voices. Dorothy stole backward in the shadow of the tree-trunk, until it
joined the darkness of the meadow, and then fled, stumbling along with
blinded eyes, the music still vibrating in her ears. Then came a quick rush
of footsteps behind her, swishing through the long grass. She did not look
back, but quickened her pace, struggling to reach the gate. Evesham was
there before her. He had swung the gate to and was leaning with his back
against it, laughing and panting.
“I've caught you, Dorothy, you little deceiver! You'll not get rid of me
to-night with any of your tricks. I'm going to take you home to your mother
and tell her you were peeping at the dancing.”
“Mother knows that I came; I asked her,” said Dorothy. Her knees were
trembling and her heart almost choked her with its throbbing.
“I'm so glad you don't dance, Dorothy. This is much nicer than the barn,
and the katydids are better fiddlers than old Darby and his son. I'll open
the gate if you will put your hand in mine, so that I can be sure of you,
you little runaway.”
“I will stay here all night, first,” said Dorothy, in a low, quivering
voice.
“As you choose. I shall be happy as long as you are here.”
Dead silence, while the katydids seemed to keep time to their heart-beats;
the fiddles began tuning for another reel, and the horses, tethered near,
stretched out their necks with low, inquiring whinnies.
“Dorothy,” said Evesham softly, leaning toward her and trying to see her
face in the darkness, “are you angry with me? Don't you think you deserve a
little punishment for the trick you played me at the mill-head?”
“It was all thy fault for insisting.” Dorothy was too excited and angry to
cry, but she was as miserable as she had ever been in her life before. “I
didn't want thee to stay. People that force themselves where they are not
wanted must take what they get.”
“What did you say, Dorothy?”
“I say I didn't want thee then. I do not want thee now. Thee may go back
to thy fiddling and dancing. I'd rather have one of those dumb brutes for
company to-night than thee, Walter Evesham.”
“Very well; the reel has begun,” said Evesham. “Fanny Jordan is waiting to
dance it with me, or if she isn't she ought to be. Shall I open the gate
for you?”
She passed out in silence, and the gate swung to with a heavy jar. She made
good speed down the lane and then waited outside the fence till her breath
came more quietly.
“Is that thee, Dorothy?” Rachel's voice called from the porch. She came out
to meet her daughter and they went along the walk together. “How damp thy
forehead is, child. Is the night so warm?” They sat down on the low steps
and Dorothy slid her arm under her mother's and laid her soft palm against
the one less soft by twenty years of toil for others. “Thee's not been
long, dear; was it as much as thee expected?”
“Mother, it was dreadful! I never wish to hear a fiddle again as long as I
live.”
Rachel opened the way for Dorothy to speak further; she was not without
some mild stirrings of curiosity on the subject herself, but Dorothy had no
more to say.
They went into the house soon after, and as they separated for the night
Dorothy clung to her mother with a little nervous laugh.
“Mother, what is that text about Ephraim?”
“Ephraim is joined to idols?” Rachel suggested.
“Yes, Ephraim is joined to his idols,” said Dorothy, lifting her head. “Let
him go!”
“Let him _alone_,” corrected Rachel.
“Let him _alone_!” Dorothy repeated. “That is better yet.”
“What's thee thinking of, dear?”
“Oh, I'm thinking about the dance in the barn.”
“I'm glad thee looks at it in that light,” said Rachel calmly.
* * * * *
Dorothy knelt by her bed in the low chamber under the eaves, crying to
herself that she was not the child of her mother any more.
She felt that she had lost something, that in truth had never been hers.
It was but the unconscious poise of her unawakened girlhood which had been
stirred; she had mistaken it for that abiding peace which is not lost or
won in a day.
Dorothy could no more stifle the spring thrills in her blood than she could
crush the color out of her cheek or brush the ripples out of her bright
hair, but she longed for the cool grays and the still waters. She prayed
that the “grave and beautiful damsel called Discretion” might take her by
the hand and lead her to that “upper chamber, whose name is Peace.” She lay
awake listening to the music from the barn, and waiting through breathless
silences for it to begin again. She wondered if Fanny Jordan had grown any
prettier since she had seen her as a half-grown girl, and then she despised
herself for the thought. The katydids seemed to beat their wings upon her
brain, and all the noises of the night, far and near, came to her strained
senses as if her silent chamber were a whispering gallery. The clock struck
twelve, and in the silence that followed she missed the music; but voices
talking and laughing were coming down the lane. There was the clink of a
horse's hoof on the stones: now it was lost on the turf, and now they were
all trooping noisily past the house. She buried her head in her pillow and
tried to bury with it the consciousness that she was wondering if Evesham
were there laughing with the rest.
