VI
As the train rushed through the familiar country, Dorinda counted the new patches of ploughed ground in the landscape. “James Ellgood must be trying to reclaim all his old fields,” she thought.
The sun had not yet risen above the fretwork of trees on the horizon, but the broomsedge had felt the approach of day and was flying upward to meet it. Out of the east, she saw gradually emerge the serpentine curves of Whippernock River; then the clouds of blown smoke, the irregular pattern of the farms, and the buildings of the station, which wore a startled and half-awake air in the dawn.
After more than two years how strange it felt to be back again! To be back again just as if nothing had happened! How small the station looked, and how desolate, stranded like a wrecked ship in the broomsedge. What isolation! What barrenness! In her memory the horizon had been so much wider, the road so much longer, the band of woods so much deeper. It seemed to her that the landscape must have diminished in an incredible way since she had left it. Even the untidy look of the station; the litter of shavings and tobacco stems; the shabbiness and crudeness of the country people meeting the train; the disreputable rags of Butcher, the lame negro, who lived in the freight car; the very fowls scratching in the dust of the cleared space;—all these characteristic details were uglier and more trivial than she had remembered them. A sense of loneliness swept her thoughts, as if the solitude had blown over her like smoke. She realized that the Pedlar’s Mill of her mind and the Pedlar’s Mill of actuality were two different places. She was returning home, and she felt as strange as she had felt in New York. Well, at least she had not crawled back. She had returned with her head held high, as she had resolved that she would.
The whistle was sounding again, and the brakeman was hastily gathering her bags. She followed him to the platform, where the conductor stood waiting, the same conductor who had helped her into the train the morning she had gone away. He did not recognize her, and for some obscure reason, she felt flattered because he had forgotten her.
The train was stopping slowly. The faces of the assembled farmers started out so close to the track that they gave her a shock. There was Jim Ellgood ready to leave for Richmond; there was Mr. Garlick meeting somebody, his daughter probably; there was Mr. Kettledrum, looking as stringy and run-to-seed, as if he had not moved out of his wheelrut since the morning he had picked her up in the rain. In the little group she saw Rufus, slender, handsome, sullen as ever. How black his eyes were, and how becoming the dark red was in his cheeks! Then, as the train reached the station, she saw Nathan Pedlar running down to the track with the mail bag in his hand. Just at the last minute, but always in time—how like Nathan that was!
The conductor, with one foot on the step, was swinging his free leg while he felt for the ground. She put up her hand, hurriedly arranging her small blue hat with the flowing chiffon veil. Then she lifted the folds of her skirt as the conductor, who was firmly planted now on the earth, helped her to alight. Her heart was sad for her father, but beneath the sadness her indomitable pride supported her. Yes, she had come back unashamed. She might not return as a conqueror, but she had returned undefeated. They were looking at her as she stepped to the ground, and she felt, with a thrill of satisfaction, that, in her navy blue poplin with the chiffon veil framing her face (hanging veils were much worn in New York that year) she was worthy of the surprised glances they cast at her. A little thinner, a little paler, less girlish but more striking, than she had been when she went away. Her height gave her dignity, and this dignity was reflected in her vivid blue eyes, with their unflinching and slightly arrogant gaze. Romantic eyes, Burch had called them, and she had wondered what he meant, for surely there was little romance left now in her mind. If experience had taught her nothing else, it had at least made her a realist. She had learned to take things as they are, and that, as Burch had once remarked whimsically, “in the long run fustian wears better than velvet.” She had learned, too, she told herself in the first moments of her homecoming, that so long as she could rule her own mind she was not afraid of the forces without.
They had gathered round her. She was smiling and shaking the outstretched hands. “Well, it looked as if we’d about lost you for good.” “You’ve been gone two years, ain’t you?” “Hardly know Pedlar’s Mill, I reckon, since Nathan’s painted the store red?” “I saw her off,” Mr. Kettledrum was saying over and over. “I saw her off. A good long visit, warn’t it?”
Moving out of the throng, she kissed Rufus, who looked dejected and resentful.
“How is Pa, Rufus?”
“There ain’t any change. The doctor says he may drag on this way for several weeks, or he may go suddenly at any time.”
“Well, we’d better start right on.” Walking quickly up the slope to where the old buggy was standing, she put her arms round Dan’s neck and laid her cheek against him. “He knows me,” she said, “dear old Dan, he hasn’t forgotten me. Is there anything you want for Ma at the store?”
“She gave me a list. I left it with Minnie May.”
“Minnie May doesn’t work in the store, does she? Who looks after the children?”
“She does. She does everything.”
