Chapter XI: Part 11

An hour later, when Josiah and Elvira had gone home, Dorinda helped her mother to take off her mourning and straighten the chamber in which Joshua had lain.

"It's the smell of mourning I can't stand," said the girl, while she folded the crape veil and laid it away in the bandbox. "Do you think I'll have to wear it?"

"It wouldn't be respectful not to," Mrs. Oakley replied, and she asked after a minute: "What do you want with those overalls of Rufus's that you took upstairs?"

Dorinda turned from the wardrobe and looked at her. "They are old ones I'm patching," she answered. "I am going to wear them when I'm milking. Those Jerseys have never been milked by a woman."

"I s'pose they'd get used to it."

"They might, but it's easier for me to wear overalls than to break them. You can't farm in skirts anyway."

"You ain't going to wear them on the farm, are you?"

"If I can farm better in them, I'm going to wear them."

Mrs. Oakley sighed. "Well, I hope nobody will see you."

"I don't care," Dorinda replied stubbornly. "I'm going to milk my cows my own way. I've got some common sense," she added sternly, "and I'm the only person, man or woman, in the county who has."

The old woman's face was as inanimate as a mask, but her eyes were fixed, with their look of prophetic doom, on the great pine in the graveyard. "I can't help thinking," she murmured, "how your father used to lie here day after day and look at that big pine. It seems as if that tree meant more to him than anything human."

Dorinda followed her gaze. "In a way it did," she said slowly, as if some inscrutable mystery were dissolving in a flood of surprise. "In a different way."

With a band of crape in her hands, Mrs. Oakley stared up at the harp-shaped boughs. "I reckon it's a heathenish way to think about things," she observed presently, "but I can't help feeling there's a heap of comfort in it."

When the room had been cleaned and the mourning pinned up again in newspapers, Dorinda begged her mother to rest before Rufus came back to supper.

"I couldn't, daughter, not with all I've got on my mind," Mrs. Oakley replied firmly. "I remember when the doctor tried to get your father to give up for a while, he'd shake his head and answer, 'Doctor, I don't know how to stop.' That's the trouble with me, I reckon. I don't know how to stop."

"If you choose to kill yourself, I don't see how I can prevent it." Dorinda's voice wavered with exasperation. If only her mother would listen to reason, she felt, both of their lives would be so much easier. But did mothers ever listen to reason? "I'm going to walk up to Poplar Spring and look at the woods you wrote me about," she added. "I hope we shan't have to sell them and put the money into the land."

"Your father was holding on to that timber to bury us with. There are all the funeral expenses to come."

"Yes, I know." Dorinda regarded her thoughtfully. "Poor Pa, it was all he had and he wanted to hold on to it. But, you see,"--her tone sharpened to the bitter edge of desperation--"I am depending upon my butter to bury us both, and who knows but your chickens may supply us with tombstones."

"I hope New York didn't turn you into a scoffer, Dorinda."

Dorinda laughed. "New York didn't get a chance, Ma. Pedlar's Mill had done it first."

"Well, there ain't anything too solemn for some folks to joke about. You ain't goin' out in Seena Snead's black dress, are you?"

"She's gone out of mourning, so she gave it to me."

"I'd think you'd hate to take charity."

There were times when it seemed to Dorinda that she could not breathe within the stark limitations of her mother's point of view. As she ran out of the room and the house, without heeding Mrs. Oakley's request that she should wear a hat at least on the day of the funeral, she asked herself if this aimless nagging was all that she could expect in the future. She was fond of her mother; but fondness, strangely enough, did not seem to make it easier for people to bear one another's tempers.

The path to Poplar Spring ran beside the eighteen-acre field, and she stopped amid the dusty fennel and ragweed to inspect the work of the last two days. The broomsedge had been partly cut down and burned, and the blackened ruins waited now for the final obliteration. "It will be hard work to get good grass here," she thought, "but if I keep turning cowpeas under, I may bring up the soil in time." In the pasture, beyond a rail fence, the grass was rank and high, for only Dan and Beersheba had grazed there for the last four or five years. The solitary cow, when they were fortunate as to own one, lived on the lawn or what was called "the home field," where Mrs. Oakley milked in summer. Across the road she saw the scantily fenced west meadow, where her father had sown his winter wheat, and her eyes filled with tears as she gazed on the sprinkling of green over the earth. While she stood there she remembered the look on his face when he lay in his coffin; a look which was austere, inaccessible, with a reproachful wonder beneath its mask of solemnity, as if he were still asking life why it had crushed him. "Whatever I give, the farm will be always mine," she thought. "That was the way he felt. The farm isn't human and it won't make you suffer. Only human things break your heart." Everything appeared so simple when she regarded it through the film of sentiment that obscured her judgment. Kinship with the land was filtered through her blood into her brain; and she knew that this transfigured instinct was blended of pity, memory, and passion. Dimly, she felt that only through this fresh emotion could she attain permanent liberation of spirit.

Moving away, she followed the path which threaded the scrub pines on the border of the broomsedge. Presently she distinguished the blur of Poplar Spring in the distance, and toward the east the acres of fair timber which had matured since her great-grandfather's death. In her new reverence for her father she shrank from cutting down the tall trees. "It would be slaughter," she said to herself. "I'll let the woods stand as long as I can."

