"It doesn't do any good to keep thinking of that," she reiterated

firmly, but the firmness had oozed from her mind into her manner. The

fact that she needed Nathan on the farm was driven home to her every day

of her life. Without him, she would never become anything more than a

farmer who was extraordinary chiefly in being a woman as well; and this

provoking disadvantage was a continual annoyance. Her life, in spite of

the companionship of Fluvanna, was an empty one, and as the shadow of

middle age grew longer, she would become more and more solitary.

They had reached the high ground by the graveyard, and over Gooseneck

Creek she saw the red chimneys of Five Oaks. At the sight a suffering

thought awoke and throbbed in her brain.

"I'll never interfere with you, Dorinda," Nathan said in a husky tone.

She turned suddenly and looked into his eyes. "It doesn't do any good to

keep thinking about it," she insisted in an expressionless voice as if

she were reciting a phrase she had learned by heart.

XVII

The exact moment of her yielding was so vague that she could never

remember it; but three weeks later they drove over to the Presbyterian

church at Pedlar's Mill and were married. Until the evening before she

had told no one but Fluvanna; and only the pastor's wife, a farmer or

two, and Nathan's children, witnessed the marriage. As they stood

together before the old minister, a shadowy fear fluttered into

Dorinda's mind, and she longed to turn and run back to the safe

loneliness of Old Farm. "Can it be possible," she asked herself, "that I

am doing this thing?" She seemed to be standing apart as a spectator

while she watched some other woman married to Nathan.

When it was over the few farmers came up to shake hands with her; but

their manner was repressed and unnatural, and even the children had

become bashful and constrained.

"Wall, you was wise to git it over," John Appleseed said. "I don't

favour marryin' fur a woman as long as she's got a better means of

provision; but it's fortunate we don't all harbour the same opinions."

He had attended with his idiot son, who was now a man of twenty-five,

but still retained his fondness for a crowd or a noise. While she looked

into his vacant face, Dorinda recalled Jason's ineffectual endeavours to

enlighten the natives, and the lecture on farming that he had delivered

to Nathan Pedlar and Billy. Appleseed, the idiot. Poor Jason! After

all, he had had his tragedy.

"Nobody wants to hear croaking at a wedding, John," William Fairlamb

remarked genially.

"Oh, I don't mind him." Dorinda laughed, but the laugh went no deeper

than her throat. Terror had seized her, the ancient panic quiver of the

hunted, and her face wore a strained and absent look as if she were

listening to some far-off music in the broomsedge. "How did I ever come

to do such a thing?" a voice like a song was asking over and over.

On the drive home she could think of nothing to say. Her mind, which was

usually crowded with ideas, had become as blank as a wall, and she sat

gazing in silence over the head of the brisk young mare Nathan was

driving. So small a thing as the fact that Nathan was holding the reins

made her feel stiff and uncomfortable.

As they passed the old mill, Geneva Greylock came running out of the

ruins and waved a blue scarf in the air. They could not see her face

clearly; but there was a distraught intensity in the lines of her thin

figure and in the violent gestures of her arms beneath the flying curves

of blue silk, which wound about her like a ribbon of autumn sky.

"She's getting worse every day," Nathan said, glancing toward her as

they spun past. "It won't be long now before they have to send her to

the asylum. Last Sunday, when the minister was taking dinner with James

Ellgood, Geneva went round the table and poured molasses into every

soup plate. When they asked her why she had done it, she said she was

trying to make life sweeter."

"Poor thing," Dorinda sighed. "She was always ailing."

It was a brown afternoon in November, with a smoky sky and a strong,

clean wind which rushed in a droning measure through the broomsedge. All

the leaves had fallen and been swept in wind drifts under the rail

fences. The only animate shapes in the landscape were the buzzards

flocking toward a dead sheep in the pasture.

"Did you tell the children to come straight over?" Nathan inquired

presently.

"Yes, I've got their rooms ready. I had paper put on the walls instead

of whitewash, and they look very nice. The new stove heats them,

comfortably."

"You mustn't let my children bother you, Dorinda."

"Oh, no. I'm glad to have them. They will be company for me. We can

begin reading again at night."

The mare trotted briskly, and the edge of the wind felt like ice on

Dorinda's face. "It's turning much colder," she said after a long pause.

"Yes, there'll be a hard frost to-night if it clears."

She turned away from him, lifting her gaze to the sky where broken

clouds were driven rapidly toward the south. A sword of light was thrust

suddenly through the greyness, and she said slowly, as if the words were

of profound significance, "The wind seems to be changing." Always

responsive to her surroundings, she told herself that the landscape

looked as if it were running away from the wind. "Does it really look

this way or is it only in my mind," she thought, as they went on past

the fork. Of course, if she had to go over it again, she could never

bring herself to be married; but since she had walked into the marriage

with open eyes, all she could do now was to endeavour to make the best

of her mistake. Nathan was a good man and--well, you couldn't have

everything! Youth, with its troubled rapture and its unsatisfied

craving, was well over. Green evening skies. The scent of wild grape.

The flutter of the heart like a caged bird. Feet flying toward

happiness. . . . Yes, he was a good man, and you couldn't have

everything.

When she reached the farm she left Nathan to build up the fire in the

hall stove, and ran upstairs to put the finishing touches to the

bedrooms she had prepared for the children. Everything was in order.

There was nothing that she could find to do; yet she lingered to

straighten a picture or change the position of a chair until she heard

wheels approaching. Then, after she ran downstairs and exchanged

embarrassed greetings, she visited the henhouse and the barn before she

went into the kitchen to help Fluvanna with supper. All the work of the

farm, so heavy and engrossing on other days that it made her a slave to

routine, was suspended like a clock after the hour has struck.

"Do you want me to make the hard sauce for the plum pudding, Fluvanna?"

"Naw, Miss Dorindy, there ain't nothin' on earth for you to bother yo'

head with to-day. Miss Minnie May has made it, and she's helping me as

much as I want. You sit right down in the parlour and wait till supper

is ready. I don't see," she concluded in a faultfinding tone, "why

anybody wanted to have a poky wedding like this. There ain't even a

fiddle to make things lively."

Dorinda went out, but not into the parlour. As she passed through the

hall she caught a glimpse of Nathan, in his new suit of grey tweed,

sitting bolt upright in the best chair, while he slowly turned the

leaves of the family Bible. No, she had always disliked the parlour, in

spite of her great-grandfather's library which almost covered the walls.

Would it be possible, she wondered, to turn the room into a more

comfortable and cheerful place? Yet she shrank from making any definite

change. Though she hated the furniture and the air of chill repose in

which it had weathered the years, she could not banish the feeling that

it was dedicated to the ancestral spirits of her family.

As she opened the back door, which admitted a gust of wind and a shower

of brown leaves, she heard Nimrod laughing with Fluvanna in the kitchen.

"Ef'n you ax me, it mought ez well be anybody's wedding ez hem. I lay she

ain' never so much as smelt dat ar wedding cake." Immediately,

Fluvanna's more educated accents responded, "I declare I couldn't help

feelin' all the time that I was baking a cake for a corpse."

"How in the world did I ever do it?" Dorinda asked herself for the

hundredth time; and she pictured the years ahead as an interminable

desert of time in which Nathan would sit like a visitor in the parlour

and perpetually turn the leaves of the family Bible. Nothing but the

first day that she had had young Ranger as an untrained puppy on her

hands had ever seemed to her so endless. "I don't see how I'm going to

stand it for the rest of my life," she thought. A different wedding day

from the one of which she had dreamed long ago! But then, as she had

learned through hard experience, imagination is a creative principle and

depends little upon the raw material of life. Nothing, she supposed,

ever happened exactly as you hoped that it would.

Supper was a dreary affair. The children were restless and awkward, and

even the wedding cake, which Fluvanna had baked in secret, and over

which she had lamented with Nimrod, was lumpy and heavy. Nathan

endeavoured to enliven the meal by a few foolish jokes badly told, and

when even Dorinda, who felt sorry for him, forgot to laugh, he stared at

her with humble, sheepish eyes while he relapsed into silence. It was a

relief when Bud, of Gargantuan appetite, refused a fifth slice of the

indigestible cake, and the last piece was wrapped in a napkin and put

away for Billy Appleseed.

"Are you going to have suppers like this every night?" Bud, the

facetious, inquired, giving his stomach a comical pat.

For the first time a laugh unforced and unafraid broke from Dorinda and

Nathan. After all, she concluded more hopefully, it was possible that

the children might make the house brighter. "I like it over here better

than I do at home," John Abner said. "It's farther away."

"Farther away from what?" asked Nathan, who was trying to appear easy

and flippant.

"Oh, I don't know. Farther away from school, I reckon."

"I wouldn't want to go back to the city if we could have plum pudding

every night till Christmas," Bud persisted.

Dorinda shook her head. "Oh, you greedy boy!" she exclaimed, smiling.

"When you are a little older you'll learn that you can't have

everything."

When supper was over she put on her overalls and lighted her lantern,

for the short November day was already closing in. She knew that the

milkers were probably slighting their work, and it made her restless to

think that the cows might not have been handled properly. The negroes

were cheerful and willing workers, but ten years of patient discipline

on her part had failed to overcome their natural preference for the

easiest way.

"You ain't going out again, are you, Dorinda?" Nathan asked anxiously,

while he watched her preparations.

"Yes, we had supper early so Fluvanna and Mary Joe could help with the

milking, but I'd better go out and see what they are doing. There's a

lot to do in the dairy and the darkeys are still a little afraid of the

new machinery."

Nathan laughed good-humouredly. "I might as well help you. Dairy work is

the sort that won't keep."

"No, it won't wait. The butter has to be packed for the early train."

"That means you'll be up before daybreak?"

She nodded impatiently. "Well, you're used to that. Don't you breakfast

by candlelight in winter?"

"Yes, I'm used to it. I'll come out now and help."

"I don't want you. There's plenty of work for you in the fields, but I

don't want you meddling in my dairy."

For the first time she understood what work had meant in her mother's

life; the flight of the mind from thought into action. To have Nathan

hanging round her in the dairy was the last thing, she said to herself,

that she had anticipated in marriage.

"Of course, I didn't mean to interfere with you." He fell back into the

house, and with a sigh of relief she fled out to the new cow-barn, where

the last milkers still lingered and chatted over the wedding. As she

passed into the heavy atmosphere and inhaled the pasture-scented breath

of the cows, she felt that a soothing vapour had blown over her nerves.

"I declar, Miss Dorindy, you mought jes' ez well not be mah'ed at all,"

Nimrod remarked dolefully.

"Well, I won't let it interfere with my work. No man is going to do

that."

Mary Joe bridled and giggled; for, being an engaging mulatto girl, she

knew all that could be told of the interference of men. "Naw'm, dat dey

ain't, nor breck yo' heart needer. Hit's a pity we ain't all ez

strong-minded ez you is."

Dorinda laughed. "Break my heart? I should think not," she replied. And

she meant what she said while she was saying it. One man had ruined her

life; but no other man should interfere with it. She was encased in

wounded pride as in defensive armour.

One of the other milkers, a big black woman named Saphira, smiled

approvingly. "Hi! Dat's moughty sassy, Miss Dorindy," she exclaimed,

"but hit ain't natur!"

After the milkers had gone home, Dorinda went into the dairy with

Fluvanna and Mary Joe and worked until nearly midnight. Usually, she had

finished by nine o'clock, at the latest, but to-night there were a dozen

extra tasks for her willing hands to perform. As the hours went on she

became so particular and so sharply critical that the two coloured women

were driven to tears. "Ef'n you ax me, hit's a good thing she cyarn't

git mah'd but oncet," muttered Mary Joe, as she was leaving.

At midnight, when there was nothing else that she could find to do and

her limbs were aching from fatigue, Dorinda went back into the house and

locked the hall door which Nathan had left unfastened. The lamp on the

bracket by the staircase was flaring up, and she stopped to lower the

wick, while Ranger rose from his bed on a mat by the door and sidled up

to her.

"Is that you, Dorinda?" whispered a voice from beyond the bend in the

staircase. "Do you work this late every night?" When she looked up, she

saw Minnie May blinking down on her.

"No, not every night. We had put off the dairy work so that Fluvanna

could go to the--" Her tongue stumbled over the word "wedding," so she

said "church" instead.

Holding her red flannel wrapper together over her flat girlish breast,

Minnie May stole noiselessly down the staircase. Her pale red hair hung

in a tight pigtail down her back, and the wrinkles of premature middle

age were visible in her young forehead. She was a girl who had, as

Fluvanna tartly observed, "run to character instead of looks."

