Before she had spoken to her first visitors, the parlour was crowded;

and John Abner was obliged to bring chairs from the spare room. "To

think of my having to wear a bonnet with a widow's ruche!" Dorinda found

herself thinking, while she was condoled with in husky accents by the

old minister. "If they'd go away and let me have time to think, I might

feel; but I can't feel anything as long as they're all talking to me."

Though most of the faces were familiar to her, and some of them she had

passed in the road ever since her childhood, there were several persons

whom she did not seem to remember. These, she discovered presently, were

strangers who had been on the wrecked train with Nathan. Two of them he

had rescued from the burning cars at the cost of his life.

Bad as the roads were, only the tenant farmers who lived beyond

Whippernock River had been prevented from coming. The bridge had been

damaged by the storm, and the thawing ice had made the shallow stream

unfordable. Old Mr. Kettledrum, who had given up his practice and become

"the mail rider" for the new rural delivery had been almost swept away

when he had tried to cross at the ford. Even Willow Creek was so high

that the log bridge had been torn to pieces by the flood. Yet neither

flood nor snow had held the neighbouring farmers at home. White and

black, rich and poor, they had turned out to visit the widow of a hero

in her affliction. Even Mr. Kettledrum had sent word that, undaunted by

his narrow escape from drowning, he had driven round the circuit in

order to bring Dorinda the morning papers.

"To think that all this should be about Nathan," Dorinda said to

herself, while she sat there with the newspaper James Ellgood had given

her in her lap.

"HERO ON WRECKED TRAIN GIVES HIS LIFE FOR OTHERS

DESCENDANT OF FIRST MILLER OF PEDLAR'S MILL DIES

AFTER SAVING WOMEN AND CHILDREN.

MONUMENT TO BE ERECTED IN CHURCHYARD AT PEDLAR'S

MILL."

After this there was a list of contributions for the monument,

beginning with one thousand dollars, which had been subscribed by

an anonymous stranger from the North.

Yes, dreadful as it was, she couldn't get over the feeling that there

was something unreal and theatrical in the event. She might have been on

the stage at a school festival, listening to all these people declaiming

selections from Shakespeare. Nathan's heroism sounded to her as

unnatural as the way things happened in Shakespeare. She felt ashamed of

herself. Had she failed Nathan in his death because she could not

recognize him in what she thought of vaguely as his heroic part? Well,

ashamed or not, she simply could not take it in. If you could once take

it in, she said to herself stupidly, the whole of life would be

different; yet, for the moment, she was too stunned, too confused, to

credit the incredible. The tragedy appeared too magnificent to be true.

The minister was an old man. He had known Dorinda's mother when they

were both young; he had known Nathan when he was a child; and he wheezed

now with distress when he talked of him. His face was as grey and

inflexible as a rock, Dorinda thought, though his voice reminded her of

a purling brook. Over his bulging forehead his limp white hair hung in

loose strands which curled at the ends. She had not seen him for years

outside the pulpit, and it embarrassed her that he should stand on a

level with her and wipe his eyes on the shreds of a silk handkerchief.

While he rambled on, she looked beyond him and saw all those persons,

some of whom were unknown to her, moving about the parlour, which was as

sacred to her as a tombstone. They were whispering, too, among

themselves, and she knew that they were speaking of Nathan in the

sanctimonious tone which they had consecrated to missionaries who had

died at their posts or to distinguished generals of the Confederacy. She

observed John Abner go out to help put up the horses, and glancing out

of the window, she saw Fluvanna coming from the henhouse with a bunch

of fowls in her hands. With her usual foresight, the girl, who had kept

her head better than the other negroes, was preparing supper for the

multitude.

The old minister had finished once, but he was beginning again in a

florid oratorical style. How long would he go on, she wondered, and

would it be like this at the funeral? There was much to be said, she

conceded, for the Episcopal service which circumscribed the rhetoric of

clergymen. When at last he sat down, wiping his glasses, in the

cushioned rocking-chair close to the fire, Bob Ellgood stood up and

explained the funeral arrangements as if he wished her to understand

that they were to be worthy of Nathan. This was Wednesday, and the

public funeral, the funeral of a hero, would be held at three o'clock on

Friday afternoon. Then he handed her a list of the pallbearers, many of

them merely "honorary," Dorinda perceived, and among them there were

several names that she did not know.

"They were on the wrecked train," Bob replied to her question, "and wish

to pay this last mark of respect." These were the men, he told her, who

had started the list of contributions. "It is our idea to build a

monument by public subscription," he concluded, "over his grave in the

churchyard. Then future generations will remember his heroism."

"Poor Nathan," she thought, while her eyes filled with tears. "If only

he could hear what they are saying." There had never been a monument

erected by public subscription at Pedlar's Mill, and she could not help

thinking how pleased Nathan would have been if he could have taken an

active part in the plan. Well, some people had to wait until they were

dead to get the things that would have made them happy while they were

living.

As soon as Bob Ellgood stopped speaking, a general droning began in the

room, and she grasped, after an instant of confusion, that everybody was

trying to tell her of some boyish act of generosity which was still

remembered. These recollections, beginning with a single anecdote

related in the cracked voice of the minister, gathered fulness of tone

as they multiplied, until the room resounded with a chorus of praise.

Was it possible that Nathan had done all these noble things and that she

had never heard of them? Was it possible that so many persons had seen

the greatness of his nature, and yet the community in which he lived had

continued to treat him as more or less of a clown? Over and over, she

heard the emphatic refrain, "I always thought there was a heap more in

Nathan Pedlar than people made out."

Sitting there in the midst of the belated appreciation, it seemed to

Dorinda that the shape of an idea emerged gradually out of the fog of

words. All his life Nathan had been misunderstood. Though she was

unaware of the exact moment when the apotheosis occurred, she realized

presently that she had witnessed the transformation of a human being

into a legend. After to-day, it was impossible that she should ever

think of Nathan as unromantically as she thought of him while he was

alive. Death had not only ennobled, it had superbly exalted him. In this

chant of praise, there was no reminder of his insignificance. Could it

be that she alone had failed to recognize the beauty of his character

beneath his inappropriate surface? Had she alone misunderstood and

belittled him in her mind? Her heart swelled until it seemed to her that

she was choking. When she remembered her husband now, it was the inward,

not the outward, man that she recalled.

"I reckon he warn't mo' than eight years old when he took that whipping

for stealing old man Haney's cherries rather than tell on Sandy Moody's

little boy Sam," Ezra Flower, the auctioneer, was reciting. "I can see

the way he stood up and took the lashing without a whimper, and the

other boys teasing him and calling him a clown on account of hid broken

nose. Yes, ma'am, I always knew thar was a heap mo' in Nathan Pedlar

than most folks made out."

The warm room, the firelight, the humming voices, faded into a mist.

Beyond the window-panes, which flamed with a reflected glow, Dorinda saw

the white fields and against the fields there flickered a vision of the

room in which she was sitting. Out of this vision, the prayer of the

minister stole over her like some soporific influence. An inescapable

power of suggestion, as intense yet as diffused as firelight, was

reassembling her thoughts of the past. "Yes, there was more in Nathan

than anybody ever suspected," she found herself repeating.

With one of those sudden changes that come in Virginia, the day of

Nathan's funeral brought a foretaste of spring. The snow had melted so

rapidly that the roads were flowing like brooks, and Whippernock River,

with its damaged bridge, was still impassable. But an April languor was

in the air, and the sky over the wintry fields was as soft as clouds of

blue and white hyacinths. Though a number of farmers who lived beyond

Whippernock River had been unable to come to the funeral, people had

arrived by train from the city and in every vehicle that could roll on

wheels from the near side of the railroad. The little church was crowded

to suffocation while the minister read his short text and preached his

long sermon on the beauty of self-sacrifice. When the last hymn was sung

with gasps of emotional tension, and the congregation flocked out into

the churchyard, with Nathan in his flower-banked coffin and Dorinda

hidden in her widow's weeds, a wave of grief spread like a contagious

affliction over the throng. With her head reverently bowed, Dorinda

tried to attend only to the words of the minister, to see only the open

grave at her feet, with the piles of red clay surrounding the oblong

hole. Yet her senses, according to their deplorable habit in a crisis,

became extraordinarily alive, and every trivial detail of the scene

glittered within her mind. She saw the blanched and harrowed face of the

minister, who prayed with closed eyes and violent gestures as if he were

wrestling with God; she saw the nodding black plumes of Miss Texanna

Snead, and remembered that Nathan had once called her "a plumed hearse."

She saw the gaping mouths of the children, whom their mothers, in the

excitement of the occasion, had neglected to wash; she saw even the

predatory brood of chickens which had invaded the graveyard and was

scratching upon the graves. The ground at her feet was heaped with

flowers, and among the floral crosses and wreaths and pillows, she

observed the design of a railway engine made of red and white

carnations, and tried to recall the names on the card. Long after she

had forgotten every word of the prayer, she could still see that

preposterous floral engine and smell the strong scent of fading

carnations.

Standing there beside the open grave, recollections blew in and out of

her mind like chaff in the wind. Her first sermon. The old minister

praying with eyes so tightly shut that they looked like slits made by a

penknife. The way her feet could not reach the floor. Peppermints in a

paper bag to keep her quiet. Her mother smelling of soap and camphor.

Missionaries in the front pew. The saving of black babies. The way she

had yawned and stretched. Nathan was there then, a big boy who sang,

with a voice as shrill as a grasshopper, in the choir. Rose Emily too.

How pretty she was. Then Rose Emily as she lay dying with the happy

light in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks. Twenty-two years ago!

Well, she had done her best by Rose Emily's children.

Afterwards, when she drove home with John Abner, she found that, though

they had buried the actual Nathan in the churchyard, the legendary

Nathan of prayer and sermon still accompanied them.

"I wish Father could have heard what they said of him," John Abner

remarked, with detached reverence, as he might have spoken of one of the

public characters in the Bible. "It would please him to know what they

thought of him after he was gone."

"Perhaps he does know," Dorinda responded.

For a few moments they talked of this; of the way death so often makes

you understand people better than life; of the sermon and the flowers,

and the general mourning.

"Did you see Jacob Moody there?" asked John Abner presently. "He used to

work for Father before we moved to Old Farm, and Jacob told me he swam

Whippernock River to come to the funeral."

Dorinda wiped her eyes. "Things like that would have touched Nathan. I

never saw any one get on better with the coloured people. It was because

he was so just, I suppose."

"Those were Jacob's very words. 'Mr. Nathan was the justest white man I

ever saw,' he said. Put back that heavy veil, Dorinda. It is enough to

smother you. There now. That's better. Your face looks like the moon

when it comes out of a cloud."

Dorinda smiled. "Even that old German who has just moved into the Haney

place was there. I wonder what he thinks now of Germany? We shan't hear

anything about the war after this. I used to tell your father he

couldn't have felt more strongly if it had been fought at Old Farm."

"I was beginning to get interested myself," John Abner returned. "I'll

try to follow it on the map just as he did in the evenings. Well, it

will be over before next winter, I reckon."

"And all that waste so unnecessary!" Dorinda exclaimed.

They were turning in at the gate by the bridge. Straight ahead, she saw

the house, with the smoke flying like banners from the chimneys. On the

hill beyond, the big pine was dark against the blue and white of the

sky.

V

Although Dorinda would have been astonished had she discovered it, the

years after Nathan's death were the richest and happiest of her life.

They were years of relentless endeavour, for a world war was fought and

won with the help of the farmers; but they were years which rushed over

her like weathered leaves in a storm. To the end, the war came no nearer

to her than a battle in history. There was none of the flame-like

vividness that suffused her mother's memories of the starving years and

the burning houses of the Confederacy. Only when she saw victory in

terms of crops, not battles, could she feel that she was part of it.

In the beginning the Germans had seemed less a mortal enemy than an evil

spirit at large, and she had fought them as her great-grandfather might

have fought a heresy or a pestilence. That men should destroy one

another appeared to her less incredible than that they should

deliberately destroy the resources which made life endurable. That they

should destroy in a day, in an hour, the materials which she was

sacrificing her youth to provide! At night, lying in bed with limbs that

ached so she could not sleep, and a mind that was a blank from

exhaustion, she would hear the rotation of crops drumming deliriously in

her thoughts. Potatoes. Corn. Wheat. Cow-peas. Clover. Alfalfa. And back

again. Alfalfa. Cowpeas. Potatoes. Corn. Wheat. Clover. That was all the

seasons meant to her, one after one. Her youth was going, she knew; but

youth had brought so little that age could take away, why should she

regret it? The hair on her temples had turned from grey to white; her

skin, beneath its warm flush, was creased with lines and roughened from

exposure; but her eyes were still bright and clear, though the caged

look had gone out of them.