Overhead, the pines were soughing in a light wind, and for a moment or two the sound of footsteps behind her was scarcely louder than the whispering trees. Then, with a start, she realized that she was followed, and glancing round, she saw Jason walking over the scarred field.

"I know you didn't want me at the funeral, Dorinda," he said, "but it was all I could do to show my respect for your father. He was one of the best men who ever lived."

Her breast quivered with pain, but she moved on without appearing to be aware of his presence.

"I was afraid you were angry because I came," he continued.

At this her pride was swallowed up in bitterness, and she stopped and looked back. "You had no right to come. You knew I did not want you there."

Without replying to her charge, he stared at her as if he were amazed by the change in her face. "This is the first time you've looked at me since you came home," he said. "You've treated me as if I were the dirt under your feet."

Her hand was on the slender bough of a pine, and stripping the needles from the branch, she flung them out on the wind with a passionate gesture. Over the chaos in her mind there darted the shadow of a regret. "If only I had killed him that night!"

"Even now, you won't let your eyes rest on me," he complained. "If you'd given me a chance, I'd have done anything you wanted. But you never gave me a chance. You never listened."

Her gaze, which had been fixed on the horizon beyond him, swept back to his face. "Your following me won't make me listen."

"If only you knew what I've suffered."

She was looking at him now with merciless eyes. For this thing she had ruined her life! Then, before the thought had left her mind, she realized that in his presence, with her eyes on his face, she was farther away from him than she had been in New York. Yesterday, he had had power over her senses; to-morrow, he might have power again over her memory; but at this instant, while they stood there, so close together that she could almost feel his breath on her face, her senses and her memory alike were delivered from the old torment of love.

"My nerve is going," he said weakly, attempting to soften her. "I've started drinking like Father."

Looking at him, she admitted that it was only her feeling for him, not the man himself, that had changed. Superficially, in spite of excessive drinking, he was as attractive as he had ever been; yet this appeal, which she had found so irresistible two years ago, failed now to awaken the faintest tremor in her heart. The contrast between his brown-black eyes and his red hair seemed to her artificial: there was something repellent to her in the gleam of his white teeth through his short red moustache. These were the physical details that had once affected her so deeply; these traits which she saw now, for the first time, in the spectral light of disenchantment.

"Can you never understand," she asked suddenly, "that I don't hate you because you mean to me--just nothing."

"You are sending me straight to the dogs."

She laughed. How theatrical men were! Beneath her ridicule, she felt the cruelty which gnaws like a worm at the heart of emotion in its decay.

"Why should I care?" she demanded.

"You mean you wouldn't care if I were to die a drunkard like my father?" His voice trembled, and she saw that he was wrestling with man's inability to believe that a woman's love can perish while his own still survives.

"No, I shouldn't care."

"You're hard, Dorinda, as hard as a stone."

Her smile was exultant. "Yes, I am hard. I'm through with soft things."

Turning her back on him, she walked rapidly away over the ploughed ground in the direction of the house. Oh, if the women who wanted love could only know the infinite relief of having love over!

XI

On an afternoon in October, Dorinda stood under the harp-shaped pine in the graveyard and looked down on the farm.

The drift of autumn was in the air; the shadows from the west were growing longer; and in a little while Nimrod, the farm boy, would let down the bars by the watering-trough, and the seven Jersey cows would file sleepily across the road and the lawn to the cow-barn. At the first glimpse of Nimrod she would run down and slip into her overalls. Ever since the cows had come from Green Acres, she had milked them morning and evening, and she was wondering now how many more she could handle with only Fluvanna to help her. Only by doing the work herself and keeping a relentless eye on every detail, could she hope to succeed in the end. If she were once weak enough to compromise with the natural carelessness of the negroes, she knew that the pails and pans would not be properly scalded, and the milk would begin to lose its quality. Fluvanna was the superior of most ignorant white women; but even Fluvanna, though she was, as Dorinda said to herself, one in a thousand, would slight her work as soon as she was given authority over others. There were times when it seemed to Dorinda that this instinct to slight was indigenous to the soil of the South. In the last six months she had felt the temptation herself. There had been hours of weariness when it had seemed to her that it was better to be swift and casual than to be slow and thorough; but she had always suppressed the impulse before it was translated into outward negligence. Would her power of resistance survive, she wondered, or would it yield inevitably to the surrounding drought of energy?

Six months were gone now, and how hard she had worked! She thought of the mornings when she had risen before day, eaten a hurried breakfast by the crack of dawn, and milked the cows by the summer sunrise. From the moment the warm milk frothed into the pails until the creamy butter was patted into moulds and stamped with the name Old Farm beneath the device of a harp-shaped pine, there was not a minute detail of the work that was left to others. Even the scalding of the churns, the straining and skimming of the milk in the old-fashioned way without a separator,--all these simple tasks came under her watchful eyes. When the first supply of butter was sent off, she waited with nervous dread for the verdict. The price had seemed extravagant, for selling directly to her customer she had asked thirty cents a pound, while butter in Pedlar's store was never higher than ninepence in summer and a shilling in winter, measured in the old English terms which were still commonly used in Queen Elizabeth County.

