ELLEN GLASCOW (continued 3)

He smiled. "Of course; but I'll be happier when we can get away. I can't stand this country. My nerves begin to creep as soon as twilight comes on."

The woods behind them, known to the negroes in slavery days as "Hoot Owl Woods," divided the front of Old Farm from the fallow meadows of Five Oaks, and stretched westward to the Old Stage Road and the gate at the fork. In front of the lovers, looking east, a web of blue air hung over the tobacco field, where the huge plants were turning yellow in the intense heat. Back and forth in the furrows Joshua and Josiah were moving slowly, like giant insects, while they searched for the hidden "suckers" along the thick juicy stalks. Beyond the tobacco field there was a ragged vegetable garden, where the tomatoes were rotting to pulp in the sun, and even the leaves of the corn looked wilted. The air was so breathless that a few languid crows appeared to float like dead things over the parched country.

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

"The trouble is that I can't be with you but a part of the time. There's this worthless practice. I can't give it up, if I'm to keep on in medicine, and yet it means that I must spend half my life jogging over these God-forsaken roads. Then the night!" He shivered with disgust. "If you only knew, and I'm thankful you don't, what it means to be shut up in that house. Some nights my father doesn't sleep at all unless he is drugged into stupor. He wanders about with a horsewhip, looking in every room and closet for something to flog."

While he spoke she had a vision of the house, with its dust and cobwebs, and of the drunken old man, in his nightshirt and bare feet, roaming up and down the darkened staircase. She could see his bleared eyes, his purple face, his skinny legs, like the legs of a turkey gobbler, and his hands, as sharp as claws, lashing out with the horsewhip. The picture was so vivid that, coming in the midst of her dreamy happiness, it sickened her. Why did Jason have to stand horrors like that?

"It can't last much longer," she said. Was it the right thing, she wondered, or ought she to have kept up the pretence of loving the old man and dreading his death? Life would be so much simpler, she reflected, if people would only build on facts, not on shams.

He shook his head. "Nobody can say. Sometimes I think he can't last but a few weeks. Then he improves, without apparent reason, and his strength is amazing. According to everything we know about his condition, he ought to have died months ago; yet he appears to be getting better now instead of worse. I believe it is simply a question of will. He is kept alive by his terror of dying. It's brutal, I know," he added, "to look forward to anybody's death, especially your own father's; but if you only knew how my life is eaten away hour by hour."

"You couldn't make some arrangement?" she asked. "Engage somebody to stay with him, or—or send him away?"

"I've thought of that. God knows I've thought of everything. But he isn't mad, you see. He is as sane as I am except when his craving for whiskey overcomes his fear of death, and he drinks himself into a frenzy. He won't have anybody else with him. I am the only human being who can do anything with him, and strange as it seems, I believe he has some kind of crazy affection for me in his heart. That's why I've put up with him so long. Several times I've been ready to leave, with my bags packed and the buggy at the door, and then he's broken down and wept like a child and begged me not to desert him. He reminds me then that he is dying, and that I promised to stick by him until the end. It's weakness in me to give in, but he broke my will when I was a child, he and my mother between them, and I can't get over the habit of yielding. I may be all wrong. Sometimes I know that I am. But, after all, it was a good impulse that made me promise to stick to him." For an instant he hesitated, and then added bitterly, "I can't tell you how often in life I've seen men betrayed by their good impulses."

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

"I don't know. The truth is I'm in an infernal muddle. After all my medical training, there's a streak of darky superstition somewhere inside of me. You'd think science would have knocked it out, but it hasn't. The fact is that I never really cared a hang about science. I was pushed into medicine, but the only aptitude I have for the profession is one of personality, and the only interest I feel in it is a sentimental pleasure in relieving pain. However, I've kept the superstition all right, and I have a sneaking feeling that if I break my word and desert the old man, it will come back at me in the end."

"But you're a wonderful doctor," she murmured, with her face against his shoulder. "Look at the people you've helped since you've been here."

He laughed without merriment. "That reminds me of the way I used to think I'd bring civilization to the natives. I imagined, when I first came back, that all I had to do was to get people together and tell them how benighted they were, and that they'd immediately want to see wisdom. Do you remember the time I put up notices and opened the schoolhouse, and got only Nathan Pedlar and an idiot boy for an audience? The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of it. Well, that was almost six months ago, and those six months have taught me that any prejudice, even the prejudice in favour of the one-crop system, is a sacred institution. Look at the land!" He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the sun-bleached soil. "Even generations of failure can't teach the farmers about here that it is impossible to make bread out of straw."

"Do you think it is really the way they have treated the land?" she asked. "That's what Nathan is always saying, you know."

"Oh, the curse started with the tenant system, I'll admit. The tenants used the land as a stingy man uses a horse he has hired by the month. But the other farmers, even those who own their farms, are no better now than the tenants. They've worked and starved the land to a skeleton. Yet it's still alive, and it could be brought back to health, if they'd have the sense to treat it as a doctor treats an undernourished human body. Take Nathan Pedlar and James Ellgood. James Ellgood has made one of the best stock farms in the state; and that, by the way, is what this country is best suited for—stock or dairy farms. If I had a little money I could make a first rate dairy farm out of Five Oaks or Old Farm. You've got rich pasture land over the other side, and so have we, down by Whippernock River. It could be made a fine place for cattle, with the long grazing season and the months when cows could live in the open. Yet to suggest anything but the antiquated crop system is pure heresy. The same fields of tobacco that get eaten by worms or killed by frost. The same fields of corn year in and year out—" he broke off impatiently and bent his lips down to hers. "I'm talking you to sleep, Dorrie."

"I like to listen to you," she said, when she had kissed him. "If you tell them over and over, in time they may believe you."

"After I'm dead, perhaps. Hasn't Nathan Pedlar told them again and again? Hasn't he even proved it to them? He's been experimenting with alfalfa, and he's getting four cuttings now off those fields of his; but they think he's a fool because he isn't satisfied with one poor crop of corn."

"I know. Pa doesn't think anything of alfalfa," she answered. "He says Nathan is wasting his time raising a weed that cattle won't touch when it is dry."

"They all talk that way. Half daft, that's what they call anybody who wants to step out of the mud or try a new method. Ezra Flower told me yesterday that Nathan was half daft. No, I want to get away, not to spend my life as a missionary to the broomsedge. I feel already as if it were growing over me and strangling the little energy I ever had. That's the worst of it. If you stay here long enough, the broomsedge claims you, and you get so lazy you cease to care what becomes of you. There's failure in the air."

She remembered what old Matthew had said to her that March afternoon. "If he'd take the advice of eighty-odd years, he'd git away befo' the broomsage ketches him."

Was it true, what the old man believed, that the broomsedge was not only wild stuff, but a kind of fate? Fear, not for herself, but for Jason, stabbed through her.

"You're so easily discouraged," she said tenderly. To her, whose inner life was a part of the country, poverty had been an inevitable condition of living, and to fight had seemed as natural as to suffer or to endure.

"I suppose I am, but I'm made that way. I can't change my temperament," he replied, with a touch of the fatalism he condemned but could not resist.

"Well, I'll help you," she responded cheerfully. "After we are married, everything will be different. I am not afraid of Five Oaks or of anything else as long as I have you."

He was gazing over her head into the bleached distance, and she felt the tightened pressure of his arms about her. "I'd be all right here, even at Five Oaks, if you were with me," he answered. "You put something in me that I need. I don't know what it is—fibre, I suppose, the courage of living." Suddenly his eyes left the landscape and looked down into hers. "What I ought to do," he added impulsively, "is to marry you to-day. We could get the last train to Washington, and be married to-morrow morning before any one knew of it. Would you come if I asked you?"

Her look did not waver. "I'll go anywhere that you ask me to. I'll do anything that will help you," she answered. Her body straightened as if its soft curves were moulded by the vein of iron in her soul.

But his impulse had spent its force in an imaginary flight. "That's what I'd like to do," he said slowly, while his rosy visions were obliterated by the first impact with reality. "But there are so many damned things to consider. There are always so many damned things to consider. First of all there's the money. I haven't got enough to take us away and keep us a week. After Father stopped helping me, I started out on my own hook in New York, and I was just making enough from the hospital to give me a living. I didn't put by a cent, and, of course, since I've been here I've made nothing. Down here the doctor gets paid after the undertaker, or not at all."

"I've got fifty dollars put away," she returned crisply, determined not to be discouraged. "And I don't need money. I've never had any." (How foolish she had been to buy the blue dress when clothes made so little difference!) "After we're married, I can keep on in the store just the same."

He laughed. "Ten dollars a month will hardly keep the fox from the henhouse."

Bending his head he began to kiss her in quick light kisses; then, as his ardour increased, in deeper and longer ones; and at last with a hungry violence. Though her love was the only thing that was vivid to her, she had even now, while she felt his arms about her and his lips seeking hers, the old haunting sense of impermanence, as if the moment, like the perfect hour of the afternoon, were too bright to endure. However much she loved him, she could not sink the whole of herself into emotion; something was left over, and this something watched as a spectator. Ecstasy streamed through her with the swiftness of light; yet she never lost completely the feeling that at any instant the glory might vanish and she might drop back again into the dull grey of existence.