What she felt most, as the struggle went on, was the failure of

elasticity. The tyranny of detail was more exacting, and she rebounded

less quickly from disappointment. Notwithstanding what Doctor Faraday

had called her "superb constitution," her health began to cause her

uneasiness. "The war has done this," she thought, "and if it has cost me

my youth, imagine what it has cost the men who are fighting." It was a

necessary folly, she supposed, but it was a folly against which she

rebelled. Had humanity been trying unwisely to hurry evolution, and had

the crust of civilization proved too thin to restrain the outbreak of

volcanic impulses? Her two years with Doctor Faraday had accustomed her

to the biological interpretation of history. "And the worst thing about

the war," she concluded grimly, "is not the fighting. It is not even the

murder and plunder of the weaker. The worst thing about it is the number

of people, both men and women, who enjoy it, who embark upon it as upon

a colossal adventure."

If John Abner had gone to France, the war would have come closer to her;

but John Abner was tied by his clubfoot to the farm. The crowning

humiliation of his life came, she knew, when he watched the other boys

from Pedlar's Mill start off for the training camp. Her pity for him was

stronger than her relief that she could keep him, and she wished with

all her heart that he could have gone. "You will be more useful on the

farm," she said consolingly, as they turned away; but he only shook his

head and stared mutely after the receding train. What John Abner

desired, she saw, was not usefulness but glory.

Of the boys they saw go, a few were killed; but they were boys whom she

knew only by sight. Two of Josiah's sons went, and one died of influenza

after he had been decorated three times; but this boy had lived away so

long that she did not feel close to him. Bob Ellgood's second son

returned a nervous wreck from shell shock, and whenever Dorinda saw him

on the porch at Green Acres, trying to make baskets of straw, she would

feel that her heart was melting in pity. But even then the war did not

actually touch her. Her nearest approach to the fighting was when

Fluvanna's son Jubal died in a French hospital, and she was obliged to

read the later aloud because Fluvanna was too distressed to spell out

the words. Dorinda had known Jubal from his babyhood. He had grows up on

the farm, and she had taught him to read. The day the news came the two

women worked until they were ready to drop from exhaustion. Work had

always been Dorinda's salvation. It was saving her now from the war as

it had once saved her from the memory of Jason.

With the return of

peace, she had hoped that the daily life on the farm would slip back

into orderly grooves; but before the end of the first year she

discovered that the demoralization of peace was more difficult to combat

than the madness of war. There was no longer an ecstatic patriotism to

inspire one to fabulous exploits. The world that had been organized for

destruction appeared to her to become as completely disorganized for

folly. Even at Pedlar's Mill there were ripples of the general

disintegration. What was left now, she demanded moodily, of that

hysterical war rapture, except an aversion from work and the high cost

of everything? The excessive wages paid for unskilled labour were

ruinous to the farmer; for the field hands who had earned six dollars a

day from the Government were not satisfied to drive a plough for the

small sum that had enabled her to reclaim the abandoned meadows of Five

Oaks. One by one, she watched the fields of the tenant farmers drop back

into broomsedge and sassafras. She was using two tractor-ploughs on the

farm; but the roads were almost impassable again because none of the

negroes could be persuaded to work on them. Even when she employed men

to repair the strip of corduroy road between the bridge and the fork, it

was impossible to keep the bad places firm enough for any car heavier

than a Ford to travel over them. Yet these years, which she had believed

would mean the end of her prosperity, passed over her also and were

gone.

After all, the men farmers had suffered more. James Ellgood allowed his

outlying fields to run to waste again because he could not find

labourers to till them. Old John Appleseed gave up his market garden

after he had lost all his vegetables one spring when he was ill and

there was nobody to gather them. It was in such a difficulty that

Dorinda was aided by a gift she had never depended on in the past, and

this was her faculty for "getting on," as she would have called it, with

the negroes. Unlike James Ellgood, who was inclined to truculence, she

had preserved her mother's friendly relations with the established

coloured families at Pedlar's Mill. When the scarcity of labour came,

the clan of Moodys provided the field workers that she required. The

Moodys, the Plumtrees, and the Greens, were scattered on thrifty little

farms from the settlement of Plumtree to the land beyond Whippernock

River; yet, one and all, they were attached by ties of kindred to the

descendants of Aunt Mehitable. In a winter of frozen roads and a

disastrous epidemic of influenza, the relatives of Aunt Mehitable, who

had died long ago, sent pleading messages to Dorinda, and she gave

generously of the peach brandy and blackberry cordial she had inherited

from her mother. There was scarcely a cabin that the pestilence did not

enter, and wherever it passed, Dorinda followed on Snowbird, her big

white horse with the flowing mane and the plaited tail which had never

been docked. That was a ghastly winter. From November to March the

landscape wore the spectral and distraught aspect of one of the

engravings after Doré in her mother's Bible. Doctor Stout was still in

France, and there was no physician but Jason Greylock at Pedlar's Mill.

Dorinda met him sometimes going or returning on horseback from a

desperate case; but he appeared either not to recognize her or to have

forgotten her name. People said that he was still a good doctor when he

had his senses about him. The pity was that he was often too drunk to

know what he was doing. He looked an old man, for his skin was drawn and

wrinkled, the pouches under his eyes were inflamed with purple, and

there were clusters of congested veins in his cheeks.

One afternoon, when the epidemic was at its worst, she rode up to the

door of one of the humbler cabins and met him coming away.

"You ought not to go in there," he said shortly, for he was sober at

last. "Two children have just died of pneumonia, and the others are ill.

They are the worst cases I've seen."

Mounted on her white horse, like some mature Joan of Arc, she glanced

down on him. Her face was expressionless but for its usual look of

dauntless fortitude. She was thinking, "At last I shall have to speak to

him, and it makes no difference to me whether I speak to him or not." It

was a quarter of a century since she had driven home with him that

February afternoon. A quarter of a century, and she had not forgotten!

Well, when you have only the solitude to distract you, your memory is

obliged to be long!

"I am not afraid," she replied in level tones, after she had dismounted

and tethered Snowbird to the branch of a tree. "Are you?"

While he could wrap himself in his professional manner, it occurred to

her that he was not without dignity. Even though there were only the

rags of it left, he was less at her mercy than he would have been in the

character of a remembered lover. For an instant it seemed to her that he

waited for her question to sink in. Then he answered with the sound of a

laugh that had been bitten back.

"I? No. What have I to fear?"

Her smile was as sharp as a blade. "There is always something, isn't

there, even if it is only the memory of fear?"

"You think, then, that I was always a coward?" Yes, he was sober enough

now, restrained by those shreds of professional responsibility which was

the only responsibility he had ever acknowledged.

She laughed. "I stopped thinking of you twenty-five years ago."

"I know." He looked as if he were impressed by her words. "You took the

best man, after all. There was more in Nathan than anybody realized."

"Every one says that now."

"Well, it's true even if every one says it. You married a good man."

It was her hour of triumph; and though it was her hour of triumph, she

knew that, like everything else in her life, it had come too late. A

quarter of a century outlasts expectancy. The old pang was dead now, and

with it the old bitterness. It made no difference any longer. Nothing

that he could say or do would make any difference. She had outlived both

love and hatred. She had outlived every emotion toward him except

disgust. That last scene at Five Oaks returned to her, and her lips

twisted with aversion. "Yes, I married a hero," she rejoined, and she

added to herself, "If only Nathan could hear me!"

"You made your life in spite of me. I'm glad of that."

She laughed again. How little men knew of women! Even Nathan, who had

loved her, had never seen her as she was. "Yes, I made my life in spite

of you."

"It was too much, I suppose, to expect you to understand how I failed. I

never ran after women. That wasn't my weakness. I never wanted to do any

of the things I did. I never wanted to throw you over. I never wanted to

marry Geneva. I never wanted to ruin either of your lives. I never

wanted to stay in this God-forsaken solitude. I never wanted to let

drink get a hold on me. I did not want to do a single one of these

things; but I did them, every one. And you will never understand how

that could be."

She shook her head. "It doesn't matter now. It isn't worth thinking

about."

"All the same I wish you could understand that I was not the kind of man

to do the things that I did. I was a different sort of fellow entirely.

But what I was never seemed strong enough to withstand the pull of what

I was not. Of course, you'll never see that. You'll just go on thinking

I was born rotten inside. Perhaps you're right. I don't know. I can't

work it out."

She looked through him and beyond him to the brown solitude of the

winter fields. The sunken roads were swimming in melted snow; the bushes

were like soaked rags; the trees were dripping with a fluid moisture

which was heavier than rain. From the sodden ground a vapour steamed up

and floated like a miasma on the motionless air.

"Men like you ought to have been sent to the war," she said. "They

wouldn't take me. I was too old, and besides I've got the drink habit."

"And you blame somebody else for that, I suppose?"

"No, I don't blame anybody. I don't blame anybody for anything. Least of

all myself. It was the way things turned out. Strange as it may seem to

you, I always did the best that I could. If Father had died sooner, it

might have been different. But everything happened too late. The

broomsedge grew over me before I could get away."

Exultation flared up and then died down to ashes. "You ruined Five Oaks,

and I saved it," she said.

"Yes, you have done well with the farm." Twenty-five years of toil and

self-denial, and in the end only: "You have done well with the farm!"

"That shows what you can do even with poor land when you put your heart

into it," he added.

"Not the heart, but the head," she retorted sharply, as she went past

him into the cabin.

VI

When the spring came and the epidemic was over, she had won the loyal

friendship of the poorer tenant farmers and the negro landowners; but

her energy and her resilience were less than they had ever been in her

life.

Machinery could not work alone, and even tractor-ploughs were obliged to

be guided. She had installed an electric plant, and whenever it was

possible, she had replaced hand labour by electricity. In the beginning

she had dreaded the cost, but it was not long before she realized that

the mysterious agency had been her safest investment. The separator in

the dairy was run by electricity. With the touch of a button the skimmed

milk was carried by pipes to the calf-yard or the hog-pen. Pumping,

washing, churning, cooling the air in summer and warming it in winter,

all these back-breaking tasks were entrusted to the invisible power

which possessed the energy of human labour without the nerves that too

often impeded it, and made it so uncertain a force.

"What would Pa say if he could see so many cows milked by machinery?"

she asked John Abner, after the first experiment with electricity in the

cow-barn.

"Do you think it will help much in milking?"

"In the end it may. The young cows don't mind it, but you'll never get

the old ones to put up with it."

"Then until the young ones have turned into the old ones, we'll have to

take whatever milkers we can find. Cows must be milked twice a day, and

no darkey wants to work more than three times a week."

"They're still living on their war wages. If I ran this farm the way men

manage the Government, we'd be over head and ears in debt. Perhaps," she

suggested hopefully, "when the negroes have spent all they've saved up,

they'll begin to feel like working."

John Abner grinned. "Perhaps. But it takes a long time to starve a

darkey."

"Well, I'll see what Fluvanna can do about it," Dorinda retorted. She

did not smile at his jest because the problem, she felt, was a serious

one. The negro, who was by temperament a happiness hunter, could pursue

the small game of amusement, she was aware, with an unflagging pace.

Without labourers, the farms she had reclaimed with incalculable effort

would sink again into waste land. "Yes, I'll see what Fluvanna can do,"

she repeated.

In the end, it was Fluvanna who, with the assistance of the patriarchs

among the Moodys, the Greens, and the Plumtrees, drove the inveterate

pleasure-seekers back to the plough. Looking at the coloured woman,

generous, brisk, smiling, with her plump brown cheeks and her bright

slanting eyes, Dorinda would ask herself how she could have managed the

farm without Fluvanna. "Heaven knows what I should have done if I had

not had a pleasant disposition about me," she said. In return for

Fluvanna's sunny sympathy and her cheerful alacrity, which never

faltered, Dorinda had discreetly overlooked an occasional slackening of

industry.

Though the years were hard ones, she was more contented than she had

ever been. The restless expectancy had ceased, and with it the

indefinite longing which had awakened with the scent of spring rains on

the grass, or the sound of the autumn wind in the broomsedge. Even the

vision of something different in the future, that illusion of

approaching happiness which she had believed as indestructible as hope

itself, had dissolved as the glimmer of swamp fires dissolves in the

twilight. She knew now that life would never be different. Experience,

like love, would always be inadequate to the living soul. What the

imperfect actuality was to-day, it would be to-morrow and the day after;

but there was rest now, not disquietude, in the knowledge. The strain

and the hard work of the war had tired her nerves, and she looked

forward to the ample leisure of the time when she could expect nothing.

Since Nathan's death she had lost the feeling that life had cheated her.

It was true that she had missed love; but at the first stir of regret

she would shake her head and remind herself that "you couldn't have

everything," and that, after all, it was something to have married a

hero. Nathan's victorious death had filled the aching void in her heart.

Where the human being had failed her, the heroic legend had satisfied.