Yes, Evesham was there. He walked with Farmer Jordan, behind the young men
and girls, and discussed with him, somewhat absently, the war news and the
prices of grain.
As they passed the dark old house, spreading its wide roofs like a hen
gathering her chickens under her wing, he became suddenly silent. A white
curtain flapped in and out of an upper window. Evesham looked up and
slightly raised his hat, but his instinct failed him there,--it was the
window of the boys' room.
“Queer kinks them old Friend preachers gits into their heads sometimes,”
said Farmer Jordan, as they passed the empty mill. “Now what do you s'pose
took Uncle Tommy Barton off right on top of plantin', leavin' his wife 'n'
critters 'n' child'en to look after themselves? Mighty good preachin' it
ought to be to make up for such practicin'. Wonderful set ag'in the war,
Uncle Tommy is. He's a-preachin' up peace now. But Lord! all the preachin'
sense Moses won't keep men from fightin' when their blood's up and there's
ter'tory in it.”
“It makes saints of the women,” said Evesham shortly.
“Wal, yes. Saints in heaven before their time, some of 'em. There's
Dorothy, now. She'll hoe her row with any saint in the kingdom or out of
it. I never see a hulsomer-lookin' gal. My Luke, he run the furrers in
her corn-patch last May. Said it made him sick to see a gal like that
a-staggerin' after a plough. She wouldn't more 'n half let him. She's a
proud little piece. They're all proud, Quakers is. I never could see no
'poorness of spirit,' come to git at 'em. And they're wonderful clannish,
too. My Luke, he'd a notion he'd like to run the hull concern, Dorothy 'n'
all; but I told him he might's well p'int off. Them Quaker gals don't never
marry out o' meetin'. Besides, the farm's too poor.”
“Good-night, Mr. Jordan,” said Evesham suddenly. “I'm off across lots.” He
leaped the fence, crashed through the alder hedgerow, and disappeared in
the dusky meadow.
Evesham was by no means satisfied with his experiments in planetary
distances. Somewhere, he felt sure, either in his orbit or hers, there
must be a point where Dorothy would be less insensible to the attraction
of atoms in the mass. Thus far she had reversed the laws of the spheres,
and the greater had followed the less. When she had first begun to hold a
permanent place in his thoughts he had invested her with something of that
atmosphere of peace and cool passivity which hedges in the women of her
faith. It had been like a thin, clear glass, revealing her loveliness,
but cutting off the magnetic currents. A young man is not long satisfied
with the mystery his thoughts have woven around the woman who is their
object. Evesham had grown impatient; he had broken the spell of her
sweet remoteness. He had touched her and found her human, deliciously,
distractingly human, but with a streak of that obduracy which history
has attributed to the Quakers under persecution. In vain he haunted the
mill-dam, and bribed the boys with traps and pop-guns, and lingered at the
well-curb to ask Dorothy for water that did not reach his thirst. She was
there in the flesh, with her arms aloft balancing the well-sweep, while he
stooped with his lips at the bucket; but in spirit she was unapproachable.
He felt, with disgust at his own persistence, that she even grudged him the
water. He grew savage and restless, and fretted over the subtle changes
that he counted in Dorothy as the summer waned. She was thinner and paler;
perhaps with the heats of harvest, which had not, indeed, been burdensome
from its abundance. Her eyes were darker and shyer, and her voice more
languid. Was she wearing down with all this work and care? A fierce disgust
possessed him that this sweet life should be cast into the breach between
faith and works.
He did not see that Rachel Barton had changed, too, with a change that
meant more, at her age, than Dorothy's flushings and palings. He did not
miss the mother's bent form from the garden, or the bench by the kitchen
door where she had been used to wash the milk-things.
Dorothy washed the milk-things now, and the mother spent her days in the
sunny east room, between her bed and the easy-chair, where she sat and
mused for hours over the five letters that she had received from her
husband in as many months. The boys had, in a measure, justified their
father's faith in them, since Rachel's illness, and Dorothy was released
from much of her out-door work; but the silence of the kitchen, when she
was there alone with her ironing and dish washing, was a heavier burden
than she had yet known.
Nature sometimes strikes in upon the hopeless monotony of life in remote
farmhouses with one of her phenomenal moods. They come like besoms of
destruction, but they scatter the web of stifling routine; they fling into
the stiffening pool the stone which jars the atoms into crystal.
