VII
Riding slowly down the road from Five Oaks to Gooseneck Creek, Dorinda watched the few sheep browsing among the lengthening shadows of the October afternoon. Beyond them the life-everlasting broke in silver waves against the dim blue horizon. Over the whole landscape, with its flat meadows, its low rounded hill in the east, its crawling rust-coloured roads, hung a faint, hazy drift, as inaudible as the dying quiver of insects. Passing at a walk on her white horse against the rich autumn sunset, she reached the log bridge at the creek and kept on toward the fork of the road. She had taken the longer way home in order that she might inspect the new gate which William Fairlamb had finished. Round her, as evanescent as the last flare of day, there was this quivering haze, which was half dreamlike and half the tremor of perishing things. Nature drifting into rest; flowers drifting into dust; grasshoppers drifting into death; faint sunshine drifting into darkness. And in her own mind shadowy images or impressions drifting into thoughts.
It was five years now since the war had ended, and in those years she had recovered both her inward confidence and her outward prosperity. The misfortunes that had threatened the two farms had passed over her like wild geese. Even the labour question had been lessened, if not solved, by the application of electricity and gasoline. She had made a name that was not unknown among the farmers of the state; she had reclaimed two unproductive farms from the clutch of broomsedge and sassafras. In shallow soil, where her father had ploughed only six inches deep, she was now raising rich and abundant crops. Her dairy, she knew, was as well managed, her butter as good, as any that could be found in the country. The products of her dairy, with the name Old Farm stamped under the device of the harp-shaped pine, were bringing the highest prices in the market. She could smile now, with her butter selling in the Washington dairy at a dollar a pound, over the timidity with which she had, modestly asked thirty cents in the beginning. By that subtle combination of prudence and imprudence which she called character, she had turned disappointment into contentment and failure into success.
Riding there in the silver gleams which flashed up from the life-everlasting, she appeared, after the hard years, to have ripened into the last mellowness of maturity. Though her figure in the shirtwaist and knickerbockers of brown corduroy was no longer youthful, it was still shapely. The texture of her skin was rough and hard like the rind of winter fruit, but the dark red had not faded, and her eyes beneath the whitened hair were still as blue as a jay bird’s wing. Though she did not look young for her fifty years, she looked as if the years had been victorious ones.
As she opened the new gate, and passing through, turned to close it behind her, she heard the sound of approaching wheels, and saw the piebald horse and peculiar gig of Mr. Kettledrum ascending from the dip in the road. When he reached her they stopped to speak, after the manner of the country, and the old “mail rider,” who was just returning on his circuit of twenty-six miles, described, with sprightliness, the condition of the roads over which he had travelled.
“Three big trees blew down on the Whippernock road the other night,” he said, “and I reckon they’ll lie thar until they rot if the farmers down that way don’t cut them up for logs to burn. The Government sent an inspector down last week and he rode over my circuit along with me.” A note of pride crept into his quavering voice. “He told me he’d never seen any worse roads in the whole course of his recollection. No, ma’am, not in the whole course of his recollection.”
“I hope he’ll do something about them. After all, the Government is responsible for the rural delivery.”
Mr. Kettledrum shook his head. “I ain’t lookin’ for nothin’ to be done, at least not in my time. It don’t look as if the Government can afford to inspect and improve too, particularly when they’re inspectin’ the roads where mostly Democrats travel. But it was a real comfort to know he thought it was the worst mail road he’d ever laid eyes on in the whole course of his recollection.”
“I’ve been trying to get some of the negroes to mend this bad place before winter. The only way is for the farmers to keep their own roads in repair. The state started to improve the road between Pedlar’s Mill and Turkey Station, and all it did was to cut down every last one of the trees. There isn’t a patch of shade left there.”
“That’s true. I know it, ma’am,” assented Mr. Kettledrum, who liked to talk of the road, as a man likes to talk of an affliction. “Don’t I travel that road between ten and two o’clock on hot August days?” Then his face saddened to the look of stoical resignation with which men survey the misfortunes of others. “When I come along thar this mornin’ they was bringin’ Jason Greylock away from his house in the woods, and I stopped for a word with him. He was too weak to speak out loud, but he made a sign to say that he knew me. If thar ever was a wasted life, I reckon it was Jason’s, though he started out with such promise. Bad blood, bad blood, and nothin’ to counteract the taint of it.”
