

"What did he say to you on the porch?"

"Only that he wanted to have you up before summer." After all, the big

lie was easier than the little one.

Mrs. Pedlar sighed happily. "I do wish summer would come!"

Dorinda bent down and straightened the pillow under the brilliant head.

It was hard to die, she thought, when the world was so beautiful. There

could be no drearier lot, she imagined, than marriage with Nathan for a

husband; better by far the drab freedom of the Snead sisters. Yet even

to Rose Emily, married to Nathan, life was not without sweetness. A

warm pity for her friend pervaded Dorinda's heart; pity for all that she

had missed and for the love that she had never known.

"It won't be long now." What more could she say?

"Dorinda!" Rose Emily's voice was quivering like the string of a harp.

"Miss Texanna came in for a minute, and she was so excited about the

dress Miss Seena is getting for you in town. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I wanted to, dear, only I didn't have time."

"I am so glad you are going to have a new dress. We can perfectly well

make it here, after Miss Seena has cut it out. Sometimes I get tired

crocheting."

Dorinda's eyes filled with tears. How kind Rose Emily was, how

unselfish, how generous! Always she was thinking of others; always she

was planning or working for the good of her children or Dorinda. Even as

a school teacher she had been like that, sweet, patient, generous to a

fault; and now, when she was dying, she grew nobler instead of peevish

and miserable like other hopelessly ill women.

"I'd love it," she said, as soon as she could trust herself to reply,

and she added hastily, "I wonder if you could eat a piece of duck

to-morrow. Aunt Mehitable brought a pair of nice fat ones."

Rose Emily nodded. "Yes, to-morrow. I'd like to see Aunt Mehitable the

next time she comes. She told me once she could conjure this mole off

the back of my neck."

"Well, you might let her try when you're out again." Tears were beading

Dorinda's lashes, and making some trivial excuse, she ran out of the

room. To be worrying about a little mole when Rose Emily would be dead

before summer was over!

A little before sunset, when the whistle of the train blew, Dorinda

picked up her shawl and hastened down to the track. Miss Texanna, having

nothing to do but knit in her box of a post office, had caught the

whistle as far away as Turkey Station, and was already waiting between

the big pump and the stranded freight car. "I reckon that's Sister Seena

on the platform," she remarked; and a few minutes later the train

stopped and the dressmaker was swung gallantly to the ground by the

conductor and the brakeman.

"I've got everything," she said, after the swift descent. "I looked

everywhere, and I bought the prettiest nun's veiling I could find. It's

as near the colour of a blue jay's wing as I ever saw, and I've got some

passementerie that's a perfect match." She was puffing while she walked

up the short slope to the store, but they were the puffs of a victorious

general. "Let's take it right straight into Rose Emily's room," she

added. "She will be just crazy about it."

When the three of them gathered about Rose Emily's bed, and the yards of

bright, clear blue unrolled on the counterpane, it seemed to Dorinda

that they banished the menacing thought of death. Though she pitied her

friend, she could not be unhappy. Her whole being was vibrating with

some secret, irrepressible hope. A blue dress, nothing more. The merest

trifle in the sum of experience; yet, when she looked back in later

years, it seemed to her that the future was packed into that single

moment as the kernel is packed into the nut.

"May I leave it here?" she asked, glancing eagerly out of the window.

"The sun has gone down, and I must hurry." Would he wait for her or had

he already gone on without her?

"We'll start cuttin' the first thing in the mornin'," said Miss Seena,

gloating over the nun's veiling. "Jest try the hat on, Dorinda, before

you go. I declar her own Ma wouldn't know her," she exclaimed, with the

pride of creation. "Nobody would ever have dreamed she was so

good-lookin', would they, Rose Emily? Ain't it jest wonderful what

clothes can do?"

With that "wonderful" tingling in her blood, Dorinda threw the orange

shawl over her head, and hastened out of the house. She felt as if the

blue waves were bearing her up and sweeping her onward. In all her life

it was the only thing she had ever had that she wanted. Yesterday there

had been nothing, and to-day the world was so rich and full of beauty

that she was dizzy with happiness. It was like a first draught of wine;

it enraptured while it bewildered.

"I was a little late, and I was afraid you would have gone," Jason said.

What did he mean by that, she asked herself. Ought she not to have

waited? She had no experience, no training, to guide her. Nothing but

this blind instinct, and how could she tell whether instinct was right

or wrong?

"Something kept me. I couldn't get away earlier," she answered. "Have

you worked all day?"

"Yes, but it isn't steady work. For hours at a time the store is empty.

Then they all come together. Of course we have to tidy up in the off

hours," she added, "and when there's nothing else to do I read aloud to

Rose Emily."

"Are you content? You look happy."

He was gazing straight ahead of him, and it seemed to her that he was as

impersonal as the Shorter Catechism. She suffered under it, yet she was

powerless, in her innocence, to change it.

"I don't know. There isn't any use thinking." Were there always these

fluctuations of hope and disappointment? Did nothing last? Was there no

stability in experience?

"Well, I got caught too," he said presently, as if he had not heard her.

"That's the rotten part of a doctor's life, everything and everybody

catches him. Good Lord! Is there never any end to it? I'd give my head

to get away. I'm not made for the country. It depresses me and lets me

down too easily. I suppose I'm born lazy at bottom, and I need the

contact with other minds to prod me into energy. This is the critical

time too. If I can't get away, I'm doomed for good. Yet what can I do?

I'm tied hand and foot as long as Father is alive."

"Couldn't you sell the farm?" Her voice sounded thin and colourless in

her ears.

"How can I? Who would buy? And it isn't only the farm. I wouldn't let

that stand in my way. Father has got into a panic about dying, and he is

afraid to be left alone with the negroes. He made me promise, when I

thought he was on his death-bed, that I wouldn't leave him as long as he

lived. He's got a will of iron--that's the only thing that keeps him

alive--and he's always had his way with me. He broke my spirit, I

suppose, when I was little. And it was the same way with Mother. She

taught me to be afraid of him, and to dodge and parry before I was old

enough to know what I was doing. When a fear like that gets into the

nerves, it's like a disease." He broke off moodily, and then went on

again without waiting for her response. "There's medicine now. I never

wanted to study medicine. I knew I wasn't cut out for it. What I wanted

to do was something entirely different,--but Father had made up his

mind, and in the end he had his way with me. He always gets his way with

me. He's thwarted everything I ever wanted to do as far back as I can

remember. For my good of course. I understand that. But you can ruin

people's lives--especially young people's lives--from the best motives."

His bitterness welled out in a torrent. It seemed to Dorinda that he had

forgotten her; yet, even though he was unaware of her sympathy, she felt

that she longed to reach out her hand and comfort him.

"I'm sorry," she said softly, "I'm sorry."

He looked at her with a laugh. "I oughtn't to have let that out," he

returned. "Something happened to upset me. I'm easy-going enough

generally, but there are some things I can't stand."

She was curious to know what had happened, what sort of things they were

that he couldn't stand; but after his brief outburst, he did not confide

in her. He was engrossed, she saw, in a recollection he did not divulge;

and, manlike, he made no effort to assume a cheerfulness he did not

feel. The drive was a disappointment to her; yet, in some inexplicable

way, the disappointment increased rather than diminished his power over

her. While she sat there, with her lips closed, she was, shedding her

allurement as prodigally as a flower sheds its fragrance. Gradually, the

afterglow thinned into dusk; the road darkened, and the broomsedge,

subdued by twilight, became impenetrable.

VIII

It was Easter Sunday, and Dorinda, wearing her new clothes with outward

confidence but a perturbed mind, stood on the front porch while she

waited for the horses to be harnessed to the spring wagon.

Though she was far less handsome in her blue dress and her straw hat

with the wreath of cornflowers than she was in her old tan ulster and

orange shawl, neither she nor Almira Pride her father's niece, who was

going to church with them, was aware of the fact. Easter would not be

acknowledged in the austere service of the church at Pedlar's Mill; but

both women knew that spring would blossom on the head of every girl who

could afford a new hat. Joshua had gone to harness the horses; and while

Mrs. Oakley put on her bonnet and her broadcloth mantle trimmed with

bugles, which she had worn to church ever since Dorinda could remember,

Almira babbled on in a rapture of admiration.

She was a pink, flabby, irresponsible person, adjusting comfortably the

physical burden of too much flesh to the spiritual repose of too little

mind. All the virtues and the vices of the "poor white" had come to

flower in her. Married at fifteen to a member of a family known as "the

low down Prides," she had been perfectly contented with her lot in a

two-room log cabin and with her husband, a common labourer, having a

taste for whiskey and a disinclination for work, who was looked upon by

his neighbours as "not all there." As the mother of children so numerous

that their father could not be trusted to remember their names, she

still welcomed the yearly addition to her family with the moral serenity

of a rabbit.

"I declar, Dorrie, I don't see how you got such a stylish flare," she

exclaimed now, without envy and without ambition. "That bell skirt sets

jest perfect!"

"I hope we got it right," said Dorinda, anxiously, as she turned slowly

round under Almira's gaze. "Is Ike staying with the children?"

"Yes, we couldn't both leave 'em the same day. Is Uncle Josh hitching

up?"

"He's coming round right now," said Mrs. Oakley, wafting a pungent,

odour of camphor before her as she appeared. "I'm glad you came over,

Almira. There's plenty of room in the wagon since we've put in the back

seat. Ain't you coming to church with us, Josiah?"

"No, I ain't," Josiah replied, stubbornly. "When I get a day's rest, I'm

goin' to take it. It don't rest me to be preached to."

"Well, it ought to," rejoined his mother, with an air of exhausted

piety. "If going to church ain't a rest, I don't know what you call

one."

But Josiah was in a stubborn and rebellious mood. He was suffering with

toothache, and though he was of the breed, he was not of the temper of

which martyrs are made. "I don't see that yo' religion has done so much

for you," he added irascibly, "or for Pa either."

In her Sunday clothes, with her buckram-lined skirt spreading about her,

Mrs. Oakley stopped, as she was descending the steps of the porch, and

looked back at her son. "It is the only thing that has kept me going,

Josiah," she answered, and her lip trembled as she repeated the

solitary formula with which experience had provided her.

"Poor Ma," Dorinda thought while she watched her. "He might a least

leave her the comfort of her religion."

"There's Uncle Josh now!" exclaimed Almira, who was by instinct a

peacemaker. "Have you got yo' hymn book, Aunt Eudora? I forgot to bring

mine along."

"It's in my reticule," Mrs. Oakley replied, producing a bag of beaded

black silk, which she had used every Sunday for twenty years. "You'll

get all muddied up, Dorinda, so I brought this old bedquilt for you to

spread over your lap. It's chilly enough, anyway, for your ulster, and

you can leave it with the quilt in the wagon. I can see you shivering

now in that thin nun's veiling."

"I'm not cold," Dorinda answered valiantly; but she slipped her arms

into the sleeves of the ulster, and accepted obediently the bedquilt

her mother held out. Something, either Josiah's surliness or the slight

chill in the early April air, had dampened her spirits, and she was

realizing that the possession of a new dress does not confer happiness.