The storms, that had ambushed in the lurid August skies and circled
ominously round the horizon during the first weeks of September, broke at
last in an equinoctial which was long remembered in the mill-house. It took
its place in the family calendar of momentous dates with the hard winter of
1800, with the late frost that had coated the incipient apples with ice and
frozen the new potatoes in the ground in the spring of '97, and with the
year the typhus had visited the valley.
The rain had been falling a night and a day; it had been welcomed with
thanksgiving, but it had worn out its welcome some hours since, and now the
early darkness was coming on without a lull in the storm. Dorothy and the
two older boys had made the rounds of the farm-buildings, seeing all safe
for the second night. The barns and mill stood on high ground, while the
house occupied the sheltered hollow between. Little streams from the hills
were washing in turbid currents across the lower levels; the waste-weir
roared as in early spring, the garden was inundated, and the meadow
a shallow pond. The sheep had been driven into the upper barn floor:
the chickens were in the corn-bin; and old John and the cows had been
transferred from the stable, that stood low, to the weighing floor of the
mill. A gloomy echoing and gurgling sounded from the dark wheel-chamber
where the water was rushing under the wheel and jarring it with its tumult.
At eight o'clock the woodshed was flooded and water began to creep under
the kitchen door. Dorothy and the boys carried armfuls of wood and stacked
them in the passage to the sitting-room, two steps higher up. At nine
o'clock the boys were sent protesting to bed, and Dorothy, looking out of
their window as she fumbled about in the dark for a pair of Shep's trousers
that needed mending, saw a lantern flickering up the road. It was Evesham
on his way to the mill-dams. The light glimmered on his oilskin coat as he
climbed the stile behind the well-curb.
“He raised the flood-gates at noon,” Dorothy said to herself. “I wonder if
he is anxious about the dams.” She resolved to watch for his return, but
she was busy settling her mother for the night when she heard his footsteps
on the porch. The roar of water from the hills startled Dorothy as she
opened the door; it had increased in violence within an hour. A gust of
wind and rain followed Evesham into the entry.
“Come in,” she said, running lightly across the sitting-room to close the
door of her mother's room.
He stood opposite her on the hearth-rug and looked into her eyes, across
the estrangement of the summer. It was not Dorothy of the mill-head, or
of Slocum's meadow, or the cold maid of the well; it was a very anxious,
lonely little girl in a crumbling old house, with a foot of water in the
cellar and a sick mother in the next room. She had forgotten about Ephraim
and his idols; she picked up Shep's trousers from the rug, where she had
dropped them, and, looking intently at her thimble finger, told him she was
very glad that he had come.
“Did you think I would not come?” said he. “I'm going to take you home with
me, Dorothy,--you and your mother and the boys. It's not fit for you to be
here alone.”
“Does thee know of any danger?”
“I know of none, but water's a thing you can't depend on. It's an ugly
rain; older men than your father remember nothing like it.”
“I shall be glad to have mother go, and Jimmy; the house is very damp. It's
an awful night for her to be out, though.”
“She _must_ go!” said Evesham. “You must all go. I'll be back in half an
hour”--
“_I_ shall not go,” Dorothy said; “the boys and I must stay and look after
the stock.”
“What's that?” Evesham was listening to a trickling of water outside the
door.
“Oh! it's from the kitchen. The door has blown open, I guess.”
Dorothy looked out into the passage; a strong wind was blowing in from the
kitchen, where the water covered the floor and washed against the chimney.
“This is a nice state of things! What's all this wood here for?”
“The woodshed's under water.”
“You must get yourself ready, Dorothy. I'll come for your mother first in
the chaise.”
“I cannot go,” she said. “I don't believe there is any danger. This old
house has stood for eighty years; it's not likely this is the first big
rain in all that time.” Dorothy's spirits had risen. “Besides, I have a
family of orphans to take care of. See here,” she said, stooping over a
basket in the shadow of the chimney. It was the “hospital tent,” and as she
uncovered it, a brood of belated chickens stretched out their thin necks
with plaintive peeps.
Dorothy covered them with her hands and they nestled with comfortable
twitterings into silence.
“You're a kind of special providence, aren't you, Dorothy? But I've no
sympathy with chickens who will be born just in time for the equinoctial.”
“_I_ didn't want them,” said Dorothy, anxious to defend her management.
“The old hen stole her nest and she left them the day before the rain.