“Where were they taking him?” Dorinda inquired indifferently; and turning, she glanced over the autumn fields to the red chimneys of Five Oaks. The house was occupied now by Martin Flower, the manager, and smoke was rising in a slender column from the roof. Mr. Kettledrum cleared his throat. “I thought perhaps they’d sent word to you. Mr. Wigfall told me they was comin’ over to ask if you could make a place for Jason at Five Oaks. They seemed to think you owed him a lodgin’ on the farm considerin’ you bought it so cheap and made so much money out of it.”
A flush of anger stained Dorinda’s forehead and her eyes burned. “I owe him nothing,” she answered. “The place was sold at public auction after he had let it run to seed, and my husband bought it fairly for what he bid. If I did well, it is because I toiled like a field-hand to restore what the Greylocks had ruined.” She broke off with a gasp, as if she had been running away from herself. The old “mail rider,” she saw after a moment, stared at her in surprise.
“Yas’m, I’m sorry I spoke, ma’am,” he replied mildly. “You’ve earned the right to whatever you have, that thar ain’t no disputin’. I was just thinkin’ as I come along what a pleasant surprise it would be to your Pa if he could come back an’ see all those barns and dairy-houses, to say nothin’ of that fine windmill an’ electric plant.”
Dorinda sighed. “Poor Pa. My only regret is that he couldn’t share in the prosperity. He worked harder than I did, but he never saw any results. It has taken me thirty years.” Yes, she was fifty now, and it had taken her thirty years.
“You’ve kept the old house just as it was in his day. Wall, I favour a shingled roof, myself, even if it does burn quicker when it ketches fire. But thar’s something unfeeling to me about one of these here slate roofs. They ain’t friendly to swallows, an’ I like to see swallows flyin’ over my head at sunset.”
“Yes, a slate roof is almost as ugly as a tin one.” She regarded him steadily for a minute while she bent over to stroke Snowbird’s neck. The light struck her face obliquely through the fiery branch of a black-gum tree, and if Mr. Kettledrum had been gifted with imagination, he would have seen the look of something winged yet caged flutter into her blue eyes.
“What is the matter with Doctor Greylock?” she asked.
In Mr. Kettledrum, who was wafted off on waves of agreeable retrospection, the sudden question produced mental confusion. He was past the sportive period when one can think without effort of two things at the same time. “Eh, ma’am?” he rejoined, cupping one gnarled hand over his ear.
“I asked you what was the matter with Doctor Greylock?”
“Oh, Doctor Greylock! Thar’s no disputin’, ma’am, that you owe him nothin’ in the matter of Five Oaks.”
“I haven’t seen him for five years,” she said with deliberate slowness. “I thought he was still living in that house by Whippernock River.”
“So he was till this morning; that’s what they told me. But it seems they’ve heard nothing of him since Aunt Mehaley Plumtree stopped doin’ for him six months ago because he told her he didn’t have the money to pay her wages. He’d put everything he had, which was mighty little, I reckon, in some wild-cat scheme of oil wells in Mexico, and they’d either burst or leaked, if they ever was thar in the beginnin’, which I doubt. Everybody knows he never paid his taxes, but that thar little old place in the backwoods wasn’t worth a cent, so nobody troubled about tryin’ to collect ’em. Anyhow, he had to do for himself ever since Aunt Mehaley left him, an’ he’s been gittin’ sicker an’ sicker with consumption all the time. When Ike Pryde was over that way squirrel huntin’ yesterday, he stopped in thar an’ found Jason out of his head, without a bite to eat in the house. The whole place, henhouse and all, Ike said, was as bare as the pa’m of his hand. Wall, he ran home an’ got his wife to come over, and she did the best she could till they could lay hands on the sheriff. Jason had just kept alive on whiskey and some persimmons he’d managed to pick up from the ground. He must have been that way for weeks.”
The colour had ebbed from Dorinda’s cheeks and she looked as if she had withered. There was no distress in her mind, only a cloud of horror through which she could not see clearly. She lifted her hand and drew it across her eyes, brushing away the mist that obscured them. There was nothing there. Nothing but the drooping shadows over the road, the shocked corn against the sunset, the blur of scarlet and gold and wine-colour in the woods. There was no horror in these things; yet while she looked at them they became alive and struck out at her like a serpent.