Going down the steps, she glanced up doubtfully at the changeable blue

of the sky. "I do hope it is going to stay clear," she murmured.

Round the corner of the house, she could see Joshua harnessing the

horses, Dan and Beersheba. Dan, the leader, was still champing fodder as

he backed up to the ramshackle vehicle, and while he raised his heavy

hoofs, he turned his gentle, humid gaze on his master. He was a tall,

rawboned animal, slow but sure, as Joshua said proudly, with a flowing

tail, plaited now and tied up with red calico, and the doleful face of a

Presbyterian gone wrong. Beside him, Beersheba, his match in colour but

not in character, moved with a mincing step, and surveyed the Sabbath

prospect with a sportive epicurean eye. Unlike the Southern farmers

around him, and the unimaginative everywhere, who are without feeling

for animals, the better part of Joshua's life was spent with his two

horses; and Dorinda sometimes thought that they were nearer to him than

even his wife and his children. Certainly he was less humble and more at

home in their company. In the midst of his family he seldom spoke, never

unless a question was put to him; but coming upon him unawares in the

fields or by the watering trough, Dorinda had heard him talking to Dan

and Beersheba in the tone a man uses only to the creatures who speak and

understand the intimate language of his heart.

Always at a disadvantage in his Sunday clothes, which obscured the

patriarchal dignity of his appearance, he looked more hairy and

earthbound than ever this morning. Though he had scrubbed his face

until it shone, the colour of clay and the smell of manure still clung

to him. Only his brown eyes, with their dumb wistfulness, were bright

and living.

Wrapped in, the old bedquilt, Dorinda jogged sleepily over the familiar

road, which had become so recently the road of happiness. In a dream she

felt the jolting of the wagon; in a dream she heard the creaking of the

wheels, the trotting of the horses, the murmur of wind in the tree-tops,

the piping of birds in the meadows. In a dream she smelt the rich, vital

scents of the ploughed ground, the sharp tang of manure on the

tobacco fields, the stimulating whiff of camphor from her mother's

handkerchief. The trees were still bare in the deep band of woods,

except for the flaming points of the maple and the white and rosy foam

of, the dogwood and redbud; but beside the road patches of grass and

weeds were as vivid as emerald, and where the distance was webbed with

light and shadow, the landscape unrolled like a black and silver

brocade. While she drove on the vague depression drifted away from her

spirits, and she felt that joy mounted in her veins as the sap flowed

upward around her. In this dream, as in a remembered one of her

childhood, she was for ever approaching some magical occasion, and yet

never quite reaching it. She was for ever about to be satisfied, and yet

never satisfied in the end. The dream, like all her dreams, carried her

so far and no farther. At the very point where she needed it most, it

broke off and left her suspended in a world of gossamer unrealities.

The mud spattered over the quilt in her lap, and she heard her Mother

say in her habitual tone of nervous nagging, "Drive carefully over that

bad place, Joshua. If Elder Pursley stays with us during the missionary

meetings, I'll have to ask Miss Texanna Snead to let us have some of her

milk and butter. They have some fresh cows coming on, and I don't reckon

she would miss it. Anyway, I'll try to pay her back with scuppernong

grapes next September."

Again the prick in Dorinda's conscience! Though her mind rebelled, her

conscience was incurably Presbyterian, and while she wore the blue dress

gaily enough, she did not doubt that it was the symbol of selfishness.

Between the blue dress and the red cow, she knew, the choice was, in its

essence, one of abstract morality. Neither her father nor her mother had

reproached her; but their magnanimity had served only to sharpen the

sting of reflection. "Well, I reckon you won't be young but once,

daughter," her mother had observed with the dry tolerance of

disillusionment, "and the sooner you get over with it the better," while

her father had stretched out his toil-worn hand and fingered one of the

balloon sleeves. "That looks mighty pretty, honey, an' don't you worry

about not gittin' the red caw. It'll save yo' Ma the trouble of

churnin', an' you kind of lose the taste fur butter when you ain't had

it fur some while."

"If Elder Pursley can't come, maybe one of the foreign missionaries

will," Dorinda remarked, hoping to cheer her mother and to distract her

mind from the mud holes.

"Of course we ain't got much to offer them," replied Mrs. Oakley in a

tone of pious humility. "Though I don't reckon things of the flesh count

much with a missionary, and, anyway, I'm going to have a parcel of young

chickens to fry. Well, if we ain't most there! I declare Dan and

Beersheba are getting real sprightly again!"

In the afternoon, sitting at the window of the spare chamber, to which,

she had been driven by the sultry calm of the Sabbath at Old Farm,

Dorinda asked herself, and could find no answer, why the day had been a

disappointment? She had expected nothing, and yet because nothing had

come, she was dissatisfied and unhappy. Was there no rest anywhere? she

asked without knowing that she asked it. Was love, like life, merely a

passing from shock to shock, with no permanent peace?

Returning from church, the family had sat down, ill-humoured from

emptiness, to dinner at four o'clock. It was the custom to have dinner

in the middle of the afternoon, and no supper on Sunday; and the men

were expected to gorge themselves into a state of somnolence which

would, as Mrs. Oakley said, "tide them over until breakfast." When the

heavy meal had been dispatched but not digested by the others, Dorinda

(who had scarcely touched the apple dumplings her mother had

solicitously pressed on her) came into the unused bedroom to put away

her hat and dress in the big closet. The spare room, which was kept

scrupulously cleaned and whitewashed, was situated at the back of the

house adjoining Mrs. Oakley's chamber. All the possessions the family

regarded as sacred were preserved here in a faint greenish light and a

stale odour of sanctity. The windows were seldom opened; but Dorinda had

just flung back the shutters, and the view she gazed out upon was like

the coming of spring in an old tapestry. Though the land was not

beautiful, that also had its moments of beauty.

Immediately in front of her, the pear orchard had flowered a little late

and scattered its frail bloom on the grass. As the sunlight streamed

through the trees, they appeared to float between earth and sky in some

ineffable medium, while the petals on the ground shone and quivered with

a fugitive loveliness, as if a stir or a breath would dissolve the white

fire to dew. Above the orchard, where a twisted path ran up to it, there

was the family graveyard, enclosed by a crumbling fence which had once

been of white palings, and in the centre of the graveyard the big

harp-shaped pine stood out, clear and black, on the low crest of the

hill. It was the tallest pine, people said, in the whole of Queen

Elizabeth County; its rocky base had protected it in its youth; and

later on no one had taken the trouble to uproot it from the primitive

graveyard. In spring the boughs were musical with the songs of birds; on

stormy days the tree rocked back and forth until Mrs. Oakley imagined,

in her bad spells, that she heard the creaking of a gallows; and on hot

summer evenings, when the moon rose round and orange-red above the hill,

the branches reminded Dorinda of the dark flying shape of a witch.

While she sat there she lived over again the incidents of the morning;

but the vision in her mind was as different from the actual occurrences

as the image of her lover was different from the real Jason Greylock.

Nothing had happened to disappoint her. Absolutely nothing. There was no

reason why she should have been happy yesterday and miserable to-day;

there was no reason except the eternal unreasonableness of love! She had

tried to fix her mind on the sermon, which was a little shorter and no

duller than usual. Sitting on the hard bench which she called a pew,

bending her head over the bare back of the seat in front of her, she had

sought to win spiritual peace by driving a bargain with God. "Give me

happiness, and I----"

Then before her prayer was completed, the congregation had stood up to

sing, and she had met the eyes of Jason Greylock over the row of humble

heads and proud voices. He was sitting in the Ellgood pew, and of course

it was natural that he should have gone home with the Ellgoods to

dinner. It was, she repeated sternly, perfectly natural. It was

perfectly natural also that he should have forgotten that he had told

her to beg, borrow, or steal a blue dress. In the few minutes when he

had stopped to shake hands with her father and mother in the porch of

the church, he had turned to her and asked, "How did you know that you

ought to wear blue?" Yes, that, like everything else that had happened,

was perfectly natural. For the last few weeks he had driven her to the

store and back every day; he had appeared to have no happiness except in

the hours that he spent with her; he had spoken to her, he had looked at

her, as if he loved her; yet, she repeated obstinately, it was natural

that he should be different on Sunday. Everything had always been

different on Sunday. Since her childhood it had seemed to her that the

movement of all laws, even natural ones, was either suspended or

accelerated on the Sabbath.

She was thinking of this when the door opened, and Mrs. Oakley, who had

resumed her ordinary clothes without disturbing her consecrated

expression, thrust her head into the room.

"I've looked everywhere for you, Dorinda. Are you sick?"

"No, I'm not sick."

"Has Rufus been teasing you?"

"No."

"Has anybody said anything to hurt your feelings? Josiah is grouchy; but

you mustn't mind what he says."

"Oh, no. He hasn't been any worse than usual. There isn't anything the

matter, Ma."

"I noticed you didn't half eat your dinner, and your father kind of

thought somebody had hurt your feelings."

Closing the door behind her, Mrs. Oakley crossed the room and sat down

near her daughter in the best mahogany rocker. Then, observing

that she had disarranged the fall of the purple calico flounce, she rose

and adjusted the slip cover. While she was still on her feet, she went

over to the bed and shook the large feather pillows into shape. After

that, before sitting down again, she stood for a few moments with her

stern gaze wandering about the room, as if she were seeking more dirt to

conquer. But such things did not worry her. They drifted like straws on

the surface of her mind, while her immortal spirit was preoccupied with

a profound and incurable melancholy.

"I hope you ain't upset in your mind, daughter," she said abruptly.

Dorinda turned her lucid gaze on her mother. "Ma, whatever made you

marry Pa?" she asked bluntly.

For an instant the frankness of the question stunned Mrs. Oakley. She

had inherited the impenetrable Scotch reserve on the subject of

sentiment, and it seemed to her, while she pondered the question, that

there were no words in which she could answer her daughter. Both her

vocabulary and her imagination were as innocent of terms of sex as if

she were still an infant learning her alphabet.

"Well, your father's a mighty good man, Dorinda," she replied evasively.

"I know he is, but what made you marry him?"

"He's never given me a cross word in his life," Mrs. Oakley pursued,

working herself up, as she went on, until she sounded as if she were

reciting a Gospel hymn. "I've never heard a complaint from him. There

never was a better worker, and it isn't his fault if things have always

gone against him."

"I know all that," said Dorinda, as implacable as truth, "but what made

you marry him? Were you ever in love with him?"

Mrs. Oakley's eyes lost suddenly their look of mystic vision and became

opaque with memories. "I reckon I sort of took a fancy to him," she

responded.

"Is there ever any reason why people marry?"

A mild regret flickered into the face of the older woman. "I s'pose they

think they've got one."

She must have been pretty once, Dorinda thought while she watched her.

She must have been educated to refinements of taste and niceties of

manner; yet marriage had been too strong for her, and had conquered her.

"I don't see how you've stood it!" she exclaimed, with the indignant

pity of youth.