X

When they parted, and she went home along the edge of the tobacco field, the sun was beginning to go down, and from the meadows, veiled in quivering heat, there rose the humming of innumerable insects. The long drought had scorched the leaves of the trees, and even the needles on the pines looked rusty against the metallic blue of the sky. In the fields the summer flowers were dry and brittle, and over the moist places near the spring, clusters of pale blue butterflies, as fragile as flower petals, hung motionless. Only the broomsedge thrived in the furnace of the earth, and sprang up in a running fire over the waste places.

As she went by the tobacco field, her father stopped work, for a moment, and stooped to take a drink of water from the wooden bucket which stood at the end of the furrow. Before she reached him the steaming odour of his body, like that of an overheated ox, floated to her. His face, the colour of red clay, was dripping with sweat, and his shirt of blue jeans, which was open on his broad, hairy chest, was as wet as if he had been swimming. There was nothing human about him, except his fine prophet's head and the humble dignity of one who has kept in close communion with earth and sky. He had known nothing but toil; he had no language but the language of toil.

"Has the drought done much harm, Pa?" she asked.

With the gourd raised to his lips, Joshua looked round at her. "Middlin'," he replied hoarsely because of his parched throat. He had removed his hat while he worked, for fear that the wide brim might bruise the tender leaves of the tobacco; but resting now for a minute, he covered his head again from the bladelike rays of the sun.

"You'll get sunstroke if you go bareheaded," she said anxiously. "The minister was in the store this morning, and he told me that, if the drought doesn't break by the end of the week, he's going to put up prayers for rain in church next Sunday. I wonder if prayer ever brought rain?"

Joshua rolled his eyes toward the implacable sky. "Don't it say so in the Bible, daughter?"

Dorinda nodded, without pursuing the inquiry. "And what the dry weather doesn't spoil, the tobacco-worms will. They were as thick as hops yesterday. It's this way every year unless we have a cool summer; then the tobacco ripens so late that the frost kills it. Why don't you give up tobacco next year and sow this field in peas or corn? Jason says the best method of farming is to change the crop whenever you can."

Having drained the last drop of tepid water, Joshua tilted the gourd bottom upward on the rim of the bucket. "I ain't one fur newfangled ways, honey," he rejoined stubbornly.

He turned back to his work, and Dorinda went on slowly along the dusty path that skirted the field. "If I had my way," she was thinking, "I would do everything differently. I'd try all the crops, one after another, until I found out which was best."

As she approached the house, the mingled scents of drying apples and boiling tomatoes enveloped her; for her mother was working desperately in an effort to save the ripening fruit and vegetables before the sun spoiled them. Boards covered with sliced apples were spread on crude props and decrepit tables, which had been brought out of doors. Above them a crowd of wasps, hornets, flies, and gnats were whirling madly, and every now and then Mrs. Oakley darted out from beneath the scuppernong grapevine and dispersed the delirious swarms with the branch of a locust tree. Though she insisted that the dry weather had "helped her neuralgia," she was suffering now from a sun headache, and could hope for no relief until evening. Her face, with its look of blended physical pain and spiritual ecstasy, was as parched and ravaged as the drought-stricken landscape.

"You got home early to-day, daughter."

"Yes, it was too hot to walk, and Jason came by sooner than usual."

"How does Rose Emily stand the heat?"

"I'm afraid she isn't getting any better," Dorinda's voice trembled. "Jason says she can't last through another bad hæmorrhage."

"And all those children," sighed Mrs. Oakley, pressing one hand over her throbbing eyes and waving the locust branch energetically with the other. "Well, the Lord's ways are past understanding. I wonder if they will ever be able to do anything for that baby's clubfoot."

"I don't know. Jason would like to operate, but Nathan and Rose Emily won't let him. They are afraid it may make it worse. Poor Rose Emily. I don't see how she can be so cheerful."

"It's her faith," said Mrs. Oakley. "She feels she's saved, and she's nothing more to worry about. I'm sorry for Nathan too," she concluded, with the compassion of the redeemed for the heathen. "He's a good man, but he hasn't seen the light like Rose Emily."

"Yes, he's a good man," Dorinda assented, "but I never understood how she could marry him."

Mrs. Oakley dropped the branch, and then picking it up began a more vigorous attack on the cloud of insects. "I declare, it seems to me sometimes that the bugs are going to eat up this place. Did you see your father as you came by?"

"Yes. He was working bareheaded. I told him he would have sunstroke. I wish he would try a different crop next year, but he's so set in his ways."

"Well, it's being set in a rut, I reckon, that keeps him going. If he weren't set, he'd have stopped long ago. You've a mighty high colour, Dorinda. Have you been much in the sun?"

"I walked across from the woods. When we turned in at the red gate I saw Miss Tabitha Snead going up the road in her buggy. Did she stop by to see you?"

"Yes, she brought me a bucket of fresh buttermilk. I've got it in the ice-house with the watermelons, so it will be cold for supper. She told me Geneva Ellgood had gone away for the summer."

"Oh, she went the first of July. I saw her at the station."

Mrs. Oakley's gaze was riveted upon an enterprising hornet that had started out from the crowd and was pursuing a separate investigation of the tomato juice on her hands. While she watched it, she swallowed hard as if her throat were too dry. "Miss Tabitha told me that her brother William went up as far as Washington on the train with Geneva. He's just back last week, and what do you reckon he said Geneva told him on the way up?" She broke off and aimed a fatal blow at the hornet. "What with wasps and bees and hornets and all the thousand and one things that bite and sting," she observed philosophically, "it's hard to understand how the Lord ever had time to think of a pest so small as a seed tick. Yet I believe I'd rather have all the other biting things together. I got some seed ticks on me when I went down to the old spring in the pasture yesterday, and they've been eating me up ever since."

"They are always worse in a drought," Dorinda said, and she asked curiously: "What was it Geneva told Mr. William?"

Mrs. Oakley swallowed again. "Of course I know there ain't a bit of truth in it," she said slowly, as if the words hurt her as she uttered them. "But William says Geneva told him she was engaged to marry Jason Greylock. She said he courted her in New York a year ago."

Dorinda laughed. "Why, how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Miss Tabitha knows we are to be married in October. Hasn't she watched Miss Seena helping me with my sewing? I was spending the evening over there last week and we talked about my marriage. She knows there isn't a word of truth in it."

"Oh, she knows. She said she reckoned Geneva must be crazy. There ain't any harm in it, but I thought maybe I'd better tell you."

"I don't mind," replied Dorinda, and she laughed again, the exultant laugh of youth undefeated. "Ma," she asked suddenly, "did you ever want anything very much in your life?"

Startled out of her stony resignation, Mrs. Oakley let fall the branch, and the spinning swarms descended like a veil over the apples. "I'll have to hang a piece of mosquito netting over these apples," she said. "There's some we used for curtains in the spare room. Well, I told you I'd kind of set my heart on your father," she added in a lifeless tone. "But there's one thing I can tell you, daughter, mighty few folks in this world ever get what they want."

"Oh, I mean before you knew Pa, when you were a girl. Didn't you ever feel that there was only one thing in the world that could make you happy?"

Mrs. Oakley pondered the question. "I reckon like most other people I was afraid of the word happiness," she replied. "But when I was just a girl, not more than sixteen or seventeen, I felt the call to be a missionary, and I wanted it, I s'pose, more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. I reckon it started with my favourite hymn, the missionary one. Even as a little child I used to think and dream about India's coral strand and Afric's sunny fountains. That was why I got engaged to Gordon Kane. I wasn't what you'd call in love with him; but I believed the Lord had intended me for work in foreign fields, and it seemed, when Gordon asked me to marry him, that an opportunity had been put in my way. I had my trunk all packed to go to the Congo to join him. I was just folding up my wedding-dress of white organdie when they broke the news to me of his death." She gasped and choked for a moment. "After that I put the thought of the heathen out of my mind," she continued when she had recovered her breath. "Your great-grandfather said I was too young to decide whether I had a special vocation or not, and then before I came out of mourning, I met your father, and we were married. For a while I seemed to forget all about the missionary call; but it came back just before Josiah was born, and I've had it ever since whenever I'm worried and feel that I'll have to get away from things, or go clean out of my mind. Then I begin to have that dream about coral strands and palm trees and ancient rivers and naked black babies thrown to crocodiles. When it first came I tried to drive it away by hard work, and that was the way I got in the habit of working to rest my mind. I was so afraid folks would begin to say I was unhinged."

"Does it still come back?" asked the girl.

"Sometimes in my sleep. When I'm awake I never think of it now, except on missionary Sunday when we sing that hymn."

"That's why you enjoy sermons about the Holy Land and far-off places."

"I used to know all those pictures by heart in your great-grandfather's books about Asia and Africa. It was a wild streak in me, I reckon," she conceded humbly, "but with the Lord's help, I've managed to stamp it out."

A missionary, her mother! For more than forty years this dark and secret river of her dream had flowed silently beneath the commonplace crust of experience. "I wonder if there is any of that wildness in me?" thought the girl, with a sensation of fear, as if the invisible flood were rushing over her.