"I tried to wait up for you," she said, "but you were so long coming,

and Pa wouldn't let me go out to the dairy. Mr. Garlick stopped by long

enough to tell us about Geneva Greylock, and I thought you ought to know

it. She threw herself into the old millpond this evening and was

drowned."

"Drowned?" Dorinda's voice was colourless. "Why, she waved to us as we

came by." While she spoke, it seemed to her that she could never stop

seeing the blue scarf flying round the distraught figure with its

violent gestures.

"I know. John Appleseed saw her, but he didn't tell anybody, and when

they missed her they didn't know where to look. It was the Haneys'

little boy who saw the blue scarf floating on the pond when he was

playing by the mill-wheel. For months, they say, she had gone about

telling everybody that Jason had murdered her baby; but, of course, it

was just a delusion."

"Poor thing." Dorinda turned away and went over to the wood stove where

the fire was quite dead. "There was something wrong with her. Even as a

girl she was always moping." Out of the fog of weariness there drifted a

vision of the red chimneys of Five Oaks. So, like an old wound that

begins to ache, the memory of Jason was thrust back into her life.

"Haven't you been to sleep, Minnie May?"

"No, I was listening for you. You came in so softly I hardly heard you."

"Well, you'd better go to bed. We have breakfast at five o'clock."

"Oh, I don't mind. I wake early, and I'll get up and help you pack the

butter."

As the girl went up the stairs, Dorinda opened the door of her room and

stepped over the threshold. The fire had been freshly made up and a

pleasant ruddiness suffused the large quaintly furnished chamber where

her parents had lived and died. Nathan had tried to keep the room warm

and to sit up for her; but overcome at last by the loneliness and the

firelight, he had fallen asleep on the big couch by the hearth. Having

removed only his coat, he lay stretched out on his back, snoring

slightly, with his jaw drooping above his magenta tie and his glazed

collar. His features wore the defenseless look which sleep brings to men

and women alike, and she felt, with a pang of sympathy, that he was at

her mercy because he cared while she was indifferent. She would be

always, she realized, the stronger of the two; for it seemed to her one

of the inconsistencies of human nature that strength should be measured

by indifference rather than by love.

Picking up the old grey blanket from the foot of the bed, she spread it

over him so gently that he did not stir in his sleep. The honesty she

had felt in him from the beginning was the single attribute that

survived in unconsciousness. If only she could remember his goodness and

forget his absurdity, life would be so much easier.

Too tired to do more than let down her hair and slip into a wrapper, she

dropped on the bed and drew the patchwork quilt up to her chin. As the

firelight flickered over her face, she remembered the night when Rufus

was arrested. Now, as then, she felt that the end of endurance was

reached. "Even if I am married to Nathan and Geneva has drowned herself,

I can't keep awake any longer."

XVIII

Up by the barn John Appleseed's threshing machine was droning like a

gigantic swarm of June beetles. After a rainy spring the sky had cleared

with the beginning of summer, and as the weeks went on, the weather

remained warm and dry for the wheat harvest.

Standing on the porch, with her curved palm screening her eyes, Dorinda

watched for Nathan to leave the threshing and come home to dinner. All

the morning Fluvanna had been baking wheaten bread for the white men and

corn pone for the coloured hands, who had their midday meal out under

the locust trees at the back of the house. It was five years since the

night of her wedding day, when Nathan had fallen asleep by the fire, and

never in those five years had she known a season of such bountiful

crops.

As she watched there in the sunlight, she looked exactly what she was in

reality, a handsome, still youthful woman of thirty-eight, who had been

hardened but not embittered by experience. Her tall straight figure had

thickened; there was a silver sheen on the hair over her temples, and

lines had gathered in the russet glow of her skin. Repose, dignity,

independence, these were the attributes with which she faced middle age,

for the lines in her face were marks of character, not of emotion. She

had long ago ceased to worry over wrinkles. Though she clung to youth,

it was youth of the arteries and the spirit. Her happiness was

independent, she felt, of the admiration of men, and her value as a

human being was founded upon a durable, if an intangible, basis. Since

she had proved that she could farm as well as a man there was less need

for her to endeavour to fascinate as a woman. Yet, as she occasionally

observed with surprise, in discouraging the sentimental advances of men,

she had employed the most successful means of holding their interest.

When all was said and done, was she not the only woman at Pedlar's Mill

who did not stoop habitually to falsehood and subterfuge to gain her

end?

Looking back from the secure place where she stood, she could afford to

smile at the perturbation of spirit which had attended her wedding.

Marriage had made, after all, little difference in the orderly precision

of her days. She held the reins of her life too firmly grasped ever to

relinquish them to another; and as she had foreseen on her

wedding night, she possessed an incalculable advantage in merely liking

Nathan while he loved her. On her side at least marriage had begun where

it so often ends happily, in charity of mind. Though she could not love,

she had chosen the best substitute for love, which is tolerance.

After five years of marriage, Nathan was scarcely more than a superior

hired man on the farm. Dorinda still smiled at his jokes; she still

considered his appetite; she still spoke of him respectfully to the

children as "your father"; but he had no part, he had never had any

part, in her life. It was his misfortune, perhaps, that by demanding

nothing, he existed as an individual through generosity alone. Yet

humble as he was in the house, his repressions fell away from him as

soon as he was out on the farm. The mechanical gesture of sowing or

reaping released his spiritual stature from the restraints that crippled

it in the flesh. Contact with the soil dissolved his humility, as

alcohol dissolved the inhibitions which had made Rufus when he was sober

colourless and ineffectual in comparison with Rufus when he was drunk.

Farming was Nathan's solitary outlet, for he did not drink and he had

observed scrupulously his promise not to encroach on Dorinda's freedom.

He left her at liberty, as he often reminded her, to have things her own

way, and nothing in his nature, except his habits, was strong enough to

resist her. Though she had been able to break him of chewing tobacco in

the house, he still drank his coffee from his saucer and sat with his

feet on the railing of the porch. Yet he was an easy man, she reflected,

to live with, and for a woman who was growing arrogant with prosperity,

an easy man was essential. At thirty-eight her philosophy had

crystallized into the axiom, "you can't have everything."

In the midst of the abandoned acres the broad cultivated fields were

rich and smiling. Where the broomsedge had run wild a few years ago, the

young corn was waving, or the ragged furrows of the harvest wheat were

overflowing with feathery green. In the pasture, if she had looked from

the front porch instead of from the back one, she would have seen the

velvety flanks of the cattle standing knee deep in grass. At her feet, a

flock of white Leghorns, direct descendants of Romeo and Juliet, were

scratching busily in the sheepmint.

Lifting her hand from her eyes, she brushed a lock of hair back from her

forehead and glanced down at the blue and white gingham dress she had

put on for dinner. Of late she had fallen into the habit of powdering

her face with her pink flannel starch bag and changing into a clean

dress before dinner. Her life, she knew, was becoming simplified into an

unbreakable chain of habits, a series of orderly actions at regular

hours. Vaguely, she thought of herself as a happy woman; yet she was

aware that this monotony of contentment had no relation to what she had

called happiness in her youth. It was better perhaps; it was certainly

as good; but it measured all the difference between youth and maturity.

She was not old. At thirty-eight, she was still young; and there were

moments in the spring when her tranquillity was shot through with arrows

of flame. Her romantic ardour lay buried under the years, but she

realized now and then that it was still living.

"Dar dey is!" exclaimed Nimrod behind her, and immediately afterwards

she heard Fluvanna's voice inquiring if it "wasn't time to begin dishing

up dinner?"

Across the fields the men were walking slowly, Nathan and John Appleseed

a little ahead, the others straggling behind them, with John Abner

limping alone at a distance. She would have recognized Nathan's loping

walk as far-off as she could distinguish his figure, and John Abner's

limp never failed to awaken a sympathetic feeling in her bosom. Of the

four children, he was the only one who had grown into her life. Minnie

May was married and the unselfish mother of an anæmic tow-headed brood;

Bud was working his way to the head of the wholesale grocery business;

and Lena had developed into a pretty, vain, empty-headed girl, who had

been engaged half a dozen times, but had always changed her mind before

it was too late. She attracted men as naturally as honey attracts flies,

and since she was troubled by neither religion nor morality, her

stepmother's only hope was "to get her safely married before anything

happened." For John Abner, Dorinda felt no anxiety beyond the maternal

one which arose from his lameness and his delicate health. He had been a

comfort to her ever since he had come to the farm; and yet, in spite of

John Abner and the knowledge that she had married from fear of a

solitary old age, she realized that she was still lonely. Evidently,

whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation

of spirit.

As Nathan reached the porch he fumbled in the pocket of his overalls and

drew out a greasy paper.

"John Appleseed brought me this notice about Five Oaks," he said. "Jason

has never paid his taxes, and the farm is to be sold on the tenth of

August. I saw the notice at the store yesterday, but I didn't stop long

enough to take it in." Though Nathan still owned the general store at

Pedlar's Mill, he had placed a manager in charge of it a few years ago.

The tenth of August! It seemed a long time to wait. Though Dorinda had

expected the sale for the last five years, she told herself that it

seemed a long time to wait. There was not the slightest surprise for her

in Nathan's announcement. She had known for months that neither the

taxes nor the interest on the mortgage could be paid, and that the farm

would soon be sold at public auction. But with the inherent perversity

of human nature, she felt now that the bare statement of the foreclosure

had startled her out of a sleep. When the men had gone to wash their

hands at the well, she lingered on the porch and gazed over the

harvested fields and the low curve of the hill in the direction of Five

Oaks. Peace surrounded her; peace was within her mind and heart; yet the

past clung to her like an odour and she could not brush it away.

"It looks mighty like we'll get Five Oaks at last," Nathan said that

night when they were alone. "To save my soul I can't see why you're so

set on it, but when a woman wants a thing as much as that, it looks as

if Providence couldn't hold out against her."

"Is there any chance of James Ellgood bidding it in?" This had been her

secret dread ever since she had heard of the sale. Suppose James

Ellgood, who could go as high as he liked, should begin bidding against

her!

"There ain't one chance in a million that Jim will lift a finger. He's

hated Jason ever since Geneva drowned herself--and before too."

"When he loses his farm, do you know what he will do? Jason Greylock, I

mean."

"He'll still own that little old house in the woods across Whippernock

River. Maybe he'll go down there to live. There ain't much land

belonging to it, but he's given up farming anyway same he's taken to

drink. The two things don't work together."

"He's his father all over again," Dorinda said, with a shiver of

repulsion.

"Yes, it looks like it." Nathan's tone was more compassionate. "John

Appleseed saw him a few days ago when he was over there with Tom Snead

looking for a foxhound puppy he'd lost. The dirt would have given you a

fit, Dorinda, he said. There was a slatternly looking coloured wench

getting dinner; but she had thrown all the vegetable peelings out into

the yard, and the front hall was stacked with kindling wood."

"Did he see Jason?"

"Yes, he came out when he heard the noise and asked what they wanted.

The old man is getting the best of him, John Appleseed said."

"And while his father was alive, he hated him so."

"Well, it's often like that, I reckon. Maybe he hated him all the more

because he felt he was like him." Nathan shook his head as if he were

dislodging a gnat. "I must say, for my part, I'd have picked the old man

of the two. At least he wasn't white-livered."

White-livered! It seemed to Dorinda that the old man himself was

speaking to her out of his grave. Even he, steeped in iniquity, had

scorned Jason because he lacked the courage of his wickedness.

Not for years had she heard directly of the Greylocks, and while she

listened she felt that the streak of cruelty in her own nature was

slowly appeased.

"I wonder why he never went North again?" Nathan said, as he rose to

undress. "I remember he told me once years ago that all he wanted was a

quiet life. He didn't care a damn for the farm, he said, he'd always

hated it."

Yes, it was true, he had always hated it. Through his whole life he had

been tied by his own nature to the thing that he hated.

When the tenth of August came, Dorinda put on her best dress, a navy

blue and white foulard which Leona Prince, the new dressmaker, had cut

after the fashionable "Princesse style." She was waiting on the porch

when Nathan, who had just removed his overalls, looked out of the window

to ask if they were going to walk.

"No, let's have the surrey." For a reason which she did not stop to

define she preferred the long way by the road to the short cut over the

fields. "Lena wants to go with us."

Nathan whistled. "What on earth has she got up her sleeve now?"