"It seems a mighty high price," her mother had objected.

"I know, but Mrs. Faraday told me to ask more. She said the dairy would get a dollar a pound for the very best. Some people are always ready to pay a high price, and they value a thing more if they pay too much for it. I found out all I could about butter making in New York, and I'm sure nobody could have taken more trouble. It tasted like flowers."

"Well, perhaps--" Mrs. Oakley had sounded dubious. "We'll wait and see."

When the letter and check came together, Dorinda's spirits had soared on wings. The hotel and the dairy would take all that she could supply of that quality; and though she had known that her success was less fortuitous than appeared on the surface, she had not paused to inquire whether it was owing to influence or to accident. "If everything goes well, I'll have twenty-five cows by next fall," she said hopefully, "and Ebenezer and Mary Joe Green to help Fluvanna."

"You always jump so far ahead, Dorinda."

"I'm made that way. I can't help it. If I didn't live in the future, I couldn't stand things as they are."

Now, in the soft afternoon light, she stretched her arms over her head with a gesture of healthy fatigue. The aromatic scent of the pine was in her nostrils. In the sun-steeped meadows below there was the murmurous chanting of grasshoppers. At the hour she felt peaceful and pleasantly drowsy, and all her troubles were lost in the sensation of physical ease. She was thinner than ever; her muscles were hard and elastic; the colour of her skin was burned to a pale amber; and the curves of her rich mouth were firmer and less appealingly feminine. In a few years the work of the farm would probably coarsen her features; but at twenty-three she was still young enough to ripen to a maturer beauty. Though her hands were roughened by work and the nails were stained and broken, she wasted no regret upon the disfigurement of her body as long as her senses remained benumbed by toil. She slept now without dreaming. This alone seemed to her to be worth any sacrifice of external softness.

Her glance travelled over the cornfield, where the shocks were gathered in rows amid the stubble, and she reflected that the harvest had been better than usual. Then her eyes passed along the orchard path to the new cow-barn, and she watched the figure of William Fairlamb climbing down from the roof. An agreeable sense of possession stole into her mind, while she looked from the cow-barn to the back of the house, and saw her mother moving along the path from the porch. There were a hundred and fifty hens in the poultry yard now, and it seemed to Dorinda that the old woman's happiness had simmered down into an enjoyment of chickens. Though she still worshipped Rufus, he was only a disappointment and an increasing anxiety. Of late he had done no work on the farm; his days were spent in hunting with Ike Pryde or Adam Snead, and it was evident to Dorinda that he was beginning to drink too much bad whiskey. It would be a relief, she felt, when November came and he went away for the winter.

Turning her head, as she prepared to leave the graveyard, she glanced beyond the many-coloured autumn scene to the distant chimneys of Five Oaks. How far-off was the time when the sight of those red chimneys against a blue or grey sky would not stab into her heart? Her love was dead; and her regret clung less to the thought that love had ended in disappointment than to the supreme tragedy that love ended at all. Nothing endured. Everything perished of its own inner decay. That, after all, was the gnawing worm at the heart of experience. If either her love or her hatred had lasted, she would have found less bitterness in the savour of life.

For the first few weeks after her meeting with Jason on the edge of the pines, she had been enveloped in profound peace. Then, gradually, it seemed to her that the farther she moved away from him in reality, the closer he approached to her hidden life. As the days went by, the freedom she had won in his presence wore off like the effects of an anodyne, and the bondage of the nerves and the senses began to tighten again. Never, since she had looked into his face and had told herself that she was indifferent, had she known complete disillusionment. The trouble was, she discovered, that instead of remembering him as she had last seen him, her imagination created images which her reason denied. Not only her pain, but the very memory of pain that had once been, could leave, she found, a physical soreness.

Beyond the fields and the road the sun was sinking lower, and the western sky was stained with the colour of autumn fruits. While she watched the clouds, Dorinda remembered the heart of a pomegranate that she had seen in a window in New York; and immediately she was swept by a longing for the sights and sounds of the city. "There's no use thinking of that now," she said to herself, as she left the brow of the hill and walked down the path through the orchard. "Like so many other things, it is only when you look back on it that you seem to want it. While I was in New York I was longing to be away. There comes Nimrod with the cows, and Fluvanna bringing the milk pails."

On the back porch her mother was drying apples, for the apple crop had been good, and the cellar was already stored with russets and winesaps.

"We ought to have dried apples enough to last us till next year," Mrs. Oakley remarked, while she wiped the discoloured blade of the knife on her apron. "The whole time I was slicing these apples, I couldn't help thinking how partial your father was to dried fruit, and last fall there were hardly any apples fit to keep." Raising her hand to her eyes, she squinted in the direction from which her daughter had come. "I can't make out who that is running across the cornfield, but whoever it is, he's in a mighty big hurry."

Dorinda followed her gaze. "It's Rufus. He looks as if something were after him."