Mrs. Oakley's bleak eyes, from which all inner glory had departed,

rested pensively on her daughter. "There ain't but one way to stand

things," she returned slowly. "There ain't but one thing that keeps you

going and keeps a farm going, and that is religion. If you ain't got

religion to lean back on, you'd just as well give up trying to live in

the country."

"I don't feel that way about religion," Dorinda said obstinately. "I

want to be happy."

"You're too young yet. Your great-grandfather used to say that most

people never came to God as long as there was anywhere else for them to

go."

"Was that true of great-grandfather?"

"It must have been. He told me once that he didn't come to Christ until

he had thirsted for blood."

To Dorinda this seemed an indirect way to divine grace; but it made her

great-grandfather appear human to her for the only time in her life.

"But he must have had something else first," she observed logically.

"People always seem to have had something else first, or they wouldn't

have found out how worthless it is. You must have been in love once,

even if you have forgotten it."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I haven't forgotten it, daughter," she

answered. "It's time you were knowing things, I reckon, or you wouldn't

be asking."

"Yes, it's time I was knowing things," repeated Dorinda. "You told me

once that great-grandfather tried to keep you from marrying. Then why

did you do it?"

For a minute or two before she replied the muscles in Mrs. Oakley's face

and throat worked convulsively. "I was so set on your father that I

moped myself into a decline," she said in a voice that was half

strangled. "Those feelings have always gone hard in our family. There

was your great-aunt Dorinda, the one you were named after," she

continued, passing with obvious relief from her personal history. "When

she couldn't get the man she'd set her heart on, she threw herself into

the millstream; but after they fished her out and dried her off, she

sobered down and married somebody else and was as sensible as anybody

until the day of her death. She lived to be upwards of ninety, and your

great-grandfather used to say he prized her advice more than that of any

man he knew. Then there was another sister, Abigail, who went deranged

about some man she hadn't seen but a few times, and they had to put her

away in a room with barred windows. They didn't have good asylums then

to send anybody to. But she got over it too, and went as a missionary

overseas. That all happened in Ireland before your great-grandfather

came to this country. I never saw your great-aunt Dorinda, but she

corresponded regularly, till the day of her death, with your

great-grandfather. I remember his telling me that she used to say

anybody could be a fool once, but only a born fool was ever a fool

twice."

"I wonder what it was?" said Dorinda wearily.

Mrs. Oakley sighed. "It's nature, I reckon," she replied, without

reproach but without sympathy. "Grandfather used to say that when a

woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could

drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome. But,

being a man, I s'pose he had his own way of looking at it; and if it's

woman's nature to take it too hard, it's just as much the nature of man

to take it too easy. The way I've worked it out is that with most women,

when it seems pure foolishness, it ain't really that. It's just the

struggle to get away from things as they are."

To get away from things as they are! Was this all there was in her

feeling for Jason; the struggle to escape from the endless captivity of

things as they are? In the bleak dawn of reason her dreams withered like

flowers that are blighted by frost.

"Whatever it is, you haven't a good word for it," she said, vaguely

resentful.

Mrs. Oakley considered the question impartially. "Well, it ain't

catching and it ain't chronic," she remarked at last, with the temperate

judgment of one who has finished with love. "I've got nothing to say

against marriage, of course," she explained. "Marriage is the Lord's own

institution, and I s'pose it's a good thing as far as it goes. Only,"

she added wisely, "it ain't ever going as far as most women try to make

it. You'll be all right married, daughter, if you just make up your mind

that whatever happens, you ain't going to let any man spoil your life."

The brave words, striking deep under the surface, rang against the vein

of iron in Dorinda's nature. Clear and strong as a bell, she heard the

reverberations of character beneath the wild bloom of emotion. Yes,

whatever happened, she resolved passionately, no man was going to spoil

her life! She could live without Jason; she could live without any man.

The shadows of her great-aunts, Dorinda and Abigail, demented victims of

love, stretched, black and sinister, across the generations. In her

recoil from an inherited frailty, she revolted, with characteristic

energy, to the opposite extreme of frigid disdain.

"Were all great-grandfather's sisters like that?" she asked hopefully,

remembering that he had had six.

"Oh, no." Her mother was vague but encouraging. "I don't recollect ever

hearing anything foolish about Rebekah and Priscilla, and even the

others were sensible enough when they had stopped running after men."

Running after men! The phrase was burned with acid into her memory. Was

that what her mother, who did not know, would think of her? Was that

what Jason, who did know, thought of her now? Her love, which had been

as careless in its freedom as the flight of a bird, became suddenly shy

and self-conscious. She had promised that she would meet him at

Gooseneck Creek after sunset; but she knew now that she could not go,

that something stronger than her desire to be with him was holding her

back.

After her mother had gone she sat there for hours, with her eyes on the

lengthening shadows over the pear orchard. This something stronger than

her desire was hardening into resolution within her. She would avoid him

in the future wherever she could; she would not look for him at the fork

of the road; she would go to work an hour earlier and return an hour

later in order that she might not appear to throw herself in his way.

Already the inevitable battle between the racial temperament and the

individual will was beginning, and before the evening was over she told

herself that she was victorious. Though her longing drew her like a cord

to Gooseneck Creek, and the quiver of her nerves was as sharp as the

pain of an aching tooth, she stayed in her mother's chamber until

bedtime, and tried unsuccessfully to fix her mind on her

great-grandfather's dry sermon on temperance. When the evening was over

at last, and she went upstairs to her room, she felt as if the blood had

turned back in her veins. In the first fight she had conquered, but it

was one of those victories, she knew without admitting the knowledge,

which are defeats.

IX

In May and June, for a brief season between winter desolation and summer

drought, the starved land flushed into loveliness. Honey-coloured

sunlight. The notes of a hundred birds. A roving sweetness of wild grape

in the air. To Dorinda, whose happiness had come so suddenly that her

imagination was still spinning from the surprise of it, the flowerlike

blue of the sky, the songs of birds, and the elusive scent of the wild

grape, all seemed to be a part of that rich inner world, with its

passionate expectancy and its sense of life burning upward.

They were to be married in the autumn. Even now, when she repeated the

words, they sounded so unreal that she could scarcely believe them; but

her prudent Scotch mind, which still distrusted ecstasy, had ceased long

ago to distrust Jason's love. The thing she wanted had come, at last,

and it had come, she realized, after she had deliberately turned her

back upon it. She had found happiness, not by seeking it, but by running

away from it. For two weeks she had persisted in her resolution; she had

drawn desperately upon the tough fibre of inherited strength. For two

weeks she had avoided Jason when it was possible, and in avoiding him,

she could not fail to perceive, she had won him. To her direct,

forward-springing nature there was a shock in the discovery that, where

the matter is one of love, honesty is at best a questionable policy. Was

truth, after all, in spite of the exhortations of preachers, a weaker

power than duplicity? Would evasion win in life where frankness would

fail? Then, as passion burned through her like the sunrise, doubt was

extinguished. Since her heart told her that he was securely hers, what

did it matter to her how she had won him?

For the first time in her life she had ceased longing, ceased striving.

She was as satisfied as Almira to drift with the days toward some

definite haven of the future. Detached, passive, still as a golden lily

in a lily-pond, she surrendered herself to the light and the softness.

Her soul was asleep, and beyond this inner stillness, men and women were

as impersonal as trees walking. There was no vividness, no reality even,

except in this shining place where her mind brooded with folded leaves.

She was no longer afraid of life. The shadows of her great-aunts,

Dorinda and Abigail, were as harmless as witches that have been robbed

of their terror.

In those months, while her eyes were full of dreams, her immature beauty

bloomed and ripened into its summer splendour. There was a richer gloss

on her hair, which was blue black in the shadow, a velvet softness to

her body, a warmer flush, like the colour of fruit, in her cheeks and

lips. Her artless look wavered and became shy and pensive. Some subtle

magic had transformed her; and if the natural Dorinda still survived

beneath this unreal Dorinda, she was visible only in momentary sparkles

of energy. When she was with Jason she talked little. Expression had

never been easy for her, and now, since silence was so much softer and

sweeter than speech, she sat in an ecstatic dumbness while she drank in

the sound of his voice. Feeling, which had drugged her until only half

of her being was awake, had excited him into an unusual mental activity.

He was animated, eager, weaving endless impracticable schemes, like a

man who is intoxicated but still in command of his faculties.

"Are you happy?" she asked one August afternoon, while they sat in the

shade of the thin pines which edged the woods beyond Joshua's

tobacco field. It was the question she asked every day, and his answers,

though satisfying to her emotion, were unconvincing to her intelligence.

He loved her as ardently as she loved him; yet she was beginning to

realize that only to a woman are love and happiness interchangeable

terms. Some obscure anxiety working in his mind was stronger than all

her love, all her tenderness. She gave way before it, but never, except

in rare moments of ecstasy, did it yield place to her.

He smiled. "Of course; but I'll be happier when we can get away. I can't

stand this country. My nerves begin to creep as soon as twilight comes

on."

The woods behind them, known to the negroes in slavery days as "Hoot Owl

Woods," divided the front of Old Farm from the fallow meadows of Five

Oaks, and stretched westward to the Old Stage Road and the gate at the

fork. In front of the lovers, looking east, a web of blue air hung over

the tobacco field, where the huge plants were turning yellow in the

intense heat. Back and forth in the furrows Joshua and Josiah were

moving slowly, like giant insects, while they searched for the hidden

"suckers" along the thick juicy stalks. Beyond the tobacco field there

was a ragged vegetable garden, where the tomatoes were rotting to pulp

in the sun, and even the leaves of the corn looked wilted. The air was

so breathless that a few languid crows appeared to float like dead

things over the parched country.

"You don't feel that when you are with me," she said.

"The trouble is that I can't be with you but a part of the time. There's

this worthless practice. I can't give it up, if I'm to keep on in

medicine, and yet it means that I must spend half my life jogging over

these God-forsaken roads. Then the night!" He shivered with disgust. "If

you only knew, and I'm thankful you don't, what it means to be shut up

in that house. Some nights my father doesn't sleep at all unless he is

drugged into stupor. He wanders about with a horsewhip, looking in every

room and closet for something to flog."

While he spoke she had a vision of the house, with its dust and cobwebs,

and of the drunken old man, in his nightshirt and bare feet, roaming up

and down the darkened staircase. She could see his bleared eyes, his

purple face, his skinny legs, like the legs of a turkey gobbler, and his

hands, as sharp as claws, lashing out with the horsewhip. The picture

was so vivid that, coming in the midst of her dreamy happiness, it

sickened her. Why did Jason have to stand horrors like that?

"It can't last much longer," she said. Was it the right thing, she

wondered, or ought she to have kept up the pretence of loving the old

man and dreading his death? Life would be so much simpler, she

reflected, if people would only build on facts, not on shams.

