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.