Mrs. Oakley's face was twisted into what was called her "neuralgic look." "He promised me to mend that churn before night," she said in a dissatisfied tone. "But I haven't laid eyes on him since dinner time. He goes too much in bad company. I haven't got a particle of use for Ike Pryde and those two Kittery boys over by Plumtree."

Dorinda nodded. "I'm glad he is going away. The sooner, the better."

"I reckon he has just recollected the churn." Mrs. Oakley's tone was without conviction, and she added presently, "He certainly does look scared, doesn't he?"

"I wonder what could have frightened him?" As the boy drew nearer, Dorinda saw that he was panting for breath and that his usually florid face was blanched to a leaden pallor. "What on earth has happened, Rufus?" she called sharply.

He waved angrily to her to be silent. His palmetto hat was in his hand, and when he reached the porch, he hurled it through the open door into the hall. Though his breath came in gasps as if he were stifling for air, he picked up a hammer from one of the benches, and without stopping to rest, bent over the broken churn at the side of the step.

"What on earth has happened, Rufus?" Dorinda asked again. She saw that her mother was trembling with apprehension, and the sight exasperated her against Rufus.

"You ought to have let me go away last spring," the boy replied in a truculent tone. He lifted the hammer above his head and, still wheezing from his race, drove a nail crookedly into the bottom of the churn. His hand trembled, and Dorinda noticed that the swinging blow fell unevenly.

"You haven't done anything you oughtn't to, have you, son?" his mother inquired shrilly.

Rufus turned his head and stared at her in moody silence. Though his handsome face wore his usual sulky frown, Dorinda suspected that his resentful manner was a veil that covered an inner disturbance. His dark eyes held a smouldering fire, as if fear were waiting to leap out at a sound, and the hand in which he clutched the hammer had never stopped shaking.

"Don't you let on I wasn't here, no matter who asks you," he said doggedly. "It wasn't my fault anyway. There isn't anybody coming, is there?"

"No, that's Nimrod bringing up the cows," Dorinda rejoined impatiently. "I must put on my overalls."

Whatever happened, the cows must be milked, she reflected as she entered the house. This morning and evening ritual of the farm had become as inexorable as law. Hearts might be broken, men might live or die, but the cows must be milked.

When she came back from the dairy, Rufus had disappeared, but her mother, who was preparing supper, beckoned her into the kitchen. "I haven't found out yet what's the matter," whispered the old woman. "He won't open his mouth, though I can see that he's terribly upset about something. I'm worried right sick."

"He's probably got into a quarrel with somebody. You know how overbearing he is."

"I reckon I spoiled him." Mrs. Oakley's lip trembled while she poured a little coffee into a cup and then poured it back again into the coffee-pot. "Your father used to tell me I made a difference because he was the youngest. I s'pose I oughtn't to have done it, but it's hard to see how I could have helped it. He was a mighty taking child, was Rufus."

"Where is he now?"

"Up in his room. I've called him to supper. He's loaded his gun again, but he didn't seem to want me to notice, and he's put it back in the corner behind the door."

"Oh, well, try not to worry about it, Ma. Some fool's play most likely. Can I help you get supper? I'll be straight back as soon as I've slipped out of these overalls. There's a lot of work for me afterwards in the dairy."

She ran upstairs to her room, and on the way down, as she passed Rufus's door, she called cheerfully, "Rufus, aren't you coming to supper?"

To her surprise, his door opened immediately, as if he had been hiding behind it, and he came out and followed her meekly downstairs into the kitchen. His excitement had apparently left him, but his healthy colour had not returned and his eyes looked strained and bloodshot. Bad whiskey, she thought, though she said as amiably as she could, "If I were you, I'd go to New York next week even if the job isn't ready."

He looked at her gratefully. "I was just thinking I'd better do that."

His manner was so conciliatory that it made her vaguely uneasy. Jason had been like that, she remembered, in the weeks before he had jilted her, and, unjustly or not, she had come to regard suavity in men with suspicion. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Rufus if he had got into a scrape; but she decided, as she brought his supper to the table, that it was a situation which she had better ignore. No good had ever come, she reflected with the ripe wisdom of experience, of putting questions to a man. What men wished you to know, and occasionally what they did not wish you to know, they would divulge in their own good time. Her mother, she knew, had spent her life trying to make men over, and what had come of her efforts except more trouble and stiffer material to work on?

When she sat down at the table, she expected her mother to begin her usual interrogation; but the old woman allowed Rufus to finish his supper undisturbed. Even when the last cake was lifted from the gridiron, and Mrs. Oakley dropped into her chair behind the tin coffee-pot, she was still silent. The cords in her throat twitched and strained when she raised a cup to her lips, and after a vain effort to swallow, she pushed her plate away with the food untasted.

"Poor Ma," thought the girl, watching the drawn grey face, where the veins in the temples bulged in knots of pain, "can she never have peace?" A longing seized her to fold the spare frame in her young arms and speak comforting words; but the habit of reserve was like an iron mould from which she could not break away. Nothing but death was strong enough to shatter that inherited restraint and resolve it into tenderness. While words of affection struggled to her lips, all she said was, "You look worn out. Is your neuralgia worse?"