He shook his head. "Nobody can say. Sometimes I think he can't last but

a few weeks. Then he improves, without apparent reason, and his strength

is amazing. According to everything we know about his condition, he

ought to have died months ago; yet he appears to be getting better now

instead of worse. I believe it is simply a question of will. He is kept

alive by his terror of dying. It's brutal, I know," he added, "to look

forward to anybody's death, especially your own father's; but if you

only knew how my life is eaten away hour by hour."

"You couldn't make some arrangement?" she asked. "Engage somebody to

stay with him, or--or send him away?"

"I've thought of that. God knows I've thought of everything. But he

isn't mad, you see. He is as sane as I am except when his craving for

whiskey overcomes his fear of death, and he drinks himself into a

frenzy. He won't have anybody else with him. I am the only human being

who can do anything with him, and strange as it seems, I believe he has

some kind of crazy affection for me in his heart. That's why I've put up

with him so long. Several times I've been ready to leave, with my bags

packed and the buggy at the door, and then he's broken down and wept

like a child and begged me not to desert him. He reminds me then that he

is dying, and that I promised to stick by him until the end. It's

weakness in me to give in, but he broke my will when I was a child, he

and my mother between them, and I can't get over the habit of yielding.

I may be all wrong. Sometimes I know that I am. But, after all, it was a

good impulse that made me promise to stick to him." For an instant he

hesitated, and then added bitterly, "I can't tell you how often in life

I've seen men betrayed by their good impulses."

"After it is over, you will be glad that you didn't leave him."

"I don't know. The truth is I'm in an infernal muddle. After all my

medical training, there's a streak of darky superstition somewhere

inside of me. You'd think science would have knocked it out, but it

hasn't. The fact is that I never really cared a hang about science. I

was pushed into medicine, but the only aptitude I have for the

profession is one of personality, and the only interest I feel in it is

a sentimental pleasure in relieving pain. However, I've kept the

superstition all right, and I have a sneaking feeling that if I break my

word and desert the old man, it will come back at me in the end."

"But you're a wonderful doctor," she murmured, with her face against his

shoulder. "Look at the people you've helped since you've been here."

He laughed without merriment. "That reminds me of the way I used to

think I'd bring civilization to the natives. I imagined, when I first

came back, that all I had to do was to get people together and tell them

how benighted they were, and that they'd immediately want to see wisdom.

Do you remember the time I put up notices and opened the schoolhouse,

and got only Nathan Pedlar and an idiot boy for an audience? The hardest

thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in

a rut, but not to get out of it. Well, that was almost six months ago,

and those six months have taught me that any prejudice, even the

prejudice in favour of the one-crop system, is a sacred institution.

Look at the land!" He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the

sun-bleached soil. "Even generations of failure can't teach the farmers

about here that it is impossible to make bread out of straw."

"Do you think it is really the way they have treated the land?" she

asked. "That's what Nathan is always saying, you know."

"Oh, the curse started with the tenant system, I'll admit. The tenants

used the land as a stingy man uses a horse he has hired by the month.

But the other farmers, even those who own their farms, are no better now

than the tenants. They've worked and starved the land to a skeleton. Yet

it's still alive, and it could be brought back to health, if they'd have

the sense to treat it as a doctor treats an undernourished human body.

Take Nathan Pedlar and James Ellgood. James Ellgood has made one of the

best stock farms in the state; and that, by the way, is what this

country is best suited for--stock or dairy farms. If I had a little

money I could make a first rate dairy farm out of Five Oaks or Old Farm.

You've got rich pasture land over the other side, and so have we, down

by Whippernock River. It could be made a fine place for cattle, with the

long grazing season and the months when cows could live in the open. Yet

to suggest anything but the antiquated crop system is pure heresy. The

same fields of tobacco that get eaten by worms or killed by frost. The

same fields of corn year in and year out--" he broke off impatiently and

bent his lips down to hers. "I'm talking you to sleep, Dorrie."

"I like to listen to you," she said, when she had kissed him. "If you

tell them over and over, in time they may believe you."

"After I'm dead, perhaps. Hasn't Nathan Pedlar told them again and

again? Hasn't he even proved it to them? He's been experimenting with

alfalfa, and he's getting four cuttings now off those fields of his; but

they think he's a fool because he isn't satisfied with one poor crop of

corn."

"I know. Pa doesn't think anything of alfalfa," she answered. "He says

Nathan is wasting his time raising a weed that cattle won't touch when

it is dry."

"They all talk that way. Half daft, that's what they call anybody who

wants to step out of the mud or try a new method. Ezra Flower told me

yesterday that Nathan was half daft. No, I want to get away, not to

spend my life as a missionary to the broomsedge. I feel already as if it

were growing over me and strangling the little energy I ever had. That's

the worst of it. If you stay here long enough, the broomsedge claims

you, and you get so lazy you cease to care what becomes of you. There's

failure in the air."

She remembered what old Matthew had said to her that March afternoon.

"If he'd take the advice of eighty-odd years, he'd git away befo' the

broomsage ketches him."

Was it true, what the old man believed, that the broomsedge was not only

wild stuff, but a kind of fate? Fear, not for herself, but for Jason,

stabbed through her.

"You're so easily discouraged," she said tenderly. To her, whose inner

life was a part of the country, poverty had been an inevitable condition

of living, and to fight had seemed as natural as to suffer or to endure.

"I suppose I am, but I'm made that way. I can't change my temperament,"

he replied, with a touch of the fatalism he condemned but could not

resist.

"Well, I'll help you," she responded cheerfully. "After we are married,

everything will be different. I am not afraid of Five Oaks or of

anything else as long as I have you."

He was gazing over her head into the bleached distance, and she felt the

tightened pressure of his arms about her. "I'd be all right here, even

at Five Oaks, if you were with me," he answered. "You put something in

me that I need. I don't know what it is--fibre, I suppose, the courage

of living." Suddenly his eyes left the landscape and looked down into

hers. "What I ought to do," he added impulsively, "is to marry you

to-day. We could get the last train to Washington, and be married

to-morrow morning before any one knew of it. Would you come if I asked

you?"

Her look did not waver. "I'll go anywhere that you ask me to. I'll do

anything that will help you," she answered. Her body straightened as if

its soft curves were moulded by the vein of iron in her soul.

But his impulse had spent its force in an imaginary flight. "That's what

I'd like to do," he said slowly, while his rosy visions were obliterated

by the first impact with reality. "But there are so many damned things

to consider. There are always so many damned things to consider. First

of all there's the money. I haven't got enough to take us away and keep

us a week. After Father stopped helping me, I started out on my own hook

in New York, and I was just making enough from the hospital to give me a

living. I didn't put by a cent, and, of course, since I've been here

I've made nothing. Down here the doctor gets paid after the undertaker,

or not at all."

"I've got fifty dollars put away," she returned crisply, determined not

to be discouraged. "And I don't need money. I've never had any." (How

foolish she had been to buy the blue dress when clothes made so little

difference!) "After we're married, I can keep on in the store just the

same."

He laughed. "Ten dollars a month will hardly keep the fox from the

henhouse."

Bending his head he began to kiss her in quick light kisses; then, as

his ardour increased, in deeper and longer ones; and at last with a

hungry violence. Though her love was the only thing that was vivid to

her, she had even now, while she felt his arms about her and his lips

seeking hers, the old haunting sense of impermanence, as if the moment,

like the perfect hour of the afternoon, were too bright to endure.

However much she loved him, she could not sink the whole of herself into

emotion; something was left over, and this something watched as a

spectator. Ecstasy streamed through her with the swiftness of light; yet

she never lost completely the feeling that at any instant the glory

might vanish and she might drop back again into the dull grey of

existence.

X

When they parted, and she went home along the edge of the tobacco field,

the sun was beginning to go down, and from the meadows, veiled in

quivering heat, there rose the humming of innumerable insects. The long

drought had scorched the leaves of the trees, and even the needles on

the pines looked rusty against the metallic blue of the sky. In the

fields the summer flowers were dry and brittle, and over the moist

places near the spring, clusters of pale blue butterflies, as fragile as

flower petals, hung motionless. Only the broomsedge thrived in the

furnace of the earth, and sprang up in a running fire over the waste

places.

As she went by the tobacco field, her father stopped work, for a moment,

and stooped to take a drink of water from the wooden bucket which stood

at the end of the furrow. Before she reached him the steaming odour of

his body, like that of an overheated ox, floated to her. His face, the

colour of red clay, was dripping with sweat, and his shirt of blue

jeans, which was open on his broad, hairy chest, was as wet as if he had

been swimming. There was nothing human about him, except his fine

prophet's head and the humble dignity of one who has kept in close

communion with earth and sky. He had known nothing but toil; he had no

language but the language of toil.

"Has the drought done much harm, Pa?" she asked.

With the gourd raised to his lips, Joshua looked round at her.

"Middlin'," he replied hoarsely because of his parched throat. He had

removed his hat while he worked, for fear that the wide brim might

bruise the tender leaves of the tobacco; but resting now for a minute,

he covered his head again from the bladelike rays of the sun.

"You'll get sunstroke if you go bareheaded," she said anxiously. "The

minister was in the store this morning, and he told me that, if the

drought doesn't break by the end of the week, he's going to put up

prayers for rain in church next Sunday. I wonder if prayer ever brought

rain?"

Joshua rolled his eyes toward the implacable sky. "Don't it say so in

the Bible, daughter?"

Dorinda nodded, without pursuing the inquiry. "And what the dry weather

doesn't spoil, the tobacco-worms will. They were as thick as hops

yesterday. It's this way every year unless we have a cool summer; then

the tobacco ripens so late that the frost kills it. Why don't you give

up tobacco next year and sow this field in peas or corn? Jason says the

best method of farming is to change the crop whenever you can."

Having drained the last drop of tepid water, Joshua tilted the gourd

bottom upward on the rim of the bucket. "I ain't one fur newfangled

ways, honey," he rejoined stubbornly.

He turned back to his work, and Dorinda went on slowly along the dusty

path that skirted the field. "If I had my way," she was thinking, "I

would do everything differently. I'd try all the crops, one after

another, until I found out which was best."

As she approached the house, the mingled scents of drying apples and

boiling tomatoes enveloped her; for her mother was working desperately

in an effort to save the ripening fruit and vegetables before the sun

spoiled them. Boards covered with sliced apples were spread on crude

props and decrepit tables, which had been brought out of doors. Above

them a crowd of wasps, hornets, flies, and gnats were whirling madly,

and every now and then Mrs. Oakley darted out from beneath the

scuppernong grapevine and dispersed the delirious swarms with the branch

of a locust tree. Though she insisted that the dry weather had "helped

her neuralgia," she was suffering now from a sun headache, and could

hope for no relief until evening. Her face, with its look of blended

physical pain and spiritual ecstasy, was as parched and ravaged as the

drought-stricken landscape.

"You got home early to-day, daughter."

"Yes, it was too hot to walk, and Jason came by sooner than usual."

"How does Rose Emily stand the heat?"

"I'm afraid she isn't getting any better," Dorinda's voice trembled.

"Jason says she can't last through another bad hæmorrhage."