As she grew older, it seemed to her that men as husbands and lovers were

scarcely less inadequate than love. Only men as heroes, dedicated to the

service of an ideal, were worthy, she felt, of the injudicious

sentiments women lavished upon them. At twenty, seeking happiness, she

had been more unhappy, she told herself, than other women; but at fifty,

she knew that she was far happier. The difference was that at twenty her

happiness had depended upon love, and at fifty it depended upon nothing

but herself and the land. To the land, she had given her mind and heart

with the abandonment that she had found disastrous in any human

relation. "I may have missed something, but I've gained more," she

thought, "and what I've gained nobody can take away from me."

Without John Abner, who was much to her, though not so much as she had

once believed he would be, and the indispensable memory of Nathan to

fall back upon, she sometimes wondered what her middle years would have

brought to her. John Abner, it is true, was subject to moods, and

recently he had been warped by a disappointment in love; but even if he

was not always easy to live with, she knew that, in his eccentric

fashion, he was attached to her. With Nathan, it was different. In the

years that had passed since his death, he had provided her with the

single verity which is essential to the happiness of a woman no longer

young, and that is a romantic background for her life. The power of

mental suggestion, which is stronger than all other influences in the

world of emotion, had cultivated around her this picturesque myth of

Nathan. No one spoke to her now of his ugliness, his crudeness, his

reputation as a laughing-stock; but whenever she went to church, she

beheld the imposing monument which public sentiment had placed over his

grave. Every soldier who went from Pedlar's Mill was reminded by

fire-breathing orators that the heroes of war must be worthy of the hero

of peace. Every appeal from the Red Cross in the county bore his name as

an ornament. As time went on this legend, which had sprung from simple

goodness, gathered a patina of tradition as a tombstone gathers moss.

Yes, it was something, Dorinda assured her rebellious heart, to have

been married to a hero.

In these years she might have married again; but a distaste for physical

love, more than the rigid necessity of her lot, kept her a widow. When,

a year after his wife's death, Bob Ellgood began, according to the

custom of the country, to motor over to Old Farm on Sunday, she was at

first flattered, then disturbed, and at last frankly provoked. Walking

through the pasture with him one afternoon in April, she reflected, not

without chagrin, that this also was one of the blessings that had come

at the wrong time. "Thirty years ago, before I knew Jason, I could have

loved him," she thought; and she remembered the Sunday mornings in

church when she had gazed longingly at his profile and had asked

herself, "Can he be the right one, after all?" She had wanted him then

with some sudden cobweb of fancy, which had been spun by an insatiable

hunger for life. If he had turned to her at that moment, she would have

loved him instead of Jason, and the future, which was now the past,

would have been different. But he had not wanted her then; he had first

to make a disappointing marriage, and by the time he had discovered his

mistake, it was too late to begin over again. Well, that was the way

things happened in life!

"Why won't you marry me, Dorinda?" he asked, wheeling abruptly round

from the pasture bars.

Startled, she cast about for a reason which might appear plausible to

his masculine vanity. Was there a reason? Had she any reason behind her

resolve, or was aversion as physical a process as first love? Once he

had been handsome, a young blond giant, and now he was coarsened and

beefy, with a neck like a bull's and a rapidly spreading girth. There

was a purple flush in his face and puckers of flesh between his collar

and his slightly receding chin. This, also, was the way things happened,

she knew. Yet, after a moment's compassionate regard, she discerned that

he wore his unalluring age as easily as he had once worn his engaging

youth. He appeared unaware even that it might be a disadvantage in

courtship.

"Suppose I looked like that?" she said to herself, and then, "Perhaps

women are more fastidious than they used to be, but men have not yet

found it out. Or is it simply because I am independent and don't have to

marry for support that I can pick and refuse?"

"Have you decided why you won't marry me?" he inquired presently.

He was smiling at her, and it seemed to her--or was it only her

imagination?--that a gleam, like the star in the eyes of her prize bull,

flickered and went out in his glance. His face was so close to her that

for an instant she believed he was going to kiss her. Not that look!

something cried in her heart. Oh, never that look again!

"I can't tell," she answered, walking on again. "There isn't any reason.

I've finished with all that."

He was undismayed. "I'll keep on. I'm not in a hurry." Actually at

fifty-five, he was not in a hurry.

"It isn't any use," she replied as firmly as she could. "It isn't the

least use in the world."

"Well, I'll keep on anyway."

In the end, though she had spoken with decision, she had failed to

convince him. That had been two years ago, and he still came in his big

car every Sunday afternoon. But as he had warned her, he was not in a

hurry, and his courtship was as deliberate as his general habit of body.

Although it seemed to her that she had grown wiser with the years, she

had never entirely abandoned her futile effort to find a meaning in

life. Hours had come and gone when she had felt that there was no

permanent design beneath the fragile tissue of experience; but the moral

fibre that had stiffened the necks of martyrs lay deeply embedded in her

character if not in her opinions. She was saved from the aridness of

infidelity by that robust common sense which had preserved her from the

sloppiness of indiscriminate belief. After all, it was not religion; it

was not philosophy; it was nothing outside her own being that had

delivered her from evil. The vein of iron which had supported her

through adversity was merely the instinct older than herself, stronger

than circumstances, deeper than the shifting surface of emotion; the

instinct that had said, "I will not be broken." Though the words of the

covenant had altered, the ancient mettle still infused its spirit.

There were winter nights, in front of her sinking fire, when she would

live over the romantic folly and the thwarted aims of her youth. Then,

through what appeared to be an endless vista, she would survey the

irreconcilable difference between character and conduct. In her own life

she could trace no logical connection between being and behaviour,

between the thing that she was in herself and the things she had done.

She thought of herself as a good woman (there were few better ones, she

would have said honestly) yet in her girlhood she had been betrayed by

love and saved by the simplest accident from murder. Surely these were

both flagrant transgressions according to every code of morality! They

were acts, she knew, which she would have condemned in another; but in

her memory they appeared as inevitable as the rest of her conduct, and

she could not unravel them from the frayed warp-and-woof of the past. And

she saw now that the strong impulses which had once wrecked her

happiness were the forces that had enabled her to rebuild her life out

of the ruins. The reckless courage that had started her on the dubious

enterprise of her life had hardened at last into the fortitude with

which she had triumphed over the unprofitable end Of her adventure. Good

and bad, right and wrong, they were all tangled together. "How can I

tell," she could ask, "what I should have done if I had not been

myself?"

VII

Riding slowly down the road from Five Oaks to Gooseneck Creek, Dorinda

watched the few sheep browsing among the lengthening shadows of the

October afternoon. Beyond them the life-everlasting broke in silver

waves against the dim blue horizon. Over the whole landscape, with its

flat meadows, its low rounded hill in the east, its crawling

rust-coloured roads, hung a faint, hazy drift, as inaudible as the dying

quiver of insects. Passing at a walk on her white horse against the rich

autumn sunset, she reached the log bridge at the creek and kept on

toward the fork of the road. She had taken the longer way home in order

that she might inspect the new gate which William Fairlamb had finished.

Round her, as evanescent as the last flare of day, there was this

quivering haze, which was half dreamlike and half the tremor of

perishing things. Nature drifting into rest; flowers drifting into dust;

grasshoppers drifting into death; faint sunshine drifting into darkness.

And in her own mind shadowy images or impressions drifting into

thoughts.

It was five years now since the war had ended, and in those years she

had recovered both her inward confidence and her outward prosperity. The

misfortunes that had threatened the two farms had passed over her like

wild geese. Even the labour question had been lessened, if not solved,

by the application of electricity and gasoline. She had made a name that

was not unknown among the farmers of the state; she had reclaimed two

unproductive farms from the clutch of broomsedge and sassafras. In

shallow soil, where her father had ploughed only six inches deep, she

was now raising rich and abundant crops. Her dairy, she knew, was as

well managed, her butter as good, as any that could be found in the

country. The products of her dairy, with the name Old Farm stamped under

the device of the harp-shaped pine, were bringing the highest prices in

the market. She could smile now, with her butter selling in the

Washington dairy at a dollar a pound, over the timidity with which she

had, modestly asked thirty cents in the beginning. By that subtle

combination of prudence and imprudence which she called character, she

had turned disappointment into contentment and failure into success.

Riding there in the silver gleams which flashed up from the

life-everlasting, she appeared, after the hard years, to have ripened

into the last mellowness of maturity. Though her figure in the

shirtwaist and knickerbockers of brown corduroy was no longer youthful,

it was still shapely. The texture of her skin was rough and hard like

the rind of winter fruit, but the dark red had not faded, and her eyes

beneath the whitened hair were still as blue as a jay bird's wing.

Though she did not look young for her fifty years, she looked as if the

years had been victorious ones.

As she opened the new gate, and passing through, turned to close it

behind her, she heard the sound of approaching wheels, and saw the

piebald horse and peculiar gig of Mr. Kettledrum ascending from the dip

in the road. When he reached her they stopped to speak, after the manner

of the country, and the old "mail rider," who was just returning on his

circuit of twenty-six miles, described, with sprightliness, the

condition of the roads over which he had travelled.

"Three big trees blew down on the Whippernock road the other night," he

said, "and I reckon they'll lie thar until they rot if the farmers down

that way don't cut them up for logs to burn. The Government sent an

inspector down last week and he rode over my circuit along with me." A

note of pride crept into his quavering voice. "He told me he'd never

seen any worse roads in the whole course of his recollection. No, ma'am,

not in the whole course of his recollection."

"I hope he'll do something about them. After all, the Government is

responsible for the rural delivery."

Mr. Kettledrum shook his head. "I ain't lookin' for nothin' to be done,

at least not in my time. It don't look as if the Government can afford

to inspect and improve too, particularly when they're inspectin' the

roads where mostly Democrats travel. But it was a real comfort to know

he thought it was the worst mail road he'd ever laid eyes on in the

whole course of his recollection."

"I've been trying to get some of the negroes to mend this bad place

before winter. The only way is for the farmers to keep their own roads

in repair. The state started to improve the road between Pedlar's Mill

and Turkey Station, and all it did was to cut down every last one of the

trees. There isn't a patch of shade left there."

"That's true. I know it, ma'am," assented Mr. Kettledrum, who liked to

talk of the road, as a man likes to talk of an affliction. "Don't I

travel that road between ten and two o'clock on hot August days?" Then

his face saddened to the look of stoical resignation with which men

survey the misfortunes of others. "When I come along thar this mornin'

they was bringin' Jason Greylock away from his house in the woods, and I

stopped for a word with him. He was too weak to speak out loud, but he

made a sign to say that he knew me. If thar ever was a wasted life, I

reckon it was Jason's, though he started out with such promise. Bad

blood, bad blood, and nothin' to counteract the taint of it."

"Where were they taking him?" Dorinda inquired indifferently; and

turning, she glanced over the autumn fields to the red chimneys of Five

Oaks. The house was occupied now by Martin Flower, the manager, and

smoke was rising in a slender column from the roof. Mr. Kettledrum

cleared his throat. "I thought perhaps they'd sent word to you. Mr.

Wigfall told me they was comin' over to ask if you could make a place

for Jason at Five Oaks. They seemed to think you owed him a lodgin' on

the farm considerin' you bought it so cheap and made so much money out

of it."

A flush of anger stained Dorinda's forehead and her eyes burned. "I owe

him nothing," she answered. "The place was sold at public auction after

he had let it run to seed, and my husband bought it fairly for what he

bid. If I did well, it is because I toiled like a field-hand to restore

what the Greylocks had ruined." She broke off with a gasp, as if she had

been running away from herself. The old "mail rider," she saw after a

moment, stared at her in surprise.

"Yas'm, I'm sorry I spoke, ma'am," he replied mildly. "You've

earned the right to whatever you have, that thar ain't no disputin'.

I was just thinkin' as I come along what a pleasant surprise

it would be to your Pa if he could come back an' see all those

barns and dairy-houses, to say nothin' of that fine windmill an'

electric plant."

Dorinda sighed. "Poor Pa. My only regret is that he couldn't share in

the prosperity. He worked harder than I did, but he never saw any

results. It has taken me thirty years." Yes, she was fifty now, and it

had taken her thirty years.

"You've kept the old house just as it was in his day. Wall, I favour a

shingled roof, myself, even if it does burn quicker when it ketches

fire. But thar's something unfeeling to me about one of these here slate

roofs. They ain't friendly to swallows, an' I like to see swallows

flyin' over my head at sunset."

"Yes, a slate roof is almost as ugly as a tin one." She regarded him

steadily for a minute while she bent over to stroke Snowbird's neck. The

light struck her face obliquely through the fiery branch of a black-gum

tree, and if Mr. Kettledrum had been gifted with imagination, he would

have seen the look of something winged yet caged flutter into her blue

eyes.

"What is the matter with Doctor Greylock?" she asked.

