XVII
The exact moment of her yielding was so vague that she could never remember it; but three weeks later they drove over to the Presbyterian church at Pedlar’s Mill and were married. Until the evening before she had told no one but Fluvanna; and only the pastor’s wife, a farmer or two, and Nathan’s children, witnessed the marriage. As they stood together before the old minister, a shadowy fear fluttered into Dorinda’s mind, and she longed to turn and run back to the safe loneliness of Old Farm. “Can it be possible,” she asked herself, “that I am doing this thing?” She seemed to be standing apart as a spectator while she watched some other woman married to Nathan.
When it was over the few farmers came up to shake hands with her; but their manner was repressed and unnatural, and even the children had become bashful and constrained.
“Wall, you was wise to git it over,” John Appleseed said. “I don’t favour marryin’ fur a woman as long as she’s got a better means of provision; but it’s fortunate we don’t all harbour the same opinions.”
He had attended with his idiot son, who was now a man of twenty-five, but still retained his fondness for a crowd or a noise. While she looked into his vacant face, Dorinda recalled Jason’s ineffectual endeavours to enlighten the natives, and the lecture on farming that he had delivered to Nathan Pedlar and Billy. Appleseed, the idiot. Poor Jason! After all, he had had his tragedy.
“Nobody wants to hear croaking at a wedding, John,” William Fairlamb remarked genially.
“Oh, I don’t mind him.” Dorinda laughed, but the laugh went no deeper than her throat. Terror had seized her, the ancient panic quiver of the hunted, and her face wore a strained and absent look as if she were listening to some far-off music in the broomsedge. “How did I ever come to do such a thing?” a voice like a song was asking over and over.
On the drive home she could think of nothing to say. Her mind, which was usually crowded with ideas, had become as blank as a wall, and she sat gazing in silence over the head of the brisk young mare Nathan was driving. So small a thing as the fact that Nathan was holding the reins made her feel stiff and uncomfortable.
As they passed the old mill, Geneva Greylock came running out of the ruins and waved a blue scarf in the air. They could not see her face clearly; but there was a distraught intensity in the lines of her thin figure and in the violent gestures of her arms beneath the flying curves of blue silk, which wound about her like a ribbon of autumn sky.
“She’s getting worse every day,” Nathan said, glancing toward her as they spun past. “It won’t be long now before they have to send her to the asylum. Last Sunday, when the minister was taking dinner with James Ellgood, Geneva went round the table and poured molasses into every soup plate. When they asked her why she had done it, she said she was trying to make life sweeter.”
“Poor thing,” Dorinda sighed. “She was always ailing.”
It was a brown afternoon in November, with a smoky sky and a strong, clean wind which rushed in a droning measure through the broomsedge. All the leaves had fallen and been swept in wind drifts under the rail fences. The only animate shapes in the landscape were the buzzards flocking toward a dead sheep in the pasture.
“Did you tell the children to come straight over?” Nathan inquired presently.
“Yes, I’ve got their rooms ready. I had paper put on the walls instead of whitewash, and they look very nice. The new stove heats them, comfortably.”
“You mustn’t let my children bother you, Dorinda.”
“Oh, no. I’m glad to have them. They will be company for me. We can begin reading again at night.”
The mare trotted briskly, and the edge of the wind felt like ice on Dorinda’s face. “It’s turning much colder,” she said after a long pause.
“Yes, there’ll be a hard frost to-night if it clears.”
She turned away from him, lifting her gaze to the sky where broken clouds were driven rapidly toward the south. A sword of light was thrust suddenly through the greyness, and she said slowly, as if the words were of profound significance, “The wind seems to be changing.” Always responsive to her surroundings, she told herself that the landscape looked as if it were running away from the wind. “Does it really look this way or is it only in my mind,” she thought, as they went on past the fork. Of course, if she had to go over it again, she could never bring herself to be married; but since she had walked into the marriage with open eyes, all she could do now was to endeavour to make the best of her mistake. Nathan was a good man and—well, you couldn’t have everything! Youth, with its troubled rapture and its unsatisfied craving, was well over. Green evening skies. The scent of wild grape. The flutter of the heart like a caged bird. Feet flying toward happiness.... Yes, he was a good man, and you couldn’t have everything.
When she reached the farm she left Nathan to build up the fire in the hall stove, and ran upstairs to put the finishing touches to the bedrooms she had prepared for the children. Everything was in order. There was nothing that she could find to do; yet she lingered to straighten a picture or change the position of a chair until she heard wheels approaching. Then, after she ran downstairs and exchanged embarrassed greetings, she visited the henhouse and the barn before she went into the kitchen to help Fluvanna with supper. All the work of the farm, so heavy and engrossing on other days that it made her a slave to routine, was suspended like a clock after the hour has struck.
“Do you want me to make the hard sauce for the plum pudding, Fluvanna?”