If she had spoken the thought in her mind, Dorinda would have replied

tartly, "She wants to go because she thinks men will be there"; but

instead she answered simply, "Oh, she's always ready to go anywhere."

"Well, can't she walk? It ain't over a mile by the short cut."

"She's afraid of seed ticks. Besides, she's putting on her flowered

organdie."

"What on earth?" Nathan demanded a second time. Then, after a meditative

pause, he added logically, "I reckon she's got her eye open for young

Jim Ellgood, but she'll be disappointed."

Lena had recently turned her seductions in a new direction; and Dorinda

was divided between pity for the victim, a nice boy of twenty, and the

fervent hope that Lena might be safely, if not permanently, settled. To

be sure, young Jim had given no sign as yet of responding to her

energetic advances; but the girl had never failed when she had gone

about her business in a whole-hearted fashion, and Dorinda remained

optimistic though vaguely uneasy about the results. Of course her

step-daughter was the last wife in the world for a farmer. Scheming,

capricious, dangerously oversexed, and underworked, she had revealed of

late a chronic habit of dissimulation, and it was impossible to decide

whether she was lying for diversion or speaking the truth from

necessity. Yet none of these moral imperfections appeared to detract an

iota from the advantage of a face like an infant Aphrodite, vacant but

perfect as the inside of a shell. A deplorable waste of any good man's

affection, thought Dorinda. However, she had ceased long ago to worry

over what she could not prevent, and she had observed that the strongest

desires are directed almost invariably toward the least desirable.

"I am not sure that it is young Jim," she said, firm but indefinite.

"Anyhow, you'll have to hitch up the surrey. The weeds would tear that

dress to pieces."

When she spoke in that tone, she knew that Nathan never waited to argue.

"All right. I turned the horses out to graze, but I'll see if I can find

them." He went off obediently enough, after protesting again that it

wasn't a mile by the short cut through the woods. Though Nathan always

gave in to her wishes, he seldom gave in without grumbling.

It took him a quarter of an hour of hard hunting to catch the horses;

but by the time Lena was ready, he appeared at the dour with the surrey.

"If you don't hurry up and come on, the sale will be over before we get

there," he remarked in the casual tone of a man who is not interested in

the result.

"Why, I thought we had plenty of time," Dorinda replied; but she hurried

Lena down the steps and into the vehicle, in spite of the girl's

complaint that the ruffles on her skirt would be ruined if she did not

spread a robe over the seat. Not until they had started off at a brisk

pace and were well on the road, did Dorinda's heart stop its rapid

pulsation. Suppose her own stupid folly in withstanding Nathan should

cost her the possession of Five Oaks!

XIX

Up the long shady slope; into the branch road by the fork; between the

wastes of Joe-Pyeweed and life-everlasting; over the rotting bridge

across Gooseneck Creek, where the dragon-flies swarmed above the partly

dried stream; up the rutted track through last year's corn stubble; and

past the broken fences of the farmyard to the group of indifferent

farmers gathered on benches, chairs, and upturned cracker boxes, under

the fine old oaks. All through the drive something invisible was

whipping her on, as if the memory of wet branches stung her face in the

blue August weather. A question was beating unanswered at the back of

her brain. Why, since she neither loved nor hated Jason, should she long

so passionately to own the place where he lived? Was it merely that the

possession of Five Oaks would complete her victory and his degradation?

Or was it simply that feeling like hers never died, that it returned

again and again, in some changed form, to the place where it had first

taken root?

When she reached the lawn, Ezra Flower, the auctioneer, was intoning

from the front porch to the gathering under the trees. He was a fat

little man, with a beard which stood out like ruffled grey feathers and

the impudent manner of a bedraggled sparrow. From his scolding tone,

Dorinda inferred that the bidding had been fainthearted. Nobody wanted

land, for land was the one thing that everybody owned and could not give

away. While Nathan drove on to the side of the house, Dorinda walked

quickly over to a chair a farmer was relinquishing. Only after she had

seated herself between John Appleseed and William Fairlamb, did she

glance round and observe that Lena had not followed her, but had stopped

among the younger men and boys who were sprawling over the grass.

Already the girl was rolling her eyes and giggling without modesty.

Well, what did it matter? Dorinda had tried, she felt sincerely, to do

her duty by Nathan and his children; but it was impossible for any

stepmother to be responsible for the character of a girl who possessed

none. A stern expression forced her lips together, and she looked away

to the twitching figure of Ezra Flower.

Still the auctioneer droned on, eliciting now and then responses as curt

as oaths. Presently she heard Nathan's dry cough and his slow emphatic

voice rasping out the words, "Three thousand dollars!" The bidding was

about to begin in earnest, she saw, and a chill sensation ran over her

as she settled her flaring skirt in the rush-bottomed chair.

While she sat there, listening to the rise and fall of the bidding, she

tried to keep her mind firmly fixed on the objects before her. Overhead,

the sky was of larkspur blue. Far away in the glittering fields, she

heard the shrill chorus of grasshoppers chiming in with the monotonous

hum of the auctioneer's voice. In the nearer meadow clouds of golden

pollen were drifting like swarms of devouring insects. Over the grass on

the lawn a flock of white turkeys moved in a sedate procession.

Yes, what had happened had happened, she told herself, and was over. Her

affair was not with the past; it was not with the future. The only thing

that concerned her vitally was the moment in which she was living. Only

by keeping her mind close to the immediate present could she prevent her

thoughts from slipping back into the abyss. Even now there were hours

when memory seemed to be dragging her into the past; and when this

occurred, a sense of weakness, of futility, of distaste for living,

would sweep over her like a malady. To look back, she knew, meant the

frustration of effort. To go on, taking the moment as it came,

surmounting the obstacles, one by one, as they confronted her; to lavish

her vital energy on permanent, not fugitive, endeavours,--these were the

resolves which had carried her triumphantly over the years.

"Six thousand dollars," sang the auctioneer. "Going--going--going for six

thousand dollars. Only six thousand dollars. Will nobody bid more? Not a

quarter of what it is worth. Will nobody bid more for this fine old

farm? Going--going--what? Nobody bids more? Going--going--gone for six

thousand dollars!"

She rose and went over to where Nathan stood surrounded by a few

farmers, who were trying in vain to pretend that they did not think him

a fool. "Should have thought you had as much land as you knew what to do

with," John Appleseed was saying, as she approached. "What are you going

to do with Five Oaks, now you've got it? Eat it, I reckon?"

"It ain't mine. I bid on it for my wife," Nathan replied stubbornly.

"She was so set on it I couldn't hold out against her."

Yes, Nathan was a good man, there was no denying it. Feeling nearer to

him than she had ever felt in her life, she moved over to his side and

slipped her hand through his arm.

"Wall, she got it dirt cheap," the auctioneer declared. "Dirt cheap, if

I do say so."

"I don't see what you want with two farms, ma'am," chuckled Mr.

Kettledrum, the veterinarian. "It looks as if you was goin' to live on

one an' let Nathan live by himself on the other."

Then the faint-hearted bidders mounted their horses or stepped into

their buggies, while Ezra Flower invited the new owners into the house.

"Come right in an' clinch the sale with Doctor Greylock. He's settin'

right there now with the papers to draw up," he added persuasively, as

Dorinda hung back.

Beckoning Lena to follow them, Dorinda went up the steps with Nathan and

entered the hall. Only once before had she been inside the house; but

every detail of the interior had bitten into her memory. She knew the

bend in the staircase down which the old man had roamed with his whip at

night. She had never forgotten the litter of dust in the corners; the

guns and fishing-poles crowded behind the door; the collection of hats

on the table and sofa; the empty whiskey bottles arranged in a row by

the wainscoting. Above all, she remembered the stale odour of

degeneration, of mingled whiskey and tobacco, which saturated the walls.

Eighteen years ago, and nothing, not even that odour, had changed! In

those eighteen years she had spent her youth and had restored dead land

to life; but this house in which Jason had lived was still sunk in

immovable sloth and decay.

Ezra Flower passed, with his sprightly sparrow-like twitter, through the

hall, and flung open the door of a room on the right--the room in which

she had sat with the drunken old man while the storm broke outside.

Jason, she saw, was standing on the very spot in the rug where his

father had stood that afternoon in November.

As she crossed the threshold, it seemed to her that the room shifted and

came forward to meet her. She heard Nathan's voice saying meaningless

words. Then Jason took her hand and dropped it so limply that it might

have been a dead leaf.

"Won't you sit down?" he asked courteously, for he had evidently kept

sober until the sale could be concluded. "So you've bought Five Oaks,"

he continued, as indifferently as if he were speaking of corn or wheat.

"Well, it's never been any use to me, and I'm not sorry to get rid of

it. But I don't see what you're going to do with it. Isn't one farm as

much as you're able to manage?" As he finished, he pushed a decanter of

whiskey in the direction of Nathan. "We might as well have a drink over

it anyway."

Yes, nothing had altered. It might have been the same dust that lay in a

film over the floor, the furniture and the walls. It might have been the

same pile of old newspapers on the table. It might have been the same

spot of grease on the table cover; the same rattrap baited with a piece

of greenish cheese in one corner; the same light falling obliquely

through the speckled window-panes. She would not have been surprised,

when she turned her head, to see the sheets of rain blowing out like a

curtain over the hunched box-bush.

Jason laughed, and the sound had a sardonic merriment. She had never

thought that he resembled the old man, and she told herself now, while

she watched him, that it was only the bad light or a trick of memory

which gave him the discouraged and desperate air of his father. In

looking at him she seemed not to brush aside, but to gather together all

the years that had gone. Why had she ever loved him? What was there in

this one man that was different from all other men whom she had known?

Once she had beheld him within a magic circle of wonder and delight,

divided and set apart from the surrounding dullness of existence. Now

the dullness had swept over him as the waste flows over the abandoned

fields.

He leaned back in his chair, glancing from Nathan to Ezra Flower with

morose and weary eyes. His face, which had been charming in youth, was

now spiritless and inert. There were yellow blotches under his eyes; his

eyelids were puffed and heavy; his features were swollen and leaden in

colour; and even his hair, which had once been so alive, was as sandy

and brittle as straw. Yes, the broomsedge had grown over him.

For a minute she scarcely heard what they were saying; then the details

of the sale were discussed, and she made an effort to follow the words.

When, presently, Nathan asked her to sign a paper, she turned

automatically and wrote her name in the race that Ezra Flower pointed

out to her. As she laid down the pen, she saw that Jason was smiling,

and for an instant a glimmer of his old bright charm shone in his

expression. She wished that he had not smiled. Then, with the wish still

in her mind, she saw that he was smiling, not at her, but at Lena. His

heavy gaze turned Lena as instinctively as the eyes turn to a flaring

lamp in a darkened room. His look was not amorous, for drink, Dorinda

knew, not sex, was his preoccupation; but, while she watched it, a

sensation of physical nausea attacked her.

Rising from her chair, she stood waiting for Nathan to finish the

discussion. It was agreed, she understood vaguely, that Jason should

leave the farm the first day of October, and that Nathan should take over

the better part of the furniture. "I'll be glad to get rid of it," Jason

remarked agreeably enough, "and I hope that you will make more out of the

farm than I ever did. All I can say that it ruined me. If I had been

hard-hearted about it instead of soft, I'd be a different man from the

one I am to-day."

"Yes, you weren't cut out for a farmer," Nathan rejoined mildly, and he

added with one of his untimely jests, "Now, is you'd been as thrifty as

my wife, you'd have found a way to make two leaves of alfalfa grow where

there wasn't even one blade of grass before."

At this, for the first time, Jason looked at her attentively, and she

knew from his gaze that his interest in her was as casual as his

interest in Nathan. With his look, she felt that the part of her that

was sex withered and died; but something more ancient than sex came to

her rescue, and this was the instinct of self-preservation which had

made her resolve in her youth that no man should spoil her rife. In the

matter of sex, he had won; matched merely as human beings, as man to

man, she knew that she was the stronger. Though she did not realize its

significance, the moment was a crisis in her experience; for when it had

passed she had discarded for ever the allurements of youth. She felt

securely middle-aged, but it was the middle age of triumphant

independence.

Jason's glance had wandered from her to Nathan, and she detected the

flicker of ridicule in his smile. Anger seized her at the suspicion that

he was mocking them, and with the anger a passionate loyalty to Nathan

welled up in her heart. She saw Nathan as clearly as Jason saw him, but

she saw also something fine and magnanimous in his character which Jason

could never see because he was blind to nobility. "I don't care," she

thought indignantly, "he is worth twenty of Jason." Obeying a protective

impulse, she moved nearer to her husband and laid her hand on his arm.