"Did you ever tell Pa?" she asked.

Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I never told anybody when I was in my right mind. I don't believe in telling men more than you're obliged to. After all, it was nobody's fault the way things turned out," she added, with scrupulous justice. "I'm going in now to get that mosquito netting. There's your father coming. I reckon he'd like a drink of fresh water from the well."

Following her mother's glance, Dorinda saw her father's bowed figure toiling along the path on the edge of the vegetable garden. Far beyond him, where a field had been abandoned because it contained a gall, where nothing would grow, she could just discern the scalloped reaches of the broomsedge, rippling, in the lilac-coloured distance, like still water at sunset. Yes, old Matthew was right. What the broomsedge caught, it never relinquished.

Lifting the wooden bucket from the shelf on the back porch, she poured the stale water over a thin border of portulaca by the steps, and started at a run for the well. By the time Joshua had reached the house, she had brought the bucket of sparkling water, and had a gourd ready for him.

"You must be worn out, Pa. Don't you want a drink?"

"That I do, honey." He took the gourd from her, and raised it to his bearded lips where the sweat hung in drops. "Powerful hot, ain't it?"

"It's scorching. And you've been up since before day. I'll hunt worms for you to-morrow." She was thinking, while she spoke, that her father was no longer young, and that he should try to spare himself. But she knew that it was futile to remind him of this. He had never spared himself in her memory, and he would not begin now just because he was old. The pity of it was that, even if he wore himself out in the effort to save his crop from the drought or the worms, there was still the possibility that the first killing frost would come too soon and inflict as heavy a damage.

He shook his head with a chuckle of pride. "Thar's no use yo' spilin' yo' hands. I've hired a parcel of Uncle Toby Moody's little niggers to hunt 'em in the mornin'. If they kill worms every day till Sunday, I've promised 'em the biggest watermelon I've got in the ice-house."

Before going on to feed the horses, he stopped to wash his face in the tin basin on the back porch. "I declar' I must be gittin' on," he remarked cheerfully. "I've got shootin' pains through all my j'ints."

This was nearer a complaint than any speech she had ever heard from him, and she looked at him anxiously while he dried his face on the roller towel. "You ought to take things more easily, Pa. The way you work is enough to kill anybody."

"Wall, I'll take my ease when the first snow falls," he responded jocosely.

"But you won't. You work just as hard in winter."

"Is that so?" He appeared genuinely surprised. "I never calculated! The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver."

"And a good steed, they say," she answered. "If you could only get the better of it."

He smiled wistfully, and she watched the clay-coloured skin above his thick beard break into diverging fissures. "We've got to wait for that, I reckon, till my ship comes in. It takes money to get money, daughter."

While he trudged away to the stable, Dorinda went up to her room and changed into a pink gingham dress which Rose Emily had given her a year ago. The flower-like colour tinged her face when she came downstairs and found her mother, who had dropped from exhaustion, in a rocking-chair on the front porch.

"I felt as if I couldn't stand the kitchen a minute longer." Mrs. Oakley glanced wearily at her daughter over the palm leaf fan she was waving. "You ain't going out before supper, Dorinda?" Her damp hair looked as if it had been plastered over her skull, and in the diminishing light her pallid features resembled a waxen mask.

"I can't wait for supper," the girl replied. "I've promised to meet Jason over by Gooseneck Creek."

"Well, don't stay out too long after dark. The night air ain't healthy."

Dorinda laughed. "Jason says that's as much a superstition as the belief that Aunt Mehitable can make cows go dry. But I shan't be late. Jason can't stay out long at night, unless somebody is dying, and then he gets one of the field hands to sleep in the house. It must be terrible over at Five Oaks."

"I ain't easy in my mind about your living there with that old man, daughter. He's been a notorious sinner as far back as I can recollect, though he was a good enough doctor till he went half crazy from drink. But even before his wife died, he kept that bright yellow girl, Idabella, living over there in the old wing of the house. And he's not only as hard as nails," she concluded, with final condemnation, "he's close-fisted as well."

"Poor Jason can't help his father's sins," Dorinda rejoined loyally. "After all, it's worse on him than it is on anybody else." As she turned away from the flagged walk, she resolved that the dissolute old man should not spoil her happiness.

Her path led by the pear orchard, past the vegetable garden, which was fenced off from the tobacco field, and continued in an almost obliterated track through the feathery plumes of the broomsedge. At the end of the barren acres the thin edge of Hoot Owl Woods began, and after she had passed this, there would be only a stretch of sandy road between her and the creek. By the willows she knew the air would be fresh and moist, and she knew also that Jason was waiting for her in the tall blue-eyed grasses.

She went slowly along the path, in a mood so pensive that it might have been merely a reflection of the summer trance. The vagrant breeze, which had roamed for a few minutes at sunset, had died down again with the afterglow. Heat melted like colour into the distance. Not a blade of grass trembled; the curled leaves on the pear trees were limp and heavy; even the white turkeys, roosting in a solitary oak near the orchard, were as motionless as if they were under a spell. As far as she could see there was not a stir or quiver in the landscape, and the only sounds that jarred the leaden silence were the monotonous chirping of the locusts, the discordant croak of a tree-frog, and the staccato shrieks of the little negroes hunting tobacco-flies.

The sun had gone down long ago, and the western sky was suffused with the transparent yellow-green of August evenings. All the light on the earth had vanished, except the faint glow that was still cast upwards by the broomsedge. Wave by wave, that symbol of desolation encroached in a glimmering tide on the darkened boundaries of Old Farm. It was the one growth in the landscape that thrived on barrenness; the solitary life that possessed an inexhaustible vitality. To fight it was like fighting the wild, free principle of nature. Yet they had always fought it. They had spent their force for generations in the futile endeavour to uproot it from the soil, as they had striven to uproot all that was wild and free in the spirit of man.

At the edge of the woods she paused and looked back. There would be light enough later, for the golden rim of a moon, paling as it ascended, was visible through the topmost branches of the big pine in the graveyard. While she stood there she was visited by a swift perception, which was less a thought than a feeling, and less a feeling than an intuitive recognition, that she and her parents were products of the soil as surely as were the scant crops and the exuberant broomsedge. Had not the land entered into their souls and shaped their moods into permanent or impermanent forms? Less a thought than a feeling; but she went on more rapidly toward the complete joy of the moment in which she lived.

XI

On the first Sunday in October, Dorinda came out on the porch, with old Rambler at her side, and looked over the road and the pasture to the frowning sky. The range of clouds, which had huddled all the afternoon above the western horizon, was growing darker, and there was a slow pulsation, like the quiver of invisible wings, in the air. While she stood there, she wondered if the storm would overtake her before she reached Whistling Spring.

"I think I'll risk it," she decided at last. "It's looked this way for hours, and it won't hurt me to get wet."

For days she had felt disturbed, and she told herself that her anxiety had sprung from a definite cause, or, if not from a definite cause,—well, at least from a plausible reason. Jason had been away for two weeks, and she had had only one letter. He had promised to write every day, and she had heard from him once. More than this, when he left, against his father's wish, he had expected to stay only a week, and the added days had dragged on without explanation. Of course there were a dozen reasons why he should not have written. He had gone to select surgical instruments, and it was probable that he had been kept busy by professional matters. Her heart made excuses. She repeated emphatically that there was no need for her to worry; but, in spite of this insistence, it was useless, she found, to try to argue herself out of a condition of mind. The only thing was to wait as patiently as she could for his return. They were to be married in a week; and the hours before and after her work at the store were spent happily over her sewing. Mrs. Oakley had neglected her other work in order to help her daughter with her wedding clothes, and the drawers in Dorinda's walnut bureau were filled with white, lace-edged garments, made daintily, with fine, even stitches, by her mother's rheumatic fingers.

"I shouldn't be satisfied if you didn't have things to start with like other girls," Mrs. Oakley had remarked, while she pinned a paper pattern to a width of checked muslin. "I don't want that old doctor to say his son is marrying a beggar."

"Well, Jason won't say that," Dorinda had protested. "It would cost less if I were married in my blue nun's veiling; but Miss Seena thinks a figured challis would be more suitable."

"Well, I reckon Miss Seena knows," Mrs. Oakley had agreed. "It ain't lucky not to have a new dress to be married in, and though I don't set a bit of store by superstition, it won't do any harm not to run right up against it." Glancing round at her daughter, she had continued in a tone of anxiety: "Ain't you feeling well, daughter? You've been looking right peaked the last day or two, and I noticed you didn't touch any breakfast."

"Oh, I'm all right," Dorinda had responded. "I've been worrying about not hearing from Jason, that's all." As she answered, she had turned away and dropped into a chair. "I've been bending over all day," she had explained, "and the weather has been so sultry. It makes me feel kind of faint."

"Take a whiff of camphor," Mrs. Oakley had advised. "There's the bottle right there on the bureau. I get a sinking every now and then myself, so I like to have it handy. But there ain't a bit of use worrying yourself sick about Jason. It ain't much more than two weeks since he went away."