"No, it ain't worse. I've got a stabbing pain in my temple, that's all."

Rising from her chair, she began to mix cornbread and gravy for Rambler and Flossie. Though she tottered when she moved, she put aside Dorinda's offer of help. "I'm used to doing things," she said, without stopping for an instant. "You and Rufus had better go along about what you want to do."

The hound and the cat were at her skirts, and she had just put the tin plates down for them and taken up the empty dish, when there was a sound of wheels on the rocks outside, and Dorinda, who was watching Rufus, saw him turn a muddy grey, like the discoloured whitewash on the walls.

"Don't you let on that I was off this afternoon, Ma," he whispered hoarsely.

"I declare, Rufus, you talk as if you were crazy," snapped Mrs. Oakley, flinching from a dart of neuralgia. Though her tone was merely one of irritation, her hands trembled so violently that the china dish she was holding dropped to the floor and crashed into bits. "This china never was a particle of account!" she exclaimed, as she bent over to pick up the pieces.

"I wonder who it can be this time of night?" Dorinda said more lightly than she would have believed possible.

"Maybe I'd better go," Rufus jerked out.

"You sit right down, son," his mother retorted tartly.

Going into the hall, Dorinda opened the front door and stood waiting in the square of lamplight on the threshold. It was a dark night, for the moon had not yet risen, and all that she could distinguish was what appeared to be the single shape of a horse and buggy. Only when the vehicle had jogged up the slope among the trees, and the driver had alighted and ascended the steps of the porch, did she recognize the squat shape and flabby features of Amos Wigfall, the sheriff. She had known him at the store in his political capacity as the familiar of every voter; yet friendly as he had always appeared to be, she could not repress a feeling of apprehension while she held out her hand. People, especially farmers, she knew, did not venture out, except with good reason, on bad roads after dark.

"Why, it's you, Mr. Wigfall!" she exclaimed, with cheerful hospitality. "Ma, Mr. Wigfall is here. I hope you've got some supper for him." And all the time she was thinking, "I might have known Rufus had done something foolish. Poor Ma!"

The sheriff heaved his bulky figure into the house. "I ain't come to supper, Dorinda," he said heartily. "Don't you go and get yo' Ma upset. I don't reckon it's anything to worry about. I wouldn't have come if I could have helped it."

Still grasping the girl's hand, he stood blinking apologetically in the glare of the lamp. His face was so bloated and so unctuous that it might have been the living embodiment of the fee system upon which it had fattened. He was chewing tobacco as he spoke, and wheeling abruptly he spat a wad into the night before he followed Dorinda down the hall to the kitchen. "The fact is I've come about Rufus," he explained, adding, "I hope I ain't intrudin', mum," as he whipped off his old slouch hat with an air of gallantry which reminded Dorinda of the burlesque of some royal cavalier.

"Oh, no, you ain't intruding, Mr. Wigfall," Mrs. Oakley replied. "What was it you said about Rufus?"

"He said he was sure it wasn't anything to worry about," Dorinda hastened to explain. She did not glance at Rufus while she spoke, yet she was aware that he had risen and was scowling at their visitor.

"Wall, as between friends," the sheriff remarked ingratiatingly, "I hope thar ain't a particle of truth in the charge; but Peter Kittery was found dead over by Whistling Spring this evening, and Jacob has got it into his head that 'twas Rufus that shot him."

"It's a lie!" Rufus shouted furiously. "I never went near Whistling Spring this evening. Ma knows I was mending her churn for her from dinner till supper time."

"Wall, I'm downright glad of that, son," Mr. Wigfall returned, and he looked as if he meant it, fee or no fee. "Yo' Pa was a good friend to me when he got a chance, and I shouldn't like to see his son mixed up in a bad business. Jacob says you and Peter had a fuss over cards last night at the store. But if you ain't been near Whistling Spring," he concluded, with triumphant logic, "it stands to reason that you couldn't have done it. You jest let him come along with me, mum," he added after a pause, as he turned to Mrs. Oakley. "I'll take good care of him, and send him back to you as soon as the hearing is over to-morrow. Thar ain't no need for you to worry a mite."

"I never saw Peter after last night!" Rufus cried out in a storm of rage and terror. "I never went near Whistling Spring. Ma knows I was working over her old churn all the evening."

His words and his tone struck with a chill against Dorinda's heart. Why couldn't the boy be silent? Why was he obliged, through some obliquity of nature, invariably to appear as a braggart and a bully? While she stood there listening to his furious denial of guilt, she was as positive that he had killed Peter Kittery as if she had been on the spot.

For a minute there was silence; then a new voice began to speak, a voice so faint and yet so shrill that it was like the far-off whistle of a train. At first the girl did not recognize her mother's tone, and she glanced quickly at the door with the idea that a stranger might have entered after the sheriff.

"It couldn't have been Rufus," the old woman said, with that whistling noise. "Rufus was here with me straight on from dinner time till supper. I had him mending my old churn because I didn't want to use one of Dorinda's new ones. Dorinda went off in the fields to watch the hands," she continued firmly, "but Rufus was right here with me the whole evening."