It was the second time that afternoon that she had drawn closer to him

of her own accord.

"Well, I reckon we'd better be starting home," Nathan said, as he held

out his hand in simple good will. "I hope you'll make out all right

where you're going."

"All I ask is a quiet life," Jason repeated. Then, as they were leaving

the room, his eyes roved back to Lena and clung to her face as if he

hated to see the last of her. "Take good care of that daughter of

yours," he advised. "She's the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life."

"Well, she ain't bad-looking," Nathan retorted with spirit, "but she

can't hold a candle to the way her mother and Dorinda looked when they

were her age."

Without touching Jason's hand again, Dorinda walked quickly down the

hall and out of the house. Not until they were driving over Gooseneck

Creek, did it occur to her that she had not opened her lips at Five

Oaks.

"I hope you're satisfied, Dorinda," Nathan remarked, with hilarity.

"Yes, I'm satisfied."

"I fancied you looked kind of down in the mouth while we were in the

room. You ain't changed your mind about wanting the farm, have you?"

"Oh, no, I haven't changed my mind."

"I'm glad of that. You never can tell about a woman. He seemed to think

that Lena was good to look at."

Though she had believed that her anger was over, the embers grew red and

then grey again. Middle age as an attitude of mind might enjoy an

immunity from peril, but it suffered, she found, from the disadvantages

of an unstable equilibrium.

"I wonder if he has forgotten Geneva," she observed irrelevantly.

At the reminder of that tragic figure Nathan's hilarity died. "When a

thing like that has happened to a man," he responded, "he doesn't

usually keep the dry bones lying around to look at."

The sun was beginning to go down and the sandy stretch of road, where

the shadow of the surrey glided ahead of them, glittered like silver.

After the intense heat of the day the fitful breeze was as torrid as the

air from an oven.

"John Abner promised he would drive me over to the ice cream festival at

the church," Lena said hopefully. There were pearly beads on her

shell-like brow and Nathan's leathery face was streaming with

perspiration.

"Poor John Abner! It is so hot and he will be tired!" protested Dorinda,

though she was aware that any protest was futile, for Lena possessed the

obstinacy peculiar to many weak-minded women.

"He needn't stay," retorted the girl. "Somebody will be sure to bring me

home." She pressed her pink lips together and smiled with the secret

wisdom of instinct.

As soon as they reached the house Dorinda slipped into her gingham dress

and hurried out to the barn. Milking had already begun, but she knew

that it would proceed with negligence if she were long absent. In

summer, as in winter, they had supper after dark, and for a little while

when the meal was over she liked to rest on the porch with Nathan and

John Abner. To-night, John Abner was away with Lena, and when Dorinda

came out into the air, she dropped, with a sigh of relief, into the

hammock beneath the climbing rose Nathan had planted.

"I never felt anything like the heat," she said, "there's not a breath

anywhere."

Nathan stirred in the darkness and removed his pipe from his mouth.

"Yes, if it don't break soon, the drought will go hard with the crops."

"And with the dairy too. The ice melts so fast I can't keep the butter

firm."

She leaned back, breathing in the scent of his pipe. The protective

feeling, so closely akin to tenderness, which had awakened in her heart

at Five Oaks, had not entirely vanished, and she felt nearer to her

husband, sitting there in the moonlight of her thoughts, than she had

felt since her marriage. Even that moment at Five Oaks when Jason had

laughed at him had not brought him so close. She longed to tell him this

because she knew how much the knowledge of it would mean to him; yet she

could find no words delicate enough to convey this new sense of his

importance in her life. The only words at her command were those that

had struggled in her mind over at Five Oaks: "He is worth twenty of

Jason," and these were not words that could be spoken aloud.

"There goes a shooting star!" Nathan exclaimed suddenly out of the

stillness.

"And another," she added, after a brief silence.

"I wonder what becomes of them," he continued presently. "When you stop

to think of it, it's odd what becomes of everything. It makes the

universe seem like a scrap heap."

She left the hammock and sat down on the step at his feet. "That reminds

me of all the trash over at Five Oaks. What in the world can we do with

it? Doesn't that screech owl sound as if he were close by us."

"Well, we'll have to put a manager on that farm, I reckon. We can't look

after both farms and make anything of them. I never heard so many

tree frogs as we've had this summer. What with the locusts and the

katydids you can't hear yourself talk. But it's right pleasant sitting

here like this, ain't it?"

"Yes, it's pleasant." She tried to say something affectionate and gave

up the effort. "I like to think that Five Oaks belongs to us." Her

accent on the "us" was the best that she could do in the matter of

sentiment; yet she was sure that he understood her mood and was touched

by its gentleness.

They talked until late, planning changes in the old farm and

improvements in the new one. It was an evening that she liked to

remember as long as she lived. Whenever she looked back on it

afterwards, it seemed to lie there like a fertile valley in the arid

monotony of her life.

_PART

THIRD_

LIFE-EVERLASTING

"_For the next few years_. . . ."

I

For the next few years she gave herself completely to Five Oaks. Only by

giving herself completely, only by enriching the land with her abundant

vitality, could she hope to restore the farm. Reclaiming the abandoned

fields had become less a reasonable purpose than a devouring passion in

her mind and heart. Old Farm was managed by Nathan now, and since he had

let his own place to a thrifty German tenant, he had, as Dorinda

frequently reminded him, "all the time in the world on his hands." The

dairy work, which had prospered when three trains a day were run between

Washington and the South, still remained under her supervision; but all

the hours that she could spare were spent on the freshly ploughed acres

of Five Oaks. Over these acres she toiled as resolutely as the pioneer

must have toiled when he snatched a home from the wilderness. Though she

had installed Martin Flower in the house, she had rejected Nathan's idea

of letting the farm "on shares" to the tenant. This was the only

disagreement she had ever had with Nathan, and he had yielded at last to

the habit of, command which had fastened upon her. As she grew older she

clung to authority as imperiously as a king who refuses to abdicate.

There were moments in these years when, arrested by some sudden check on

her arrogance, she stopped to wonder if any man less confirmed in

humility than Nathan could have stood her as a wife. But, immediately

afterwards, she would reflect, with the faint bitterness which still

flavoured her opinion of love, that if she had married another man, he

might not have found her overbearing.

Though the gentleness of mood which had stolen over her that August

evening had not entirely departed, it lingered above the bare reason of

her mind as a tender flush might linger over the austere pattern of the

landscape. After that evening she had drawn no nearer to her husband,

yet she had felt no particular impulse to stand farther away. Their

association had touched its highest point in the soft darkness of that

night, and she knew that they could never again reach the peak of

consciousness together. But the quiet friendliness of their intercourse

was not disturbed by Dorinda's interest in Five Oaks; and when, after a

longer pursuit and a fiercer capture than usual, Lena finally married

young Jim Ellgood, the days at Old Farm assumed the aspect of bright

serenity which passes so often for happiness. Though Dorinda was not

happy in the old thrilling sense of the word, she drifted, as middle age

wore on, into a philosophy of acquiescence. John Abner was still her

favourite companion, and he shared her ardent interest in Five Oaks. In

time, she hoped he would marry some girl whom she herself should select,

and that they would live with their children at Old Farm. When she

suggested this to Nathan, he chuckled under his breath.

"It wouldn't surprise me if he wanted his head when he comes to

marrying," he observed.

"Of course you think I am high-handed," she rejoined.

"Well, it don't make any difference to me what you are. And as long as

you can manage me," he added, "you needn't worry about not keeping your

hand in."

"It's for your own good anyway," she retorted. "You're too easy-going

with everybody."

"I know it, honey. I ain't complaining."

He was refilling his pipe from his shabby old pouch of tobacco, and

while he prodded the bowl with his thumb, he lifted his eyes and looked

at her with his sheepish smile.

"I heard 'em talking about Jason Greylock yesterday at the store," he

said.

She made a gesture of aversion. "What did they say?"

"Not much that I can recollect. Only that he is too lazy to come for his

mail. He has buried himself in that house in the woods across

Whippernock River, and he sometimes lets a whole month go by without

coming to the post office."

"Perhaps he hasn't any way of getting over."

"He's still got his horse and buggy. I doubt if he's really as poor as

he makes out. He hires Aunt Mehaley Plumtree to cook for him and look

after the poultry. She comes every morning and stays till dark."

"To think of coming down to that after Five Oaks!"

"Well, the country goes against you when you ain't cut out for a farmer.

Since the old man brought him back from the North, I reckon Jason has

had a hard row to hoe."

"He wasn't obliged to stay here," she observed scornfully.

"No, but he was always too easy-going. A pleasant enough fellow when he

was a boy; but soon ripe, soon rotten."

"Oh, I give it up." Dorinda was untying her apron while she answered.

"He isn't worth all the time we've wasted talking about him."

"Good Lord, Dorinda! You haven't been sitting here ten minutes."

"Well, ten minutes will pick a bushel, as Ebenezer says. They are

waiting for me over at Five Oaks."

This was the secret of her contentment, she knew, breathless activity.

If she was satisfied with her life, it was only because she never

stopped long enough in her work to imagine the kind of life she should

have preferred. While her health was good and her energy unimpaired, she

had no time for discontent. If she had looked for it, she sometimes told

herself, she could have found sufficient cause for unhappiness; but she

was careful not to look for it.

In these years there were brief periods when her old dreams awakened.

Beauty that seemed too fugitive to be real was still more a torment than

a delight to her. The moon rising over the harp-shaped pine; the shocked

corn against the red sunsets of autumn; the mulberry-coloured twilights

of winter;--while she watched these things the past would glow again

with the fitful incandescence of memory. But the inner warmth died with

the external beauty, and she dismissed the longing as weakness. "You

know where that sort of thing leads you," she would tell herself

sternly. "Three months of love, and you pay for it with all the rest of

your life."

Looking round at other women, she could not see that they were

better off in the matter of love than she was herself. Even the few

who had married the men they had chosen had paid for it--or so it

appeared to her--with a lifetime of physical drudgery or emotional

disappointment. She supposed they had compensations that she could not

discover--otherwise how could they have borne with their lives?--but

there was lot one among them with whom she would have changed places.

Those who had been most deeply in love appeared to her to have become

most bitterly disenchanted.

"I've a lot to be thankful for," she would repeat, while she went out to

struggle against he scrub pine or broomsedge.

At Five Oaks, during those first seasons, she converted her repressed

energy into the work of destruction. She would watch the reclaiming of

the waste places, the burning of the broomsedge, the grubbing up of the

pin and the sassafras, as if the fire and smoke were clearing her life

of its illusions. Her nightmare dream of ploughing under the thistles

was translated into the actual event. Perhaps, as the years went by, the

reality would follow the dream into oblivion. At thirty she had looked

forward to forty, as the time of her release from van expectation; but

when forty came, she pushed the horizon of her freedom still farther

away. "Perhaps at fifty I shall be rid of it for ever," she thought.

The winter had begin with a heavy snowstorm in December, and the week

before Christmas Nathan went to bed with a cold which left him with at

abscess in one of his teeth. There was no dental surgeon nearer than

Richmond, and Doctor Stout had advised him to go to the city and have

the tooth out as quickly as possible. "You won't lave a minute's peace

until you do," the doctor added decisively.

That was weeks ago, for Nathan had deferred the evil day until the

twentieth of January when he was required as a witness in a lawsuit Bob

Ellgood was bringing against the railroad. "As long as I've got to go to

Richmond anyway, I might as well wait and kill two birds with one

store," he said.

A few days before the case was called his toothache began again with

violence, and for two nights he had walked the floor in agony.

"You will be so thankful afterwards that it is over!" Dorinda assured

him encouragingly.

She was busily seeding raisins for a plum pudding, and she paused long

enough in her task to glance out of the window and shake her head.

Though her forty-second birthday had just gone, the wintry flush in her

cheeks and the imperious carriage of her head still created, at a little

distance, the aspect of youth. There was a white lock on her forehead;

but the premature greyness appeared theatrical rather than elderly above

the intense blue of her eyes. "You look as good to me as you ever did,"

Nathan had said to her on her birthday.

As she turned from the window and put down the bowl of raisins, a frown

wrinkled her forehead. "I wonder if it will ever stop snowing?" she

said.

For days the weather had been bitterly cold, and the bare country had

frozen under a leaden sky. Then at sunset the evening before a red fire

had streamed over the rim of the horizon, and in the night snow had

begun to fall. When Dorinda had gone out to the barn at five o'clock,

she had found the landscape covered with a white blanket and deep drifts

at the corners of the house and on the north side of the well and the

woodpile. The blackness had been so thick that she had been obliged to

walk in the flitting circle of light her lantern had cast on the ground.