"Two weeks to-morrow, but I haven't heard since the day after he left. I am worried for fear something has happened."

"Your father could ask the old doctor?"

Frowning over the bottle of camphor, Dorinda had pondered the suggestion. "No, he doesn't like us," she had replied at last. "I doubt if he'd tell us anything. Jason told me once he wanted him to marry Geneva Ellgood."

"You might send a telegram," Mrs. Oakley had offered as the final resource of desperation.

Dorinda had flushed through her pallor. "I did yesterday, but there hasn't been any answer." After a minute's reflection, she had added, "If it's a good day to-morrow, I think I'll walk down to Whistling Spring in the evening and see Aunt Mehitable Green. Her daughter Jemima works over at Five Oaks, and she may have heard something."

"Then you'd better start right after dinner, and you can get back before dark," Mrs. Oakley had returned. The word "afternoon" was never used at Pedlar's Mill, and any hour between twelve o'clock and night was known as "evening."

That was yesterday, and standing now on the front porch, Dorinda considered the prospect. Scorched and blackened by the long summer, the country was as bare as a conquered province after the march of an invader. "I'll start anyway," she repeated, and turning, she called out, "Ma, is there anything I can take Aunt Mehitable?"

"Doesn't it look as if it were getting ready to rain, Dorinda?"

"I don't care. If it does, I'll stop somewhere until it is over."

Entering the hall, the girl paused on the threshold of the room where her mother sat reading her Bible.

"Where would you stop?" Mrs. Oakley was nothing if not definite. "There ain't anybody living on that back road between Five Oaks and Whistling Spring. It makes me sort of nervous for you to walk down there by yourself, Dorinda. Can't you get Rufus to go with you?"

"No, he's gone over to see the Garlick girls, and I don't want him anyway. I'd rather walk down by myself. Anybody I'd meet on the road would know who I am. I see them all at the store. May I take a piece of the molasses pudding we had for dinner?"

"Yes, there's some left in the cupboard. I was saving it for Rufus, but you might as well take it. Then there are the last scuppernong grapes on the shelf. Aunt Mehitable was always mighty fond of scuppernong grapes."

Going into the kitchen, Dorinda put the molasses pudding into the little willow basket, and then, covering it with cool grape leaves, laid the loose grapes on top. A slip of the vine had been given to her great-grandfather by a missionary from Mexico, and had grown luxuriantly at Old Farm, clambering over the back porch to the roof of the house. It was a peculiarity of the scuppernong that the large, pale grapes were not gathered in a bunch, but dropped grape by grape, as they ripened. "Is there any message you want to send Aunt Mehitable?" she asked, returning through the hall.

On a rag carpet in the centre of her spotless floor, Mrs. Oakley rocked slowly back and forth while she read aloud one of the Psalms. It was the only time during the week that she let her body relax; and now that the whip of nervous energy was suspended, her face looked old, grey, and hopeless. The dreary afternoon light crept through the half-closed shutters, and a large blue fly buzzed ceaselessly, with a droning sound, against the ceiling.

"Tell her my leg still keeps poorly," she said, "and if she's got any more of that black liniment, I'd be glad of a bottle. You ain't so spry, to-day yourself, daughter."

"I got tired sitting in church," the girl answered, "but the walk will make me feel better."

"Be sure you come back if you hear thunder. I don't like your setting out in the face of a storm. Can you take Rambler?"

"No, he's old and rheumatic, and it's too far. But I'm all right." Without waiting for more advice or remonstrance, Dorinda hastened through the hall and out of the house.

For the first quarter of a mile, before she reached the red gate at the fork and turned into the sandy road leading to Five Oaks, her naturally level spirits drooped under an unusual weight of depression. Then, as she lifted the bar and passed through the gate, she felt that the solitude, which had always possessed a mysterious sympathy with her moods, reached out and received her into itself. Like a beneficent tide, the loneliness washed over her, smoothing out, as it receded, the vague apprehensions that had ruffled her thoughts. The austere horizon, flat and impenetrable beneath the threatening look of the sky; the brown and yellow splashes of woods in the October landscape; the furtive windings and recoils of the sunken road; the perturbed murmur and movement of the broomsedge, so like the restless inlets of an invisible sea,—all these external objects lost their inanimate character and became as personal, reserved, and inscrutable as her own mind. So sensitive were her perceptions, while she walked there alone, that the wall dividing her individual consciousness from the consciousness of nature vanished with the thin drift of woodsmoke over the fields.

The road sank gradually to Gooseneck Creek and then ascended as evenly to the grounds of Five Oaks. To reach the back road by the short cut, which saved her a good mile and a half, she was obliged to pass between the house and the barn, where she caught a glimpse of the old doctor and heard the sound of a gun fired at intervals. He was shooting, she surmised, at a chicken hawk, which was hovering low over the barnyard. Why, she wondered, with all the heavens and the earth around him, had he placed the stoop-shouldered rustic barn within call of the dwelling house? The ice-house, three-cornered and red, like all the buildings on the place, was so near the front porch that one might almost have tossed the lumps of ice into the hall. Though the red roof, chimneys, and outbuildings produced, at a distance, an effect of gaiety, she felt that the colour would become oppressive on hot summer afternoons. Dirt, mildew, decay everywhere! White turkeys that were discoloured by mould. Chips, trash, broken bottles littering the yard and the back steps, which were rotting to pieces. Windows so darkened by dust and cobwebs that they were like eyes blurred by cataract. Several mulatto babies crawling, like small, sly animals, over the logs at the woodpile. "Poor Jason," she thought. "No wonder his nerves are giving way under the strain."

She followed the path between the house and the barn, and then, crossing an old cornfield, turned into the back road, which led, through thick woods, to Whistling Spring and Whippernock River. After she had lost sight of the house, she came up with old Matthew Fairlamb, who was trudging sturdily along, with his hickory stick in his hand and a small bundle, tied up in a bandanna handkerchief, swinging from his right arm.

"Are you on your way to see William?" she inquired as she joined him, for she knew that his son William lived a mile away, on one of the branch roads that led through to the station. "You must have come quite a distance out of your way."

Old Matthew wagged his knowing head. "That's right, gal, I'm gittin' along to William's now," he replied. "I took dinner over to John Appleseed's, that's why you find me trampin' through Five Oaks. Ain't you goin' too fur from home, honey? Thar's a storm brewin' over yonder in the west, and it'll most likely ketch you."

"I'm going down to Whistling Spring," Dorinda replied, falling into step at his side.

He smacked his old lips. "Then you'll sholy be caught," he rejoined, with sour pleasure. "It's a matter of five miles or so, ain't it?"

"That's by the long road. It isn't over four by the short cut through Five Oaks."

"Thar ain't nobody but the niggers livin' down by Whistling Spring."

"I'm going down to see Aunt Mehitable Green. She nursed Ma when she was sick."

"I recollect her." Old Matthew wagged again. "She conjured some liver spots off the face of my son's wife. They used to say she was the best conjure woman anywhar round here."

"I know the darkeys are still afraid of her," Dorinda returned. "But she was good to me when I was little, and I don't believe anything bad about her."

"Mebbe not, mebbe not," old Matthew assented. "Anyhow, if she's got a gift with moles an' warts, thar can't nobody blame her fur practisin' it. How's yo' weddin' gittin' on, honey? By this time next week you'll be an old married woman, won't you?"

Dorinda blushed. "It's hard for me to realize it."

"Jason's gone away, ain't he?"

"Yes, he went to New York to buy some instruments."

"It's a mortal wonder his Pa let him. I hear he keeps as tight a rein on him as if he'd never growed up. Wall, wall, he didn't ax the advice of eighty-odd years. But, mark my words, he'll live to regret the day he come back to Five Oaks."

"But what else could he do?" the girl protested loyally. "His father needed him."

Old Matthew broke into a sly cackle. "Oh, he'll larn, he'll larn. I ain't contendin'. He's a pleasant-mannered youngster, an' I wish you all the joy of him you desarve. You ain't heerd from Geneva Ellgood sence she went away, have you?"

"Oh, no. She never writes to me."

"I kind of thought she might have. But to come back to Jason, he's got everything you want in a man except the one quality that counts with the land."

"You speak as if Jason lacked character," she said resentfully.

"Wall, if he's got it, you'll know it soon," rejoined the disagreeable old man, "and if he ain't got it, you'll know it sooner. I ain't contendin'. It don't pay to contend when you're upwards of eighty." He rolled the words of ill omen like a delicate morsel on his tongue. "This here is my turnout, honey. Look sharp that you don't git a drenchin'."

They nodded in the curt fashion of country people, and the old man tramped off, spitting tobacco juice in the road, while Dorinda hurried on into the deepening gloom of the woods. She was glad to be free of old Matthew. He was more like an owl than ever, she thought, with his ominous who-who-whoee.

Here alone in the woods, with the perpetually moist clay near the stream underfoot, the thick tent of arching boughs overhead, the aromatic smell of dampness and rotting leaves in her nostrils, she felt refreshed and invigorated. After all, why was she anxious? She was securely happy. She was to be married in a week. She knew beyond question, beyond distrust, that Jason loved her. For three months she had lived in a state of bliss so supreme that, like love, it had created the illusion of its own immortality. Yes, for three months she had been perfectly happy.