"And all those children," sighed Mrs. Oakley, pressing one hand over her

throbbing eyes and waving the locust branch energetically with the

other. "Well, the Lord's ways are past understanding. I wonder if they

will ever be able to do anything for that baby's clubfoot."

"I don't know. Jason would like to operate, but Nathan and Rose Emily

won't let him. They are afraid it may make it worse. Poor Rose Emily. I

don't see how she can be so cheerful."

"It's her faith," said Mrs. Oakley. "She feels she's saved, and she's

nothing more to worry about. I'm sorry for Nathan too," she concluded,

with the compassion of the redeemed for the heathen. "He's a good man,

but he hasn't seen the light like Rose Emily."

"Yes, he's a good man," Dorinda assented, "but I never understood how

she could marry him."

Mrs. Oakley dropped the branch, and then picking it up began a more

vigorous attack on the cloud of insects. "I declare, it seems to me

sometimes that the bugs are going to eat up this place. Did you see your

father as you came by?"

"Yes. He was working bareheaded. I told him he would have sunstroke. I

wish he would try a different crop next year, but he's so set in his

ways."

"Well, it's being set in a rut, I reckon, that keeps him going. If he

weren't set, he'd have stopped long ago. You've a mighty high colour,

Dorinda. Have you been much in the sun?"

"I walked across from the woods. When we turned in at the red gate I saw

Miss Tabitha Snead going up the road in her buggy. Did she stop by to

see you?"

"Yes, she brought me a bucket of fresh buttermilk. I've got it in the

ice-house with the watermelons, so it will be cold for supper. She told

me Geneva Ellgood had gone away for the summer."

"Oh, she went the first of July. I saw her at the station."

Mrs. Oakley's gaze was riveted upon an enterprising hornet that had

started out from the crowd and was pursuing a separate investigation of

the tomato juice on her hands. While she watched it, she swallowed hard

as if her throat were too dry. "Miss Tabitha told me that her brother

William went up as far as Washington on the train with Geneva. He's just

back last week, and what do you reckon he said Geneva told him on the

way up?" She broke off and aimed a fatal blow at the hornet. "What with

wasps and bees and hornets and all the thousand and one things that bite

and sting," she observed philosophically, "it's hard to understand how

the Lord ever had time to think of a pest so small as a seed tick. Yet I

believe I'd rather have all the other biting things together. I got some

seed ticks on me when I went down to the old spring in the pasture

yesterday, and they've been eating me up ever since."

"They are always worse in a drought," Dorinda said, and she asked

curiously: "What was it Geneva told Mr. William?"

Mrs. Oakley swallowed again. "Of course I know there ain't a bit of

truth in it," she said slowly, as if the words hurt her as she uttered

them. "But William says Geneva told him she was engaged to marry Jason

Greylock. She said he courted her in New York a year ago."

Dorinda laughed. "Why, how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Miss Tabitha knows

we are to be married in October. Hasn't she watched Miss Seena helping

me with my sewing? I was spending the evening over there last week and

we talked about my marriage. She knows there isn't a word of truth in

it."

"Oh, she knows. She said she reckoned Geneva must be crazy. There ain't

any harm in it, but I thought maybe I'd better tell you."

"I don't mind," replied Dorinda, and she laughed again, the exultant

laugh of youth undefeated. "Ma," she asked suddenly, "did you ever want

anything very much in your life?"

Startled out of her stony resignation, Mrs. Oakley let fall the branch,

and the spinning swarms descended like a veil over the apples. "I'll

have to hang a piece of mosquito netting over these apples," she said.

"There's some we used for curtains in the spare room. Well, I told you

I'd kind of set my heart on your father," she added in a lifeless tone.

"But there's one thing I can tell you, daughter, mighty few folks in

this world ever get what they want."

"Oh, I mean before you knew Pa, when you were a girl. Didn't you ever

feel that there was only one thing in the world that could make you

happy?"

Mrs. Oakley pondered the question. "I reckon like most other people I

was afraid of the word happiness," she replied. "But when I was just a

girl, not more than sixteen or seventeen, I felt the call to be a

missionary, and I wanted it, I s'pose, more than I've ever wanted

anything in my life. I reckon it started with my favourite hymn, the

missionary one. Even as a little child I used to think and dream about

India's coral strand and Afric's sunny fountains. That was why I got

engaged to Gordon Kane. I wasn't what you'd call in love with him; but I

believed the Lord had intended me for work in foreign fields, and it

seemed, when Gordon asked me to marry him, that an opportunity had been

put in my way. I had my trunk all packed to go to the Congo to join him.

I was just folding up my wedding-dress of white organdie when they broke

the news to me of his death." She gasped and choked for a moment. "After

that I put the thought of the heathen out of my mind," she continued

when she had recovered her breath. "Your great-grandfather said I was

too young to decide whether I had a special vocation or not, and then

before I came out of mourning, I met your father, and we were married.

For a while I seemed to forget all about the missionary call; but it

came back just before Josiah was born, and I've had it ever since

whenever I'm worried and feel that I'll have to get away from things, or

go clean out of my mind. Then I begin to have that dream about coral

strands and palm trees and ancient rivers and naked black babies thrown

to crocodiles. When it first came I tried to drive it away by hard work,

and that was the way I got in the habit of working to rest my mind. I

was so afraid folks would begin to say I was unhinged."

"Does it still come back?" asked the girl.

"Sometimes in my sleep. When I'm awake I never think of it now, except

on missionary Sunday when we sing that hymn."

"That's why you enjoy sermons about the Holy Land and far-off places."

"I used to know all those pictures by heart in your great-grandfather's

books about Asia and Africa. It was a wild streak in me, I reckon," she

conceded humbly, "but with the Lord's help, I've managed to stamp it

out."

A missionary, her mother! For more than forty years this dark and secret

river of her dream had flowed silently beneath the commonplace crust of

experience. "I wonder if there is any of that wildness in me?" thought

the girl, with a sensation of fear, as if the invisible flood were

rushing over her.

"Did you ever tell Pa?" she asked.

Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I never told anybody when I was in my

right mind. I don't believe in telling men more than you're obliged to.

After all, it was nobody's fault the way things turned out," she added,

with scrupulous justice. "I'm going in now to get that mosquito netting.

There's your father coming. I reckon he'd like a drink of fresh water

from the well."

Following her mother's glance, Dorinda saw her father's bowed figure

toiling along the path on the edge of the vegetable garden. Far beyond

him, where a field had been abandoned because it contained a gall, where

nothing would grow, she could just discern the scalloped reaches of the

broomsedge, rippling, in the lilac-coloured distance, like still water

at sunset. Yes, old Matthew was right. What the broomsedge caught, it

never relinquished.

Lifting the wooden bucket from the shelf on the back porch, she poured

the stale water over a thin border of portulaca by the steps, and

started at a run for the well. By the time Joshua had reached the house,

she had brought the bucket of sparkling water, and had a gourd ready for

him.

"You must be worn out, Pa. Don't you want a drink?"

"That I do, honey." He took the gourd from her, and raised it to his

bearded lips where the sweat hung in drops. "Powerful hot, ain't it?"

"It's scorching. And you've been up since before day. I'll hunt worms

for you to-morrow." She was thinking, while she spoke, that her father

was no longer young, and that he should try to spare himself. But she

knew that it was futile to remind him of this. He had never spared

himself in her memory, and he would not begin now just because he was

old. The pity of it was that, even if he wore himself out in the effort

to save his crop from the drought or the worms, there was still the

possibility that the first killing frost would come too soon and inflict

as heavy a damage.

He shook his head with a chuckle of pride. "Thar's no use yo' spilin'

yo' hands. I've hired a parcel of Uncle Toby Moody's little niggers to

hunt 'em in the mornin'. If they kill worms every day till Sunday, I've

promised 'em the biggest watermelon I've got in the ice-house."

Before going on to feed the horses, he stopped to wash his face in the

tin basin on the back porch. "I declar' I must be gittin' on," he

remarked cheerfully. "I've got shootin' pains through all my j'ints."

This was nearer a complaint than any speech she had ever heard from him,

and she looked at him anxiously while he dried his face on the roller

towel. "You ought to take things more easily, Pa. The way you work is

enough to kill anybody."

"Wall, I'll take my ease when the first snow falls," he responded

jocosely.

"But you won't. You work just as hard in winter."

"Is that so?" He appeared genuinely surprised. "I never calculated! The

truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a

hard driver."

"And a good steed, they say," she answered. "If you could only get the

better of it."

He smiled wistfully, and she watched the clay-coloured skin above his

thick beard break into diverging fissures. "We've got to wait for that,

I reckon, till my ship comes in. It takes money to get money, daughter."

While he trudged away to the stable, Dorinda went up to her room and

changed into a pink gingham dress which Rose Emily had given her a year

ago. The flower-like colour tinged her face when she came downstairs and

found her mother, who had dropped from exhaustion, in a rocking-chair on

the front porch.

"I felt as if I couldn't stand the kitchen a minute longer." Mrs. Oakley

glanced wearily at her daughter over the palm leaf fan she was waving.

"You ain't going out before supper, Dorinda?" Her damp hair looked as if

it had been plastered over her skull, and in the diminishing light her

pallid features resembled a waxen mask.

"I can't wait for supper," the girl replied. "I've promised to meet

Jason over by Gooseneck Creek."

"Well, don't stay out too long after dark. The night air ain't healthy."

Dorinda laughed. "Jason says that's as much a superstition as the belief

that Aunt Mehitable can make cows go dry. But I shan't be late. Jason

can't stay out long at night, unless somebody is dying, and then he gets

one of the field hands to sleep in the house. It must be terrible over

at Five Oaks."

"I ain't easy in my mind about your living there with that old man,

daughter. He's been a notorious sinner as far back as I can recollect,

though he was a good enough doctor till he went half crazy from drink.

But even before his wife died, he kept that bright yellow girl,

Idabella, living over there in the old wing of the house. And he's not

only as hard as nails," she concluded, with final condemnation, "he's

close-fisted as well."

"Poor Jason can't help his father's sins," Dorinda rejoined loyally.

"After all, it's worse on him than it is on anybody else." As she turned

away from the flagged walk, she resolved that the dissolute old man

should not spoil her happiness.

Her path led by the pear orchard, past the vegetable garden, which was

fenced off from the tobacco field, and continued in an almost

obliterated track through the feathery plumes of the broomsedge. At the

end of the barren acres the thin edge of Hoot Owl Woods began, and after

she had passed this, there would be only a stretch of sandy road between

her and the creek. By the willows she knew the air would be fresh and

moist, and she knew also that Jason was waiting for her in the tall

blue-eyed grasses.

She went slowly along the path, in a mood so pensive that it might have

been merely a reflection of the summer trance. The vagrant breeze, which

had roamed for a few minutes at sunset, had died down again with the

afterglow. Heat melted like colour into the distance. Not a blade of

grass trembled; the curled leaves on the pear trees were limp and heavy;

even the white turkeys, roosting in a solitary oak near the orchard,

were as motionless as if they were under a spell. As far as she could

see there was not a stir or quiver in the landscape, and the only sounds

that jarred the leaden silence were the monotonous chirping of the

locusts, the discordant croak of a tree-frog, and the staccato shrieks

of the little negroes hunting tobacco-flies.