She had already sent off the butter to meet the five o'clock train to

Washington; but Nimrod had overslept himself, and Nathan had hurried to

the cabin to wake him, while John Abner had harnessed the horses to the

wagon. Even then the coloured boy had had to take his breakfast with him

and eat it at the station. If the train had been delayed, the butter

would not have reached Washington until the day was well advanced.

All the morning and afternoon the flakes were driven in the high wind.

Though Dorinda could see only a few feet in front of her, she knew that

the dim fleecy shapes huddled on the lawn were not sheep but lilac

bushes and flower-beds. The animals and the birds had long ago fled to

shelter. As soon as the snow stopped falling the crows would begin

flying over the fields; but now the world appeared as deserted as if it

were the dawn of creation. In the kitchen, where she stayed when she was

not obliged to be in the dairy, there was an ashen light which gave

everything, even the shining pots and pans, an air of surprise.

Fluvanna, who was stirring the mixture for the plum pudding, sat as

close to the stove as she could push her chair, and shivered beneath her

shawl of knitted grey wool.

"Well, I reckon I'll be glad to get it over," Nathan said in a mournful

voice. "I've stood it' about as long as I can."

He had dropped disconsolately into a chair by the table, and sat with

his hands hanging helplessly between his knees. His face was tied up in

a white silk handkerchief which Dorinda had given him at Christmas, and

while she looked at him with sympathy, she could not repress a smile at

the comical figure he made. Like a sick sheep! That was the way he

always looked when anything hurt him. He was a good man; she was

sincerely attached to him; but there was no use denying that he looked

like a sick sheep.

"Nimrod can drive you over with the butter in the morning," she

rejoined. "Then you can have your tooth pulled before you have to go to

court."

Afterwards, when she recalled this conversation, the ashen light of the

kitchen flooded her mind. A small thing like that to decide all one's

future! Yet it seemed to her that it was always the little things, not

the big ones, that influenced destiny; the fortuitous occurrence instead

of the memorable occasion. The incident of his going was apparently as

trivial as her meeting with Jason in the road, as the failure of her aim

when the gun had gone off, as the particular place and moment when she

had fallen down in Fifth Avenue. These accidents had changed utterly the

course of her life. Yet none of them could she have foreseen and

prevented; and only once, she felt, in that hospital in New York, had

the accident or the device of fortune been in her favour.

"Yes, I'll do it," Nathan repeated firmly. "Ebenezer or Nimrod can meet

the evening train. That ought to get me home in time for supper."

"If this keeps up," Dorinda observed, "everything will be late."

In the morning, as she had foreseen, everything was an hour later than

usual. "The train is obliged to be behindhand," she thought, "so it

won't really matter." Though it was still snowing, the wind had dropped

and the stainless white lay like swan's-down over the country. All that

Dorinda could see was the world within the moving circle of the lantern;

but imagination swept beyond to the desolate beauty of the scene. "I'd

like to go over with you," she said, when they had finished breakfast,

"only the roads will be so heavy I oughtn't to add anything on the

horses."

"It will be pretty hard driving," Nathan returned. "I hope I shan't take

cold in my tooth."

"Oh, I can wrap up your face in a shawl, and I've got out that old

sheepskin Pa used to use. You couldn't suffer more than you did last

night. Doctor Stout says the trouble isn't from cold but from

infection."

He shook his head dolefully. "No, I couldn't stand another night as bad

as that. The train will be warm anyhow, and even the drive won't be much

worse than the barn was this morning. Jim Ellgood has his barn heated. I

wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea for us to heat ours next year.

Milking ain't much fun when your hands are frostbitten."

"Yes, it would be a good idea," she conceded inattentively, while she

brought a pencil and a piece of paper and made a list of the things she

wished him to buy in town. "You may hear something about the war in

Europe," she added, in the hope of diverting his mind from the pain in

his tooth. Nathan was the only man at Pedlar's Mill who had taken the

trouble to study the battles in France, and even Dorinda, though she

made no comment, thought he was going too far when he brought home an

immense new map of Europe and spent his evenings following the march of

the German Army. Already lie had prophesied that we should be drawn into

the war before it was over; but like his other prophecies, this one was

too farsighted to be heeded by his neighbours.

When it was time for him to start, and Nimrod had brought the wagon to

the door, she wrapped Nathan's face in her grey woollen scarf and tied

the ends in a knot at the back of his head. "You can get somebody to

undo you at the station."

He smiled ruefully. "No, I don't reckon I'd better get on the train tied

up like this. I must look funny."

"It doesn't matter how you look," she responded; but she could not keep

back a laugh.

As the wagon ploughed through the snow, she stood there, with her shawl

wrapped tightly over her bosom and the lantern held out into the

blackness before dawn. The air was alive with a multitude of whirling

flakes, which descended swiftly and sped off into the space beyond the

glimmer of her lantern. After the wagon had disappeared the silence was

so profound that she could almost hear the breathless flight of the

snow-flakes from the veiled immensity of the sky. By the glow of the

lantern she could just distinguish the ghostly images of trees rising

abruptly out of the shrouded stillness of the landscape. While she

lingered there it seemed to her that the earth and air and her own being

were purified and exalted into some frigid zone of the spirit. Humanity,

with its irksome responsibilities and its unprofitable desires, dropped

away from her; but when she turned and entered the house, it was waiting

in the ashen light to retard her endeavours.

II

In the kitchen John Abner was lingering over his breakfast, and Fluvanna

was frying bacon and eggs, while she complained of the weather in a

cheerful voice.

"Are the cows all right?" Dorinda inquired of her stepson. Until the

storm was over, the cows must be kept up, and John Abner, who was a

diligent farmer, had been out to feed and water them.

"Yes, but it's rough on them. It's still as black as pitch, but the

sooner we get the milking over the better. The hands are always late on

a morning like this."

Dorinda glanced at the tin clock on the shelf. "It isn't five o'clock

yet. We'll start as soon as you finish breakfast whether the other

milkers have come or not. The cows can't wait on the storm."

"It's a pity Father had to go to town to-day."

"It may be fortunate that something decided him. The doctor said he

wouldn't be any better until he had that tooth out. He walked the floor

all night with whiskey in his mouth."

The smile that came into Dorinda's eyes when she looked at her stepson

made her face appear girlish, in spite of its roughened skin and the

lines which were deeper in winter. "I see the lanterns outside now," she

added. "The women must be on the way to the milking." Wrapping her shawl

over her head, she took down a coat of raccoon skins, which was hanging

behind the door, and slipped her arms into the shapeless sleeves. Then

going out on the back porch, she felt under a snow-laden bench for the

overshoes she had left there last evening. Dawn was still far away, and

in the opaque darkness she could see the lanterns crawling like frozen

glowworms through the whirling snow, which was blown and scattered in

the glimmering circles of light.

In one of the long low buildings where the milk cows were sheltered, she

found a few grotesquely arrayed milkers. From the beginning she had

employed only women milkers, inspired by a firm, though illogical,

belief in their superior neatness. Yet she had supplemented faith with

incessant admonition, and this was, perhaps, the reason that the women

wore this morning neat caps and aprons above a motley of borrowed or

invented raiment. When she entered, stepping carefully over the mixture

of snow and manure on the threshold, they greeted her with grumbling

complaints of the weather; but before the work was well started they had

thawed in the contagious warmth of her personality, and were chattering

like a flock of blackbirds in a cherry tree. Since it is the law of

African nature to expand in the sunshine, she was particular never to

wear a dismal face over her work.

For the first minute, while she hung the lantern on the nail over her

head, she felt that the meadow-scented breath of the cows was woven into

an impalpable vision of summer. Though she shivered outwardly in the

harsh glare of light, a window in her mind opened suddenly, and she saw

Jason coming toward her through the yellow-green of August evenings. As

with her mother's missionary dream, these visitations of the past

depended less upon her mood, she had discovered, than upon some fugitive

quality in time or place which evoked them from the shadows of memory.

Concealing a shiver of distaste, she turned away and bent over a

milk pail.

"Your fingers are stiff, Jessie, let me try her a moment."

Hours later, when light had come and the work of the dairy was over for

the morning, she went back into the house, and the ashen light went with

her over the threshold. Fluvanna was busy with dinner, and a pointer

puppy named Pat was fast asleep by the stove. Young Ranger, the son of

old Ranger, lay on a mat by the door, and though many Flossies had

passed away, there was always a grey and white cat bearing the name to

get under one's feet between the stove and the cupboard. The room,

Dorinda told herself, was more cheerful than it had ever been. She

remembered that her mother could never afford curtains for the windows,

and that Fluvanna had laughed at her when she had bought barred muslin

and edged it with ruffles. "Good Lord, Miss Dorinda, who ever heard

tell!" the girl exclaimed. Yet, in the end, the curtains, with other

innovations, had become a part of the established order of living. Why

was it so difficult, she wondered, to bring people to accept either a

new idea or a new object? Nathan was the only man at Pedlar's Mill who

lived in the future, and Nathan had always been ridiculed by his

neighbours. The telephone, the modern churn, and the separator, what a

protracted battle he had fought for each of these labour-saving

inventions! He was talking now of the time when they would have an

electric plant on the farm and all the cows would be milked and the

cream separated by electricity. Was this only the fancy of a visionary,

or, like so many of Nathan's imaginary devices, would it come true in

the end?

At twelve o'clock John Abner came in for dinner, and, after a hurried

meal, went out to help clear away the snow from the outbuildings. As

there was no immediate work to be done, Dorinda sat down before the fire

in her bedroom and turning to her workbasket, slipped her darning-egg

into one of Nathan's socks. She disliked darning, and because she

disliked it she never permitted herself to neglect it. Her passionate

revolt from the inertia of the land had permeated the simplest details

of living. The qualities with which she had triumphed over the abandoned

fields were the virtues of the pioneers who had triumphed over life.

The room was quiet except for the crackling of the flames and the

brushing of an old pear-tree against the window. In the warmth of the

firelight the glimpse of the snow-covered country produced a sensation

of physical comfort, which stole over her like the Sabbath peace for

which her mother had yearned. Lifting her eyes from her darning, she

glanced over the long wainscoted room, where the only changes were the

comforts that Nathan had added. The thick carpet, the soft blankets, the

easy chair in which she was rocking,--if only her mother had lived long

enough to enjoy these things! Then the thought came to her that, if her

parents had been denied material gifts, they had possessed a spiritual

luxury which she herself had never attained. She had inherited, she

realized, the religious habit of mind without the religious heart; for

the instinct of piety had worn too thin to cover the generations.

Conviction! That, at least, they had never surrendered. The glow of

religious certitude had never faded for them into the pallor of moral

necessity. For them, the hard, round words in her great-grandfather's

books were not as hollow as globes. Her gaze travelled slowly over the

rows of discoloured bindings in the bookcases, and she remembered the

rainy days in her childhood when, having exhausted the lighter treasures

of adventure, she had ploughed desperately in the dry and stubborn acres

of theology. After all, was the mental harvest as barren as she had

believed? Firmness of purpose, independence of character, courage of

living, these attributes, if they were not hers by inheritance, she had

gleaned from those heavy furrows of her great-grandfather's sowing.

"Once a Presbyterian, always a Presbyterian," her mother had said when

she was dying.

As the afternoon wore on she grew restless from inaction, and the ruddy

firelight, which had been so pleasant after the cold morning, became

oppressive. Putting her work basket aside, she went out into the hall

and opened the back door, where Ebenezer, with a comforter of crimson

wool tied over his head and ears, was shovelling the snowdrifts away

from the angle of the porch. At a distance other men were digging out

the paths to the barn, and the narrow flagged walk to the dairy was

already hollowed into a gully between high white banks.

Ebenezer, a big, very black negro, with an infinite capacity for rest

and the mournful gaze of an evangelist, wielded his shovel vigorously at

the sound of the opening door, while he hummed in a bass voice which was

like the drone of a tremendous beehive. He was subject to intervals of

dreaminess when he would stop work for ten minutes at a time; but the

only attention Dorinda had bestowed on his slackness was a mild wonder

if he could be thinking.

"Try to get that snow away before dark, Ebenezer," she said, "and tell

Nimrod he must start earlier than usual to meet the evening train."