Above, the leaves rustled. Through the interlacing boughs she could see the grey sky growing darker. The warm scents of the wood were as heavy as perfumed smoke.

Presently the trees ended as abruptly as they had begun, and she came out into the broomsedge which surrounded the negro settlement of Whistling Spring. A narrow path led between rows of log cabins, each with its patchwork square of garden, and its clump of gaudy prince's feather or cockscomb by the doorstep. Aunt Mehitable's cabin stood withdrawn a little; and when Dorinda reached the door, there was a mutter of thunder in the clouds, though the storm was still distant and a silver light edged the horizon. On the stone step a tortoise-shell cat lay dozing, and a little to one side of the cabin the smouldering embers of a fire blinked like red eyes under an iron pot, which hung suspended from a rustic crane made by crossing three sticks.

In response to the girl's knock on the open door, the cat arched its back in welcome, and the old negress came hurriedly out of the darkness inside, wiping her hands on her blue gingham apron. She took Dorinda in her arms, explaining, while she embraced her, that she had just heated some water to make a brew of herbs from her garden.

"Dar ain' no use kindlin' a fire inside er de cabin twell you're obleeged ter," she remarked. "You ain' lookin' so peart, honey. I've got a bottle of my brown bitters put away fur yo' Ma, en you ax 'er ter gin you a dose de fust thing ev'y mawnin'. Yo' Ma knows about'n my brown bitters daze she's done tuck hit, erlong wid my black liniment. Hit'll take erway de blue rings unner yo' eyes jes' ez sho', en hit'll fill yo' cheeks right full er roses agin."

"I've been worrying," said the girl, sitting down in the chair the old woman brought. "It's taken my appetite, and made me feel as if I dragged myself to the store and back every day. Isn't it funny what worry can do to you, Aunt Mehitable?"

"Dat 'tis, honey, dat 'tis."

"I get dizzy too, when I bend over. You haven't got any camphor about, have you?"

Aunt Mehitable hastened into the cabin, and brought out a bottle of camphor. "Yo' Ma gun me dat' de ve'y las' time I wuz at Ole Farm," she said, removing the stopper, and handing the bottle to Dorinda. "Hit's a long walk on dis heah peevish sort of er day. You jes' set en res' wile I git you a swallow uv my blackberry cord'al. Dar ain't nuttin' dat'll pick you up quicker'n blackberry cord'al w'en it's made right."

Going indoors again, she came out with the blackberry cordial in a ruby wineglass which had once belonged to the Cumberlands. "Drink it down quick, en you'll feel better right befo' you know hit. Huccome you been worryin', chile, w'en yo is gwineter be mah'ed dis time nex' week?" she inquired abruptly.

"I'm afraid something has happened," Dorinda said. "Jason has been away two weeks, and I haven't had a word since the day after he left. I thought you might have heard something from Jemima."

The old woman mumbled through toothless gums. She was wearing a bandanna handkerchief wrapped tightly about her head, and beneath it a few grey-green wisps of hair straggled down to meet the dried grass of her eyebrows. Her face was so old that it looked as if the flesh had been polished away, and her features shone like black lacquer where the light struck them.

"Naw'm, I ain't heerd nuttin'," she replied, "but I'se done been lookin' fur you all de evelin'. Dar's a lil' bird done tole me you wuz comin'," she muttered mysteriously.

"I wasn't sure of it myself till just before I started."

"I knowed, honey, I knowed," rejoined Aunt Mehitable, leaning against the smoke-blackened pine by her doorstep, while she fixed her bleared, witchlike gaze on the girl. There was the dignity in her demeanour that is inherent in all simple, profound, and elemental forces. The pipe she had taken out of the pocket of her apron was in her mouth, but the stem was cold and she mumbled over it without smoking. With her psychic powers, which were a natural endowment, she combined a dramatic gift that was not uncommon among the earlier generations of negroes. In another century Aunt Mehitable would have been either a mystic philosopher or a religious healer.

"Can you really see things, Aunt Mehitable?" Dorinda inquired, impressed but not convinced.

Aunt Mehitable grunted over her smokeless pipe. "Mebbe I kin en mebbe I cyan't."

"They say you can tell about the future?"

"Hi!" the old negress exclaimed, and continued with assumed indifference. "Dey sez I kin do a heap mo'n I kin do. But I ain' steddyin' about'n dat, honey. I knows w'at I knows. I kin teck moles en warts en liver spots off'n you twell you is jes' ez smooth ez de pa'm er my han', en ern ennybody's done put a conjure ball ovah yo' do' er th'owed a ring on de grass fur you to walk in, I kin tell you whar you mus' go ter jump ovah runnin' water. Ern you is in enny trubble, honey, hit's mos' likely I kin teck hit erway. Is you stuck full er pins an' needles in yo' legs an' arms, jes' lak somebody done th'owed a spell on you?"

"No, it isn't that," answered Dorinda. "I came because I thought you might have heard something from Jemima. I'd better be starting back now. I want to get home, if I can, before the storm breaks——"

She had risen to her feet, and was turning to look at the clouds in the west, when the broomsedge plunged forward, like a raging sea, and engulfed her. She felt the pain and dizziness of the blow; she heard the thunder of the waves as they crashed together; and she saw the billows, capped with spray-ike plumes, submerging the cabin, the fields, the woods, and the silver crescent of the horizon.

When she came to herself, it was an hour, a day, or a year afterwards. She was still on the bare ground, beneath the blackened pine, in front of Aunt Mehitable's cabin. The tortoise-shell cat still dozed on the step. The dying embers still blinked under the hanging pot. There was a pungent smell in her nostrils, as the old woman splashed camphor over her forehead. Her consciousness was struggling through the fumes which saturated her brain.

"Dar now, honey. Don't you worry. Hit's all right," crooned Aunt Mehitable, bending above her.

Dorinda sat up slowly, and looked round her. "I believe I fainted," she said. "I never fainted before." The roar of far-off waters was still in her ears.

The old woman held out the ruby wineglass, which she had refilled. "Hit's all right, honey, hit's all right."

"It came on so suddenly." Dorinda pushed the glass away after she had obediently swallowed a few sips. "It was exactly like dying; but I'm well now. The walk must have been too long on a sultry day."

"Don't you worry, caze hit's gwineter be all right," crooned Aunt Mehitable. "I'se done axed de embers en hit's gwineter be all right." The magnetic force emanating from the old negress enveloped the girl, and she abandoned herself to it as to a mysterious and terrible current of wisdom. How did Aunt Mehitable know things before other people? she wondered. She shivered in the warm air, and laid her head on the wizened shoulder. Of course no one believed in witches any longer; but there was something queer in the way she could look ahead and tell fortunes.

"Befo' de week's up you is gwineter be mah'ed," muttered the old woman, "en dar ain't a livin' soul but Aunt Mehitable gwineter know dat de chile wuz on de way sooner——"

"I—" Dorinda began sharply. Rising quickly to her feet, she stood looking about her like a person who has been dazzled by a flash of lightning. She was bewildered, but she was less bewildered than she had been for the last three months. In the illumination of that instant a hundred mysteries were made plain; but her dominant feeling was one of sharp awakening from a trance. Swift and savage, animal terror clutched at her heart. Where was Jason? Suppose he was dead! Suppose he was lost to her! The longing to see him, the urgent need of his look, of his touch, of his voice, shuddered through her like a convulsion. It seemed to her that she could not live unless she could feel the reassuring pressure of his arms and hear the healing sound of her name on his lips.

"I must go back," she said. "I'll come again, Aunt Mehitable, but I must hurry before the storm."

Breaking away from the old woman's arms, she walked rapidly, as if she were flying before the approaching storm, through the acres of broomsedge to the road by which she had come.

XII

On either side of the road the trees grew straight and tall, and overhead the grey arch of sky looked as if it were hewn out of rock. The pines were dark as night, but the oaks, the sweet gums, the beeches, and hickories were turning slowly, and here and there the boughs were brushed with wine-colour or crimson. Far away, she could hear the rumble of the storm, and it seemed to her that the noise and burden of living marched on there at an immeasurable distance. Within the woods there was the profound silence of sleep. Nothing but the occasional flutter of a bird or stir of a small animal in the underbrush disturbed the serenity. The oppressive air stifled her, and she felt that her breath, like the movement of the wind, was suspended.

"If I don't hurry, I shall never get out of the woods," she thought. "I ought not to have come."

Forgetting the attack of faintness, she quickened her steps into a run, and stumbled on over the wheel ruts in the road, which was scarcely wider than a cart track. For a while this stillness was so intense that she felt as if it were palpitating in smothered throbs like her heart. The storm was gathering on another planet. So remote it was that the slow reverberations were echoed across an immensity of silence. The first mile was past. Then the second. With the ending of the third, she knew that she should come out into the pasture and the old cornfield at Five Oaks.