In Mr. Kettledrum, who was wafted off on waves of agreeable

retrospection, the sudden question produced mental confusion. He was

past the sportive period when one can think without effort of two things

at the same time. "Eh, ma'am?" he rejoined, cupping one gnarled hand

over his ear.

"I asked you what was the matter with Doctor Greylock?"

"Oh, Doctor Greylock! Thar's no disputin', ma'am, that you owe him

nothin' in the matter of Five Oaks."

"I haven't seen him for five years," she said with deliberate slowness.

"I thought he was still living in that house by Whippernock River."

"So he was till this morning; that's what they told me. But it seems

they've heard nothing of him since Aunt Mehaley Plumtree stopped doin'

for him six months ago because he told her he didn't have the money to

pay her wages. He'd put everything he had, which was mighty little, I

reckon, in some wild-cat scheme of oil wells in Mexico, and they'd

either burst or leaked, if they ever was thar in the beginnin', which I

doubt. Everybody knows he never paid his taxes, but that thar little old

place in the backwoods wasn't worth a cent, so nobody troubled about

tryin' to collect 'em. Anyhow, he had to do for himself ever since Aunt

Mehaley left him, an' he's been gittin' sicker an' sicker with

consumption all the time. When Ike Pryde was over that way squirrel

huntin' yesterday, he stopped in thar an' found Jason out of his head,

without a bite to eat in the house. The whole place, henhouse and all,

Ike said, was as bare as the pa'm of his hand. Wall, he ran home an' got

his wife to come over, and she did the best she could till they could

lay hands on the sheriff. Jason had just kept alive on whiskey and some

persimmons he'd managed to pick up from the ground. He must have been

that way for weeks."

The colour had ebbed from Dorinda's cheeks and she looked as if she had

withered. There was no distress in her mind, only a cloud of horror

through which she could not see clearly. She lifted her hand and drew it

across her eyes, brushing away the mist that obscured them. There was

nothing there. Nothing but the drooping shadows over the road, the

shocked corn against the sunset, the blur of scarlet and gold and

wine-colour in the woods. There was no horror in these things; yet while

she looked at them they became alive and struck out at her like a

serpent.

"I have no sympathy to waste on him," she said harshly, and then, "Won't

James Ellgood take care of him?"

Mr. Kettledrum shook his head, vaguely apologetic. "Not James. He hates

him like poison. Maybe thar's something in the notion that Jason drove

his wife crazy. I ain't takin' sides. But like most soft-hearted men

James is like a rock when he gets set against a thing. Thar wa'n't no

place for Jason to go but the poorhouse. The old women thar can look

after him when he needs it."

"Well, you can't blame James Ellgood," Dorinda replied. "As far as I can

see nobody owes Jason Greylock anything but trouble."

She was determined not to make excuses for him simply because he was

dying. Everybody died sooner or later, and the vein of posthumous

sentiment was not, she told herself sharply now, her affliction. Nothing

was altered in the past because Jason had drunk himself into the

poorhouse or the grave. Nothing was altered, she repeated, and yet she

could not see the past any longer because of the present. Neither love

nor hate but the poorhouse was the reality.

"It is a hard thing to have to die in the poorhouse," she said.

"So 'tis, ma'am," assented Mr. Kettledrum, who had stinted himself all

his life in the hope of attaining an honourable old age. "But he's

light-headed most of the time and don't know it. Anyhow," he continued

astutely, "it ain't so hard on him as it would be on a man who had lived

more respectable. He wasted mo' on drink, I reckon, than it would cost

to bury him decently."

"That's the dreadful part of it. It would be easier to help a man you

didn't despise." She rode on a few paces and then turned back to the

side of the gig. "If you see Mr. Wigfall at the station, tell him I'll

give him what he needs for Doctor Greylock, but I cannot have him at

Five Oaks."

"I'll tell him," Mr. Kettledrum rejoined, and he added impulsively for

one of his unhurried observations, "You carry yo' years well, if you

don't mind my remarkin' on it."

She smiled. "That's because I never think of them. Most women want their

youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine at any price. The worst years

of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead."

"You look it," the old man agreed, and then, without reason, he sighed.

"Ah, I recollect you thirty years ago, when they used to say you had a

face like a May mornin'. Not that you ain't a fine figure of a woman

now; but as we old men get on in years, our thoughts turn backward and

we like to dwell on young things. Thirty years ago you looked as if

sugar wouldn't melt in yo' mouth."

He drove on regretfully, while Dorinda, on Snowbird, trotted homeward.

The light on the shocked corn was so faint that it waned to a shadow

while she looked at it. A flock of wild geese curved like blown smoke in

the afterglow. Immersed in this twilight as in the sadness of memory,

she gazed at the autumn scene, with the small gold leaves on the locust

trees, the windmill beyond the house, and the flickering of firelight in

the west wing. A prosperous farm to-day, a casual observer would have

remarked; but to Dorinda, who never forgot, the whole place wore the

look of wistful brooding which she remembered whenever she thought of

her father.

Her exultation over Jason's ruinous end had diminished now into an

impersonal pity. She had longed to punish him for his treachery; she had

hated him for years, until she had discovered that hatred is energy

wasted; but in all her past dreams of retribution, she had never once

thought of the poorhouse. Even as a question of justice, it seemed to

her that the poorhouse was excessive. That terror of indigence which is

inherent in self-respecting poverty was deeply bred in her nature, and

she knew that her humbler neighbours were haunted by fear of charity as

one is haunted by fear of smallpox in a pestilence. Yes, whatever he

deserved, the poorhouse was too much. Though the horror of his fate did

not lessen the wrong he had done, by some curious alchemy of imagination

it reduced the sum of human passions to insignificance. What did

anything invisible matter at the gate of the poorhouse?

Though her first impulse, derived from Presbyterian theology, was to

regard his downfall as a belated example of Divine vengeance, her

invincible common sense reminded her that Divine vengeance is seldom so

logical in its judgments. No, he had not ended in the poorhouse because

he had betrayed her. On the contrary, she saw that he had betrayed her

because of that intrinsic weakness in his nature which would have

brought him to disaster even if he had walked in the path of exemplary

virtue. "His betrayal of me was merely an incident," she thought. "Drink

was an incident. If he had been stronger, he might have done all these

things and yet have escaped punishment." For it was not sin that was

punished in this world or the next; it was failure. Good failure or bad

failure, it made no difference, for nature abhorred both. "Poor Jason,"

she said to herself, with contemptuous pity. "He was neither good enough

nor bad enough, that was the trouble."

VIII

As she stepped on the porch, the door opened and John Abner came out,

accompanied by Amos Wigfall and one of the tenant farmers, Samuel Larch,

who lived on the far side of Pedlar's Mill. John Abner looked morose,

but this had become his habitual expression since he had been crossed in

love, and she was less disturbed by it than she was by the anxious

suavity on the face of the sheriff.

"I was admirin' yo' improvements," Mr. Wigfall remarked. "Thar's been a

heap of changes since the old days when yo' Pa an' Ma lived here."

She met his wandering glance and held it firmly. "I saw Mr. Kettledrum

and he gave me your message."

The sheriff's flabby face stiffened. "My message, ma'am?"

"About Doctor Greylock. I cannot have him at Five Oaks. He has no claim

on me." Hesitating an instant, she repeated slowly, weighing each

separate syllable, "He has no claim on me, but I will pay you whatever

you need to keep him out of the poorhouse."

Mr. Wigfall uttered an obsequious noise which might have been either a

bray or a cough. "I don't reckon thar's a mo' charitable-minded lady in

the county, ma'am. It ain't often that you refuse to help an' when you

do, you're likely to have a good reason."

"Well, I'm ready to help Doctor Greylock," Dorinda rejoined impatiently,

"but there's no sense in the notion that I owe him something because he

ruined Five Oaks and I saved it."

"Naw'm, thar cert'n'y ain't no sense in that," Mr. Wigfall conceded with

suspicious alacrity.

"He thinks we might let him live in one of the unused wings," John Abner

explained. "Of course that will mean we'll have to provide for him too,

and as you say he hasn't really the shadow of a claim on us. Poor

devil!"

"The idea has got about that he's dangerous from drink," said Mr.

Wigfall, "and thar wouldn't nobody take him in, pay or no pay. The

choice was between the county gaol an' the poorhouse, an' considerin'

everything the poorhouse seemed mo' hospitable. Doctor Stout can look

after him thar, and a bunch of female paupers can take turns at the

nursing."

"If he's still out of his head, you can hardly expect Martin Flower to

want him at Five Oaks," John Abner suggested.

"Oh, he's come to himself now," Samuel Larch rejoined before the sheriff

could reply. "I was the first to git to him after Ike Pryde brought

word, an' when I first clapped eyes on him he was clean out of his

senses. But even then he was as weak as a baby an' he couldn't have

lifted a finger against you. Soon as he had a few swallows of soup and a

little brandy, he began to pick up, an' by the time he'd been fed

regular he could talk like himself again. Doctor Stout thinks he'll hang

on a few months longer if he gets plenty of milk an' fresh eggs."

"Well, I imagine he isn't likely to get them in the poorhouse," John

Abner observed, with his sarcastic smile.

"Of course there isn't the slightest reason why we should help him,"

Dorinda insisted, as if the deprecating sheriff had started an argument.

After a moment's silence she added in a sharper tone, "But you can't

possibly let him die in the poorhouse."

Mr. Wigfall, who had occupied a position of authority long enough to

feel uncomfortable when he was displaced, shuffled his feet in the rocky

path while he fingered uneasily the brim of his hat. "Naw'm," he replied

with as much dignity as he could command, and a few minutes later, he

repeated in a louder voice, "Naw'm."

Dorinda looked over his head at John Abner.

"It isn't human," she began, and, correcting herself, continued more

deliberately: "It isn't Christian to let a man die in the poorhouse

because he has lost all he had."

The two men nodded vacantly, and only John Abner appeared unimpressed by

her piety.

"Naw'm, it cert'n'y ain't Christian," Mr. Wigfall agreed, with a

promptness that was disconcerting.

"He can't possibly be looked after there," Dorinda resumed, as if she

had not been interrupted.

"Naw'm, he can't be looked after thar."

For an instant she hesitated. Though she understood that her decision

was a vital one, she felt as remote and impersonal to it as if it were

one of those historic battles in France, which cost so much and yet were

so far away. It even occurred to her, as it had occurred so often during

the war, that men were never happy except when they were making trouble.

Of course Jason could not be left in the poorhouse. Having acknowledged

this much, she, to whom efficiency had become a second nature, was

irritated because these slow-witted country officials appeared helpless

to move in the matter.

"There isn't any call to worry Martin Flower's wife," she said. "She's

ailing, anyway, and it would put her out to have a sick man, even if he

were sober, in the house. You'll have to bring him here until you can

make some other arrangement. It is true," she repeated harshly, "that he

hasn't the shadow of a claim on us; but we have plenty of milk and eggs,

and for a few weeks he may have the spare room on the first floor."

Mr. Wigfall gasped before he could articulate. Though he had prayed

fervently to have the burden of an extra pauper, especially a pauper who

had known better days and acquired the habit of drink, removed from his

shoulders, he had never imagined, from his acquaintance with the

leisurely methods of Providence, that his prayer would be so speedily

answered. While he stared at Dorinda, his mute relief was as obvious as

if he had uttered it at the top of his voice.

"He's glad to wash his hands of him," she thought, and then: "Who

wouldn't be?"

"I don't reckon anybody will dispute yo' charity, Mrs. Pedlar," Samuel

Larch was wheezing out. "Thar ain't nobody stands any higher to-day in

this here community than you do. You're hard on the surface, as my wife

says, but you're human enough when you're whittled down to the core."

Dorinda smiled, but her eyes were tired and wrinkles showed in her ruddy

skin. If they knew! If only they knew! she reflected; and she wondered

if many other reputations were founded like hers upon a flattering

ignorance of fact.

"Tell your wife it is hard things that wear well," she responded. "After

all, somebody has to bear the burden, and I am better able to do it than

any of the rest of you, except perhaps," she concluded indifferently,

"James Ellgood."

"Yas'm. I'm downright glad you take that sensible view of it," the

sheriff replied, as soon as he was capable of speaking. "Everybody about

here knows that when they come to you, they'll get justice."

Justice! That was Nathan's favourite word, she remembered. She could

hear him saying as plainly as if he were present, "Any man has a right,

Dorinda, to demand justice." Strange how often Nathan's words, which she

had scarcely heeded when he was alive, returned to her in moments of

difficulty or indecision. Only in the last few years had she begun to

realize her mental dependence upon Nathan.

"I reckon we can manage to get him over here to-morrow evening," Samuel

Larch was saying. "Thar ain't no call for you to send all the way to the

poorhouse. Maybe Reuben Fain will let us have that auto-wagon of his."

"Oh, I'll come for him in the big car in the morning," Dorinda replied.

