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.
She walked on, still followed by Rambler and Flossie, beyond the woods to the fork of the road. Looking away from the gate of Five Oaks, she kept her eyes on the acres of broomsedge belonging to Honeycomb Farm. The stretch of road beyond the burned cabin was deserted, and the only sound was the monotonous droning of insects and the dropping of persimmons or acorns on the dead leaves under the trees. Far away, in the direction of Old Farm, the shocked corn on the hill was swimming in a rain of apricot-coloured lights. “If only it would last,” she thought, “things would not be so hard to bear. But it is like happiness. Before you know that you have found it, it goes.”
Turning away, because beauty was like a knife in her heart, she called Rambler back to her side. In the middle of the road, bathed in the apricot-coloured glow, Flossie was sitting, and farther on, she saw the figures of old Matthew and William Fairlamb on their way home from work. When they reached her they spoke without stopping.
“Good evening. We’ll be over bright and early to-morrow.”
“Good evening to you both. There won’t be a killing frost to-night, will there?”
“Not enough to hurt. Thar ain’t nothin’ but flowers left out by this time, I reckon.”
Old Matthew’s cheeks were as red as winter apples, and his eyes twinkled like black haws in their sockets. “He! He! When thar ain’t nothin’ to hurt, we’ve no need to worry!”
As they trudged away, she turned and looked after them. She wanted to ask what they had heard of the shooting; but she resisted the impulse until they were too far away for her words to reach them. Standing there, while the two figures dwindled gradually into the blue distance, she was visited again by the feeling that the moment was significant, if only she could discover the meaning of it before it eluded her. Strange how often that sensation returned to her now! Everything at which she gazed; the frosted brown and yellow and wine-red of the landscape; the shocked corn against the sunset; the figures of the two men diminishing in the vague smear of the road; all these images were steeped in an illusion of mystery. “I’ve let myself get wrought up over nothing,” she thought, with an endeavour to be reasonable.
By the time she came within sight of the house again the afterglow was paling, and a chill had crept through the thick shawl that she wore. Perhaps, in spite of old Matthew, there would be a heavy frost before morning, and she was glad to reflect that only the few summer flowers in her mother’s rockery would be blighted. Smoke was rising from two of the chimneys, and she knew that Mary Joe had kindled fires in the kitchen and in her mother’s chamber. Already Fluvanna would be well on with the milking. It was the first time Dorinda had trusted it to the girl and Nimrod, and she hoped that there would be nothing to find fault with when she went out to the barn.
Two hours later, when the milking and the straining were both over, she hurried out of the dairy at the noise of wheels in the darkness. As the buggy drew up to the steps, she saw that her mother was seated between Rufus and Nathan; and even before she caught the words they shouted, she understood that the boy had been discharged. It was what she had expected; yet after the assurance reached her, her anxiety was still as heavy as it had been all day. When her eyes fell on her mother’s shrunken figure she realized that the old woman must have paid a fearful price for her son’s freedom. “She looks bled,” the girl thought bitterly. “She looks as if she would crumble to a handful of dust if you touched her.” A hot anger against Rufus flamed in her heart. Then she saw that the boy was shaking with emotion, and her anger was smothered in pity. After all, who was to blame? Who was ever to blame in life?
“It’s all right, Dorinda,” Nathan said, as he helped Mrs. Oakley to the ground and up on the porch. “Your Ma held up splendidly, but it’s been too much for her. She’s worn clean out, I reckon.”
“I wish you’d been there to see the way she did it,” Rufus added. “Nobody said a word after she got through.” Had he actually forgotten, Dorinda asked herself, that his mother had sworn to a lie in order to save him?