“Naw, Miss Dorindy, there ain’t nothin’ on earth for you to bother yo’ head with to-day. Miss Minnie May has made it, and she’s helping me as much as I want. You sit right down in the parlour and wait till supper is ready. I don’t see,” she concluded in a faultfinding tone, “why anybody wanted to have a poky wedding like this. There ain’t even a fiddle to make things lively.”
Dorinda went out, but not into the parlour. As she passed through the hall she caught a glimpse of Nathan, in his new suit of grey tweed, sitting bolt upright in the best chair, while he slowly turned the leaves of the family Bible. No, she had always disliked the parlour, in spite of her great-grandfather’s library which almost covered the walls. Would it be possible, she wondered, to turn the room into a more comfortable and cheerful place? Yet she shrank from making any definite change. Though she hated the furniture and the air of chill repose in which it had weathered the years, she could not banish the feeling that it was dedicated to the ancestral spirits of her family.
As she opened the back door, which admitted a gust of wind and a shower of brown leaves, she heard Nimrod laughing with Fluvanna in the kitchen. “Ef’n you ax me, it mought ez well be anybody’s wedding ez hem. I lay she ain’ never so much as smelt dat ar wedding cake.” Immediately, Fluvanna’s more educated accents responded, “I declare I couldn’t help feelin’ all the time that I was baking a cake for a corpse.”
“How in the world did I ever do it?” Dorinda asked herself for the hundredth time; and she pictured the years ahead as an interminable desert of time in which Nathan would sit like a visitor in the parlour and perpetually turn the leaves of the family Bible. Nothing but the first day that she had had young Ranger as an untrained puppy on her hands had ever seemed to her so endless. “I don’t see how I’m going to stand it for the rest of my life,” she thought. A different wedding day from the one of which she had dreamed long ago! But then, as she had learned through hard experience, imagination is a creative principle and depends little upon the raw material of life. Nothing, she supposed, ever happened exactly as you hoped that it would.
Supper was a dreary affair. The children were restless and awkward, and even the wedding cake, which Fluvanna had baked in secret, and over which she had lamented with Nimrod, was lumpy and heavy. Nathan endeavoured to enliven the meal by a few foolish jokes badly told, and when even Dorinda, who felt sorry for him, forgot to laugh, he stared at her with humble, sheepish eyes while he relapsed into silence. It was a relief when Bud, of Gargantuan appetite, refused a fifth slice of the indigestible cake, and the last piece was wrapped in a napkin and put away for Billy Appleseed.
“Are you going to have suppers like this every night?” Bud, the facetious, inquired, giving his stomach a comical pat.
For the first time a laugh unforced and unafraid broke from Dorinda and Nathan. After all, she concluded more hopefully, it was possible that the children might make the house brighter. “I like it over here better than I do at home,” John Abner said. “It’s farther away.”
“Farther away from what?” asked Nathan, who was trying to appear easy and flippant.
“Oh, I don’t know. Farther away from school, I reckon.”
“I wouldn’t want to go back to the city if we could have plum pudding every night till Christmas,” Bud persisted.
Dorinda shook her head. “Oh, you greedy boy!” she exclaimed, smiling. “When you are a little older you’ll learn that you can’t have everything.”
When supper was over she put on her overalls and lighted her lantern, for the short November day was already closing in. She knew that the milkers were probably slighting their work, and it made her restless to think that the cows might not have been handled properly. The negroes were cheerful and willing workers, but ten years of patient discipline on her part had failed to overcome their natural preference for the easiest way.
“You ain’t going out again, are you, Dorinda?” Nathan asked anxiously, while he watched her preparations.
“Yes, we had supper early so Fluvanna and Mary Joe could help with the milking, but I’d better go out and see what they are doing. There’s a lot to do in the dairy and the darkeys are still a little afraid of the new machinery.”
Nathan laughed good-humouredly. “I might as well help you. Dairy work is the sort that won’t keep.”
“No, it won’t wait. The butter has to be packed for the early train.”
“That means you’ll be up before daybreak?”
She nodded impatiently. “Well, you’re used to that. Don’t you breakfast by candlelight in winter?”
“Yes, I’m used to it. I’ll come out now and help.”
“I don’t want you. There’s plenty of work for you in the fields, but I don’t want you meddling in my dairy.”
For the first time she understood what work had meant in her mother’s life; the flight of the mind from thought into action. To have Nathan hanging round her in the dairy was the last thing, she said to herself, that she had anticipated in marriage.
“Of course, I didn’t mean to interfere with you.” He fell back into the house, and with a sigh of relief she fled out to the new cow-barn, where the last milkers still lingered and chatted over the wedding. As she passed into the heavy atmosphere and inhaled the pasture-scented breath of the cows, she felt that a soothing vapour had blown over her nerves.