"It isn't my way to do things by halves."

The sheriff nodded. "Naw'm, it ain't yo' way to do things by halves," he

echoed thankfully.

After the two men were out of sight, she turned apologetically to John

Abner. Although he said little, for he was never a great talker, she had

observed that his face wore a look of severe disapprobation.

"There wasn't anything else to do, was there, John Abner?" she asked, in

the deferential tone she reserved for a crisis. It was not often that

Dorinda deferred, and on the rare occasions when she did so, she was

able to administer a more piquant flattery than the naturally clinging

woman has at her command.

"It looks to me as if they were letting you down," John Abner rejoined

moodily; but his face cleared under her persuasion. After all, what he

liked best was to be treated as an authority not only on farming, but on

human nature as well. The fact that he had lived as a recluse, and knew

nothing whatever of life, did not interfere with the sincerity of his

claim to profound wisdom. Men were so immature, she found herself

thinking; and they were never so immature as when they strutted most

with importance. Since the emotional disaster of her youth, she had been

incapable of either loving or hating without a caustic reservation; and

she felt that the hidden flaw in her relations with men was her

inability to treat a delusion of superiority as if it were a moral

principle. This was a small indulgence, she imagined, to a woman who

loved passionately; but to one who had safely finished with love and

attained the calm judgment of the disillusioned, it was an indulgence

which might prove to be particularly irksome.

Slipping her arm through John Abner's, she walked with him into the

house. "Well, of course, in a way you're right; but after all, even if

they are imposing on us, we couldn't very well refuse to do anything."

Though the two farms would go to John Abner at her death, there were

moments when, notwithstanding his affection for her, she suspected

uncomfortably that he would like complete authority while she was

living. Not that he was ever disagreeable or ungenerous about the way

she managed him. He was, she knew, honestly devoted to her, and he

admired her without the pity that had always tempered her admiration for

him. But he shared, she told herself, with all males who were not

milksops, the masculine instinct to domineer over the opposite sex.

"Well, if it's anybody's business, it's James Ellgood's," he protested.

She raised her straight grey eyebrows with a quizzical smile. "All the

same you can hardly blame James Ellgood for not making it his business.

Nothing will ever let him forget that Jason drove Geneva out of her

mind."

"Well, perhaps he did, but there was no law to punish him."

"That's what James Ellgood feels, of course, and I suppose he is right.

If it were simply a question of punishment----"

"You mean it's more than that?"

"Well, isn't it?" She had learned that she could always win him to her

point of view by disguising a naked fact in the paraphernalia of

philosophy. "From our side, I suppose it's one of humanity." Though she

despised sophistry as heartily as she despised indirectness, she could

bend both to her purpose when it was a matter of compulsion.

"If you mean that our humanity is more important than his punishment?"

he returned in a mollified tone.

"Yes, I do mean that. You have said it so often yourself." That would

finish his opposition, she knew, and without his opposition, life on the

farm would be easier for the next two or three weeks.

"Won't it make a lot of trouble?" he inquired.

She frowned. "I'm afraid it will. Of course, if he gets better, he can

move over to Five Oaks, and anyway the authorities ought to make some

kind of provision for him. We can't be expected to take over the

poor farm." Her tone was suddenly bitter with memory; but she concluded

hastily: "In the meantime, I'll warm the spare room and get it ready. If

the doctor says he must have fresh air, we can move his bed out on the

back porch."

John Abner looked resentful. "I'm sorry for the poor devil, of course,

even if he did drive his wife crazy; but I don't see the sense in

turning the place upside down for somebody who hasn't the slightest

claim on you. He isn't even a poor relation."

"He isn't anybody's poor relation, that's the trouble."

"I'm not so sure." John Abner could be brutally candid at times. "There

are a lot of Idabella's mulatto children still hanging about Five Oaks."

She shivered with disgust. "What the law doesn't acknowledge, I suppose

it doesn't bother about."

"Well, it isn't any business of mine," John Abner said, after

deliberation. "If you choose to bring him here, of course you have the

right. But I hope you aren't going to wear yourself out waiting on him.

You've got no moderation in such things. After Snowbird's sickness last

winter, you didn't look like yourself."

She shook her head. "I'd do much more for Snowbird. But I shan't wait on

him. I'll get Fluvanna's sister, Mirandy. She's an old woman, and a good

hand with sick people, even if she hasn't any sense in the dairy." As

she finished, she heard a voice in her mind asking distinctly, "Why am I

doing this? Why should I take the trouble?" And there wasn't any answer.

Even when she dragged her mind for an excuse or even an idea, she could

not unearth one. She had stopped loving Jason thirty years ago; she had

stopped hating him at an indefinite period; she had stopped even

remembering that he was alive; yet she could not, without doing violence

to her own nature, let him die in the poorhouse. After all, it was not

her feeling or lack of feeling for him, it was the poorhouse and her

horror of the poorhouse that decided his fate.

"I'll have to go with you," John Abner was saying. "You can't manage it

by yourself."

"No. I'd rather have you. If we start right after dinner, that ought to

bring us back before the milking is over. The road is rough, I'm afraid.

We'll have to take some pillows in the back of the car."

"If he's bad off, perhaps Doctor Stout won't let him come," John Abner

suggested hopefully.

"Well, we'll stop at the doctor's house on the way. That's why I want to

start early."

That night, after the last of the day's work was over, they sat in front

of Dorinda's fire and talked as they used to talk when John Abner was a

boy and had not been warped by disappointment. Their thoughts were in

the future, not in the past, and Dorinda's visions were coloured by the

optimism which she had won more from perseverance than from any

convincing lesson of experience. Because of the very defects of his

qualities, John Abner suited her. It was true that his companionship had

its imperfections; but she would not have exchanged his sullen reticence

for the golden fluency of the new minister at Pedlar's Mill. Her

stepson's personality was attractive to her, for he gave an impression

of inexhaustible strength in reserve; and in the matter of disposition

he influenced her less as an example than as a warning, which, after

all, she reflected, was the kind of influence she needed.

"When all is said, we are as contented as we could expect to be," she

remarked, when he rose to go upstairs. "If you don't marry, we'll have a

pleasant old age by the fireside."

He laughed shortly, for he was in one of his gentler moods. There was a

charm, she thought, in his long thin features, his sallow skin with

bluish shadows about the mouth, his squinting eyes, and his straight

black hair which fell in stringy locks over his forehead.

"You may marry again yourself," he said abruptly. "You aren't as

handsome as you used to be, but you're still better-looking than anybody

about here."

She shook her head obstinately. "With white hair and wrinkles!"

"Well, there's more than white hair and wrinkles. I don't know what it

is, but it's there," he answered, as he turned away and went out of the

room.

In the morning she awoke with a feeling of despondency. Dread had come

over her while she slept, and she felt it dragging at her memory after

she had opened her eyes. Why had she yielded to that erratic impulse the

evening before? Why had she allowed those two men to impose on her? "If

is because I am a woman," she thought. "If I were a man, they would

never have dared." Yes, John Abner was right (here was another instance

of how right he so often was) and the county authorities had taken

advantage of her weakness. "Well, I've let myself in for it now, and

I'll have to go through with it," she said aloud, as she got out of bed

and began dressing.

At breakfast, while she tried to eat and could not because of the lump

in her throat, she reminded herself of her mother on the day of her

journey to the Courthouse. "All I need is a crape veil and a

handkerchief scented with camphor," she said, with a laugh.

"What are you talking about, Dorinda?" John Abner asked, with a frown.

"I was thinking of my mother. Poor Ma! She'd be living now if she hadn't

worried so."

"Well, she'd be nearly a hundred, I reckon. And don't you begin

worrying. Are you out of temper because you let those men put something

over on you?"

"I don't know. It seems different this morning. I can't see why I did

it."

"I heard the men talking about it in the barn. Somebody, the sheriff, I

reckon, had told Martin Flower, and he said you'd bitten off more than

you could chew."

Dorinda flushed angrily. "When I want Martin Flower's interference, I'll

ask for it."

Already a message had gone to Mirandy, and the old negress was waiting

outside for directions when breakfast was over. The floor and the

woodwork of the spare room must be scrubbed; the bed thoroughly aired

before it was made up; a fire kindled in the big fireplace; and the

red-bordered towels, which her mother had reserved for the visiting

elder, must be hung on the towel-rack. Last of all, Mirandy must

remember to keep a kettle boiling day and night on the brass footman.

"I wonder why I am doing all this?" Dorinda asked herself. Was it, as

she believed, from impersonal compassion? Or was it because her first

lover, merely because he had been the first, was impressed eternally on

the unconscious cells of her being? "No, I'm not doing it for Jason,"

she answered. "Even if I had never loved him, I couldn't let the man who

had owned Five Oaks die in the poorhouse."

"Before we bring him here," John Abner said, "you'd better warn Aunt

Mirandy that consumption is catching." He shook his head with a sardonic

smile. "I'm afraid he's going to be a nuisance; but I believe you would

have done the same thing if it had been smallpox."

She looked at him with inscrutable eyes. "I was never afraid of taking

things."

"But you don't even like Jason Greylock."

"Like him? Who could? What has that to do with the poorhouse?"

A look of rare tenderness, for he was not often tender, came into John

Abner's eyes while he squinted at her over the table. "Well, you're a

big woman, Dorinda, even if you're trying at times. There's an extra

dimension in you somewhere."

Though praise from John Abner was one of the things that pleased her

most, she was incapable, she knew, of draining the sweetness of the

moment before it escaped her. When happiness came to her she had always

the feeling that she was too dull or too slow to realize it completely

until it was, over, when she responded to the memory as she had never

responded to the actual occurrence.

"You're very good to me, John Abner," she answered. Her words were

insufficient, but the habit of reticence was, as usual, too strong for

her.

For hours she went about her work with the thoroughness that she exacted

of herself on days of mental disturbance. Not until the car was waiting

at the door, and Fluvanna was hastening out with robes and pillows, did

Dorinda turn aside from her ordinary activities, and go into the room

she had selected for Jason. Yes, everything was in order. The floor and

walls were clean; the windows had been closed after an airing; and the

fire burned brightly on the sunken stones in the fireplace. Even the big

iron kettle steamed away on the footman. There was soap in the soap-dish

on the washstand; an abundance of soft warm blankets covered the bed; on

the candlestand stood a blue thermos bottle, and her mother's Bible lay

beside it, with the purple bookmarker she had embroidered marking a

favourite text. "It ought to seem pleasant," she thought, "after the

poorhouse."

Outside, she found John Abner at the wheel of the car and Fluvanna

arranging the pillows on the back seat.

"Would you like to drive, Dorinda?"

"No, but I'll sit in front with you. When we come back, one of us will

have to sit with him, and I'd rather it would be you."

IX

They talked little on the long drive. John Abner was intent on the

wheel, and Dorinda held her cape closely about her, and gazed straight

ahead at the twisted road and the hazy brightness of the October

landscape. A veil of glittering dust drifted up from the meadows of

life-everlasting; in the underbrush by the fences, sumach and sassafras

made splashes of crimson and wine-colour; farther away, the changing

woods were tossed in broken masses against the cloudless arch of the

sky.

As they approached the Courthouse, the country was less thinly settled,

and throngs of barefooted children ran beside the car and offered

bunches of prince's feather and cockscomb. In some of the fields men

were ploughing, and among them Dorinda observed the phlegmatic faces of

Swedes or Germans. As the car sped by, they stopped in their ploughing

or cutting, and turned to stare curiously like slow-witted animals. Over

all was the blue haze of October and the drifting silver pollen of

life-everlasting.

At Doctor Stout's, a new green and white cottage near the road, which

looked as trivial as a butterfly on the edge of the autumnal solitude,

they were told that the doctor had already gone to the poorhouse.

"He was that upset he couldn't sleep last night," said Mrs. Stout, a

pretty, plump, deep-bosomed woman, in a pink and white gingham dress and

a starched apron. "It seemed to prey on him to think of Doctor Greylock,

who used to have the best practice around here, dying up yonder in the

poorhouse. He was so promising, too, they say, when he came back, and

his people owned that big place over near Pedlar's Mill. Drink was his

ruin, I reckon, and that made it so hard, for everybody was afraid to

take in a man that was out of his head. I couldn't have had him here on

account of the children and measles just broken out yesterday. But there

ought to be some way of caring for sick and crazy people without sending

them to the poorhouse. And now with all the poorhouses going, there soon

won't be any place for them but the gaol." She was a voluble person, but

at last the flow of words stopped, and they drove on between dusty

borders of sassafras.

"Is it true that Doctor Stout was born in a poorhouse?" Dorinda asked

presently.

"Nobody knows. It doesn't surprise me to hear that he was."

"And now Jason is dying in one. Is that the result of character or

merely accident, I wonder?"