“Well, it’s a shame. She oughtn’t to, and only thirteen. I’ll speak to Nathan about it.”
At her commanding tone, Rufus grinned. “You’ve come back looking as if you could run the world, Dorinda,” he observed, with envy. “I wish I could go away. I’d start to-morrow, if it wasn’t for Pa.”
“Yes, that’s why I came back. We can’t leave Pa and Ma now. But it’s hard on you, Rufus.”
“You bet it is! It’s my turn to get away next.”
She assented. “I know it. If the time comes when Pa can do without you, I’ll help you to go. You’ll never make much of a farmer.”
He stared moodily at the road, but she could see that her promise had encouraged him. “There’s nothing in it,” he answered. “I believe it is the meanest work ever made. You may slave till you drop, and there’s never anything to show for it. Look at Pa.”
“Pa never had a chance. He grew up at the wrong time. But all farming isn’t bad. Suppose we had a dairy farm?”
He grinned again. “O Lord! with one cow! You’re out of your head!”
“Perhaps. Anyway, I’ve come back to see what I can do.”
Her glance wavered as Nathan, having dashed into the store with the mail bag, came toward them with the kind of lope that he used when he was in a hurry. “I didn’t get a chance to speak to you at the train, Dorinda,” he said, “but all the same I’m glad you’re home again. The children want to get a peek at you in your city clothes. Minnie May’s gone crazy about your veil.”
In two years he had altered as little as the landscape. Lank, sand-coloured, with his loping, stride, his hands that were all knuckles, and his kindly clown’s face under hair that was as short as rubbed-off fur, he appeared to her, just as he used to do, as both efficient and negligible. Poor Nathan, how unattractive he was, but how good and faithful! Clean, too, notwithstanding the fact that he never stopped working. His face and neck looked well scrubbed, and his blue cotton shirt was still smelling of starch and ironing. The memory of the lunch he had given her when she went away was in her mind as she held out her hand to him and then stooped to kiss the children, one after another. How they must miss their mother, these children! She must do something for Minnie May, who had the stunted look of overworked childhood. Nathan was well off for Pedlar’s Mill, yet he let the little girl work like a servant. It was simply that he did not know, and she would make it her business, she told herself firmly, to instruct him. Minnie May was a nice, earnest child, with the look of her mother. She would be almost pretty, too, if she could get that driven expression out of her pinched little face. Her hair was really lovely, wheaten red like Rose Emily’s, only it needed brushing, and she wore it dragged back from her forehead where, at thirteen, wrinkles were already forming. Yes, Dorinda decided, she would certainly speak to Nathan.
“You look fine, Dorinda,” he was saying while he stared at her.
“She is like a paper doll in a book,” Minnie May exclaimed. “One of those fashion books Miss Seena Snead has.”
The three smaller children were staring with wide open eyes and mouths, and John Abner, the baby, she remembered, with the clubfoot, was holding a slice of bread and butter in both hands. He limped badly when he walked, she noticed. What a job it must be keeping these children washed and dressed.
“Are you the nurse too, Minnie May?” she inquired.
“Yes, I do everything,” the little girl replied proudly, wrinkling her forehead. “We had a coloured girl, but the children didn’t like her and wouldn’t mind her.”
Dorinda turned to Nathan. “It’s too much, Nathan. You oughtn’t to let her do it.”
“I tell her not to slave so hard,” he answered helplessly. “But it doesn’t do any good. She promised her mother that she would take care of the children.”
“But Rose Emily never meant this. It is making an old woman of the child before she grows up.”
“I can’t help it. She’s as stubborn as a mule about it. Maybe you can do something.”
Dorinda nodded with her capable air. “Well, I’ll fix it.” She looked cool, composed, and competent, the picture of dignified self-reliance, as she stepped between the muddy wheels of the dilapidated buggy.
“I hope you’ll find your father better,” Nathan said. “I’ll come over later in the day and see if there is anything I can help about.” She smiled gratefully over her shoulder, and Rufus remarked, in his sullen, suppressed voice, as they drove off, “He’s been over every single evening since Pa had his stroke.”
“Nobody ever had a kinder heart,” Dorinda responded absently, for she was not thinking of Nathan.
As the buggy jolted down the slope to the pine woods, a dogcart passed them on the way to the station, and she recognized Geneva Greylock. She was driving the dogcart with red wheels which she had used before her marriage; she was wearing the same jaunty clothes; but the change in her appearance made Dorinda turn to glance back at her. Though she was still in her early twenties, she looked like a middle-aged woman. Her sallow cheeks had fallen in, her long nose was bony and reddened at the tip, and her abundant flaxen hair was lustreless and untidy.