When she had finished speaking, she reached for a chair and sat down suddenly, as if her legs had failed her. Rufus broke into a nervous laugh which had an indecent sound, Dorinda thought, and Mr. Wigfall heaved a loud sigh of relief.

"Wall, you jest come over to-morrow and tell that to the magistrate," he said effusively. "I don't reckon there could be a better witness for anybody. Thar ain't nobody round Pedlar's Mill that would be likely to dispute yo' word." Slinging his arm, he gave Rufus a hearty slap on the back. "I'm sorry I've got to take you along with me, son, but I hope you won't bear me any grudge. It won't hurt you to spend a night away from yo' Ma, and my wife, she'll be glad to have you sample her buckwheat cakes. I hope you're having good luck with your chickens," he remarked to Mrs. Oakley as an afterthought. "My wife has been meaning to get over and look at yo' white leghorns."

"Tell her I'll be real glad to see her whenever she can get over," Mrs. Oakley replied, as she made an effort to struggle to her feet. "Ain't you going to take any clean clothes to wear to-morrow, Rufus? That shirt looks right mussed."

Rufus shook his head. "No, I'm not. If they want me, they can take me as I am."

"Wall, he looks all right to me," the sheriff observed, with jovial mirth. "I'll expect you about noon," he said, as he shook hands. "Don't you lose a minute's sleep. Thar ain't nothing in the world for you to worry about."

Picking up the kerosene lamp from the table, Dorinda went out on the porch to light the way to the gate. "There's a bad place near the 'rockery,'" she cautioned.

He had climbed heavily into the buggy, and Rufus was in the act of mounting between the wheels, when Mrs. Oakley came out of the house and thrust a parcel wrapped in newspaper into the boy's hand. "There's a clean collar and your comb," she said, drawing quickly back. "Be sure not to forget them in the morning."

XII

Standing there on the porch, with the light from the lamp she held flaring out against the silver black of the night sky, Dorinda watched the buggy crawling down the dangerous road to the gate. Something dark and cold had settled over her thoughts. She could not shake it off though she told herself that it was unreasonable for her to feel so despondent. As if despondency, she added, were the product of reason!

Mother love was a wonderful thing, she reflected, a wonderful and a ruinous thing! It was mother love that had helped to make Rufus the mortal failure he was, and it was mother love that was now accepting, as a sacrifice, the results of this failure. Mrs. Oakley was a pious and God-fearing woman, whose daily life was lived beneath the ominous shadow of the wrath to come; yet she had deliberately perjured herself in order that a worthless boy might escape the punishment which she knew he deserved.

"I'm not like that," Dorinda thought. "I couldn't have done it." At the bottom of her heart, in spite of her kinship to Rufus, there was an outraged sense, not so much of justice as of economy. The lie appeared to her less sinful than wasted. After all, why should not Rufus be held responsible for his own wickedness? She was shocked; she was unsympathetic; she was curiously exasperated. Her mother's attitude to Rufus impressed her as sentimental rather than unselfish; and she saw in this painful occurrence merely one of the first fruits of that long weakness. Since she had been brought so close to reality she had had less patience with evasive idealism. "I suppose I'm different from other women," she meditated. "I may have lost feeling, or else it was left out of me when I was born. Some women would have gone on loving Jason no matter how he treated them; but I'm not made that way. There's something deep down in me that I value more than love or happiness or anything outside myself. It may be only pride, but it comes first of all."

The buggy had disappeared into the night, and lowering the lamp, she turned and entered the house. As she closed the door the mocking screech of an owl floated in, and she felt that the frost was slipping over the threshold. All the ancient superstitions of the country gathered in her mind. It was foolish, she knew, to let herself remember these things at such a time; but she had lost control of her imagination, which galloped ahead dragging her reason after it.

In the kitchen she found her mother bending over the dish-pan with her arms plunged in soapsuds.

"Come to bed, Ma. I'll finish the dishes."

To her surprise, Mrs. Oakley did not resist. The spirit of opposition was crushed out of her, and she tottered as she turned away to wipe her hands on a cup towel.

"I reckon I'd better," she answered meekly. "I don't feel as if I could stand on my feet another minute."

Putting her strong young arm about her, Dorinda led her across the hall into her bedroom. While the girl struck a match and lighted the lamp on the table, she saw that her mother was shaking as if she had been stricken with palsy.

"I'll help you undress, Ma."

"I can manage everything but my shoes, daughter. My fingers are too swollen to unbutton them."

"Don't you worry. I'll put you to bed." As she turned down the bed and smoothed out the coarse sheets and the patchwork quilt, it seemed to Dorinda that the inanimate objects in the room had borrowed pathos from their human companions. All the stitches that had gone into this quilt, happy stitches, sad stitches, stitches that had ended in nothing! Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked quickly away. What was it in houses and furniture that made them come to life in hours of suspense and tear at the heartstrings?

Mrs. Oakley was undressing slowly, folding each worn, carefully mended garment before she placed it on a chair near the foot of the bed.

"Do you reckon they will do anything to Rufus?" she asked presently in a quavering voice.