"Of both probably," John Abner rejoined. "I've read of too many decent

human beings going on the rocks to believe the fable that virtue alone

will get you anywhere, unless it is to the poorhouse instead of the

gaol."

"There it must be now," Dorinda exclaimed, pointing to the right of the

road. "Do we turn in over that ditch?"

"It seems to be the only way. Hey! Get out of the road there!" shouted

John Abner to a skulking black and tan foxhound.

Withdrawn from the road, behind the fallen planks which had once made a

fence, the poorhouse sprawled there, in the midst of the

life-everlasting, like the sun-bleached skeleton of an animal which

buzzards had picked clean of flesh. The walls and roof were covered with

whitewash; there was whitewash on the smooth, round stones that bordered

the path to the door; and the few starved cedar trees in the yard were

whitewashed to the thin foliage at their tops. At one side, a few coarse

garments were fluttering from clothes-lines, and several decrepit

paupers were spreading wet things on the bushes that grew by the back

porch.

Like other relics of an abruptly changing era, the county poorhouse

possessed both the advantages and the disadvantages of desuetude. The

seven aged paupers and the one indigent young mother who now accepted

its charity were neglected, it is true, but they were neglected in

freedom. Where there was no system there was less room for interference.

If the coarse clothes were thin, they were as varied as the tempers or

the inclinations of the paupers. Though the fare was mean, the

complaints over it were bountiful. It is hard to be a pauper; it is

particularly hard to be an aged pauper; but if these nine inmates

(including the week-old infant) could have chosen between liberty and

fraternity, they would probably have preferred the scant food and the

rough clothes to the neat livery of dependence. Dorinda, however,

perceived none of the varied blessings attendant upon orderless

destitution. All she saw was the ramshackle building and the whitewashed

cedars, which reminded her vaguely of missionary stories of the fences

of dry bones surrounding the huts of Ethiopian kings. "It looks as bare

as the palm of my hand," she said aloud.

The doctor's Ford car was standing in front of the door, with one wheel

in a mudhole and one in a pile of trash; and when they stopped, an old

woman, who was hanging the wash to dry on the bushes, put down the wet

clothes and came over to meet them. She was so old that her skin was

like bark; her mouth was closed as tight as a nutcracker over her

toothless gums; and her small red eyes flickered between eyelids which

looked as if they had worn away. As she mumbled at them, she wiped her

steaming wet hands on her skirt.

"You ain't got any sweet stuff, is you, honey?" she whined, until the

doctor appeared at the door and beckoned them round the corner of the

house where the sunshine was falling. As usual he looked brisk, kind,

incurably sanguine.

"There is no longer any question. These county poorhouses must go," he

said, as they followed the beaten track which wound by the side of the

building. "It costs the county not a cent under two thousand dollars a

year to keep this place open for these eight inmates. It would be

cheaper in the end to board them at the City Home where there is some

system about the way things are managed." Then he lowered his voice,

which had been high and peremptory, as if he wished to be overheard. "We

brought Doctor Greylock here because he couldn't be left alone, and none

of the negroes would go near him. There's a scare about him, though he's

perfectly harmless. A little out of his dead now and then, but too weak

to hurt anybody even if he tried."

"Is he delirious now?"

"No, he's in his senses this morning, and quiet--you'll find him as

quiet as you could wish. Is there anybody to look after him at Five

Oaks?"

"We're not taking him to Five Oaks. There's no place for him there. But

I've got a nurse for him, Aunt Mirandy Moody. She knows how to take care

of the sick, and I believe the can manage him."

"Oh, anybody can manage him now," Doctor Stout said reassuringly.

A tremor of weakness passed over Dorinda. She felt that her knees and

elbows were shaking, and there was a meaningless noise in her ears. Was

it Jason of whom they were speaking? No, it was not Jason, for it seemed

to her that Jason had died long ago, so long ago that she couldn't

remember him. She was standing by the wall of the poorhouse, and an

obscure pauper, somebody who could be "easily managed," was dying

within. She dropped her eyelids to shut out the brown cloud, as thick as

the smoke of burning leaves, which rolled up from the meadows. When she

opened her eyes again the sunshine on the whitewashed wall dazzled her.

If only she had known! If only she could have looked ahead to this

moment! Those summer evenings thirty years ago, and this autumn day

beside the wall of the poorhouse! The whitewashed cedars, the sunken

road, the flat fields, the ridged earth where labourers moved slowly,

and over all the glittering dust of life-everlasting.

"He ought to drink as much milk as he can," Doctor Stout was saying in

his professional voice. "And eggs when he will take them. Every two

hours he should have nourishment in some form, and an eggnog with

whiskey three or four times a day. You can't expect him to do without

whiskey. I've got a bottle for you to take back with you. He may need

some on the way if he seems to be losing strength."

She nodded. "I learned a little when I was a girl in a doctor's office

in New York; but everything has changed since the war. You'll come over

to-morrow?"

"I'll drop in whenever I am called that way. If he gets much worse, you

can telephone me. I feel that he has a professional claim on me."

The weakness had gone now. She felt courageous and full of vitality, as

if the rich blood had surged up through her veins. With the return of

strength, her self-reliance, her calm efficiency, revived. She was

facing the present now, not the past, and she faced it imperiously.

"You think he is able to be moved?" she asked.

"Even if it is a risk,"--he met her gaze candidly,--"wouldn't anything

be better than to die in this place?"

She acquiesced by a gesture. Then, threading her way between the stunted

rosebushes, she spoke in a smothered voice, "Is he ready to go with

us?"

"He is waiting on the back porch. It's sunny there."

"The car is open, you know, but John Abner is putting up the top."

"Fresh air won't hurt him. You've plenty of rugs, I suppose, and he'll

need pillows."

"I've thought of that. You can fix the back seat like a bed. Of course

we shall drive very slowly." Glancing up at the sun, she concluded in

her capable manner: "It's time we were starting. John Abner and I both

have work to do on the farm."

Doctor Stout bent an admiring gaze on her, and she knew from his look

that he was thinking, "Sensible woman. No damned mushiness about her."

Aloud, he said, "He is ready to go. You'll find that he doesn't say

much. When a man has touched the bottom of things, there isn't much talk

left in him. But I think he'll be glad to get away."

"Well, I'll see what I can do." Stepping in front of him, she turned the

sharp angle of the wall and saw Jason lying on a shuck mattress in the

sunshine. Beneath his head there was a pile of cotton bags stuffed with

feathers and tied at the ends. Several patchwork quilts were spread over

him, and one of the old women was covering his feet as Dorinda

approached. His eyes were closed, and if he heard her footsteps on the

ground, he made no sign. A chain of shadows cast by the drying clothes

on the line fell over him, and these intangible fetters seemed to her

the only bond linking him to existence. While she looked down on him,

all connection between him and the man she had once loved was severed as

completely as the chain of shadows when the wind moved the clothesline.

He lay straight and stiff under the quilts, and above the variegated

pattern his features protruded, shrivelled, inanimate, expressionless,

like the face of a mummy that would crumble to dust at a touch. His eyes

beneath his closed lids were sunk in hollows from which the yellow

stains spilled over on his bluish cheeks. The chin under the short

stubble of beard was thrust out as if it would pierce the withered skin.

It was not the face of Jason Greylock. What she looked on was merely a

blank collection of features from which poverty and illness had drained

all human intelligence. Turning away, she saw through a mist the

doddering old woman who was fussing about the mattress and the decrepit

manager who was too ancient and incompetent for more serious employment.

"They've come for you. We'll get you away," Doctor Stout said in his

cheerful tones which rang with an artificial resonance. Then he turned

to Dorinda. "The stimulant is wearing off. He'll need something stronger

before he is able to start."

At the words, Jason opened his eyes and looked straight up at the sky.

"I am thirsty," he said, while his hand made an empty claw-like gesture.

If he were aware of their figures, she realized that they meant nothing

to him. He had withdrawn from the external world into the darkness of

some labyrinth where physical sensations were the only realities. While

she watched him it came over her with a shock that the last thing to die

in a human being is not thought, is not even spirit, but sensation.

One of the old women, who appeared to be in authority, brought a glass

of blue milk, and taking a flask from his pocket the doctor added a

measure of whiskey. Then lifting Jason's head, he held the glass to his

lips.

Suddenly, it seemed to Dorinda that her impressions of the actual scene

dissolved and slipped like quicksilver from her mind. She ceased to

look, ceased to think, overcome by an emotion which was not grief,

though it was the very essence of sadness. Closing her eyes, she waited

for some sound or touch that would restore the fading glow of her

reason. Why was she here? Where was it leading her? What was the meaning

of it all?

She heard a strangled voice gasp, "You're hurting me," and looking round

she saw that the doctor and John Abner were carrying Jason to the car.

"You'll feel better presently," the doctor said soothingly. "I'll give

you something for the pain."

Like an automaton, she followed them; like an automaton, she stepped

into the car and took her place by Jason's side on the back seat. She

had intended to drive home, but she knew that she was incapable of

controlling the big car. "Some one had better be back here with him,"

the doctor had insisted, and she had obeyed his directions in silence.

"I've put the whiskey under the rug. Give him an eggnog as soon as you

put him to bed."

The car started slowly, and they had driven for some miles before she

found sufficient courage to turn and look at the figure beside her.

Dazed by the sedative, he was staring straight in front of him,

oblivious of the autumn sunshine, oblivious of the uninteresting

country, oblivious of her presence, lost beyond reach in that dark

labyrinth of sensation. His face was the face of one who had come to the

edge of the world and looked over. It expressed not pain, not despair

even, but nothingness. A grey woollen comforter was tied over his head,

and his features appeared to have fallen away beneath the mummy-like

covering. He was neither young nor old, she saw; he was over and done

with, a thing with which time had finished. And he was a stranger to

her! She had never loved him; she had never known him until to-day. The

weight on her heart was so heavy that it was suffocating her. Again she

thought: "Why am I here? What is the meaning of it all?" Again she felt

as she had felt at her father's death: "The pathos of life is worse than

the tragedy."

They drove on in silence; but it was a silence that reverberated like

thunder in her brain. Nothing and everything was over. Ahead of her the

road sank between the autumn fields and the brilliant patches of woods.

The blue haze swam before her in the direction of the river. They passed

the same ragged white and black children, who held up the same withered

flowers. The same labourers were at work in the fields, bent in the same

gestures of ploughing. As they went by a house set far back from the

road, with a little crooked path leading up to a white wicket-gate, she

imagined herself walking up the path and through the wicket-gate into

another life.

John Abner looked back. "Am I going too fast? He coughs as if he were

choking."

She turned to Jason and replaced a pillow which had slipped from under

his head. His boots, with lumps of red clay still clinging to them, were

stretched out stiffly on the pile of rugs. And those worn boots with the

earth on the soles seemed to her so poignantly moving that her eyes

filled with tears. His cough stopped, and she spoke to him in a raised

voice as if he were at a distance, "Are you suffering now?"

If he heard her, he made no response. It seemed to her while she looked

at him that he was in reality at a distance, that everything but the

shell of physical pain in which he was imprisoned had already perished.

She wondered if he remembered her, or if her image had dropped from him,

with other material objects, in that blind wilderness. From his apathy,

she might have been no more to him than one of the old women in the

poorhouse. A shiver ran over her, as if she had been touched by a dead

hand. Youth, beauty, victory, revenge,--what did any of these things

signify before the inevitable triumph of time?

Yes, time had revenged her. If she had stood still, if she had not

lifted a finger to help, time would still have revenged her; for time,

she saw, always revenges one. She thought of the hot agony of that other

October afternoon. Of the patter of rain on the roof. Of the smell of

wet grass underfoot. Of the sodden sky. Of the branches whipping her

face.

They passed the station, where a train had just gone by; they passed the

old Haney place, where the new German tenant was ploughing; they passed

Honeycomb Farm and the fork of the road, where the burned cabin and the

blasted oak used to be. The new gate stood there now, and beyond it,

there was the sandy road through the meadows of Joe-Pyeweed and

life-everlasting. Against the sky, she could still see unchanged the

chimneys of Five Oaks. Then they spun easily down the wooded slope,

crawled over the patch of corduroy road, and, turning in at the bridge,

rolled up to the front porch of Old Farm.

"Well, we got him here," John Abner said, with a breath of relief.

As they helped Jason to alight, it seemed to Dorinda that his bones were

crumbling beneath her touch. If she had awakened to find that the whole

afternoon had been a nightmare, she would have felt no surprise. Even

the quiet house, with its air of patient expectancy, startled her by its

strangeness.

Mirandy, a big, strong, compassionate old negress, who was born for a

nurse but had missed her vocation until she was too old to profit by it,

came out to help, and among them they carried Jason into the spare room

and put him to bed. His clothes were so soiled and ragged that John

Abner went upstairs and brought down some woollen things of his own. A

fire blazed in the cavernous fireplace. Ripples of light and shadow

danced over the yellow walls. The whole room smelt of burning logs and

of the branches of pine on the mantelpiece. Warmth, peace, comfort,

enfolded them as they entered.