Presently a few withered leaves fluttered past her, flying through the narrow tunnel of the woods toward the clearer vista ahead. Immediately round her the atmosphere was still motionless. Like an alley in a dream the road, stretched, brown, dim, monotonous, between the tall trees; and this alley seemed to her unutterably sad, strewn with dead leaves and haunted by an autumnal taint of decay. The fear in her own mind had fallen like a blight on her surroundings, as if the external world were merely a shadow thrown by the subjective processes within her soul.

Suddenly, without nearer warning, the storm broke. A streak of white fire split the sky, and the tattered clouds darkened to an angry purple. The wind, which had been chained at a distance, tore itself free with a hurtling noise and crashed in gusts through the tree-tops. Overhead, she heard the snapping of branches, and when she glanced back, it seemed to her that the withered leaves had gathered violence in pursuit, and were whirling after her like a bevy of witches. As she came out of the shelter of the trees, the stream of wind and leaves swept her across the cornfield, with the patter of rain on her shoulders. Where the road turned, she saw the red barn and the brick dwelling of Five Oaks, and in obedience to the wind rather than by the exercise of her own will, she was driven over the field and the yard to the steps of the back porch. Her first impression was that the place was deserted; and running up the steps, she sank into one of the broken chairs on the porch, and shook the water from her hat while she struggled for breath. On the roof of the house the rain was beating in drops as hard as pebbles. She heard it thundering on the shingles; she saw it scattering the chips and straws by the woodpile, and churning the puddles in the walk until they foamed with a yeasty scum. The sky was shrouded now in a crape-like pall, and where the lightning ripped open the blackness, the only colour was that jagged stain of dull purple. "I'm wet already," she thought. "In another minute I'd have been soaked through to the skin." Turning her head, she looked curiously at the home of her lover.

The thought in her mind was, "You could tell no woman lived here. When I get the chance, it won't take me long to make things look different." With the certainty that this "chance" would one day be hers, she forgot her anxiety and fatigue, and a thrill of joy eased her heart. Yes, things would be different when she and Jason lived here together and little children played under the great oaks in the grove. Her fingers "itched," as she said to herself, to clean up the place and make it tidy without and within. A rivulet of muddy water was pouring round the corner of the house, wearing a channel in the gravelled walk, which was littered with rubbish. Beside the porch there was a giant box-bush, beneath which several bedraggled white turkeys had taken shelter. She could see them through the damp twilight of the boughs, shaking drenched feathers or scratching industriously in the rank mould among the roots.

Leaning back in her wet clothes, against the splints of the chair, which sagged on one rocker, she glanced about her at the refuse that overflowed from the hall. The porch looked as if it had not been swept for years. There was a pile of dusty bagging in one corner, and, scattered over the floor, she saw a medley of oil cans, empty cracker boxes and whiskey bottles, loose spokes of cart wheels, rolls of barbed wire, and stray remnants of leather harness. "How can any one live in such confusion?" she thought. Through the doorway, she could distinguish merely a glimmer of light on the ceiling, from which the plaster was dropping, and the vague shape of a staircase, which climbed, steep and slender, to the upper story. It was a fairly good house of its period, the brick dwelling, with ivy-encrusted wings, which was preferred by the more prosperous class of Virginia farmers. The foundation of stone had been well laid; the brick walls were stout and solid, and though neglect and decay had overtaken it, the house still preserved, beneath its general air of deterioration, an underlying character of honesty and thrift. Turning away, she gazed through the silver mesh of rain, past the barn and the stable, to the drenched pasture, where a few trees rocked back and forth, and a flock of frightened sheep huddled together. Where were the farm labourers, she wondered? What had become of Jemima, who, Aunt Mehitable had said, was still working here? Two men living alone must keep at least one woman servant. Had the storm thrown a curse of stagnation over the place, and made it incapable of movement or sound? She could barely see the sky for the slanting rain, which drove faster every minute. Was she the only living thing left, except the cowering sheep in the pasture and the dripping white turkeys under the box-bush?

While she was still asking the question, she heard a shuffling step in the hall behind her, and looking hastily over her shoulder, saw the figure of the old man blocking the doorway. For an instant his squat outline, blurred between the dark hall and the sheets of rain, was all that she distinguished. Then he lurched toward her, peering out of the gloom. Yesterday, she would have run from him in terror. Before her visit to Whistling Spring she would have faced the storm rather than the brooding horror at Five Oaks. But the great fear had absorbed the small fears as the night absorbs shadows. Nothing mattered to her if she could only reach Jason.

"Come in, come in," the old doctor was mumbling, with a dreary effort at hospitality.

He held out his palsied hand, and all the evil rumours she had heard since he had given up his practice and buried himself at Five Oaks rushed into her mind. It must be true that he had always been a secret drinker, and that the habit had taken possession now of his faculties. Though she had known him all her life, the change in him was so startling that she would scarcely have recognized him. His once robust figure was wasted and flabby, except for his bloated paunch, which hung down like a sack of flour; his scraggy throat protruding from the bristles of his beard reminded the girl of the neck of a buzzard; his little fiery eyes, above inflamed pouches of skin, flickered and shone, just as the smouldering embers had flickered and shone under Aunt Mehitable's pot. And from these small bloodshot eyes something sly and secretive and malignant looked out at her. Was this, she wondered, what whiskey and his own evil nature could do to a man?

"I am on my way back from Whistling Spring," she explained, while she struggled against the repulsion he aroused in her. "The storm caught me just as I reached here."

He smirked with his bloodless old lips, which cracked under the strain. "Eh? Eh?" he chuckled, cupping his ear in his hand. Then catching hold of her sleeve, he pulled her persuasively toward the doors "Come in, come in," he urged. "You're wet through. I've kindled a bit of fire to dry my boots, and it's still burning. Come in, and dry yourself before you take cold from the wetting."

Still clutching her, he stumbled into the hall, glancing uneasily back, as if he feared that she might slip out of his grasp. On the right a door stood ajar, and a few knots of resinous pine blazed, with a thin blue light, in the cavernous fireplace. As he led her over the threshold, she noticed that the windows were all down, and that the only shutters left open were those at the back window, against which the giant box-bush had grown into the shape of a hunchback. There was a film of dust or wood ashes over the floor and the furniture, and cobwebs were spun in lacy patterns on the discoloured walls. A demijohn, still half full of whiskey, stood on the crippled mahogany desk, and a pitcher of water and several dirty glasses were on a tin tray beside it. Near the sparkling blaze a leather chair, from which the stuffing protruded, faced a shabby footstool upholstered in crewel work, and a pile of hickory logs, chips, and pine knots, over which spiders were crawling. While Dorinda sat down in the chair he pointed out, and looked nervously over the dust and dirt that surrounded her, she thought that she had never seen a room from which the spirit of hope was so irrevocably banished. How cheerful the room at Pedlar's Mill, where Rose Emily lay dying, appeared by contrast with this one! What a life Jason's mother must have led in this place! How had Jason, with his charm, his fastidiousness, his sensitive nerves, been able to stay here? Her gaze wandered to the one unshuttered window, where the sheets of rain were blown back and forth like a curtain. She saw the hunched shoulder of the box-bush, crouching under the torrent of water which poured down from the roof. Yet she longed to be out in the storm. Any weather was better than this close, dark place, so musty in spite of its fire, and this suffocating stench of whiskey and of things that were never aired.

"Just a thimbleful of toddy to ward off a chill?" the old man urged, with his doddering gestures.

She shook her head, trying to smile. A drop of the stuff in one of those fly-specked glasses would have sickened her.

Darkness swept over her with the ebb and flow of the sea. She felt a gnawing sensation within; there wag a quivering in her elbows; and it seemed to her that she was dissolving into emptiness. The thin blue light wavered and vanished and wavered again. When she opened her eyes the room came out of the shadows in fragments, obscure, glimmering, remote. On the shingled roof the rain was pattering like a multitude of tiny feet, the restless bare feet of babies. Terror seized her. She longed with all her will to escape; but how could she go back into the storm without an excuse; and what excuse could she find? After all, repulsive as he appeared, he was still Jason's father.

"No, thank you," she answered, when he poured a measure of whiskey into a glass and pushed it toward her. "Aunt Mehitable gave me some blackberry cordial." After a silence she asked abruptly: "Where is Jemima?"

Lifting the glass she had refused, he added a stronger dash to the weak mixture, and sipped it slowly. "There's nothing better when you're wet than a little toddy," he muttered. "Jemima is off for the evening, but she'll be back in time to get supper. I heard her say she was going over to Plumtree."

A peal of thunder broke so near that she started to her feet, expecting to see the window-panes shattered.

"There, there, don't be afraid," he said, nodding at her over his glass. "The worst is over now. The rain will have held up before you're dry and ready to go home."

It was like a nightmare, the dark, glimmering room, with its dust and cobwebs, the sinister old man before the blue flames of the pine knots, the slanting rain over the box-bush, the pattering sound on the roof, and the thunderbolts which crashed near by and died away in the distance. Even her body felt numbed, as if she were asleep, and her feet, when she rose and took a step forward, seemed to be walking on nothing. It was just as if she knew it was not real, that it was all visionary and incredible, and as if she stood there waiting until she should awake. The dampness, too, was not a genuine dampness, but the sodden atmosphere of a nightmare.