She had released her hair from the tight coil at the back of her head, and it hung now, combed and plaited by Dorinda, in a thin grey braid on her shoulders. The childish arrangement gave a fantastic air to the shadow on the whitewashed wall.

"Not after what you said. Didn't you hear Mr. Wigfall tell you that he was taking him just for the night?"

Mrs. Oakley turned her head, and the shadow at her back turned with her. "Yes, I heard him. Well, if the Lord will give me strength to go through with it, I'll never ask for anything else."

"He'll be more likely to help you if you get some sleep and stop worrying. The Lord helps good sleepers." Though she spoke flippantly, she was frightened by the look in her mother's face.

"I don't feel as if I could close my eyes." Mrs. Oakley had climbed into bed, and was lying, straight and stiff as an effigy, under the quilt. "Don't you think it would be a comfort if we were to read a chapter in the Bible?"

Dorinda broke into a dry little laugh. "No, I don't. The only comforting thing I can imagine is to get my head on a pillow. I've got seven cows to milk by sunrise, and that is no easy job."

"Yes, you'd better go," her mother assented reluctantly, and she added with a sigh, "I can't help feeling that something dreadful is going to happen."

"You won't prevent it by lying awake. Don't get up in the morning until you're obliged to milk the cows before day and get Fluvanna to help about breakfast as soon as she comes. It's a long way to Queen Elizabeth Courthouse, and we'll have to allow plenty of time for the horses. Do you want anything more?" She resisted an impulse to stoop and kiss the wrinkled cheek because she knew that the unusual exhibition of tenderness would embarrass them both. "Shall I put out the lamp for you?"

"No, I like a little light. You can see so many things in the dark after the fire goes out."

Dorinda moved away as noiselessly as she could; but she had barely crossed the hall before she heard a muffled sound in the room, and knew that her mother was out of bed and on her knees. "I can't do anything," thought the girl desperately. "It is going to kill her, and I can't do anything to prevent it." Every muscle in her body ached from the strain of the day while she washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen for the next morning. She realized that she should have to do most of her farm work before sunrise, and she decided that, in case Fluvanna came late, it would be well to put out whatever she needed for breakfast. After that--well, even if Rufus had murdered somebody, she couldn't keep awake any longer.

In the morning, when she came back into the house after milking, she found that her mother was already in the kitchen, and that a pot of coffee was bubbling on the stove. Of course Fluvanna, on the day when she was particularly needed, had contrived to be late.

"I told you not to worry about breakfast, Ma," Dorinda said, provoked in spite of her pity.

"I know you did, but I couldn't lie in bed any longer. I was so afraid you might oversleep yourself and not wake me in time." She was the victim of a nervous apprehension lest they should be too late for the magistrate, and it was futile to attempt to reason her out of her folly. "You sit right down in your overalls and drink your coffee while it's hot," she continued, stirring restlessly. "I've got some fried eggs and bacon to keep up your strength."

"My strength is all right." Dorinda washed her hands and then came over to the table where breakfast was waiting for her. "The sun isn't up yet, and we can't start before day."

"Well, I wanted to be ready in plenty of time. You'll have to be away from the farm all day, won't you?"

"I don't know," Dorinda rejoined briskly. "Fluvanna and Nimrod will have to manage the best they can. I'm not going to worry about it. People can always be spared easier than they think they can."

Her animation, however, was wasted, for her mother was not following her. Mrs. Oakley had grown so restless that she could not sit still at the table, and she jumped up and ran to the stove or the safe whenever she could find an excuse. She wore the strained expression of a person who is listening for an expected sound and is afraid of missing it by a moment of inadvertence. Already, before lighting the stove, she had put on her Sunday dress of black alpaca, and had protected it in front by an apron of checked blue and white gingham. If she had had the courage, Dorinda suspected, she would have cooked breakfast in her widow's bonnet, with the streamer of rusty crape at her back.

"Is that somebody going along the road?" she inquired whenever Dorinda looked up from her plate.

"No, I don't hear anybody," the girl replied patiently. "Try to eat something, or you'll be sick."

Mrs. Oakley obediently lifted a bit of egg on her fork, and then put it down again before it had touched her lips. "I don't feel as if I could swallow a morsel."

"Drink a little coffee anyway," Dorinda pleaded.

Again the old woman made a futile effort to swallow. "I don't know what can be the matter with me," she said, "but my throat feels as if it were paralyzed."

"Well, I'll fix up a snack for you, and you can nibble at it on the way. Somebody will be sure to ask us to dinner. Now, I'll clear the table before I get ready."

But, after all, Dorinda was left at home for the day. Just as Nimrod, animated by misfortune, was leading Dan and Beersheba out to the wagon, a buggy drove briskly into the yard, and Nathan Pedlar alighted.

"I kind of thought you'd want a man with your Ma, Dorinda," he explained, "so I left Bob Shafer in charge of the store and came right over. Rufus spoke to me as he was going by with the sheriff last night, and I told him I'd take his Ma to the Courthouse."

Though Dorinda was doubtful at first, Mrs. Oakley responded immediately. In spite of her protracted experience with masculine helplessness, she had not lost her confidence in the male as a strong prop in the hour of adversity. "I can't tell you how thankful I am to have you, Nathan," she replied eagerly. "Dorinda had just as well stay at home and look after the farm."