When they had undressed Jason and covered him up warmly, Dorinda brought

the eggnog, and Mirandy slipped her arm under the pillow and raised his

head while he drank it. The tormented look had gone from his face. About

his mouth the outline of a smile flickered.

"It feels good," he said, and closed his eyes as the glass was taken

away.

"You'll eat some supper?"

"Yes, I'll eat some supper."

"You're not in pain now?"

"No, I'm not in pain now."

He spoke in a dazed way, like a child that is repeating words it does

not understand. Had he forgotten that he had known her? Or had he

reached the depths from which all memories appear as frail as the bloom

on a tree? She did not know. She would never know probably. She had lost

even the wish to know. Whether he had loved her or not made no

difference. It made no difference whether or not he remembered. In that

instant beside the poorhouse wall, the old Jason had been submerged and

lost in this new Jason who was a stranger. Not in thirty years but in a

single minute, she had lost him. Stripped of associations, stripped of

sentiment, this new Jason was protected only by the intolerable pathos

of life. How futile, how unnecessary, it had all been,--her love, her

suffering, her bitterness.

He opened his eyes and looked at her.

"This isn't Five Oaks?"

"No, it is Old Farm."

"Old Farm? That is the Oakley place. Am I going to stay here?"

"Until you are better."

"Until I am better," he repeated.

"Are you comfortable now?"

He closed his eyes again. "Yes, it feels good."

"In a little while I'll give you some veronal and you will sleep."

A change passed over his face and he sighed, "I'd like to sleep."

She drew back and turned to go out of the room. Yes, the connection

between youth and middle age was broken for ever.

X

In the night she heard him coughing, and slipping into her flannel

wrapper, she went into the kitchen and beat up an egg with milk and

brandy. When she took it into his room, he appeared feverish and asked

for veronal. "But the brandy will undo it," he added mechanically. His

face was flushed and when she touched his hand it was burning. "Is it

near day?" he inquired.

"No, it is only one o'clock. I thought you were sleeping."

"I was, but I wake up this way. I've done it every night for months."

She gave him veronal, and then raised his head while he sipped the

eggnog. "An owl has been hooting so loud I thought it was at the

window," he said, looking up at her over the rim of the glass.

"It's up in the big pine. You've been dreaming."

The fire had burned down to a few embers, which flickered out when she

tried to stir them to life. A dim light from the screened lamp on the

floor behind the chintz-covered chair left the bed and his uncovered

face in shadow.

"Do you feel better?" she asked, as she was turning away.

"Yes, I feel better." His eyes followed her from the shadow with a

glance of mute interrogation.

"I'll put this stick by your bed." She went out into the hall and came

back with one of John Abner's hickory sticks. "If you want anything or

feel nervous, knock on the wall. I am a light sleeper, and Mirandy is in

the room off the kitchen."

She waited, but he did not answer. Had he understood her, or was he

incapable of grasping the meaning of sounds? It was like the

inconsistency of life, she thought, that he, who once had been so

voluble, should have become almost inarticulate at the end. She knew

that he was trying to give as little trouble as possible, yet he seemed

unable to put his wish into words.

Before going out, she made one last effort with the embers, but the wood

she threw into the fireplace did not catch. When she went over to the

bed again, Jason was lying with closed eyes. "He doesn't look as if he

could last much longer," she thought dispassionately.

The still October days drifted by, hazy, mellow, declining into the rich

light of the sunsets. With the dry weather and sufficient food after

starvation, Jason appeared to improve. The old wheel-chair which had once

belonged to Rose Emily was brought down from the attic, and he sat out,

muffled in rugs, on bright afternoons. He liked his meals, though he

never asked for them. Sometimes, after a hard spell of coughing, he

would say, "How long is it before I have my eggnog?"; yet he never

attempted to hasten the hour. Twice, after a severe hæmorrhage, they

believed he was dying, but he recovered and was wheeled out again on the

lawn. Day after day, he sat there in the sunshine, passive, silent,

wrapped in a curious remoteness which was like the armour of an

inscrutable reserve. Yet it was not reserve, she felt instinctively. It

was something thinner; vaguer, something as impalpable as a shadow. It

was, she realized suddenly one day, an emptiness of spirit. He was

silent because there was nothing left in him to be uttered. He was

remote because he had lost all connection with his surroundings, with

events, with the material structure of living. Through the autumn days

he would sit there, propped on pillows, in his wheel-chair between the

half-bared lilac bushes and the "rockery," where Mrs. Oakley had planted

portulaca over an old stump. His head would sink down into the rugs, and

his unseeing eyes would gaze up the road to the starry fields of the

life-everlasting. Behind him there was the porch and the long grey roof

where swallows were wheeling. From the locust trees by the wings a rain

of small yellow leaves fell slowly and steadily in the windless air,

turning once as they left the stem, and drifting down to the flagged

walk and the borders of sheepmint and wire-grass. His figure, bowed

under the rugs, seemed to her to become merely another object in the

landscape. He was as inanimate as the fields or the trees; and yet he

made the solitude more lonely and the autumn dreaminess more pensive.

His features had the scarred and seared look that is left in the faces

of men who had fought their way out of a forest fire. Only the look that

Jason wore now had passed from struggle into defeat. He appeared to be

waiting, without fear and without hope, for whatever might happen. "I've

seen so many people die," she thought, and then, "In fifty years many

people must die."

She had come home this afternoon a little earlier than usual, and, still

in riding breeches, she stood by the porch and looked down on the inert

figure in the wheel-chair. Jason's eyes were open, but she could not

tell whether he saw her or not. The mask of his features was as blank as

if an indestructible glaze were spread over his face; and he stared

straight before him, searching the road and the distant fields of

life-everlasting for something that was not there. Though his

helplessness was his only hold on her, she felt that it had become too

poignant for her to bear. If only he would speak! If only he would

complain! If only he would say what he was seeking! In the faint

sunshine, beneath the ceaseless rain of leaves, he gathered, a deeper

meaning, a fresher significance. A glamour of sadness enveloped him. For

an instant the memory of the Jason she had first known flickered over

him like a vanishing ray of sunlight. As the gleam faded, she felt that

he was passing with it into some unearthly medium where she could not

follow. It was, she told herself, only the endless riddle of mortality,

renewed again and yet again in each human being. It was the old baffling

sense of a secret meaning in the universe, of a reality beneath the

actuality, of a deep profounder than the deeps of experience. The

reserve of even one human being was impenetrable; the reserve of every

human being was impenetrable. Of what was he thinking? she wondered, and

knew that she could never discover. Had he loved her in the past, or had

his desire for her been merely a hunger? Would he have been faithful to

her if stronger forces had not swept him away? Which was the accident,

his love or his faithlessness? When it was over, had she dropped out of

his life, or had she continued to exist as a permanent influence? Was he

better or worse than she had believed him to be? She had never known,

and now she could never know. The truth would always elude her. She

could never wring his secret from this empty shell which was as

unfathomable as the sea. She felt that the mystery was killing her, and

she knew that it was a mystery which could never be solved.

She tried to ask, "How much did I mean in your life?" an found herself

reciting, parrot-like, "Do you feel any pain?"

He shook his head, without looking at her. His gaze was still on the

road where it dipped at the bridge and travelled upward into the dreamy

distance.

"Are you ready for your eggnog?" The effort to make her voice sound

light and natural brought tears to her eyes.

At last she had touched him. The quiver of appetite stole over his face,

and he turned his eyes, which were dark with pain, away from the road.

"Is it almost time?" This was what he lived for now, an egg with milk

and whiskey every four hours.

"It must be nearly. I'll go and see." As she still lingered, the quiver

on his face deepened into a look of impatience, and he repeated eagerly,

"You will go and see?"

"In a minute. Has the doctor been here?"

"Nobody has been here. A few people went by in the road, but they did not

stop."

"Something must have prevented the doctor. He will come to-morrow."

"It makes no difference. I am a doctor."

A thought occurred to her while she watched him. "Would you rather be at

Five Oaks? It might be managed."

He shook his head. "It doesn't matter. You are good to me here. I don't

know why." He broke off with a rough, grating cough which sounded like

the blows of a hammer. A few minutes afterwards, when the spell of

coughing was over, he repeated, so mechanically that the words seemed to

reach no deeper than his lips, "I don't know why."

He had not said as much as this since she had brought him to Old Farm,

and while she listened a piercing light flashed into her mind, as if a

lantern had been turned without warning on a dark road. In this light,

all the hidden cells of her memory were illuminated. Things she had

forgotten; things she had only dimly perceived when they were present;

swift impulses; unacknowledged desires; flitting impressions like the

shadow of a bird on still water,--all these indefinite longings started

out vividly from the penumbra of darkness. As this circle of light

widened, she saw Jason as she had first seen him more than thirty years

ago, on that morning in winter. She saw his dark red hair, his

brown-black eyes, his gay and charming smile with its indiscriminate

friendliness. Time appeared to stand still at that instant. Beyond this

enkindled vision there was only the fall of the locust leaves, spinning

like golden coins which grew dull and tarnished as soon as they reached

the ground. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the vision faded and the

light flickered out. There remained this stranger, huddled beneath the

rugs in the wheel-chair, and around him the melancholy stillness of the

October afternoon.

"People have to be kind to each other sometimes," she answered.

His brief animation had passed. He seemed to have forgotten his words as

soon as he had uttered them. The blank despair was in his eyes again as

he fixed them on the empty road, searching--searching. His face, so

scarred and burned out by an inner fire, wore a lost and abstracted

look, as if he were listening for some sound at a distance.

"I'll bring the eggnog in a minute," she added hastily, and went into

the house. She felt embarrassed by her rugged health, and by her firm

and energetic figure when she contrasted it with his diminished frame.

Yet her pity, she knew, could make no impression on vacancy.

As the weeks passed, she grew to look for his chair when she returned

from work in the fields. There was no eagerness, no anxiety even. There

was merely the wonder if she should still find him in the pale afternoon

sunshine, watching the road for something that never came. If he had

been absent, she would scarcely have missed him; yet, in a way, his

wheel-chair made the lawn, or the fireside on wet days, more homelike.

He was a poor thing, she felt, to look forward to, but at least he was

dependent upon her compassion.

Then one afternoon in November, when she returned, riding her white

horse through the flame and dusk of the sunset, she saw that the

wheel-chair was not in its accustomed place between the porch and the

"rockery." When she had dismounted at the stable door and watched the

bedding down of Snowbird, she walked slowly back to the house. Even

before she met Mirandy running to look for her, she knew that Jason was

dead.

"He 'uz settin' out dar de hull evelin'," began Mirandy, who being old

still spoke the vivid dialect of her ancestors. "He sot out dar jes' lak

he's done day in an' day out w'ile I wuz gittin' thoo wid de ironin'.

Den w'en de time come fuh his eggnog, I beat it up jes' ez light, en

tuck it out dar ter de cheer, en dar he wuz layin' back, stone daid, wid

de blood all ovah de rugs en de grass. He died jes' ez quick ez ern he

ain' nevah ketched on ter w'at wuz gwinter happen. 'Fo' de Lawd, hit

wa'n't my fault, Miss Dorindy. I 'uz jes' gittin' erlong thoo wid de

ironin', lak you done tole me."

"No, it wasn't your fault, Mirandy. Have you telephoned for the doctor?"

"Yas'm, Fluvanna, she done phone fuh 'im right straight away. We is done

laid 'im out on de baid. You'd 'low jes' ter look at 'im dat hit wuz a

moughty pleasant surprise ter find out dat he wuz sholy daid."

Turning away from her, Dorinda went into the spare room, where the fire

was out, and in deference to one of Aunt Mehitable's superstitions,

Mirandy had draped white sheets over the furniture and the pictures. The

windows were wide open. In the graveyard on the curve of the hill, she

could see the great pine towering against the evening sky. A stray sheep

was bleating somewhere in the meadow, and it seemed to her that the

sound filled the universe.

So at last he was dead. He was dead, and she could never know whether or

not he remembered. She could never know how much or how little she had

meant in his life. And more tragic than the mystery that surrounded him

at the end, was the fact that neither the mystery nor his end made any

difference. The passion that had ruined her life thirty years ago was

nothing, was less than nothing, to her to-day. She was not glad that he

was dead. She was not sorry that he had died alone.

Turning back the end of the sheet, she looked down on his face. Despair

had passed out of it. The scarred and burned look of his features had

faded into serenity. Death had wiped out the marks of the years, and had

restored, for an instant, the bright illusion of youth. He wore, as he

lay there with closed eyes, an expression that was noble and generous,

as if he had been arrested in some magnanimous gesture. This was what

death could do to one. He had wasted his life, he had destroyed her

youth; yet, in a few hours, death had thrown over him an aspect of

magnanimity.