"Why, it has stopped now!" she exclaimed suddenly. "The storm is over." Then, because she did not wish to show fear of him, she came nearer and held her wet dress to the flames. "You won't need a fire much longer," she said. "It is warmer out of doors than it is inside."

"That's why I keep the windows down." He looked so dry and brittle, in spite of the dampness about him, that she thought he would break in pieces if he moved too quickly. There was no life, no sap, left in his veins.

"I'm by myself now," he winked at her. "But it won't be for long. Jason comes back to-night."

"To-night!" Joy sang in her voice. But why hadn't he written? Was there anything wrong? Or was he merely trying to surprise her by his return?

"You hadn't heard? Well, that proves, I reckon, that I can keep a secret." He lurched to his feet, balanced himself unsteadily for an instant, and then stumbled to the window. Beyond him she saw the black shape of the box-bush, with a flutter of white turkeys among its boughs, and overhead a triangle of sky, where the grey was washed into a delicate blue. Yes, the storm was over.

"They ought to reach the station about now," he said. "When the windows are open and the wind is in the right direction, you can hear the whistle of the train." There was malignant pleasure in his tone. "You didn't know, I s'pose, that he'd gone off to get married?"

"Married?" She laughed feebly, imagining that he intended a joke. How dreadful old men were when they tried to be funny! His pointed beard jerked up and down when he talked, and his little red blinking eyes stared between his puffed eyelids like a rat's eyes out of a hole. Then something as black and cold as stale soot floated out from the chimney and enveloped her. She could scarcely get her breath. If only he would open the windows.

"Hasn't he told you that we are to be married next week?" she asked.

"No, he hasn't told me." He gloated over the words as if they were whiskey, and she wondered what he was like when he was not drinking, if that ever happened. He could be open-handed, she had heard, when the humour struck him. Once, she knew, he had helped Miss Texanna Snead raise the money for her taxes, and when Aunt Mehitable's cow died he had given her another. "I had a notion that you and he were sweethearts," he resumed presently, "and he'd have to look far, I reckon, before he could pick out a finer girl. He's a pleasant-tempered boy, is Jason, but he ain't dependable, even if he is my son, so I hope you haven't set too much store by him. I never heard of him mixing up with girls, except you and Geneva. That ain't his weakness. The trouble with him is that he was born white-livered. Even as a child he would go into fits if you showed him a snake or left him by himself in the dark——"

"He loves me," she said stoutly, closing her ears and her mind to his words.

He nodded. "I don't doubt it, I don't doubt it. He loved you well enough, I reckon, to want to jilt Geneva; but he found out, when he tried, that she wasn't as easy to jilt as he thought. He'd courted her way back yonder last year, when they were in New York together. Later on he'd have been glad to wriggle out of it; but when Jim and Bob Ellgood came after him, he turned white-livered again. They took him off and married him while he was still shaking from fright. A good boy, a pleasant boy," continued the old man, smacking his dry lips, "but he ain't of my kidney."

When he had finished, she gazed at him in a dumbness which had attacked her like paralysis. She tried to cry out, to tell him that she knew he lied; but her lips would not move in obedience to her will, and her throat felt as if it were petrified. Was this the way people felt when they had a stroke, she found herself thinking. On the surface she was inanimate; but beneath, in the buried jungle of her consciousness, there was the stirring of primitive impulses, and this stirring was agony. All individual differences, all the acquired attributes of civilization, had turned to wood or stone; yet the racial structure, the savage fibre of instinct, remained alive in her.

The room had grown darker. Only the hearth and the evil features of the old man were picked out by the wavering blue light. She saw his face, with its short wagging beard and its fiery points of eyes, as one sees objects under running water. Everything was swimming round her, and outside, where a cloud had drifted over the triangle of clear sky, the box-bush and the white turkeys were swimming too.

"You'll meet 'em on the road if you go by the fork," piped a voice beneath that shifting surface. "They will be well on the way by the time you have started."

Stung awake at last, she thrust out her arm, warding him off. The one thought in her mind now was to escape, to get out of the room before he could stop her, to put the house and its terrors behind her. It couldn't be true. He was drunk. He was lying. He was out of his head. She was foolish even to listen, foolish to let the lie worry her for an instant.

Turning quickly, she ran from him out of the room, out of the house, out of the stagnant air of the place.

At the beginning of the sandy road, where the water had hollowed a basin, she met the coloured woman, Idabella, who said "good evening," after the custom of the country, as she went by. She was a handsome mulatto, tall, deep-bosomed, superb, and unscrupulous, with the regal features that occasionally defy ethnology in the women of mixed blood. Her glossy black hair was worn in a coronet, and she moved with the slow and arrogant grace which springs from a profound immobility.

"The dreadful old man," thought Dorinda, as she hurried in the direction of Gooseneck Creek. "The dreadful, lying old man!"

XIII

The sun had riddled the clouds, and a watery light drenched the trees, the shrubs, and the bruised weeds. This light, which bathed the external world in a medium as fluid as rain, penetrated into her thoughts, and enveloped the images in her mind with a transparent brilliance.

"It isn't true," she repeated over and over, as she went down the sandy slope to Gooseneck Creek, and over the bridge of logs in the willows. When she reached the meadows, rain was still dripping from the golden-rod and life-everlasting. A rabbit popped up from the briers and scuttled ahead of her, with his little white tail bobbing jauntily.

"How funny it looks," she thought, "just as if it were beckoning me to come on and play. The rain is over, but I am soaked through. Even my skin is wet. I'll have to dry all my clothes by the kitchen fire, if it hasn't gone out. What a terrible old man!" Out of nowhere there flashed into her mind the recollection of a day when she had gone to a dentist at the County Courthouse to have an aching tooth drawn. All the way, sitting beside her father, behind Dan and Beersheba, she had kept repeating, "It won't hurt very much." Strange that she should have thought of that now! She could see the way Dan and Beersheba had turned, flopping their ears, and looked round, as if they were trying to show sympathy; and how the bunches of indigo, fastened on their heads to keep flies away, had danced fantastically like uprooted bushes. "It isn't true;" she said now, seeking to fortify her courage as she had tried so passionately on the drive to the dentist. "When Jason comes back, we will laugh over it together. He will tell me that I was foolish to be worried, that it proved I did not trust him. But, of course, I trust him. When we are married, I will stand between him and the old man as much as I can. I am not afraid of him. No, I am not afraid," she said aloud, stopping suddenly in the road as if she had seen a snake in her path. "When Jason comes back, everything will be right. Yes, everything will be right," she repeated. "Perhaps the old man suspected something, and was trying to frighten me. Doctors always know things sooner than other people. . . . What a dirty place it is! Ma would call it a pig sty. Well, I can clean it up, bit by bit. Even if the old man doesn't let anybody touch his den, I can clean the rest of the house. I'll begin with the porch, and some day, when he is out, I can make Jemima wash that dreadful floor and the window-panes. The outside is almost as bad too. The walk looks as if it had never been swept." In order to deaden this fear, which was gnawing at her heart like a rat, she began to plan how she would begin cleaning the place and gradually bring system out of confusion. "A little at a time," she said aloud, as if she were reciting a phrase in a foreign language. "A little at a time will not upset him."

At the fork of the road, approaching the red gate, where the thick belt of woods began, her legs gave way under her, and she knew that she could go no farther. "I'll have to stop," she thought, "even if the ground is so wet, I'll have to sit down." Then the unconscious motive, which had guided her ever since she left Five Oaks, assumed a definite form. "If he came on that train, he ought to be here in a few minutes," she said. "The whistle blew a long time ago. Even if he waited for the mail, he ought to be here in a little while."

Stepping over the briers into the woods, she looked about for a place to sit down. An old stump, sodden with water, pushed its way up from the maze of creepers, and she dropped beside it, while she relapsed into the suspense that oozed out of the ground and the trees. As long as her response to this secret fear was merely physical, she was able to keep her thoughts fixed on empty mechanical movements; but the instant she admitted the obscure impulse into her mind, the power of determination seemed to go out of her. She felt weak, unstrung, incapable of rational effort.

A thicket of dogwood and redbud trees made a close screen in front of her, and through the dripping branches, she could see the red gate, and beyond it the blasted oak and the burned cabin on the other side of the road. Farther on, within range of her vision, there were the abandoned acres of broomsedge, and opposite to them she imagined the Sneads' pasture, with the white and red splotches of cows and the blurred patches of huddled sheep.

While she sat there the trembling passed out of her limbs, and the strength that had forsaken her returned slowly. Removing her hat, she let the branches play over her face, like the delicate touch of cool, moist fingers. She felt drenched without and within. The very thoughts that came and went in her mind were as limp as wet leaves, and blown like leaves in the capricious stir of the breeze. For a few minutes she sat there surrounded by a vacancy in which nothing moved but the leaves and the wind. Without knowing what she thought, without knowing even what she felt, she abandoned herself to the encompassing darkness. Then, suddenly, without warning from her mind, this vacancy was flooded with light and crowded with a multitude of impressions.

