Chapter XVIII: Part 18

The minister's voice ceased at last. Since he had never seen Jason he had trusted, perhaps imprudently, to his imagination, and Dorinda wondered how he could have found so much to say of a life that was so empty. She bent her head in prayer, and a few minutes afterwards, she heard the thud of earth falling from the spade to the coffin. The red clay fell in lumps, dark, firm, heavy, smelling of autumn. It fell without breaking or scattering, and it fell with the sound of inevitableness, of finality. For an eternity, she heard the thuds on the coffin. Then the voice of the minister rose again in the benediction, and she watched, as in a trance, John Abner bring the two flat stones from the edge of the ploughed field and place them at the head and foot of the grave.

She turned away, and became aware presently that the clergyman had followed her and was speaking. "It is a sad occasion, Mrs. Pedlar," he said, and coughed because her blank face startled the end of his remark out of his mind. "A sad occasion," he repeated, stammering.

"All funerals are sad occasions," she responded, and then asked: "Will you come to the house for a cup of coffee?"

She hoped he would refuse, and he did refuse after a brief hesitation. He had a sick call to make near by, and already the day was closing in. While he held her hand he spoke with unction of her generosity. Wherever he went, he said, he heard of her good works. This, he realized, was a concrete example of her many virtues, and he reminded her hopefully that the greatest of these is charity. Then he went off in his Ford car, and Dorinda stood where he had left her and stared after him as if she were rooted there in the damp periwinkle.

"The wind is cutting. Come away," John Abner urged, taking her arm. "Funerals are always depressing, but you did what you could." It was true. She had done what she could, and she realized that this, also, would not make any difference.

She walked away very slowly because she found that her knees were stiff when she attempted to move. It was while she was treading on the spongy earth at the edge of the ploughed field that she saw life crumble like a mountain of cinders and roll over her. She was suffocated, she was buried alive beneath an emptiness, a negation of effort, beside which the vital tragedy of her youth appeared almost happiness. Not pain, not disappointment, but the futility of all things was crushing her spirit. She knew now the passive despair of maturity which made her past suffering seem enviable to her when she looked back on it after thirty years. Youth can never know the worst, she understood, because the worst that one can know is the end of expectancy.

Smothered in this mountain of cinders, she walked to the old buggy and stepped between the wheels to the front seat. A minute later they drove past the barn where she would have killed Jason if her hand had not wavered. Past the house where she had felt her heart crouching in animal terror before the evil old man. Through the woods where the wet boughs had stung her face. Rain. Rain. The sound of rain beating into her memory. Rain on the shingled roof, pattering like the bare feet of children. Rain on the hunched box-bush and the white turkeys. Rain on the sandy road. Rain on the fork of the road, on the crushed leaves smelling of autumn. Everything was before her then. There is no finality when one is young. Though they had been unendurable while she had passed through them, those years of her youth were edged now with a flame of regret. She felt that she would give all the future if she could live over the past again and live it differently. How small a thing her life appeared when she looked back on it through the narrow vista of time! It was too late now, she knew, for her youth was gone. Yet because it was too late and her youth was gone, she felt that the only thing that made life worth living was the love that she had never known and the happiness that she had missed.

When she reached the house she went to her room in silence, and sank on a couch in front of the fire as if she were sinking out of existence. Fluvanna, finding her there a little later, helped to undress her and went to tell John Abner that she was ill enough to have the doctor summoned. Hearing her from the hall, Dorinda did not take the trouble to contradict. The doctor did not matter. Illness did not matter. Nothing mattered but the things of which life had cheated her.

Lying there in the shadowy firelight of the room, she heard the wind wailing about the corners of the house and rustling in the old chimneys. She saw the crooked shape of a bough etched on the window-panes, and she listened for the soft thud of the branches beneath the sobbing violence of the storm. Though the room was bright and warm, a chill was striking through her flesh to the marrow of her bones. Shivering by the fire, she drew the blankets close to her chin.

The door opened and John Abner came in. "Can't you eat any supper, Dorinda?"

Behind him, in the glare of lamplight, she saw Fluvanna with a tray in her hands. The blue and white china and the Rebekah-at-the-well tea-pot lunged toward her.

"No, I can't eat a mouthful." Then changing her mind, she sat up on the couch and asked for tea. When they poured it out for her, she drank three cups.

"You got a chill, Dorinda. It was raw and wet out there."

"Yes, I got a chill," she replied; but it was the chill of despair she meant.

"The wind is rising. We are going to have a bad storm. I suppose I'd better go out again and take a look."