“I have no sympathy to waste on him,” she said harshly, and then, “Won’t James Ellgood take care of him?”
Mr. Kettledrum shook his head, vaguely apologetic. “Not James. He hates him like poison. Maybe thar’s something in the notion that Jason drove his wife crazy. I ain’t takin’ sides. But like most soft-hearted men James is like a rock when he gets set against a thing. Thar wa’n’t no place for Jason to go but the poorhouse. The old women thar can look after him when he needs it.”
“Well, you can’t blame James Ellgood,” Dorinda replied. “As far as I can see nobody owes Jason Greylock anything but trouble.”
She was determined not to make excuses for him simply because he was dying. Everybody died sooner or later, and the vein of posthumous sentiment was not, she told herself sharply now, her affliction. Nothing was altered in the past because Jason had drunk himself into the poorhouse or the grave. Nothing was altered, she repeated, and yet she could not see the past any longer because of the present. Neither love nor hate but the poorhouse was the reality.
“It is a hard thing to have to die in the poorhouse,” she said.
“So ’tis, ma’am,” assented Mr. Kettledrum, who had stinted himself all his life in the hope of attaining an honourable old age. “But he’s light-headed most of the time and don’t know it. Anyhow,” he continued astutely, “it ain’t so hard on him as it would be on a man who had lived more respectable. He wasted mo’ on drink, I reckon, than it would cost to bury him decently.”
“That’s the dreadful part of it. It would be easier to help a man you didn’t despise.” She rode on a few paces and then turned back to the side of the gig. “If you see Mr. Wigfall at the station, tell him I’ll give him what he needs for Doctor Greylock, but I cannot have him at Five Oaks.”
“I’ll tell him,” Mr. Kettledrum rejoined, and he added impulsively for one of his unhurried observations, “You carry yo’ years well, if you don’t mind my remarkin’ on it.”
She smiled. “That’s because I never think of them. Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn’t have mine at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.”
“You look it,” the old man agreed, and then, without reason, he sighed. “Ah, I recollect you thirty years ago, when they used to say you had a face like a May mornin’. Not that you ain’t a fine figure of a woman now; but as we old men get on in years, our thoughts turn backward and we like to dwell on young things. Thirty years ago you looked as if sugar wouldn’t melt in yo’ mouth.”
He drove on regretfully, while Dorinda, on Snowbird, trotted homeward. The light on the shocked corn was so faint that it waned to a shadow while she looked at it. A flock of wild geese curved like blown smoke in the afterglow. Immersed in this twilight as in the sadness of memory, she gazed at the autumn scene, with the small gold leaves on the locust trees, the windmill beyond the house, and the flickering of firelight in the west wing. A prosperous farm to-day, a casual observer would have remarked; but to Dorinda, who never forgot, the whole place wore the look of wistful brooding which she remembered whenever she thought of her father.
Her exultation over Jason’s ruinous end had diminished now into an impersonal pity. She had longed to punish him for his treachery; she had hated him for years, until she had discovered that hatred is energy wasted; but in all her past dreams of retribution, she had never once thought of the poorhouse. Even as a question of justice, it seemed to her that the poorhouse was excessive. That terror of indigence which is inherent in self-respecting poverty was deeply bred in her nature, and she knew that her humbler neighbours were haunted by fear of charity as one is haunted by fear of smallpox in a pestilence. Yes, whatever he deserved, the poorhouse was too much. Though the horror of his fate did not lessen the wrong he had done, by some curious alchemy of imagination it reduced the sum of human passions to insignificance. What did anything invisible matter at the gate of the poorhouse?
Though her first impulse, derived from Presbyterian theology, was to regard his downfall as a belated example of Divine vengeance, her invincible common sense reminded her that Divine vengeance is seldom so logical in its judgments. No, he had not ended in the poorhouse because he had betrayed her. On the contrary, she saw that he had betrayed her because of that intrinsic weakness in his nature which would have brought him to disaster even if he had walked in the path of exemplary virtue. “His betrayal of me was merely an incident,” she thought. “Drink was an incident. If he had been stronger, he might have done all these things and yet have escaped punishment.” For it was not sin that was punished in this world or the next; it was failure. Good failure or bad failure, it made no difference, for nature abhorred both. “Poor Jason,” she said to herself, with contemptuous pity. “He was neither good enough nor bad enough, that was the trouble.”