"Don't you think I'd better go too, Ma?" the girl asked, not without a tinge of exasperation in her tone. It seemed absurd to her that her mother should prefer to have Nathan Pedlar stand by her simply because he happened to be a man.

"I don't believe she'll need you, Dorinda," remarked Nathan, who, like Nimrod, was inspired by adversity. "But if you feel you'd like to come, I reckon we can all three squeeze into my buggy."

"There ain't a bit of use in your going," Mrs. Oakley insisted. "You just stay right here and take care of things."

"Well, I won't go." Dorinda gave way after a resistance that was only half hearted. "Take care of her, Nathan, and make her eat something before she gets there."'

Running into the house, she wrapped two buttered rolls and boiled eggs in a red and white napkin, and put them into a little basket. Then she added a bottle of blackberry wine, and carried the basket out to the buggy, while Mrs. Oakley tied on her bonnet with trembling hands.

"Where's my bottle of camphor, Dorinda?"

"Here it is, Ma, in your reticule. Be sure and take a little blackberry wine if you feel faint." Not until she had watched the buggy drive through the gate and out on the road, where the sun was coming up in a ball of fire, did the girl understand what a relief it was not to go. "I believe she'd rather have Nathan," she decided, as she went upstairs to change into her old gingham dress, "because he doesn't know that she is not telling the truth."

When she thought of it afterwards, that day towered like a mountain in the cloudy background of her life. Alone on the farm, for the first time in her recollection, she felt forlorn and isolated. It was impossible for her to keep her mind fixed on her tasks. Restlessness, like an inarticulate longing, pricked at her nerves. When the morning work in the dairy was over, she wandered about the farm, directing the work in the fields, and stopping for a minute or two to talk with old Matthew Fairlamb, who was handing up the shingles to his son William on the roof of the new barn. At a little distance the old house of the overseer, which had been used as a tobacco barn since her great-grandfather's death, was being cleaned and repaired for Jonas Walsh (one of the "poor Walshes") who had undertaken to work as a manager in return for a living and a share of the crops. After Rufus went, Mrs. Oakley insisted, a white man and his family would be required on the place, and though Dorinda preferred loneliness to such company, she found it less wearing to yield to her mother than to argue against her opinion. "Mrs. Walsh will be company for Ma, anyway," she said to herself. "Even if she is slatternly, they will still have chickens in common."

"Do you think Jonas will be useful?" she inquired of old Matthew, while she paused to watch the expert shingling of the roof.

Old Matthew made a dubious gesture, "Mebbe he will, an' mebbe he won't. I ain't prophesyin'."

"Well, he can shoot anyhow," William observed cynically, as he stooped down for the shingles his father held up. "He's got a gun and a coon dog."

"But I need him to work. How can you make a living out of the land unless you work it?"

Old Matthew chuckled. "The trouble with this here land is that tobaccy has worn it out. I ain't never seen the land yit that it wouldn't wear out if you gave it a chance. You take my advice, Dorindy, and don't have nothin' more to do with tobaccy. As long as you don't smoke and don't chaw, thar ain't no call for you to put up with it."

"I won't," Dorinda replied with determination. "All the tobacco fields are giving way to cowpeas."

"I see you're making a new field alongside of the old one."

"Yes. I sowed sweet clover with lime, and turned the clover under when it was in bloom. I can't afford to do that again. It was an experiment, but it improved the land."

"You're right thar, honey. Put yo' heart in the land. The land is the only thing that will stay by you."

She smiled and passed on, stopping to say a few words to Mary Joe Green at the door of the henhouse. Though she was aware that her aimless movements accomplished nothing, she could not settle down to the steady work which was awaiting her. The sound of a wagon in the road shook her nerves into a quiver of fear, and she started whenever a bird flew overhead or an acorn dropped on the dead leaves at her feet. At dinner time she did not kindle a fire in the stove, but drank a glass of buttermilk and ate a "pone" of cornbread while she stood on the front porch and looked at the road. One moment she wished that she had gone with her mother to the Courthouse, and the next she was glad that she had waited at home. Whatever Rufus's fate might be, she felt that the mental strain would be the end of her mother. Even if Rufus were to go free, Mrs. Oakley's conscience would torment her to death.

As the day declined the place became insupportable to her, and leaving the house, she walked across the yard to the gate, with Rambler and Flossie trailing at her heels. The road under the honey locust tree was strewn with oblong brown pods, as glossy as satin, and treading over them, she walked slowly past the bridge and up the shaded slope between the pasture and the band of Hoot Owl Woods. In the pasture she could see the Jerseys gathered by the stream under the willows, and now and then a silver tinkle of cowbells floated over the trumpet vine on the fence.

It was a rich October afternoon, with a sky of burnished blue and an air of carnival in the wine-red and ashen-bronze of the woods. For an instant the brightness hurt her eyes, and when she opened them it seemed to her that the autumnal radiance fluttered like a blown shawl over the changeless structure of the landscape. Beneath the fugitive beauty the stern features of the country had not softened.