She was standing there when John Abner came in from milking and joined

her. "Poor devil," he said. "I suppose it's the best thing that could

have happened."

"Yes, it's the best thing."

"Is there anybody we'd better get a message to?"

"No one I can remember. He had lost all his friends."

"Has the doctor been here?"

"Not yet, but Fluvanna telephoned for him."

"Then we might as well have the funeral to-morrow. There is no reason to

postpone it. He's been dying for months."

Yes, he had been dying for months; yet, she realized now, his death had

come to her with a shock. Though the moment had been approaching so

long, she felt that it had taken her by surprise, that she had not had

sufficient time to prepare.

"Of course, it isn't as if we could be expected to feel it," John Abner

said, reasonably enough, and she repeated vacantly: "No, of course it

isn't."

XI

The next afternoon, standing beneath an inclement sky in the overgrown

graveyard at Five Oaks, she wondered how, even after thirty years, she

could have become so insensible.

There had been rain in the night, and the weather was raw and wintry,

with a savage wind which prowled at a distance in the fields and woods.

Over the graveyard, where the sunken graves were almost obliterated by

periwinkle, the dead leaves were piled in sodden drifts which gave like

moss underfoot. The paling fence had rotted away, and white turkeys were

scratching in the weeds that edged the enclosure. Dampness floated down

in a grey vapour from the boughs of the trees. When the new minister

opened his mouth to speak his breath clung like frost to his drooping

moustache. Yet, bad as the day was, either compassion or curiosity had

drawn the nearer farmers and their families to Five Oaks, and a little

gathering of men and women who remembered the Greylocks in their

prosperity watched the lowering of Jason's body into the earth. In the

freshly ploughed field beyond, Mirandy and Fluvanna stood among an

inquisitive crowd of white and coloured children.

More than thirty years ago. More than thirty years of effort and

self-sacrifice--for what? Was there an unfulfilled purpose, or was it

only another delusion of life? The moaning wind plunged down on the dead

leaves and drove them in eddying gusts over the fields, over the road,

and into the open grave. It seemed to her that the sound of the autumn

wind, now rising, now sinking, now almost dying away, was sweeping her

also into the grave at her feet. She had no control over her memories;

she had no control over her thoughts. They stirred and scattered, as

aimless, as inanimate, as the dead leaves on the ground. Memories that

had outlived emotions, as empty as withered husks, were released from

their hidden graves, and tossed wildly to and fro in her mind. Little

things that she had forgotten. Little things that mean nothing when they

happen and break the heart when they are remembered. She felt no sorrow

for Jason. He was nothing to her; he had always been nothing; yet her

lost youth was everything. What she mourned was not the love that she

had had and lost, but the love that she had never had. Impressions

drifted through her thoughts, vague, swift, meaningless, without form or

substance. . . .

Out of this whirling chaos in her mind, Jason's face emerged like the

face of a marionette. Then dissolving as quickly as it had formed, it

reappeared as the face of Nathan, and vanished again to assume the

features of Richard Burch, of Bob Ellgood, and of every man she had ever

known closely or remotely in her life. They meant nothing. They had no

significance, these dissolving faces; yet as thick and fast as dead

leaves they whirled and danced there, disappearing and reassembling in

the vacancy of her thoughts. Faces. Ghosts. Dreams. Regrets. Old

vibrations that were incomplete. Unconscious impulses which had never

quivered into being. All the things that she might have known and had

never known in her life.

The minister's voice ceased at last. Since he had never seen Jason he

had trusted, perhaps imprudently, to his imagination, and Dorinda

wondered how he could have found so much to say of a life that was so

empty. She bent her head in prayer, and a few minutes afterwards, she

heard the thud of earth falling from the spade to the coffin. The red

clay fell in lumps, dark, firm, heavy, smelling of autumn. It fell

without breaking or scattering, and it fell with the sound of

inevitableness, of finality. For an eternity, she heard the thuds on the

coffin. Then the voice of the minister rose again in the benediction,

and she watched, as in a trance, John Abner bring the two flat stones

from the edge of the ploughed field and place them at the head and foot

of the grave.

She turned away, and became aware presently that the clergyman had

followed her and was speaking. "It is a sad occasion, Mrs. Pedlar," he

said, and coughed because her blank face startled the end of his remark

out of his mind. "A sad occasion," he repeated, stammering.

"All funerals are sad occasions," she responded, and then asked: "Will

you come to the house for a cup of coffee?"

She hoped he would refuse, and he did refuse after a brief hesitation.

He had a sick call to make near by, and already the day was closing in.

While he held her hand he spoke with unction of her generosity. Wherever

he went, he said, he heard of her good works. This, he realized, was a

concrete example of her many virtues, and he reminded her hopefully that

the greatest of these is charity. Then he went off in his Ford car, and

Dorinda stood where he had left her and stared after him as if she were

rooted there in the damp periwinkle.

"The wind is cutting. Come away," John Abner urged, taking her arm.

"Funerals are always depressing, but you did what you could." It was

true. She had done what she could, and she realized that this, also,

would not make any difference.

She walked away very slowly because she found that her knees were stiff

when she attempted to move. It was while she was treading on the spongy

earth at the edge of the ploughed field that she saw life crumble like a

mountain of cinders and roll over her. She was suffocated, she was

buried alive beneath an emptiness, a negation of effort, beside which

the vital tragedy of her youth appeared almost happiness. Not pain, not

disappointment, but the futility of all things was crushing her spirit.

She knew now the passive despair of maturity which made her past

suffering seem enviable to her when she looked back on it after thirty

years. Youth can never know the worst, she understood, because the worst

that one can know is the end of expectancy.

Smothered in this mountain of cinders, she walked to the old buggy and

stepped between the wheels to the front seat. A minute later they drove

past the barn where she would have killed Jason if her hand had not

wavered. Past the house where she had felt her heart crouching in animal

terror before the evil old man. Through the woods where the wet boughs

had stung her face. Rain. Rain. The sound of rain beating into her

memory. Rain on the shingled roof, pattering like the bare feet of

children. Rain on the hunched box-bush and the white turkeys. Rain on

the sandy road. Rain on the fork of the road, on the crushed leaves

smelling of autumn. Everything was before her then. There is no finality

when one is young. Though they had been unendurable while she had passed

through them, those years of her youth were edged now with a flame of

regret. She felt that she would give all the future if she could live

over the past again and live it differently. How small a thing her life

appeared when she looked back on it through the narrow vista of time! It

was too late now, she knew, for her youth was gone. Yet because it was

too late and her youth was gone, she felt that the only thing that made

life worth living was the love that she had never known and the

happiness that she had missed.

When she reached the house she went to her room in silence, and sank on

a couch in front of the fire as if she were sinking out of existence.

Fluvanna, finding her there a little later, helped to undress her and

went to tell John Abner that she was ill enough to have the doctor

summoned. Hearing her from the hall, Dorinda did not take the trouble to

contradict. The doctor did not matter. Illness did not matter. Nothing

mattered but the things of which life had cheated her.

Lying there in the shadowy firelight of the room, she heard the wind

wailing about the corners of the house and rustling in the old chimneys.

She saw the crooked shape of a bough etched on the window-panes, and she

listened for the soft thud of the branches beneath the sobbing violence

of the storm. Though the room was bright and warm, a chill was striking

through her flesh to the marrow of her bones. Shivering by the fire, she

drew the blankets close to her chin.

The door opened and John Abner came in. "Can't you eat any supper,

Dorinda?"

Behind him, in the glare of lamplight, she saw Fluvanna with a tray in

her hands. The blue and white china and the Rebekah-at-the-well tea-pot

lunged toward her.

"No, I can't eat a mouthful." Then changing her mind, she sat up on the

couch and asked for tea. When they poured it out for her, she drank

three cups.

"You got a chill, Dorinda. It was raw and wet out there."

"Yes, I got a chill," she replied; but it was the chill of despair she

meant.

"The wind is rising. We are going to have a bad storm. I suppose I'd

better go out again and take a look."

After he had gone, she lay there still shivering beneath the blankets,

with her eyes on the low white ceiling, where the firelight made

shimmering patterns. Outside, the wind grew louder. She heard it now at

a distance, howling like a pack of wolves in the meadow. She heard it

whistling round the eaves of the house and whining at the sills of the

doors. All night the gusts shook the roof and the chimneys, and all

night she lay there staring up at the wavering shadows of the flames.

And the youth that she had never had, the youth that might have been

hers and was not, came back, in delusive mockery, to torment her. It was

as if the sardonic powers of life assumed, before they vanished for

ever, all the enchanting shapes of her dreams. She remembered the past,

not as she had found it, but as she had once imagined that it might be.

She saw Jason, not as she had seen him yesterday or last year, but as he

was when she had first loved him. Though she tried to think of him as

broken, ruined, and repellent, through some perversity of recollection,

he returned to her in the radiance of that old summer. He returned to

her young, ardent, with the glow of happiness in his eyes and the smile

of his youth, that smile of mystery and pathos, on his lips. In that

hour of memory the work of thirty years was nothing. Time was nothing.

Reality was nothing. Success, achievement, victory over fate, all these

things were nothing beside that imperishable illusion. Love was the only

thing that made life desirable, and love was irrevocably lost to her.

Toward morning she fell asleep, and when she awoke at dawn the wind had

lulled and a crystal light was flooding the room. Within herself also

the storm was over. Life had washed over her while she slept, and she

was caught again in the tide of material things. Rising from the couch,

she bathed and dressed and went out of doors into the clear flame of the

sunrise.

Around her the earth smelt of dawn. After the stormy night the day was

breaking, crisp, fair, windless, with the frost of a mirage on the

distant horizon. The trees were bare overhead. Bronze, yellow, crimson

and wine-colour, the wet leaves strewed the flagged walk and the grass.

Against the eastern sky the boughs of the harp-shaped pine were

emblazoned in gold.

Turning slowly, she moved down the walk to the gate, where, far up the

road, she could see the white fire of the life-everlasting. The storm

and the hag-ridden dreams of the night were over, and the land which she

had forgotten was waiting to take her back to its heart. Endurance.

Fortitude. The spirit of the land was flowing into her, and her own

spirit, strengthened and refreshed, was flowing out again toward life.

This was the permanent self, she knew. This was what remained to her

after the years had taken their bloom. She would find happiness again.

Not the happiness for which she had once longed, but the serenity of

mind which is above the conflict of frustrated desires. Old regrets

might awaken again, but as the years went on, they would come rarely and

they would grow weaker. "Put your heart in the land," old Matthew had

said to her. "The land is the only thing that will stay by you." Yes,

the land would stay by her. Her eyes wandered from far horizon to

horizon. Again she felt the quickening of that sympathy which was deeper

than all other emotions of her heart, which love had overcome only for

an hour and life had been powerless to conquer in the end, the living

communion with the earth under her feet. While the soil endured, while

the seasons bloomed and dropped, while the ancient, beneficent ritual of

sowing and reaping moved in the fields, she knew that she could never

despair of contentment.

Strange, how her courage had revived with the sun! She saw now, as she

had seen in the night, that life is never what one dreamed, that it is

seldom what one desired; yet for the vital spirit and the eager mind,

the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the

possibilities of high adventure. Though in a measure destiny had

defeated her, for it had given her none of the gifts she had asked of

it, still her failure was one of those defeats, she realized, which are

victories. At middle age, she faced the future without romantic glamour,

but she faced it with integrity of vision. The best of life, she told

herself with clear-eyed wisdom, was ahead of her. She saw other autumns

like this one, hazy, bountiful in harvests, mellowing through the blue

sheen of air into the red afterglow of winter; she saw the coral-tinted

buds of the spring opening into the profusion of summer; and she saw the

rim of the harvest moon shining orange-yellow through the boughs of the

harp-shaped pine. Though she remembered the time when loveliness was

like a sword in her heart, she knew now that where beauty exists the

understanding soul can never remain desolate.

A call came from the house, and turning at the gate, she went back to

meet John Abner, who was limping toward her over the dead leaves in the

walk. His long black shadow ran ahead of him, and while he approached

her, he looked as if he were pursuing some transparent image of himself.

"You are yourself again," he said, as he reached her. "Last night I was

disturbed about you. I was afraid you'd got a bad chill."

"It went in the night. The storm wore on my nerves, but it was over by

morning." Then before he could reply, she added impulsively, "Bear with,

my fancies now, John Abner. When I am gone, both farms will be yours."

"Mine?" John Abner laughed as he looked at her. "Why, you may marry

again. They are saying at Pedlar's Mill that you may have Bob Ellgood

for the lifting of a finger."

Dorinda smiled, and her smile was pensive, ironic, and infinitely wise.

"Oh, I've finished with all that," she rejoined. "I am thankful to have

finished with all that."

THE END