She's making herself comfortable now in the corn-bin.”
“She ought to be made an example of; that's the way of the world,
however,--retribution doesn't fall always on the right shoulders. I must go
now. We'll take your mother and Jimmy first, and then, if you _won't_ come,
you shall let me stay with you. The mill is safe enough, anyhow.”
Evesham returned with the chaise and a man, who, he insisted, should drive
away old John and the cows, so that Dorothy should have less care. The
mother was packed into the chaise with a vast collection of wraps, which
almost obliterated Jimmy. As they started, Dorothy ran out in the rain with
her mother's spectacles and the five letters, which always lay in a box on
the table by her bed. Evesham took her gently by the arms and lifted her
back across the puddles to the stoop.
As the chaise drove off, she went back into the sitting-room and crouched
on the rug, her wet hair shining in the firelight. She took out her
chickens one by one and held them under her chin, with tender words and
finger-touches. If September chickens have feelings as susceptible as their
bodies, Dorothy's orphans must have been imperiled by her caresses.
“Look here, Dorothy! Where's my trousers?” cried Shep, opening the door at
the foot of the stairs.
Reuby was behind him, fully arrayed in his own garment aforesaid, and
carrying the bedroom candle.
“Here they are--with a needle in them,” said Dorothy. “What are you getting
up in the middle of the night for?”
“Well, I guess it's time somebody's up. Who's that man driving off our
cows?”
“Goosey! It's Walter Evesham's man. He came for mother and all of us, and
he's taken old John and the cows to save us so much foddering.”
“Ain't we going too?”
“I don't see why we should, just because there happens to be a little water
in the kitchen. I've often seen it come in there before.”
“Well, thee never saw anything like _this_ before--nor anybody else,
either,” said Shep.
“I don't care,” said Reuby, “I wish there'd come a reg'lar flood. We could
climb up in the mill-loft and go sailin' down over Jordan's meadows.
Wouldn't Luke Jordan open that big mouth of his to see us heave in sight
about cock-crow, wing and wing, and the old tackle a-swingin'!”
“Do hush!” said Dorothy. “We may have to try it yet.”
“There's an awful roarin' from our window,” said Shep. “Thee can't half
hear it down here. Come out on the stoop. The old ponds have got their
dander up this time.”
They opened the door and listened, standing together on the low step. There
was, indeed, a hoarse murmur from the hills, which grew louder as they
listened.
“Now she's comin'! There goes the stable-door. There was only one hinge
left, anyway,” said Reuby. “Mighty! Look at that wave!”
It crashed through the gate, swept across the garden and broke at their
feet, sending a thin sheet of water over the floor of the porch.
“Now it's gone into the entry. Why didn't thee shut the door, Shep?”
“Well, I think we'd better clear out, anyhow. Let's go over to the mill.
Say, Dorothy, shan't we?”
“Wait. There comes another wave.”
The second onset was not so violent; but they hastened to gather together
a few blankets, and the boys filled their pockets with cookies, with a
delightful sense of unusualness and peril almost equal to a shipwreck or an
attack by Indians. Dorothy took her unlucky chickens under her cloak, and
they made a rush all together across the road and up the slope to the mill.
“Why didn't we think to bring a lantern?” said Dorothy, as they huddled
together on the platform of the scale. “Will thee go back after one, Shep?”
“If Reuby'll go, too.”
“Well, _my_ legs are wet enough now. What's the use of a lantern? Mighty
Moses! What's that?”
“The old mill's got under way,” cried Shep. “_She's_ going to tune up for
Kingdom Come.”
A furious head of water was rushing along the race; the great wheel creaked
and swung over, and with a shudder the old mill awoke from its long sleep.
The cogs clenched their teeth, the shafting shook and rattled, the stones
whirled merrily round.
“Now she goes it!” cried Shep, as the humming increased to a tremor, and
the tremor to a wild, unsteady din, till the timbers shook and the bolts
and windows rattled. “I just wish father could hear them old stones hum.”
“Oh, this is awful!” said Dorothy. She was shivering and sick with terror
at this unseemly midnight revelry of her grandfather's old mill. It was
as if it had awakened in a fit of delirium, and given itself up to a wild
travesty of its years of peaceful work.
Shep was creeping about in the darkness.
“Look here! We've got to stop this clatter somehow. The stones are hot now.
The whole thing'll burn up like tinder if we can't chock her wheels.”
“Shep! Does thee _mean_ it?”