Their first meeting in the road. The way he looked at her. His eyes when he smiled. The red of his hair. His hand when he touched her. The feeling of his arms, of his mouth on hers, of the rough surface of his coat brushing her face. The first time he had kissed her. The last time he had kissed her. No. It isn't true. It isn't true. Deep down in her being some isolated point of consciousness, slow, rhythmic, monotonous, like a swinging pendulum, was ticking over and over: It isn't true. It isn't true. True. True. It isn't true. On the surface other thoughts came and went. That horrible old man. A fire in summer. The stench of drunkenness. Tobacco stains on his white beard. A rat watching her from a hole. How she hated rats! Did he suspect something, and was he trying to frighten her? Trying to frighten her. But she would let him see that she was too strong for him. She was not afraid. . . . The thoughts went on, coming and going like leaves blown in the wind, now rising, now fluttering down again. But far away, in a blacker vacancy, the pendulum still swung to and fro, and she heard the thin, faint ticking of the solitary point of consciousness: True. True. It isn't true. It isn't true—true—true—

No, he couldn't frighten her. She was too sure of herself. Too sure of Jason, too sure of her happiness. "Too sure of Jason," she repeated aloud.

The little sad, watery sun sputtered out like a lantern, and after a few minutes of wan greyness, shone more clearly, as if it had been relighted and hung up again in the sky. Colour flowed back into the landscape, trickling in shallow streams of blue and violet through the nearer fields and evaporating into dark fire where the broomsedge enkindled the horizon. She started up quickly, and fell back. When she put her hand on the slimy moss it felt like a toad.

Far down the road, somewhere in the vague blur of the distance, there was the approaching rumble of wheels. She heard the even rise and fall of the hoofs, the metallic clink of horseshoes striking together, the jolting over the rock by the Sneads' pasture, the splash of mud in the bad hole near the burned cabin, and the slip and scramble of the mare as she stumbled and then, recovering herself, broke into a trot.

It isn't true. It isn't true, ticked the pin point of consciousness. Her mind was still firm; but her limbs trembled so violently that she slipped from the stump to the carpet of moss and soaked creepers. Shutting her eyes, she held fast to the slimy branch of a tree. "When he turns at the fork, I will look. I will not look until he turns at the fork."

The rumble was louder, was nearer. An instant of silence. The buggy was approaching the fork. It was at the fork. She heard close at hand the familiar clink of the steel shoes and the sharper squeak of a loosened screw in the wheel. Rising on the sodden mould, she opened her eyes, pushed aside the curtain of branches, and looked out through the leaves. She saw Jason sitting erect, with the reins in his hands. She saw his burnished red hair, his pale profile, his slightly stooping shoulders, his mouth which was closed in a hard straight line. Clear and sharp, she saw him with the vividness of a flash of lightning, and beside him, she saw the prim, girlish figure and the flaxen head of Geneva Ellgood.

It isn't true. It isn't true. The pendulum was swinging more slowly; and suddenly the ticking stopped, and then went on in jerks like a clock that is running down. It isn't true. It isn't true—true—true.

She felt cold and wet. Though she had not lost the faculty of recollection, she was outside time and space, suspended in ultimate darkness. There was an abyss around her, and through this abyss wind was blowing, black wind, which made no sound because it was sweeping through nothingness. She lay flat in this vacancy, yet she did not fall through it because she also was nothing. Only her hands, which clutched wood mould, were alive. There was mould under her finger nails, and the smell of wet earth filled her nostrils. Everything within her had stopped. The clock no longer ticked; it had run down. She could not think, or, if she thought, her thoughts were beyond her consciousness, skimming like shadows over a frozen lake. Only the surface of her could feel, only her skin, and this felt as if it would never be warm again.

"So it is true," she said aloud, and the words, spoken without a thought behind them, startled her. The instant afterwards she began to come back to existence; she could feel life passing through her by degrees, first in her hands and feet, where needles were pricking, then in her limbs, and at last in her mind and heart. And while life fought its way into her, something else went out of her for ever—youth, hope, love—and the going was agony. Her pain became so intolerable that she sprang to her feet and started running through the woods, like a person who is running away from a forest fire. Only she knew, while she ran faster and faster, that the fire was within her breast, and she could not escape it. No matter how far she ran and how fast, she could not escape it.

Presently the running shook her senses awake, and her thoughts became conscious ones. In the silence the shuddering beats of her heart were like the unsteady blows of a hammer—one, two, one, one, two, two. Her breath came with a whistling sound, and for a minute she confused it with the wind in the tree-tops.

"So this is the end," she said aloud, and then very slowly, "I didn't know I could feel like this. I didn't know anybody could feel like this." A phrase of her mother's, coloured with the barbaric imagery of a Hebrew prophet, was driven, as aimlessly as a wisp of straw, into her mind: "Your great-grandfather said he never came to Christ till he had thirsted for blood." Thirsted for blood! She had never known what that meant. It had seemed to her a strange way to come to Christ, but now she understood.

The wet briers tore her legs through her stockings. Branches whipped her face and bruised its delicate flesh. Once, when she came out of the woods, she slipped and fell on her hands and knees. The splinters of the fence pierced her skin when she climbed over the rails. But still she ran on, trying to escape from the fire within her breast.

XIV

On the front porch, with her hand shielding her eyes from the sunset, her mother stood and looked out for her.

"I was watching for you, Dorinda. You must have got caught in the storm."

"Just at the beginning. I stopped at Five Oaks."

"Was anybody there?"

"Nobody but the old doctor. Jemima was off."

"Did he say when he expected Jason?"

"Yes, he told me he might come back this evening."

Once, long ago, she had heard a ventriloquist at a circus, and her voice was like the voice that had come out of the chair, the table, or the wax doll. As she stepped on the porch, her mother examined her closely. "Well, you're as white as a sheet. Go up and take off your wet things as quick as you can, and bring 'em down to the fire. Supper'll be ready in a minute."

Dorinda tried to smile when she hurried by, but her muscles, she found, eluded the control of her will, and the smile was twisted into a smirking grimace. Without trusting herself to meet her mother's eyes, she went upstairs to her room and took off her rain-soaked clothes, hanging her skirt and shirtwaist in the closet, and putting her muddy shoes side by side, as if they were standing at attention on the edge of the rug. Pushing back the curtain over the row of hooks, she selected an old blue gingham dress which she had discarded, and put it on, carefully adjusting the belt, from which the hooks and eyes, were missing, with the help of a safety pin. All the time, while she performed these trivial acts, she felt that her intimate personal self had stepped outside her body, and was watching her from a distance. When she went downstairs, it was only a marionette, like one of the figures she had seen as a child in a Punch and Judy show, that descended the stairs and sat down at the table. She looked at her father and mother, her father eating so noisily, her mother pouring buttermilk, without spilling a drop, into the row of glasses, and wondered what she had to do with these people? Why had she been born in this family and not in another? Could she have been a changeling that they had picked up?

"Dorinda stopped at Five Oaks until the storm was over," she heard her mother say to the others; and suddenly, as if the sound had touched some secret spring in her mind, she became alive again, and everything was bathed in the thin blue light of that room at Five Oaks. The pain was more than she could bear. It was more than anybody could be expected to bear. In a flash of time it became so violent that she jumped up from her chair, and began walking up and down as if she were in mortal agony.

"What's the matter, daughter? Did you come down on your tooth?" inquired Mrs. Oakley solicitously.

"No, it isn't that. I don't want any supper," replied the girl, hurrying out of the room and walking the length of the hall to the front door. "I must do something," she thought. "If I don't do something, this pain will go on for ever."

She had crossed the threshold to the porch, when, wheeling abruptly, she went back into the hall and from the hall into her mother's chamber, where the family Bible lap open on the table and the big fly was still knocking against the ceiling. She had not known that flies lived so long! It seemed an eternity, not a few hours ago, when her mother had sat there reading the Psalms and the fly had buzzed in the stillness. The peaceful room, pervaded by the Sabbath lethargy, with the open Bible waiting for family prayers, and the battered old furniture arranged in changeless order, seemed to close over her like a trap. "I must do something, or this misery will never end," she thought again. But there was nothing that she could do. There would never be anything that she could do in her life. It was over. Everything was over, and she might live to be ninety. "And the child coming too." There also she could find no escape. "No matter what I do, I can change nothing." Something had caught her. Life had caught her. She could not get away, no matter how hard she struggled. A drop of blood fell on her fingers, and glancing into the mirror, she saw that she had bitten her lip until it bled, yet she had not felt it. Nothing like that, nothing on the outside of herself, could ever hurt her again. "If I could only do something," she said in a whisper, and walked from the chamber to the spare room, and from the spare room, which looked as if it were hiding something, out into the hall. Suddenly, like a person moving in delirium, she walked out of the house, and along the path between the pear orchard and the vegetable garden. The green afterglow had faded; but a sallow moon was riding high over the big pine, and gave light enough for her to see her way. Like a wet sheet the twilight folded about her, clinging to her arms and legs when she tried to shake herself free from it. She would have moonlight in the woods, and besides she had nothing to fear. A dry sob broke from her, hurting her throat. You had reached the worst, she realized, when you had nothing to fear.