The sun had gone down long ago, and the western sky was suffused with

the transparent yellow-green of August evenings. All the light on the

earth had vanished, except the faint glow that was still cast upwards by

the broomsedge. Wave by wave, that symbol of desolation encroached in a

glimmering tide on the darkened boundaries of Old Farm. It was the one

growth in the landscape that thrived on barrenness; the solitary life

that possessed an inexhaustible vitality. To fight it was like fighting

the wild, free principle of nature. Yet they had always fought it. They

had spent their force for generations in the futile endeavour to uproot

it from the soil, as they had striven to uproot all that was wild and

free in the spirit of man.

At the edge of the woods she paused and looked back. There would be

light enough later, for the golden rim of a moon, paling as it ascended,

was visible through the topmost branches of the big pine in the

graveyard. While she stood there she was visited by a swift perception,

which was less a thought than a feeling, and less a feeling than an

intuitive recognition, that she and her parents were products of the

soil as surely as were the scant crops and the exuberant broomsedge. Had

not the land entered into their souls and shaped their moods into

permanent or impermanent forms? Less a thought than a feeling; but she

went on more rapidly toward the complete joy of the moment in which she

lived.

XI

On the first Sunday in October, Dorinda came out on the porch, with old

Rambler at her side, and looked over the road and the pasture to the

frowning sky. The range of clouds, which had huddled all the afternoon

above the western horizon, was growing darker, and there was a slow

pulsation, like the quiver of invisible wings, in the air. While she

stood there, she wondered if the storm would overtake her before she

reached Whistling Spring.

"I think I'll risk it," she decided at last. "It's looked this way for

hours, and it won't hurt me to get wet."

For days she had felt disturbed, and she told herself that her anxiety

had sprung from a definite cause, or, if not from a definite

cause,--well, at least from a plausible reason. Jason had been away for

two weeks, and she had had only one letter. He had promised to write

every day, and she had heard from him once. More than this, when he

left, against his father's wish, he had expected to stay only a week,

and the added days had dragged on without explanation. Of course there

were a dozen reasons why he should not have written. He had gone to

select surgical instruments, and it was probable that he had been kept

busy by professional matters. Her heart made excuses. She repeated

emphatically that there was no need for her to worry; but, in spite of

this insistence, it was useless, she found, to try to argue herself out

of a condition of mind. The only thing was to wait as patiently as she

could for his return. They were to be married in a week; and the hours

before and after her work at the store were spent happily over her

sewing. Mrs. Oakley had neglected her other work in order to help her

daughter with her wedding clothes, and the drawers in Dorinda's walnut

bureau were filled with white, lace-edged garments, made daintily, with

fine, even stitches, by her mother's rheumatic fingers.

"I shouldn't be satisfied if you didn't have things to start with like

other girls," Mrs. Oakley had remarked, while she pinned a paper pattern

to a width of checked muslin. "I don't want that old doctor to say his

son is marrying a beggar."

"Well, Jason won't say that," Dorinda had protested. "It would cost less

if I were married in my blue nun's veiling; but Miss Seena thinks a

figured challis would be more suitable."

"Well, I reckon Miss Seena knows," Mrs. Oakley had agreed. "It ain't

lucky not to have a new dress to be married in, and though I don't set a

bit of store by superstition, it won't do any harm not to run right up

against it." Glancing round at her daughter, she had continued in a tone

of anxiety: "Ain't you feeling well, daughter? You've been looking right

peaked the last day or two, and I noticed you didn't touch any

breakfast."

"Oh, I'm all right," Dorinda had responded. "I've been worrying about

not hearing from Jason, that's all." As she answered, she had turned

away and dropped into a chair. "I've been bending over all day," she had

explained, "and the weather has been so sultry. It makes me feel kind of

faint."

"Take a whiff of camphor," Mrs. Oakley had advised. "There's the bottle

right there on the bureau. I get a sinking every now and then myself, so

I like to have it handy. But there ain't a bit of use worrying yourself

sick about Jason. It ain't much more than two weeks since he went away."

"Two weeks to-morrow, but I haven't heard since the day after he left. I

am worried for fear something has happened."

"Your father could ask the old doctor?"

Frowning over the bottle of camphor, Dorinda had pondered the

suggestion. "No, he doesn't like us," she had replied at last. "I doubt

if he'd tell us anything. Jason told me once he wanted him to marry

Geneva Ellgood."

"You might send a telegram," Mrs. Oakley had offered as the final

resource of desperation.

Dorinda had flushed through her pallor. "I did yesterday, but there

hasn't been any answer." After a minute's reflection, she had added, "If

it's a good day to-morrow, I think I'll walk down to Whistling Spring in

the evening and see Aunt Mehitable Green. Her daughter Jemima works over

at Five Oaks, and she may have heard something."

"Then you'd better start right after dinner, and you can get back before

dark," Mrs. Oakley had returned. The word "afternoon" was never used at

Pedlar's Mill, and any hour between twelve o'clock and night was known

as "evening."

That was yesterday, and standing now on the front porch, Dorinda

considered the prospect. Scorched and blackened by the long summer, the

country was as bare as a conquered province after the march of an

invader. "I'll start anyway," she repeated, and turning, she called out,

"Ma, is there anything I can take Aunt Mehitable?"

"Doesn't it look as if it were getting ready to rain, Dorinda?"

"I don't care. If it does, I'll stop somewhere until it is over."

Entering the hall, the girl paused on the threshold of the room where

her mother sat reading her Bible.

"Where would you stop?" Mrs. Oakley was nothing if not definite. "There

ain't anybody living on that back road between Five Oaks and Whistling

Spring. It makes me sort of nervous for you to walk down there by

yourself, Dorinda. Can't you get Rufus to go with you?"

"No, he's gone over to see the Garlick girls, and I don't want him

anyway. I'd rather walk down by myself. Anybody I'd meet on the road

would know who I am. I see them all at the store. May I take a piece of

the molasses pudding we had for dinner?"

"Yes, there's some left in the cupboard. I was saving it for Rufus, but

you might as well take it. Then there are the last scuppernong grapes on

the shelf. Aunt Mehitable was always mighty fond of scuppernong grapes."

Going into the kitchen, Dorinda put the molasses pudding into the little

willow basket, and then, covering it with cool grape leaves, laid the

loose grapes on top. A slip of the vine had been given to her

great-grandfather by a missionary from Mexico, and had grown luxuriantly

at Old Farm, clambering over the back porch to the roof of the house. It

was a peculiarity of the scuppernong that the large, pale grapes were

not gathered in a bunch, but dropped grape by grape, as they ripened.

"Is there any message you want to send Aunt Mehitable?" she asked,

returning through the hall.

On a rag carpet in the centre of her spotless floor, Mrs. Oakley rocked

slowly back and forth while she read aloud one of the Psalms. It was the

only time during the week that she let her body relax; and now that the

whip of nervous energy was suspended, her face looked old, grey, and

hopeless. The dreary afternoon light crept through the half-closed

shutters, and a large blue fly buzzed ceaselessly, with a droning sound,

against the ceiling.

"Tell her my leg still keeps poorly," she said, "and if she's got any

more of that black liniment, I'd be glad of a bottle. You ain't so spry,

to-day yourself, daughter."

"I got tired sitting in church," the girl answered, "but the walk will

make me feel better."

"Be sure you come back if you hear thunder. I don't like your setting

out in the face of a storm. Can you take Rambler?"

"No, he's old and rheumatic, and it's too far. But I'm all right."

Without waiting for more advice or remonstrance, Dorinda hastened

through the hall and out of the house.

For the first quarter of a mile, before she reached the red gate at the

fork and turned into the sandy road leading to Five Oaks, her naturally

level spirits drooped under an unusual weight of depression. Then, as

she lifted the bar and passed through the gate, she felt that the

solitude, which had always possessed a mysterious sympathy with her

moods, reached out and received her into itself. Like a beneficent tide,

the loneliness washed over her, smoothing out, as it receded, the vague

apprehensions that had ruffled her thoughts. The austere horizon, flat

and impenetrable beneath the threatening look of the sky; the brown and

yellow splashes of woods in the October landscape; the furtive windings

and recoils of the sunken road; the perturbed murmur and movement of the

broomsedge, so like the restless inlets of an invisible sea,--all these

external objects lost their inanimate character and became as personal,

reserved, and inscrutable as her own mind. So sensitive were her

perceptions, while she walked there alone, that the wall dividing her

individual consciousness from the consciousness of nature vanished with

the thin drift of woodsmoke over the fields.

The road sank gradually to Gooseneck Creek and then ascended as evenly

to the grounds of Five Oaks. To reach the back road by the short cut,

which saved her a good mile and a half, she was obliged to pass between

the house and the barn, where she caught a glimpse of the old doctor and

heard the sound of a gun fired at intervals. He was shooting, she

surmised, at a chicken hawk, which was hovering low over the barnyard.

Why, she wondered, with all the heavens and the earth around him, had he

placed the stoop-shouldered rustic barn within call of the dwelling

house? The ice-house, three-cornered and red, like all the buildings on

the place, was so near the front porch that one might almost have tossed

the lumps of ice into the hall. Though the red roof, chimneys, and

outbuildings produced, at a distance, an effect of gaiety, she felt that

the colour would become oppressive on hot summer afternoons. Dirt,

mildew, decay everywhere! White turkeys that were discoloured by mould.

Chips, trash, broken bottles littering the yard and the back steps,

which were rotting to pieces. Windows so darkened by dust and cobwebs

that they were like eyes blurred by cataract. Several mulatto babies

crawling, like small, sly animals, over the logs at the woodpile. "Poor

Jason," she thought. "No wonder his nerves are giving way under the

strain."

She followed the path between the house and the barn, and then, crossing

an old cornfield, turned into the back road, which led, through thick

woods, to Whistling Spring and Whippernock River. After she had lost

sight of the house, she came up with old Matthew Fairlamb, who was

trudging sturdily along, with his hickory stick in his hand and a small

bundle, tied up in a bandanna handkerchief, swinging from his right arm.

"Are you on your way to see William?" she inquired as she joined him,

for she knew that his son William lived a mile away, on one of the

branch roads that led through to the station. "You must have come quite

a distance out of your way."

Old Matthew wagged his knowing head. "That's right, gal, I'm gittin'

along to William's now," he replied. "I took dinner over to John

Appleseed's, that's why you find me trampin' through Five Oaks. Ain't

you goin' too fur from home, honey? Thar's a storm brewin' over yonder

in the west, and it'll most likely ketch you."

"I'm going down to Whistling Spring," Dorinda replied, falling into step

at his side.

He smacked his old lips. "Then you'll sholy be caught," he rejoined,

with sour pleasure. "It's a matter of five miles or so, ain't it?"

"That's by the long road. It isn't over four by the short cut through

Five Oaks."