“How soon blondes break,” Dorinda said aloud, and she thought, “Two years of marriage have made an old woman of her.”
“Yes, she’s lost what looks she ever had,” returned Rufus. “She was always delicate, they say, and now her health has gone entirely. It’s the life she leads, I reckon. Folks say he is beginning to follow in his father’s footsteps. That’s why the new doctor up by the Courthouse is getting all his practice.” When he spoke of Jason he carefully refrained from calling his name.
“Are there any children?” Dorinda asked. Her spirits were drooping; but this depression, as far as she was aware, had no connection with Jason. Not her own regret, but the futility of things in general, oppressed her with a feeling of gloom.
“Not that I ever heard of,” Rufus replied. “To tell the truth I never hear anybody mention his name. You can ask Nathan. He knows everything about everybody.” He shut his sullen lips tight, and stared straight ahead of him.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I was merely wondering why her health had failed.”
They had come out of the woods, and the wheels were creaking over the dried mudholes. The sun had risen through a drift of cloud, and beneath the violet rim an iridescent light rained over the abandoned fields. While they drove on, it seemed to Dorinda that it was like moving within the heart of an opal. Every young green leaf, every dew-drenched weed, every silken cobweb, every brilliant bird, or gauzy insect,—all these things were illuminated and bedizened with colour. Only the immense black shadow of the horse and buggy raced sombrely over the broomsedge by the roadside.
“Nothing has changed,” Dorinda thought. “Nothing has changed but myself.”
Yes, it was all familiar, but it was different, and this difference existed only within herself. All that she had suffered was still with her. It was not an episode that she had left behind in the distance; it was a living part of her nature. Even if she worked her unhappiness into the soil; even if she cut down and burned it off with the broomsedge, it would still spring up again in the place where it had been. Already, before she had reached the house, the past was settling over her like grey dust.
They passed the Sneads’ red brick house with white columns. The same flowers bloomed in the borders; the same shrubs grew on the lawn; the same clothes appeared to hang perpetually on the same clothes-line at the corner of the back porch. In the pasture, the friendly faces of cows looked at her over the rail fence, and she remembered that two years ago, as she went by, she had seen them filing to the well trough. In a few minutes she would pass the burned cabin and the oak with the fading Gospel sign fastened to its bark. Her heart trembled. The racing shadow by the road appeared to stretch over the sunrise. She felt again the chill of despair, the involuntary shudder of her pulses. Then she lifted her eyes with a resolute gesture and confronted remembrance.
The place was unchanged. The deep wheelruts where the road forked; the flat rock on which the mare slipped; the cluster of dogwood which screened the spot where she had waited for Jason’s return; the very branch she had pushed aside,—not one of these things had altered. Only the fire in her heart had gone out. The scene was different to her because the eyes with which she looked on it had grown clearer. The stone was merely a stone; the road was nothing more than a road to her now. Over the gate, she could see the willows of Gooseneck Creek. Beyond them the tall chimneys of Five Oaks lay like red smears on the changeable blue of the sky.
After they had left the fork, Dan quickened his pace.
“The fence has been mended, I see, Rufus.”
“Yes, we had so much trouble with the cow straying. Pa was trying to get all the fences near the house patched before fall. We were using the rails that were left over from the timber he sold.”
“Those weren’t the woods Ma wrote me about?” She could never think of living trees as timber.
“No, he is holding on to that in hope of getting a better price.”
They travelled the last quarter of a mile without speaking, and not until the buggy had turned in at the gate and driven up the rocky grade to the porch, did Dorinda ask if her father expected her.
“Yes, Ma told him, but she wasn’t sure that he understood. He was awake before I left the place and Ma was seeing about breakfast.”
“Haven’t you had any yet?”
“Yes, I had a bite before I started. I’m no friend to an empty stomach, and I reckon I can manage a little something after I’ve turned Dan into the pasture. Pa was ploughing the tobacco field when he had his stroke, but he had decided not to plant tobacco there this year. We’re going to try corn.”
“I’m glad he’s given up tobacco.”
“He hasn’t. Not entirely. But it takes more manure than he can spare this year. Well, we’re here at last. Is that you, Ma?” he shouted, as the wheel scraped against the “rockery” by the steps.
At his second call, the door opened and Mrs. Oakley ran out on the porch.
“So you’ve come, daughter,” she said, and stood wiping her hands on her apron while she waited for Dorinda to alight. How old she had grown, thought the girl, with a clutch at her heart. Only the visionary eyes looked out of the ravaged face through a film of despair, as stars shine through a fog.