Turning back into the empty hall, she was surprised to find that she had

begun to miss Nathan. It was the first time since her marriage that he

had spent a whole day away from the farm, and she realized that she

should be glad to have him in the house again. The discovery was so

unexpected that it startled her into gravity, and passing the kitchen,

where she saw Fluvanna poking wood into the open door of the stove, she

walked slowly into her room and stood looking about her as if a fresh

light had fallen across her surroundings. Yes, incredible as it was, she

really missed Nathan! Though she had never loved him, after nine years

of marriage she still liked him with a strong and durable liking. It was

a tribute, she realized, to her husband's character that this negative

attachment should have remained superior to the universal law of

diminishing returns. No woman, she told herself, could have lived for

nine years with so good a man as Nathan and not have grown fond of him.

She recognized his disadvantages as clearly as ever; yet recognizing

them made little difference in her affection. She liked him because, in

spite of his unattractiveness, he possessed a moral integrity which she

respected and a magnanimity which she admired. He had accepted her

austerity of demeanour as philosophically as he accepted a bad season;

and to love but to refrain from the demands of love, was the surest way

he could have taken to win her ungrudging esteem.

When she went out to remind Nimrod that he must start earlier to meet

the six o'clock train, the snow was light and feathery on the surface,

and the air was growing gradually milder. At sunset the sky was

shattered by a spear of sunshine which pierced the wall of clouds in the

west. Between that golden lance and the solitary roof under which she

stood swept the monotonous fields of snow.

"If it clears, there'll be a good moon to-night," she thought.

When the milking hour came she yielded to the persuasions of John Abner

and did not go out to the barn. "It is time you learned that nobody is

indispensable," he said, half sternly, half jestingly. "There are mighty

few jobs that a full-grown man can't do as well as a woman, and loafing

round a cow-barn in wintertime isn't one of them."

"The negroes get so careless," she urged, "if they aren't watched."

He was standing in front of the fire, and while he held out his stout

boots, one by one, to the flames, the snow in the creases of the leather

melted and ran down on the hearth. The smell of country life in

winter--a mingled odour of leather, manure, harness oil, tobacco, and

burning leaves--was diffused by the heat and floated out with a puff of

smoke from the chimney. His features, seen in profile against the

firelight, reminded her of Jason. John Abner was not really like him,

she knew; but there were traits in every man, tricks of expression, of

gesture, of movement, which brought Jason to life again in her thoughts.

Twenty-two years ago she had known him! Twenty-two years filled to

overflowing with dominant interests; and yet she could see his face as

distinctly as she had seen it that first morning in the russet glow of

the broomsedge. Dust now, she told herself, nothing more. Her memories

of him were no better than deserted wasps' nests; but these dry and

brittle ruins still clung there amid the cobwebs, in some obscure corner

of her mind, and she could not brush them away. Neither regret nor

sentiment had preserved them, and yet they had outlasted both sentiment

and regret.

With a start of exasperation, she tore her mind from the past and

glanced down at John Abner's clubfoot. "Are those boots comfortable?"

she asked gently.

"Oh, they do as well as any," he replied irritably. Though any reference

to his deformity annoyed him, there were times when she felt obliged to

allude to it as a factor in his career. For good or ill, that clubfoot,

like the mark of Jason in her life, had been his destiny. With his

unusual gifts and without the sensitive shrinking from crowds which his

lameness had developed into a disease, he might have achieved success in

any profession that he had chosen. "You stay by the fire," he added,

"while I take a turn at the bossing."

She nodded. "Very well, I'll be in the dairy when you are ready for me."

"I'll manage the whole business if you'll let me."

"But I shan't let you." She was smiling as she answered, and she

perceived from his face that he was big enough to respect her for her

inflexible purpose. While authority was still hers she would cling to it

as stubbornly as she had toiled to attain it.

He went out laughing, and she dropped back in her chair to wait until

the hour came for her work in the dairy. John Abner was right, of

course. One of the exasperating things about men, she reflected, was

that they were so often right. It was perfectly true that she could not

stay young for ever, and at forty-two, after twenty years of arduous

toil, she ought to think of the future and take the beginning of the

hill more gradually. Though she was as strong, as vital, as young, in

her arteries at least, as she had ever been, she could not, she

realized, defend herself from the inevitable wearing down of the years.

Her eyes wandered to the mirror in the bureau which had belonged to her

mother, and it seemed to her that, sitting there in the ruddy firelight,

the magic of youth enveloped her again with a springtime freshness. Her

eyes looked so young in the dimness that they bathed her greying hair,

her weatherbeaten skin, and her tall, strong figure, which was becoming

a little dry, a trifle inelastic, in the celestial blueness of a May

morning.

"I wonder if it is because I've missed everything I really wanted that I

cannot grow old?" she asked herself with a start.

It was seven o'clock when she returned from the dairy, and John Abner

was already in the kitchen demanding his supper.

"The train is certain to be hours late," he said. "There's no use

waiting any longer for Father."

"Yes, we might as well have supper. I can cook something for him when he

comes."

"I saw Mr. Garlick going over a few minutes ago. His daughter, Molly,

went down yesterday with young Mrs. Ellgood to a concert. Mrs. Ellgood

has always been crazy about music. Did you ever hear her play on the

violin?"

"No, I never went anywhere even before I was married. I'm glad she's

coming up with your father. He always liked her in spite of the fact

that she despises the country."

When supper was over, and John Abner had eaten with an amazing appetite,

they went back into her bedroom and sat down to wait before the fire.

Though she had never been what Nathan called "an easy talker," she could

always find something to say to her stepson; and they talked now, not

only of the farm, the spring planting, the new tractor-plough they had

ordered, but of books and distant countries and the absurd illustrations

in the Lives of the Missionaries, which John Abner was reading for the

fourth time.

"Alfalfa has been the making of Five Oaks," Dorinda said. "It's a shame

Pa never knew of it."

"I wonder if Doctor Greylock ever comes back to his farm. If he does, he

must be sorry he lost it."

"Well, he ruined the place, he and his father before him. It was no

better than waste land when we bought it."

John Abner bent over to caress the head of the pointer. "I can't blame

anybody for wanting to quit," he said. "There's a lot to be said for

those missionary chaps. They were the real adventurers, I sometimes

think."

He rose from his chair and shook himself. "Why, it's almost ten o'clock.

There's no use staying up any longer. If we've got to wake before five,

it is time we were both asleep."

"I believe I hear the buggy now." Dorinda bent her ear listening. "Isn't

that a noise on the bridge? Or is it only another branch cracking?"

"You can't hear wheels in this snow. But I'll go out and take a look

round. There's a fine moon coming up."

When he had unbarred the front door, she slipped into her raccoon coat

and overshoes, and flung her knitted shawl over her head. After a minute

or two, she saw John Abner's figure moving among the shrouded trees to

the gate, and descending the steps as carefully as she could, she

followed slowly in the direction he had taken. By the time she was

midway down the walk, he had disappeared up the frozen road. Except for

the lighted house at her back she might have been alone in a stainless

world before the creation of life. A cold white moon was shedding a

silver lustre over the landscape, which appeared as transparent as glass

against the impenetrable horizon. Even the house, when she glanced round

at it, might have been only a shadow, so unreal, so visionary, it looked

in the unearthly light of the snow. While she lingered there it seemed

to her that the movement of the air, the earth, and the stars, was

suspended. Substance and shadow melted into each other and into the

vastness of space. Not a track blurred the ground, not a cloud trembled

in the sky, not a murmur of life broke the stillness.

Presently, as she drew nearer the gate, a moving shape flitted in from

the trees by the road, and John Abner called to her that the buggy was

in sight. "I'll wait and bed down the mare," he said. "Nimrod will be

pretty hungry, I reckon, and he won't look after her properly."

"Well, I'll go right in and fix supper for both of them."

Without waiting for the vehicle, she hurried into the house and

replenished the fire in the stove. Thin, while she broke the eggs and

put on water to boil for coffee, she told herself that Nathan's coffee

habit was as incurable as a taste for whiskey. The wood had caught and

the fire was burning well when John Abner appeared suddenly in the

doorway. He looked sleepy and a trifle disturbed.

"That wasn't Father after all," he said. "They told Nimrod there wasn't

any use waiting longer. He was shaking with cold, so I sent him to bed.

As soon as I've made the mare comfortable, I'll come and tell you all

about it."

"I was just scrambling some eggs. I wish you'd eat them. I hate to waste

things."

"All right. I'll be back in a jiffy."

He ran out as quickly as his lameness would permit, and she arranged the

supper on the table. After all, if Nathan wasn't coming home to-night,

John Abner might as well eat the eggs she had scrambled. There was no

sense in wasting good food.

After attending to the mare the boy came in and began walking up and

down the floor of the kitchen. He did not sit down at the table, though

Dorinda was bringing the steaming skillet from the stove. "It's a

nuisance all the wires are down," he said presently.

"Yes, but for that we might telephone."

"The telegraph wires have fallen too. Nimrod said they didn't know much

more at the store than we do."

"Well, you'd better sit down and eat this while it's hot. It doesn't do

any good to worry about things."

"One of the coloured men, Elisha Moody, told Nimrod he would be coming

home in an hour, and he would stop and tell us the news. Mr. Garlick is

going to wait at the station until his daughter comes."

"The news?" she asked vaguely. For the first time the idea occurred to

her that John Abner was holding back what he had heard. "Doesn't Nimrod

know when the train is expected?"

"Nobody knows. The wires are broken, but the train from Washington went

down and came up again with news of a wreck down the road. I don't know

whether it is Father's train or another, Nimrod was all mixed up about

it. He couldn't tell me anything except that something had happened. The

thing that impressed Nimrod most was that all the freight men carried

axes. He kept repeating that over and over."

"Axes?" Dorinda's mind had stopped working. She stood there in the

middle of the kitchen floor, with the coffee-pot in her hand, and

repeated the word as if it were strange to her. Behind her the fire

crackled, and the pots of rose-geraniums she had brought away from the

window-sill stood in an orderly row on the brick hearth.

"I suppose they had to cut the coaches away from the track," replied

John Abner indefinitely. "Elisha will tell us more when he stops by.

He's got more sense than Nimrod, who was scared out of his wits."

"I would have given him some supper. Why didn't he come in?"

"He said his wife was waiting for him and he wanted to get to his

cabin."

Dorinda poured out the coffee and carried the pot back to the stove.

"I'm afraid your father will catch his death of cold," she said

anxiously, "and with that tooth out!"

She was fortified by a serene confidence in Nathan's ability to take

care of himself. The only uneasiness she felt was on account of the

abscess. With all his good judgment, when it came to toothache he was no

braver than a child.

John Abner seemed glad to get the hot coffee. "You might as well keep

some for Elisha," he suggested. "It's almost time he was coming and I

know he'll be thankful for something hot."

Though he ate and drank as if he were hungry, there was a worried look

in his face, and he kept turning his head in the direction of the road.

"I don't suppose it's anything really serious," Dorinda remarked

reassuringly. "If it had been, we should certainly have heard it

sooner."

Dropping into a chair beside him, she raised a cup of coffee and drank

it slowly in sips. Presently, notwithstanding her effort to minimize the

cause for alarm, she became aware that anxiety was stealing over her as

if it emanated from her surroundings. She felt it first in the creeping

sensation which ran like spiders over her flesh; then in an almost

imperceptible twitching of her muscles; and at last in a delicate

vibration of her nerves, as if a message were passing over electric

wires in her body. Then, suddenly, the fear mounted to her brain, and

she found herself listening like John Abner for the crunching of wheels

in the snow.

"Do you hear anybody, John Abner?"

"A branch snapped, that was all. I'll make up the fire in your chamber.

It's more comfortable in there."

After he had gone into the bedroom, she fed the two dogs and the cat

before she washed the dishes and placed the coffee where it would keep

hot for Elisha. As she was leaving the kitchen she noticed the

rose-geraniums and moved the pots farther away from the heat. "If we are

going to keep up the fire, it will be too warm for them there," she

thought.

III

The log fire was blazing in her bedroom, and John Abner stood before the

window which looked on the gate and the road.

"The panes are so frosted you can't see your hand before you," he said,

as she entered.

Standing there beside him, she gazed through the leafless boughs of the

lilac bushes. "No, even the moonlight doesn't help you," she answered.

"It must be bitterly cold in the road. I hope the mare got warm again."

"Yes, I covered her up. Nimrod had some whiskey and he was going to make

a hot toddy." John Abner shivered in the icy draught that crept in

through the loose window sashes. "Hadn't you better lie down?" he asked,

turning back to the fire. "It won't be long now."