"Thar ain't nobody but the niggers livin' down by Whistling Spring."

"I'm going down to see Aunt Mehitable Green. She nursed Ma when she was

sick."

"I recollect her." Old Matthew wagged again. "She conjured some liver

spots off the face of my son's wife. They used to say she was the best

conjure woman anywhar round here."

"I know the darkeys are still afraid of her," Dorinda returned. "But she

was good to me when I was little, and I don't believe anything bad about

her."

"Mebbe not, mebbe not," old Matthew assented. "Anyhow, if she's got a

gift with moles an' warts, thar can't nobody blame her fur practisin'

it. How's yo' weddin' gittin' on, honey? By this time next week you'll

be an old married woman, won't you?"

Dorinda blushed. "It's hard for me to realize it."

"Jason's gone away, ain't he?"

"Yes, he went to New York to buy some instruments."

"It's a mortal wonder his Pa let him. I hear he keeps as tight a rein on

him as if he'd never growed up. Wall, wall, he didn't ax the advice of

eighty-odd years. But, mark my words, he'll live to regret the day he

come back to Five Oaks."

"But what else could he do?" the girl protested loyally. "His father

needed him."

Old Matthew broke into a sly cackle. "Oh, he'll larn, he'll larn. I

ain't contendin'. He's a pleasant-mannered youngster, an' I wish you all

the joy of him you desarve. You ain't heerd from Geneva Ellgood sence

she went away, have you?"

"Oh, no. She never writes to me."

"I kind of thought she might have. But to come back to Jason, he's got

everything you want in a man except the one quality that counts with the

land."

"You speak as if Jason lacked character," she said resentfully.

"Wall, if he's got it, you'll know it soon," rejoined the disagreeable

old man, "and if he ain't got it, you'll know it sooner. I ain't

contendin'. It don't pay to contend when you're upwards of eighty." He

rolled the words of ill omen like a delicate morsel on his tongue. "This

here is my turnout, honey. Look sharp that you don't git a drenchin'."

They nodded in the curt fashion of country people, and the old man

tramped off, spitting tobacco juice in the road, while Dorinda hurried

on into the deepening gloom of the woods. She was glad to be free of old

Matthew. He was more like an owl than ever, she thought, with his

ominous _who-who-whoee_.

Here alone in the woods, with the perpetually moist clay near the stream

underfoot, the thick tent of arching boughs overhead, the aromatic smell

of dampness and rotting leaves in her nostrils, she felt refreshed and

invigorated. After all, why was she anxious? She was securely happy. She

was to be married in a week. She knew beyond question, beyond distrust,

that Jason loved her. For three months she had lived in a state of bliss

so supreme that, like love, it had created the illusion of its own

immortality. Yes, for three months she had been perfectly happy.

Above, the leaves rustled. Through the interlacing boughs she could see

the grey sky growing darker. The warm scents of the wood were as heavy

as perfumed smoke.

Presently the trees ended as abruptly as they had begun, and she came

out into the broomsedge which surrounded the negro settlement of

Whistling Spring. A narrow path led between rows of log cabins, each

with its patchwork square of garden, and its clump of gaudy prince's

feather or cockscomb by the doorstep. Aunt Mehitable's cabin stood

withdrawn a little; and when Dorinda reached the door, there was a

mutter of thunder in the clouds, though the storm was still distant and

a silver light edged the horizon. On the stone step a tortoise-shell cat

lay dozing, and a little to one side of the cabin the smouldering embers

of a fire blinked like red eyes under an iron pot, which hung suspended

from a rustic crane made by crossing three sticks.

In response to the girl's knock on the open door, the cat arched its

back in welcome, and the old negress came hurriedly out of the darkness

inside, wiping her hands on her blue gingham apron. She took Dorinda in

her arms, explaining, while she embraced her, that she had just heated

some water to make a brew of herbs from her garden.

"Dar ain' no use kindlin' a fire inside er de cabin twell you're

obleeged ter," she remarked. "You ain' lookin' so peart, honey. I've got

a bottle of my brown bitters put away fur yo' Ma, en you ax 'er ter gin

you a dose de fust thing ev'y mawnin'. Yo' Ma knows about'n my brown

bitters daze she's done tuck hit, erlong wid my black liniment. Hit'll

take erway de blue rings unner yo' eyes jes' ez sho', en hit'll fill yo'

cheeks right full er roses agin."

"I've been worrying," said the girl, sitting down in the chair the old

woman brought. "It's taken my appetite, and made me feel as if I dragged

myself to the store and back every day. Isn't it funny what worry can do

to you, Aunt Mehitable?"

"Dat 'tis, honey, dat 'tis."

"I get dizzy too, when I bend over. You haven't got any camphor about,

have you?"

Aunt Mehitable hastened into the cabin, and brought out a bottle of

camphor. "Yo' Ma gun me dat' de ve'y las' time I wuz at Ole Farm," she

said, removing the stopper, and handing the bottle to Dorinda. "Hit's a

long walk on dis heah peevish sort of er day. You jes' set en res' wile

I git you a swallow uv my blackberry cord'al. Dar ain't nuttin' dat'll

pick you up quicker'n blackberry cord'al w'en it's made right."

Going indoors again, she came out with the blackberry cordial in a ruby

wineglass which had once belonged to the Cumberlands. "Drink it down

quick, en you'll feel better right befo' you know hit. Huccome you been

worryin', chile, w'en yo is gwineter be mah'ed dis time nex' week?" she

inquired abruptly.

"I'm afraid something has happened," Dorinda said. "Jason has been away

two weeks, and I haven't had a word since the day after he left. I

thought you might have heard something from Jemima."

The old woman mumbled through toothless gums. She was wearing a bandanna

handkerchief wrapped tightly about her head, and beneath it a few

grey-green wisps of hair straggled down to meet the dried grass of her

eyebrows. Her face was so old that it looked as if the flesh had been

polished away, and her features shone like black lacquer where the light

struck them.

"Naw'm, I ain't heerd nuttin'," she replied, "but I'se done been lookin'

fur you all de evelin'. Dar's a lil' bird done tole me you wuz comin',"

she muttered mysteriously.

"I wasn't sure of it myself till just before I started."

"I knowed, honey, I knowed," rejoined Aunt Mehitable, leaning against

the smoke-blackened pine by her doorstep, while she fixed her bleared,

witchlike gaze on the girl. There was the dignity in her demeanour that

is inherent in all simple, profound, and elemental forces. The pipe she

had taken out of the pocket of her apron was in her mouth, but the stem

was cold and she mumbled over it without smoking. With her psychic

powers, which were a natural endowment, she combined a dramatic gift

that was not uncommon among the earlier generations of negroes. In

another century Aunt Mehitable would have been either a mystic

philosopher or a religious healer.

"Can you really see things, Aunt Mehitable?" Dorinda inquired, impressed

but not convinced.

Aunt Mehitable grunted over her smokeless pipe. "Mebbe I kin en mebbe I

cyan't."

"They say you can tell about the future?"

"Hi!" the old negress exclaimed, and continued with assumed

indifference. "Dey sez I kin do a heap mo'n I kin do. But I ain'

steddyin' about'n dat, honey. I knows w'at I knows. I kin teck moles en

warts en liver spots off'n you twell you is jes' ez smooth ez de pa'm er

my han', en ern ennybody's done put a conjure ball ovah yo' do' er

th'owed a ring on de grass fur you to walk in, I kin tell you whar you

mus' go ter jump ovah runnin' water. Ern you is in enny trubble, honey,

hit's mos' likely I kin teck hit erway. Is you stuck full er pins an'

needles in yo' legs an' arms, jes' lak somebody done th'owed a spell on

you?"

"No, it isn't that," answered Dorinda. "I came because I thought you

might have heard something from Jemima. I'd better be starting back now.

I want to get home, if I can, before the storm breaks----"

She had risen to her feet, and was turning to look at the clouds in the

west, when the broomsedge plunged forward, like a raging sea, and

engulfed her. She felt the pain and dizziness of the blow; she heard the

thunder of the waves as they crashed together; and she saw the billows,

capped with spray-ike plumes, submerging the cabin, the fields, the

woods, and the silver crescent of the horizon.

When she came to herself, it was an hour, a day, or a year afterwards.

She was still on the bare ground, beneath the blackened pine, in front

of Aunt Mehitable's cabin. The tortoise-shell cat still dozed on the

step. The dying embers still blinked under the hanging pot. There was a

pungent smell in her nostrils, as the old woman splashed camphor over

her forehead. Her consciousness was struggling through the fumes which

saturated her brain.

"Dar now, honey. Don't you worry. Hit's all right," crooned Aunt

Mehitable, bending above her.

Dorinda sat up slowly, and looked round her. "I believe I fainted," she

said. "I never fainted before." The roar of far-off waters was still in

her ears.

The old woman held out the ruby wineglass, which she had refilled.

"Hit's all right, honey, hit's all right."

"It came on so suddenly." Dorinda pushed the glass away after she had

obediently swallowed a few sips. "It was exactly like dying; but I'm

well now. The walk must have been too long on a sultry day."

"Don't you worry, caze hit's gwineter be all right," crooned Aunt

Mehitable. "I'se done axed de embers en hit's gwineter be all right."

The magnetic force emanating from the old negress enveloped the girl,

and she abandoned herself to it as to a mysterious and terrible current

of wisdom. How did Aunt Mehitable know things before other people? she

wondered. She shivered in the warm air, and laid her head on the wizened

shoulder. Of course no one believed in witches any longer; but there was

something queer in the way she could look ahead and tell fortunes.

"Befo' de week's up you is gwineter be mah'ed," muttered the old woman,

"en dar ain't a livin' soul but Aunt Mehitable gwineter know dat de

chile wuz on de way sooner----"

"I--" Dorinda began sharply. Rising quickly to her feet, she stood

looking about her like a person who has been dazzled by a flash of

lightning. She was bewildered, but she was less bewildered than she had

been for the last three months. In the illumination of that instant a

hundred mysteries were made plain; but her dominant feeling was one of

sharp awakening from a trance. Swift and savage, animal terror clutched

at her heart. Where was Jason? Suppose he was dead! Suppose he was lost

to her! The longing to see him, the urgent need of his look, of his

touch, of his voice, shuddered through her like a convulsion. It seemed

to her that she could not live unless she could feel the reassuring

pressure of his arms and hear the healing sound of her name on his lips.

"I must go back," she said. "I'll come again, Aunt Mehitable, but I must

hurry before the storm."

Breaking away from the old woman's arms, she walked rapidly, as if she

were flying before the approaching storm, through the acres of

broomsedge to the road by which she had come.

XII

On either side of the road the trees grew straight and tall, and overhead

the grey arch of sky looked as if it were hewn out of rock. The pines

were dark as night, but the oaks, the sweet gums, the beeches, and

hickories were turning slowly, and here and there the boughs were

brushed with wine-colour or crimson. Far away, she could hear the rumble

of the storm, and it seemed to her that the noise and burden of living

marched on there at an immeasurable distance. Within the woods there was

the profound silence of sleep. Nothing but the occasional flutter of a

bird or stir of a small animal in the underbrush disturbed the serenity.