“I declar, Miss Dorindy, you mought jes’ ez well not be mah’ed at all,” Nimrod remarked dolefully.
“Well, I won’t let it interfere with my work. No man is going to do that.”
Mary Joe bridled and giggled; for, being an engaging mulatto girl, she knew all that could be told of the interference of men. “Naw’m, dat dey ain’t, nor breck yo’ heart needer. Hit’s a pity we ain’t all ez strong-minded ez you is.”
Dorinda laughed. “Break my heart? I should think not,” she replied. And she meant what she said while she was saying it. One man had ruined her life; but no other man should interfere with it. She was encased in wounded pride as in defensive armour.
One of the other milkers, a big black woman named Saphira, smiled approvingly. “Hi! Dat’s moughty sassy, Miss Dorindy,” she exclaimed, “but hit ain’t natur!”
After the milkers had gone home, Dorinda went into the dairy with Fluvanna and Mary Joe and worked until nearly midnight. Usually, she had finished by nine o’clock, at the latest, but to-night there were a dozen extra tasks for her willing hands to perform. As the hours went on she became so particular and so sharply critical that the two coloured women were driven to tears. “Ef’n you ax me, hit’s a good thing she cyarn’t git mah’d but oncet,” muttered Mary Joe, as she was leaving.
At midnight, when there was nothing else that she could find to do and her limbs were aching from fatigue, Dorinda went back into the house and locked the hall door which Nathan had left unfastened. The lamp on the bracket by the staircase was flaring up, and she stopped to lower the wick, while Ranger rose from his bed on a mat by the door and sidled up to her.
“Is that you, Dorinda?” whispered a voice from beyond the bend in the staircase. “Do you work this late every night?” When she looked up, she saw Minnie May blinking down on her.
“No, not every night. We had put off the dairy work so that Fluvanna could go to the—” Her tongue stumbled over the word “wedding,” so she said “church” instead.
Holding her red flannel wrapper together over her flat girlish breast, Minnie May stole noiselessly down the staircase. Her pale red hair hung in a tight pigtail down her back, and the wrinkles of premature middle age were visible in her young forehead. She was a girl who had, as Fluvanna tartly observed, “run to character instead of looks.”
“I tried to wait up for you,” she said, “but you were so long coming, and Pa wouldn’t let me go out to the dairy. Mr. Garlick stopped by long enough to tell us about Geneva Greylock, and I thought you ought to know it. She threw herself into the old millpond this evening and was drowned.”
“Drowned?” Dorinda’s voice was colourless. “Why, she waved to us as we came by.” While she spoke, it seemed to her that she could never stop seeing the blue scarf flying round the distraught figure with its violent gestures.
“I know. John Appleseed saw her, but he didn’t tell anybody, and when they missed her they didn’t know where to look. It was the Haneys’ little boy who saw the blue scarf floating on the pond when he was playing by the mill-wheel. For months, they say, she had gone about telling everybody that Jason had murdered her baby; but, of course, it was just a delusion.”
“Poor thing.” Dorinda turned away and went over to the wood stove where the fire was quite dead. “There was something wrong with her. Even as a girl she was always moping.” Out of the fog of weariness there drifted a vision of the red chimneys of Five Oaks. So, like an old wound that begins to ache, the memory of Jason was thrust back into her life.
“Haven’t you been to sleep, Minnie May?”
“No, I was listening for you. You came in so softly I hardly heard you.”
“Well, you’d better go to bed. We have breakfast at five o’clock.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I wake early, and I’ll get up and help you pack the butter.”
As the girl went up the stairs, Dorinda opened the door of her room and stepped over the threshold. The fire had been freshly made up and a pleasant ruddiness suffused the large quaintly furnished chamber where her parents had lived and died. Nathan had tried to keep the room warm and to sit up for her; but overcome at last by the loneliness and the firelight, he had fallen asleep on the big couch by the hearth. Having removed only his coat, he lay stretched out on his back, snoring slightly, with his jaw drooping above his magenta tie and his glazed collar. His features wore the defenseless look which sleep brings to men and women alike, and she felt, with a pang of sympathy, that he was at her mercy because he cared while she was indifferent. She would be always, she realized, the stronger of the two; for it seemed to her one of the inconsistencies of human nature that strength should be measured by indifference rather than by love.
Picking up the old grey blanket from the foot of the bed, she spread it over him so gently that he did not stir in his sleep. The honesty she had felt in him from the beginning was the single attribute that survived in unconsciousness. If only she could remember his goodness and forget his absurdity, life would be so much easier.
Too tired to do more than let down her hair and slip into a wrapper, she dropped on the bed and drew the patchwork quilt up to her chin. As the firelight flickered over her face, she remembered the night when Rufus was arrested. Now, as then, she felt that the end of endurance was reached. “Even if I am married to Nathan and Geneva has drowned herself, I can’t keep awake any longer.”