She shook her head. "That coffee will keep me awake. Lie down on the

couch, and I'll listen for Elisha. I drew up the shades, so he will know

we haven't gone to bed."

For a few minutes he resisted her, his eyes blinking in the firelight

while he struggled to bite back a yawn. Then he gave up and flung

himself down on the big soft couch. "It would take something stronger

than coffee to keep me awake to-night," he said. "If I drop off, will

you wake me?"

"If there is any news. But you will hear Elisha when he comes." He

laughed drowsily. "I believe I could sleep straight through Judgment

Day."

Taking the quilt from the bed, she covered him carefully from head to

foot. As she tucked him in, she remembered her wedding night when she

had found Nathan asleep on the couch in front of the fire. "If he hadn't

been like that, I couldn't have stood him," she thought.

Sinking into the easiest chair by the flames, she picked up the sock she

had partly darned in the afternoon. Then, observing that the lamp was

shining in John Abner's face, she lowered the wick and folding the sock,

replaced it in her work basket. The chair creaked gently as she rocked,

and fearing the noise might disturb him, she sat motionless, with her

eyes on the hickory logs and her foot touching the neck of the pointer.

While she sat there she recalled, with one of the irresponsible flashes

of memory which revived only when she was inactive, the afternoon when

she had waited in the dripping woods to see Jason drive home with

Geneva. She was a girl then; now she was a woman and middle-aged; yet

there was an intolerable quality in all suspense which made it alike.

Compared to those moments, this waiting was as the dead to the living

agony. "Suppose I had married Jason and he was on that train, could I

sit here like this?" she asked herself. "Suppose I had married Jason

instead of Nathan, would marriage have been different?"

Then, because the question was useless and she had no room for useless

things in her practical mind, she put it sternly away from her, and

rising, slipped into her coat and went out of the house. Closing the

door softly, she passed out on the porch and down the frozen steps to

the lawn. The snow was slippery in thin places, and she knew that Elisha

would try to keep to the road where the deep drifts were less dangerous.

Advancing cautiously, she moved in the direction of the gate, but she

had gone only a few steps when she saw Elisha's old spring wagon rolling

over the bridge. Quickening her steps dangerously, she ran over the

slippery ground.

"I've kept some hot coffee for you, Uncle Elisha. Can't you come into

the kitchen and get something to eat?"

"Naw'm, I reckon I'd better be gittin' erlong home. My ole grey mare,

she's had jes' about enuff er dis yeah wedder, en she's kinder hankerin'

fur de stable."

"We can keep her here. There's plenty of room in the stable, and you can

spend the night with Ebenezer."

"Thanky, Miss Dorindy, bofe un us sutney would be glad uv er spell er

res'. My son Jasper, he's on dat ar train dat's done been stalled down

de track, an' I'se gwine out agin about'n sunup."

"Have they heard anything yet?" asked Dorinda, while the wagon crawled

over the snags of roots in the direction of the stable.

Elisha shook his muffled head. "Dey don' know nuttin', Miss Dorindy,

dat's de Gospel trufe, dey don' know nuttin' 'tall. Dar's a train done

come down Pom de Norf, en hit's gwine on wid whatevah dey could git

abo'd hit. Hi! Dey's got axes erlong, en I 'low dar ain' nary a one un

um dat kin handle an axe like my Jasper."

"I'm afraid it's a bad wreck," Dorinda said uneasily.

"Yas'm, dar's a wreck somewhar, sho 'nuff, but dey don' know nuttin'

out dar at de station. All de wires is down, ev'y las' one un um, en dar

ain' nobody done come erlong back dat went down de road. Ef'n you'll

lemme res' de night heah, me en de mare'll go out agin befo' sunup."

"There's all the room in the world, Uncle Elisha. Wait, and I'll give

you a lantern to take to the stable." She went indoors and returned in a

few minutes with a light swinging from her hand. "As soon as you've

attended to your mare, come in and I'll have something for you to eat."

As she passed her bedroom on the way to the kitchen she saw that John

Abner was still sleeping, and she did not stop to arouse him. Why should

she disturb his slumber when there was nothing definite that she could

tell him? Instead, she hastened about her preparations for Elisha's

supper, and by the time the old negro came in from bedding the mare, the

bacon and eggs were on the table. Withdrawing to a safe distance from

the stove, he thawed his frostbitten hands and feet, while his grizzled

head emerged like some gigantic caterpillar from the chrysalis of shawls

he had wound about him.

"Were there many people at the station?" she inquired presently.

"Naw'm, hit was too fur fur mos' folks. Marse John Garlick, he wuz

spendin' de night in de sto', en so was Marse Jim Ellgood. Young Marse

Bob en his wife wuz bofe un um on de train."

"Well, make a good supper. Then you can go up to Ebenezer's. I saw smoke

coming out of his chimney, so it will be warm there."

Because she knew that he would enjoy his supper more if he were

permitted to eat it alone, she went back to the fire in her bedroom

where John Abner was still sleeping. She watched there in the silence

until she heard Elisha exclaim, "Good night, Miss Dorindy!" and go out,

shutting the back door behind him. Then she locked up the house, and

after lowering the wick of the hall lamp, touched John Abner on the

shoulder.

"You'd better go to bed. In a little while you will have to be up

again."

He opened his eyes and sat up, blinking at the firelight. "I could have

slept on into next week."

"Well, don't wake up. Go straight upstairs."

"Did Elisha ever come?"

"Yes, he put his mare in the stable and went up to spend the night with

Ebenezer."

"What did he tell you?"

"Only that they haven't found out anything definite at the station. You

know how cut off everything is when the wires are down. Mr. Garlick and

James Ellgood are both waiting out there all night."

"Then it was Father's train. It must have been a bad wreck."

"I'm afraid so. This suspense is so baffling. Anything in the world

might happen, and we shouldn't know of it until the next day."

Her face was pale and drawn, and while she spoke, she shivered, not from

cold but from anxiety. She saw John Abner glance quickly toward the

front window and she knew that he, like herself, was feeling all the

terror of primitive isolation. How did people stand it when they were

actually cut off by the desert or the frozen North from communication

with their kind?

"You know now what it must have been like in the old days before we had

the telegraph and the telephone," she said. "Pedlar's Mill was scarcely

more than a stopping place in the wilderness, and my mother would be

shut in for days without a sign from the outer world."

"I never thought of it before," said John Abner, "but it must have been

pretty rough on her. The roads were no better than frozen bogs, so she

couldn't get anywhere if she wanted to."

"That was why she got her mania for work. The winter loneliness; she

said, was more than she could endure without losing her mind. She had to

move about to make company for herself. There were weeks at a time, she

told me once, when the roads were so bad that nobody went by, not even

Mr. Garlick, or an occasional negro. During the war the trains stopped

running on this branch road, and afterwards there were only two trains

passing a day."

"I suppose it was always better on the other side of the railroad."

"They're nearer the highway, of course, though that was bad enough when

Ma was first married. Over here the roads were never mended unless a few

of the farmers agreed to give so much labour, either of slaves or free

negroes. Then, after the contract was made, something invariably got in

the way and it fell through. Somebody died or fell ill or lost all his

crops. You know how indisposed tenant farmers are to doing their share

of work."

"And there wasn't even a store at Pedlar's Mill until Father started

one?"

"Nothing but the mill. That was there as far back as anybody could

remember, and there was always a Pedlar for a miller. The farmers from

this side took corn there to be ground, and sometimes they would trade

it for sugar or molasses. But the only store was far up at the

Courthouse. People bought their winter supplies when they went to town

to sell tobacco. All the tobacco money went for coffee and sugar and

clothes. That was why Pa raised a crop every year to the end of his

life."

John Abner rose and stretched himself. "Well, I'm precious glad I live

in the days of the telephone and the telegraph, with the hope of owning

an automobile when they get cheaper." Going over to the window, he held

his hand over his eyes and peered out. "You can't see a thing but snow.

We might as well be dead and buried under it. Shall I take the butter

over in the morning?"

"No, I'd like to go myself. You'd better stay and look after the

milking." How inexorable were the trivial necessities of the farm!

Anxieties might come and go, but the milking would not wait upon life or

death. Not until John Abner had gone upstairs did she perceive that she

had been talking, as her mother would have said, "to make company for

herself." "I've almost lost my taste for books," she thought, "and I

used to be such a hungry reader."

After putting a fresh log on the fire, she flung herself on the bed,

without undressing, and lay perfectly still while a nervous tremor, like

the suspension of a drawn breath, crept over her. Toward daybreak, when

the crashing of a dead branch on one of the locust trees sounded as if

it had fallen on the roof, she realized that she was straining every

sense for the noise of an approaching vehicle in the road. Then, rising

hurriedly, she threw open the window and leaned out into the night.

Nothing there. Only the lacquered darkness and the moon turning to a

faint yellow-green over the fields of snow!

At four o'clock she went into the kitchen and began preparations for

breakfast. When the coffee was ground, the water poured over it in the

coffee-pot, and the butterbread mixed and put into the baking dish, she

returned to her room and finished her dressing. By the time John Abner

came down to go out to the cow-barn, she was waiting with her hat on and

a pile of sheepskin rugs at her feet.

"I suppose we might as well send the butter out. Fluvanna has it ready,"

she said, watching him while he lighted his lantern from the lamp on the

breakfast table. "If the trains have begun running again, they will

expect it in Washington."

"It won't hurt anyway to take it along. I'll tell Nimrod to hitch up."

They both spoke as if the wreck had been merely a temporary

inconvenience which was over. Vaguely, there swam through Dorinda's mind

the image of her mother cooking breakfast in her best dress before she

went to the Courthouse. The old woman had worn the same expression of

desperate hopefulness that Dorinda felt now spreading like a mask of

beeswax over her own features. Already, though it was still dark, the

life of the farm was stirring. As John Abner went out, she saw the stars

of lanterns swinging away into the night, and when he returned to

breakfast, Fluvanna was in the kitchen busily frying bacon and eggs.

Before they had finished the meal, Nimrod appeared to say that the wagon

was waiting, and rising hastily Dorinda slipped on her raccoon-skin

coat.

"We'd better start," she said. "Give Uncle Elisha his breakfast, and

tell him we will bring Jasper back with us. Keep the kettle on, so you

can make coffee for Mr. Nathan as soon as he gets here."

Hurrying out, she climbed into the heavy wagon, and they started

carefully down the slippery grade to the road. As they turned out of the

gate, the wheels slid over the embedded rocks to the frozen ruts in the

snow. Only a circle of road immediately in front of them was visible,

and while the wagon rolled on, this spot of ground appeared to travel

with them, never changing and never lingering in its passage. Into this

illuminated circle tiny tracks of birds drifted and vanished like magic

signs.

Presently, as they drew nearer Pedlar's Mill, a glimmer, so faint that

it was scarcely more than a ripple on the surface of black waters,

quivered in the darkness around them. With this ripple, a formless

transparency floated up in the east, as a luminous mist swims up before

an approaching candle. Out of this brightness, the landscape dawned in

fragments, like dissolving views of the Arctic Circle. The sky was

muffled overhead, but just as they reached the station a pale glow

suffused the clouds beyond the ruined mill on the horizon.

"If the train was on time, it must have gone by an hour ago," Dorinda

said, but she knew that there was no chance of its having gone by.

"Hit's gwinter thaw, sho' nuff, befo' sundown," Nimrod rejoined,

speaking for the first time since they started.

"Yes, it's getting milder."

At that hour, in the bitter dawn, the station looked lonelier and more

forsaken than ever. Hemmed in by the level sea of ice, the old warehouse

and platform were flung there like dead driftwood. Even the red streak

in the sky made the winter desolation appear more desolate.

At first she could distinguish no moving figures; but when they came

nearer, she saw a small group of men gathered round an object which she

had mistaken in the distance for one of the deserted freight cars.

Now she saw that this object was a train of a single coach, with an

engine attached, and that the men were moving dark masses from the car

to crude stretchers laid out on the snow.

"The trains are running again," Dorinda said hoarsely. "They must have

got the track cleared."

"I hope dey's gwinter teck dis yeah budder," Nimrod returned. "Git up

heah, hosses! We ain' got no mo' time to poke."

A chill passed down Dorinda's spine; but she was unaware of the cause

that produced it, and her mind was vacant of thought. Then, while the

wagon jolted up the slope, some empty words darted into her

consciousness. "Something has happened. I feel that something has

happened."

"Do you see anybody that you know, Nimrod?"

"Naw'm, I cyarn see nobody." Then he added excitedly, "But dar's

somebody a-comin'. Ain' he ole Marse Jim Ellgood?"