“Thee'll see if I don't. Thee won't need any lantern either.”
“Can't we break away the race?”
“Oh, there's a way to stop it. There's the tip-trough, but it's downstairs
and we can't reach the pole.”
“I'll go,” said Dorothy.
“It's outside, thee knows. Thee'll get awful wet, Dorothy.”
“Well, I'd just as soon be drowned as burned up. Come with me to the head
of the stairs.”
They felt their way hand in hand in the darkness, and Dorothy went down
alone. She had forgotten about the “tip-trough,” but she understood its
significance. In a few moments a cascade shot out over the wheel, sending
the water far into the garden.
“Right over my chrysanthemum bed,” sighed Dorothy.
The wheel swung slower and slower, the mocking tumult subsided, and the old
mill sank into sleep again.
There was nothing now to drown the roaring of the floods and the steady
drive of the storm.
“There's a lantern,” Shep called from the door. He had opened the upper
half and was shielding himself behind it. “I guess it's Evesham coming back
for us. He's a pretty good sort of a fellow after all; don't thee think so,
Dorothy? He owes us something for drowning us out at the sheep-washing.”
“What does all this mean?” said Dorothy, as Evesham swung himself over the
half-door and his lantern showed them to each other in their various phases
of wetness.
“There's a big leak in the lower dam; I've been afraid of it all along;
there's something wrong in the principle of the thing.”
Dorothy felt as if he had called her grandfather a fraud, and her father
a delusion and a snare. She had grown up in the belief that the mill-dams
were part of Nature's original plan in laying the foundations of the hills;
but it was no time to be resentful, and the facts were against her.
“Dorothy,” said Evesham, as he tucked the buffalo about her, “this is the
second time I've tried to save you from drowning, but you never will wait.
I'm all ready to be a hero, but you won't be a heroine.”
“I'm too practical for a heroine,” said Dorothy. “There! I've forgotten my
chickens.”
“I'm glad of it. Those chickens were a mistake. They oughtn't to be
perpetuated.”
Youth and happiness can stand a great deal of cold water; but it was not to
be expected that Rachel Barton would be especially benefited by her night
journey through the floods. Evesham waited in the hall when he heard the
door of her room open next morning. Dorothy came slowly down the stairs;
he knew by her lingering-step and the softly closed door that she was not
happy.
“Mother is very sick,” she answered his inquiry. “It is like the turn of
inflammation and rheumatism she had once before. It will be very slow,--and
oh, it is such suffering! Why do the best women in the world have to suffer
so?”
“Will you let me talk things over with you after breakfast, Dorothy?”
“Oh yes,” she said, “there is so much to do and think about. I wish father
would come home!”
The tears came into Dorothy's eyes as she looked at him. Rest, such as she
had never known or felt the need of till now, and strength immeasurable,
since it would multiply her own by an unknown quantity, stood within reach
of her hand, but she might not put it out.
Evesham was dizzy with the struggle between longing and resolution. He
had braced his nerves for a long and hungry waiting, but fate had yielded
suddenly; the floods had brought her to him,--his flotsam and jetsam more
precious than all the guarded treasures of the earth. She had come, with
all her girlish, unconscious beguilements, and all her womanly cares and
anxieties too. He must strive against her sweetness, while he helped her to
bear her burdens.
“Now about the boys, Dorothy,” he said, two hours later, as they stood
together by the fire in the low, oak-finished room, which was his office
and book-room. The door was ajar so that Dorothy might hear her mother's
bell. “Don't you think they had better be sent to school somewhere?”
“Yes,” said Dorothy, “they ought to go to school,--but--well, I may as well
tell thee the truth. There's very little to do it with. We've had a poor
summer. I suppose I've managed badly, and mother has been sick a good
while.”
“You've forgotten about the pond-rent, Dorothy.”
“No,” she said, with a quick flush, “I hadn't forgotten it, but I couldn't
_ask_ thee for it.”
“I spoke to your father about monthly payments, but he said better leave
it to accumulate for emergencies. Shouldn't you call this an 'emergency,'
Dorothy?”
“But does thee think we ought to ask rent for a pond that has all leaked
away?”
“Oh, there's pond enough left, and I've used it a dozen times over this
summer. I should be ashamed to tell you, Dorothy, how my horn has been
exalted in your father's absence. However, retribution has overtaken me at
last; I'm responsible, you know, for all the damage last night. It was in
the agreement that I should keep up the dams.”
“Oh!” said Dorothy; “is thee sure?”
Evesham laughed.