The oppressive air stifled her, and she felt that her breath, like the

movement of the wind, was suspended.

"If I don't hurry, I shall never get out of the woods," she thought. "I

ought not to have come."

Forgetting the attack of faintness, she quickened her steps into a run,

and stumbled on over the wheel ruts in the road, which was scarcely

wider than a cart track. For a while this stillness was so intense that

she felt as if it were palpitating in smothered throbs like her heart.

The storm was gathering on another planet. So remote it was that the

slow reverberations were echoed across an immensity of silence. The

first mile was past. Then the second. With the ending of the third, she

knew that she should come out into the pasture and the old cornfield at

Five Oaks.

Presently a few withered leaves fluttered past her, flying through the

narrow tunnel of the woods toward the clearer vista ahead. Immediately

round her the atmosphere was still motionless. Like an alley in a dream

the road, stretched, brown, dim, monotonous, between the tall trees; and

this alley seemed to her unutterably sad, strewn with dead leaves and

haunted by an autumnal taint of decay. The fear in her own mind had

fallen like a blight on her surroundings, as if the external world were

merely a shadow thrown by the subjective processes within her soul.

Suddenly, without nearer warning, the storm broke. A streak of white

fire split the sky, and the tattered clouds darkened to an angry purple.

The wind, which had been chained at a distance, tore itself free with a

hurtling noise and crashed in gusts through the tree-tops. Overhead, she

heard the snapping of branches, and when she glanced back, it seemed to

her that the withered leaves had gathered violence in pursuit, and were

whirling after her like a bevy of witches. As she came out of the

shelter of the trees, the stream of wind and leaves swept her across the

cornfield, with the patter of rain on her shoulders. Where the road

turned, she saw the red barn and the brick dwelling of Five Oaks, and in

obedience to the wind rather than by the exercise of her own will, she

was driven over the field and the yard to the steps of the back porch.

Her first impression was that the place was deserted; and running up the

steps, she sank into one of the broken chairs on the porch, and shook

the water from her hat while she struggled for breath. On the roof of

the house the rain was beating in drops as hard as pebbles. She heard it

thundering on the shingles; she saw it scattering the chips and straws

by the woodpile, and churning the puddles in the walk until they foamed

with a yeasty scum. The sky was shrouded now in a crape-like pall, and

where the lightning ripped open the blackness, the only colour was that

jagged stain of dull purple. "I'm wet already," she thought. "In another

minute I'd have been soaked through to the skin." Turning her head, she

looked curiously at the home of her lover.

The thought in her mind was, "You could tell no woman lived here. When I

get the chance, it won't take me long to make things look different."

With the certainty that this "chance" would one day be hers, she forgot

her anxiety and fatigue, and a thrill of joy eased her heart. Yes,

things would be different when she and Jason lived here together and

little children played under the great oaks in the grove. Her fingers

"itched," as she said to herself, to clean up the place and make it tidy

without and within. A rivulet of muddy water was pouring round the

corner of the house, wearing a channel in the gravelled walk, which was

littered with rubbish. Beside the porch there was a giant box-bush,

beneath which several bedraggled white turkeys had taken shelter. She

could see them through the damp twilight of the boughs, shaking drenched

feathers or scratching industriously in the rank mould among the roots.

Leaning back in her wet clothes, against the splints of the chair, which

sagged on one rocker, she glanced about her at the refuse that

overflowed from the hall. The porch looked as if it had not been swept

for years. There was a pile of dusty bagging in one corner, and,

scattered over the floor, she saw a medley of oil cans, empty

cracker boxes and whiskey bottles, loose spokes of cart wheels, rolls of

barbed wire, and stray remnants of leather harness. "How can any one

live in such confusion?" she thought. Through the doorway, she could

distinguish merely a glimmer of light on the ceiling, from which the

plaster was dropping, and the vague shape of a staircase, which climbed,

steep and slender, to the upper story. It was a fairly good house of its

period, the brick dwelling, with ivy-encrusted wings, which was

preferred by the more prosperous class of Virginia farmers. The

foundation of stone had been well laid; the brick walls were stout and

solid, and though neglect and decay had overtaken it, the house still

preserved, beneath its general air of deterioration, an underlying

character of honesty and thrift. Turning away, she gazed through the

silver mesh of rain, past the barn and the stable, to the drenched

pasture, where a few trees rocked back and forth, and a flock of

frightened sheep huddled together. Where were the farm labourers, she

wondered? What had become of Jemima, who, Aunt Mehitable had said, was

still working here? Two men living alone must keep at least one woman

servant. Had the storm thrown a curse of stagnation over the place, and

made it incapable of movement or sound? She could barely see the sky for

the slanting rain, which drove faster every minute. Was she the only

living thing left, except the cowering sheep in the pasture and the

dripping white turkeys under the box-bush?

While she was still asking the question, she heard a shuffling step in

the hall behind her, and looking hastily over her shoulder, saw the

figure of the old man blocking the doorway. For an instant his squat

outline, blurred between the dark hall and the sheets of rain, was all

that she distinguished. Then he lurched toward her, peering out of the

gloom. Yesterday, she would have run from him in terror. Before her

visit to Whistling Spring she would have faced the storm rather than the

brooding horror at Five Oaks. But the great fear had absorbed the small

fears as the night absorbs shadows. Nothing mattered to her if she could

only reach Jason.

"Come in, come in," the old doctor was mumbling, with a dreary effort at

hospitality.

He held out his palsied hand, and all the evil rumours she had heard

since he had given up his practice and buried himself at Five Oaks

rushed into her mind. It must be true that he had always been a secret

drinker, and that the habit had taken possession now of his faculties.

Though she had known him all her life, the change in him was so

startling that she would scarcely have recognized him. His once robust

figure was wasted and flabby, except for his bloated paunch, which hung

down like a sack of flour; his scraggy throat protruding from the

bristles of his beard reminded the girl of the neck of a buzzard; his

little fiery eyes, above inflamed pouches of skin, flickered and shone,

just as the smouldering embers had flickered and shone under Aunt

Mehitable's pot. And from these small bloodshot eyes something sly and

secretive and malignant looked out at her. Was this, she wondered, what

whiskey and his own evil nature could do to a man?

"I am on my way back from Whistling Spring," she explained, while she

struggled against the repulsion he aroused in her. "The storm caught me

just as I reached here."

He smirked with his bloodless old lips, which cracked under the strain.

"Eh? Eh?" he chuckled, cupping his ear in his hand. Then catching hold

of her sleeve, he pulled her persuasively toward the doors "Come in,

come in," he urged. "You're wet through. I've kindled a bit of fire to

dry my boots, and it's still burning. Come in, and dry yourself before

you take cold from the wetting."

Still clutching her, he stumbled into the hall, glancing uneasily back,

as if he feared that she might slip out of his grasp. On the right a

door stood ajar, and a few knots of resinous pine blazed, with a thin

blue light, in the cavernous fireplace. As he led her over the

threshold, she noticed that the windows were all down, and that the only

shutters left open were those at the back window, against which the

giant box-bush had grown into the shape of a hunchback. There was a film

of dust or wood ashes over the floor and the furniture, and cobwebs were

spun in lacy patterns on the discoloured walls. A demijohn, still half

full of whiskey, stood on the crippled mahogany desk, and a pitcher of

water and several dirty glasses were on a tin tray beside it. Near the

sparkling blaze a leather chair, from which the stuffing protruded,

faced a shabby footstool upholstered in crewel work, and a pile of

hickory logs, chips, and pine knots, over which spiders were crawling.

While Dorinda sat down in the chair he pointed out, and looked nervously

over the dust and dirt that surrounded her, she thought that she had

never seen a room from which the spirit of hope was so irrevocably

banished. How cheerful the room at Pedlar's Mill, where Rose Emily lay

dying, appeared by contrast with this one! What a life Jason's mother

must have led in this place! How had Jason, with his charm, his

fastidiousness, his sensitive nerves, been able to stay here? Her gaze

wandered to the one unshuttered window, where the sheets of rain were

blown back and forth like a curtain. She saw the hunched shoulder of the

box-bush, crouching under the torrent of water which poured down from

the roof. Yet she longed to be out in the storm. Any weather was better

than this close, dark place, so musty in spite of its fire, and this

suffocating stench of whiskey and of things that were never aired.

"Just a thimbleful of toddy to ward off a chill?" the old man urged,

with his doddering gestures.

She shook her head, trying to smile. A drop of the stuff in one of those

fly-specked glasses would have sickened her.

Darkness swept over her with the ebb and flow of the sea. She felt a

gnawing sensation within; there wag a quivering in her elbows; and it

seemed to her that she was dissolving into emptiness. The thin blue

light wavered and vanished and wavered again. When she opened her eyes

the room came out of the shadows in fragments, obscure, glimmering,

remote. On the shingled roof the rain was pattering like a multitude of

tiny feet, the restless bare feet of babies. Terror seized her. She

longed with all her will to escape; but how could she go back into the

storm without an excuse; and what excuse could she find? After all,

repulsive as he appeared, he was still Jason's father.

"No, thank you," she answered, when he poured a measure of whiskey into

a glass and pushed it toward her. "Aunt Mehitable gave me some

blackberry cordial." After a silence she asked abruptly: "Where is

Jemima?"

Lifting the glass she had refused, he added a stronger dash to the weak

mixture, and sipped it slowly. "There's nothing better when you're wet

than a little toddy," he muttered. "Jemima is off for the evening, but

she'll be back in time to get supper. I heard her say she was going over

to Plumtree."

A peal of thunder broke so near that she started to her feet, expecting

to see the window-panes shattered.

"There, there, don't be afraid," he said, nodding at her over his glass.

"The worst is over now. The rain will have held up before you're dry and

ready to go home."

It was like a nightmare, the dark, glimmering room, with its dust and

cobwebs, the sinister old man before the blue flames of the pine knots,

the slanting rain over the box-bush, the pattering sound on the roof,

and the thunderbolts which crashed near by and died away in the

distance. Even her body felt numbed, as if she were asleep, and her

feet, when she rose and took a step forward, seemed to be walking on

nothing. It was just as if she knew it was not real, that it was all

visionary and incredible, and as if she stood there waiting until she

should awake. The dampness, too, was not a genuine dampness, but the

sodden atmosphere of a nightmare.

"Why, it has stopped now!" she exclaimed suddenly. "The storm is over."

Then, because she did not wish to show fear of him, she came nearer and

held her wet dress to the flames. "You won't need a fire much longer,"

she said. "It is warmer out of doors than it is inside."

"That's why I keep the windows down." He looked so dry and brittle, in

spite of the dampness about him, that she thought he would break in

pieces if he moved too quickly. There was no life, no sap, left in his

veins.

"I'm by myself now," he winked at her. "But it won't be for long. Jason

comes back to-night."

"To-night!" Joy sang in her voice. But why hadn't he written? Was there

anything wrong? Or was he merely trying to surprise her by his return?