After he had gone, she lay there still shivering beneath the blankets, with her eyes on the low white ceiling, where the firelight made shimmering patterns. Outside, the wind grew louder. She heard it now at a distance, howling like a pack of wolves in the meadow. She heard it whistling round the eaves of the house and whining at the sills of the doors. All night the gusts shook the roof and the chimneys, and all night she lay there staring up at the wavering shadows of the flames.

And the youth that she had never had, the youth that might have been hers and was not, came back, in delusive mockery, to torment her. It was as if the sardonic powers of life assumed, before they vanished for ever, all the enchanting shapes of her dreams. She remembered the past, not as she had found it, but as she had once imagined that it might be. She saw Jason, not as she had seen him yesterday or last year, but as he was when she had first loved him. Though she tried to think of him as broken, ruined, and repellent, through some perversity of recollection, he returned to her in the radiance of that old summer. He returned to her young, ardent, with the glow of happiness in his eyes and the smile of his youth, that smile of mystery and pathos, on his lips. In that hour of memory the work of thirty years was nothing. Time was nothing. Reality was nothing. Success, achievement, victory over fate, all these things were nothing beside that imperishable illusion. Love was the only thing that made life desirable, and love was irrevocably lost to her.

Toward morning she fell asleep, and when she awoke at dawn the wind had lulled and a crystal light was flooding the room. Within herself also the storm was over. Life had washed over her while she slept, and she was caught again in the tide of material things. Rising from the couch, she bathed and dressed and went out of doors into the clear flame of the sunrise.

Around her the earth smelt of dawn. After the stormy night the day was breaking, crisp, fair, windless, with the frost of a mirage on the distant horizon. The trees were bare overhead. Bronze, yellow, crimson and wine-colour, the wet leaves strewed the flagged walk and the grass. Against the eastern sky the boughs of the harp-shaped pine were emblazoned in gold.

Turning slowly, she moved down the walk to the gate, where, far up the road, she could see the white fire of the life-everlasting. The storm and the hag-ridden dreams of the night were over, and the land which she had forgotten was waiting to take her back to its heart. Endurance. Fortitude. The spirit of the land was flowing into her, and her own spirit, strengthened and refreshed, was flowing out again toward life. This was the permanent self, she knew. This was what remained to her after the years had taken their bloom. She would find happiness again. Not the happiness for which she had once longed, but the serenity of mind which is above the conflict of frustrated desires. Old regrets might awaken again, but as the years went on, they would come rarely and they would grow weaker. "Put your heart in the land," old Matthew had said to her. "The land is the only thing that will stay by you." Yes, the land would stay by her. Her eyes wandered from far horizon to horizon. Again she felt the quickening of that sympathy which was deeper than all other emotions of her heart, which love had overcome only for an hour and life had been powerless to conquer in the end, the living communion with the earth under her feet. While the soil endured, while the seasons bloomed and dropped, while the ancient, beneficent ritual of sowing and reaping moved in the fields, she knew that she could never despair of contentment.

Strange, how her courage had revived with the sun! She saw now, as she had seen in the night, that life is never what one dreamed, that it is seldom what one desired; yet for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibilities of high adventure. Though in a measure destiny had defeated her, for it had given her none of the gifts she had asked of it, still her failure was one of those defeats, she realized, which are victories. At middle age, she faced the future without romantic glamour, but she faced it with integrity of vision. The best of life, she told herself with clear-eyed wisdom, was ahead of her. She saw other autumns like this one, hazy, bountiful in harvests, mellowing through the blue sheen of air into the red afterglow of winter; she saw the coral-tinted buds of the spring opening into the profusion of summer; and she saw the rim of the harvest moon shining orange-yellow through the boughs of the harp-shaped pine. Though she remembered the time when loveliness was like a sword in her heart, she knew now that where beauty exists the understanding soul can never remain desolate.

A call came from the house, and turning at the gate, she went back to meet John Abner, who was limping toward her over the dead leaves in the walk. His long black shadow ran ahead of him, and while he approached her, he looked as if he were pursuing some transparent image of himself.

"You are yourself again," he said, as he reached her. "Last night I was disturbed about you. I was afraid you'd got a bad chill."

"It went in the night. The storm wore on my nerves, but it was over by morning." Then before he could reply, she added impulsively, "Bear with, my fancies now, John Abner. When I am gone, both farms will be yours."

"Mine?" John Abner laughed as he looked at her. "Why, you may marry again. They are saying at Pedlar's Mill that you may have Bob Ellgood for the lifting of a finger."

Dorinda smiled, and her smile was pensive, ironic, and infinitely wise. "Oh, I've finished with all that," she rejoined. "I am thankful to have finished with all that."

THE END