The horses stopped by the fence and began nuzzling the snow,

while Nimrod dropped the reins and jumped down to lift out the

butter. Standing up in the wagon, Dorinda beat her chilled hands

together. Her limbs felt stiff with cold, and for a moment they

refused to obey her will. Then recovering control of herself,

she stepped down from the wagon and followed Nimrod in the

direction of the store. Immediately, she was aware of a bustle about the

track, and she thought, "How much human beings are like turkeys!" The

group of men had separated as she approached, and two figures came

forward to meet her across the snow. One was a stranger; the other,

though it took her an instant to recognize him, was Bob Ellgood. "Why,

he looks like an old man," she said to herself. "He looks as old as his

father." The ruddy, masterful features were scorched and smoke-stained,

and the curling fair hair was burned to the colour of singed broomsedge.

Even his eyes looked burned, and one of his hands was rolled in a

bandage.

She stopped abruptly and stood motionless. Though she was without

definite fear, an obscure dread was beating against the wall of her

consciousness. "Something has happened. Something has happened.

Something has happened." Her mind seemed to have no relation to herself,

to her feelings, to her beliefs, to her affections. It was only an empty

shed; and the darkness of this shed was filled suddenly with the sound

of swallows fluttering.

When Bob Ellgood reached her, he held out his unbandaged hand. "Father

and I were just going over to your place, Mrs. Pedlar," he said. "We

wanted to be the first to see you. We wanted you to hear of Nathan from

us----"

"Then he is dead," she said quietly. It had never seemed possible to her

that Nathan could die. He had not mattered enough for that. But now he

was dead.

"He died a hero," a stranger, whom she had never seen before, said

earnestly.

"Yes, he died a hero," Bob Ellgood snatched the words away from the

other. "That is what we wish you to know and to feel as long as you

live. He gave his life for others. He had got free, without a scratch,

and he went back into the wreck. The train had gone over the embankment.

It was burning and women were screaming. He went down because he was

strong. He went down and he never came back."

"God! Those shrieks!" exclaimed the strange man. "I'll hear them all my

life. As long as I live, I'll never stop hearing them."

"He got free?" she repeated stupidly.

"But he went back. He got an axe from somebody, and he went back because

he was strong. He was cutting the car away to get a woman out. He did

get her out----" He broke off and added hastily, "When we found him, he

was quite dead. . . ."

Dorinda stared at him vacantly, seeing nothing but his blackened

features and the scorched place on his head. "Will they bring him to the

farm?" she asked.

"If you wish it." Bob's voice was shaken. "But we feel that we should

like him to rest in the churchyard."

Silently, scarcely knowing what he asked, she assented. So Nathan had

forced people to take him seriously, even though he had to die before

they would do it. Was it worth it? she wondered. Would it have pleased

him if he had known?

"May I go to the church? Have they taken him there?"

She saw that Bob hesitated before he answered. "I hope you won't see

him," he replied after a minute. "We believe he was killed instantly,

but----" He broke off and then went on desperately, "If you will go home

and leave the arrangements to us, we promise you that everything shall

be as he would have wished. We should like him to have the funeral of a

hero."

"The funeral of a hero!" she echoed. She did not know, she could not

imagine what kind of funeral that would be; but she felt intuitively

that Nathan would have liked it, and that she had no right to deny him

the funeral that he would have liked.

Without replying in words, she bent her head and turned back to the

wagon, where a completely demoralized Nimrod awaited her. A stunned

sensation held her emotions imprisoned, and a few minutes later, as she

drove homeward, it occurred to her that she was proving unequal again to

one of the supreme occasions of her life. Emotionally, would she always

prove unequal to the demands of life? She was not feeling what she knew

that she ought to feel; she was not feeling what she knew that they

expected of her. Her stern judgment told her that she was a hypocrite;

but it was hypocrisy against which she was inert and helpless. Though

she was overwhelmed by the general tragedy, she was without a keen sense

of widowhood. Something within her soul, that thin clear flame which was

herself, remained unshaken by her loss, as it had remained unshaken by

every tragedy but one in her life. She was leaving Nathan, with regret

but not with grief, to his belated popularity. How could she begrudge

him in death the thing that he had wanted most when he was alive? Yes,

beholding him as she did with compassion but without pretense, she knew

that he would have enjoyed the funeral of a hero.

IV

Waking in the blackness before dawn, she heard John Abner come

downstairs and stop in the hall to light his lantern.

"I ought to go out to the milking," she thought, and then more slowly,

"I can't believe that Nathan is dead."

Would the idea ever grow familiar to her? Could she ever live with the

fact, acknowledged and yet unregarded, as she had lived with the fact of

her marriage? "There never was a better man in the world," she said

aloud. Here on the farm she found herself missing him with the first

vague sense of loss. The insensibility which had protected her at the

station disappeared when her mind dwelt on his good qualities,--his

kindness, his charity, his broad tolerance of her prejudices. She knew

that she should miss him more and more in all the details of the farm,

and that she should begin to sorrow for him as soon as she had time to

realize that she had lost him for ever. Yesterday was a void in her

mind. When she thought of the long day after her return from the

station, she could remember only the incredible tenderness of John

Abner, and the visit in the afternoon from James Ellgood, who had told

her that the news of the wreck had just travelled as far as the farms

beyond Whippernock River, and that the absent minister was returning at

midnight.

On this, the second day after Nathan's death, the primitive ceremonies

of the funeral began. The earliest and one of the most depressing signs

of mourning was the loud demoralization of the negroes, who rose to the

funeral as fish to bait, and became immediately incapable of any work

except lamenting the dead. As long as there was hope left in tragedy,

they were able to brace themselves to Herculean exertions; but

superstition enslaved them as soon as death entered the house. The cows,

of course, had to be milked; but with the exception of the milking and

the necessary feeding of the stock, the place was like an abandoned farm

until the burial was over. Though Nathan's charred body remained at

Pedlar's Mill, the pall of mourning extended to Old Farm. John Abner had

even suggested sending a telegram to the hotel and the dairy in

Washington and letting the milk spoil; but the thought of all the good

cream that would be thrown away was too much for Dorinda's economical

instincts, and she had checked the impulse with the reminder that Nathan

had hated a waste. Yes, he had hated a waste, it is true, but he had

also loved a funeral. She remembered her mother's death, and the

completeness, the perfection, of his arrangements.

"Am I too hard?" Dorinda asked herself. "Ought I not to see that

everything gets so upset? After all, as Fluvanna says, a person does not

die but once." The small ironic demon of her sagacity concluded, in

spite of her will: "It is a good thing, or there wouldn't be any room

left for life."

Breakfast was no sooner over than she was engulfed in a continuous

deluge of sympathy. She was up in the attic with Fluvanna, going over

the black things which had been left from the mourning of her parents,

when the coloured woman glanced out of the dormer-window and gasped

breathlessly. "Thar they are, Miss Dorinda. You hurry up and get into

that black bombazine befo' they catch you out of mournin'."

She held up a dingy dress which had once belonged to Mrs. Oakley, and

Dorinda slipped into it with the feeling that she was preparing for her

own coffin. As she was about to go down to meet her callers, Fluvanna

unfolded and shook out before her the crape veil which had been worn by

two generations of widows. Her grandmother had bought it in more

affluent circumstances, and after her death, for she had been one of the

perpetual widows of the South, it had lain packed away in camphor until

Mrs. Oakley was ready for it. Now it was Dorinda's turn, and a shiver

went through her heart as she inhaled the rusty smell of bereavement.

"You'll have to get a new veil after the burial," Fluvanna observed,

"but I reckon you can make out with this crape until that is over. It

has turned real brown, but there won't many people notice it in church."

Putting the proffered veil aside, Dorinda hastened downstairs, after

reminding Fluvanna that she must make coffee in case the visitors

expected something to eat.

"If only they would leave the dignity and take away the sordidness of

death," she thought.

At the foot of the staircase, Miss Seena Snead was waiting for her with

a black serge dress that she had borrowed from one of the neighbours.

"What in the world have you got on, Dorinda?" she asked, while the tears

brimmed over her kind old eyes. "I declare it looks as if it was made

befo' the Flood. I no sooner heard of po' Nathan's death than I began to

study about where I could find a good black dress for you to wear to the

funeral. I wasn't a bit surprised that Nathan turned out to be such a

hero. I always knew there was a lot mo' in him than some folks

suspected. Then, while I was in the midst of trying to recollect who had

died last year, young Mrs. John Garlick drove into our yard with this

dress and a widow's bonnet in her arms. She told me she's stoutened so

she couldn't make the dress meet on her, and she'd be obliged if you'd

do her the favour to wear it. The bonnet she sent along because it's a

widow's bonnet anyway, and she can't wear it herself until she loses

John. That makes her sort of superstitious about keepin' it put away as

if she were saving it for a purpose. John bought it for her in New York

when she lost her mother. Wasn't that like a man all over again, to go

and buy his wife a bonnet with a widow's ruche when her mother died?"

"I'm much obliged to her," Dorinda replied stiffly, taking the bonnet

out of the bandbox.

"It'll be real becomin' to you," Miss Seena exclaimed consolingly.

Though her tears were still streaming for Nathan, her imagination had

already envisaged Dorinda as a widow in weeds. "It makes you look mo'

strikin' than colours. There ain't nothin' you can wear so conspicuous

as crape, my po' Ma used to say."

Dorinda put on the dress and stood straight and still in the middle of

her bedroom floor while the dressmaker let down the hem and took a pleat

in the belt. "I've never seen anybody keep her figger so well as you've

done," remarked Miss Seena. "It's stayin' out of doors an' movin' about

so much, I reckon. My Ma used to say that when you get on in life, you

have to choose between keepin' yo' face or yo' figger; but it looks as

if you had managed to preserve both of 'em mighty well. You get sort of

chapped and weatherbeaten in the winter time, an' the lines show mo'

than they ought to, but that high colour keeps 'em from bein' too

marked. You're forty now, ain't you, Dorinda?"

"Forty-two. It's hard sometimes for me to believe it."

"Well, you're the hard kind that don't wear away soon. Look at Geneva

Ellgood, poor thing. She broke almost as quick as she grew."

Dorinda sighed. "She needed love too much ever to find it," and she

thought, "The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't

need it."

"Everybody knew that it was Jim Ellgood that made Jason marry her, and

folks about here were mighty mad with him for throwing you over. It was

that mo' than drink that ruined his practice because people didn't want

a man to doctor them who hadn't behaved honourable. He began to go

downhill right after that, and he and Geneva lived like cat and dog

befo' she drowned herself. Jason is about as bad off now as she was,

tho' men don't ever seem to get the craze that they're goin' to have a

baby. But he's got a screw loose, or he wouldn't live way back yonder in

the woods, with nobody but an old coloured woman to look after him." She

was kneeling on the floor pinning up Dorinda's skirt, with the help of

the red pincushion, shaped like a tomato, which she wore fastened to the

bosom of her dress. "It was fortunate for you that Geneva got him," she

concluded, "and that you waited and took Nathan instead. You must find a

heap of comfort in feeling that you're the widow of a hero."

The widow of a hero! Already Nathan's spirit, disencumbered of the gross

impediment of the flesh, was an influence to be reckoned with. Alive, he

had been negligible, but once safely dead, he had acquired a tremendous

advantage.

"I believe I'll drop if I have to stand a minute longer," Dorinda said

in a fainting voice.

Miss Seena was immediately solicitous. "Poor child, I reckon the shock

must have unnerved you. You lie right down, and I'll have this dress

ready befo' the minister gets here."

At last the dressmaker stopped talking and settled down to her work, and

in the afternoon, when the Ellgoods came with the minister to tell

Dorinda of the arrangements for the funeral, she received them in the

black serge dress with a bit of crape at her throat. A fire was burning

in the parlour beneath the two black basalt urns on the mantelpiece and

the speckled engraving on the wall above. While she was still shaking

hands with the Ellgoods, a stream of people, led by Minnie May and Bud,

poured into the hall. Minnie May had brought her six children with her,

and the smaller ones immediately began to play with their dolls behind

the rosewood sofa in the corner, while the eldest boy fingered the books

which ran halfway up the walls on three sides of the room.

"Don't you think I ought to make them stop?" Minnie May asked presently.

"They'd be more at home, anyway, in the kitchen where Fluvanna is making

gingerbread for them."

"Tell Fluvanna not to forget to bring in some blackberry wine and cake,"

Dorinda whispered in reply.