VIII
As she stepped on the porch, the door opened and John Abner came out, accompanied by Amos Wigfall and one of the tenant farmers, Samuel Larch, who lived on the far side of Pedlar’s Mill. John Abner looked morose, but this had become his habitual expression since he had been crossed in love, and she was less disturbed by it than she was by the anxious suavity on the face of the sheriff.
“I was admirin’ yo’ improvements,” Mr. Wigfall remarked. “Thar’s been a heap of changes since the old days when yo’ Pa an’ Ma lived here.”
She met his wandering glance and held it firmly. “I saw Mr. Kettledrum and he gave me your message.”
The sheriff’s flabby face stiffened. “My message, ma’am?”
“About Doctor Greylock. I cannot have him at Five Oaks. He has no claim on me.” Hesitating an instant, she repeated slowly, weighing each separate syllable, “He has no claim on me, but I will pay you whatever you need to keep him out of the poorhouse.”
Mr. Wigfall uttered an obsequious noise which might have been either a bray or a cough. “I don’t reckon thar’s a mo’ charitable-minded lady in the county, ma’am. It ain’t often that you refuse to help an’ when you do, you’re likely to have a good reason.”
“Well, I’m ready to help Doctor Greylock,” Dorinda rejoined impatiently, “but there’s no sense in the notion that I owe him something because he ruined Five Oaks and I saved it.”
“Naw’m, thar cert’n’y ain’t no sense in that,” Mr. Wigfall conceded with suspicious alacrity.
“He thinks we might let him live in one of the unused wings,” John Abner explained. “Of course that will mean we’ll have to provide for him too, and as you say he hasn’t really the shadow of a claim on us. Poor devil!”
“The idea has got about that he’s dangerous from drink,” said Mr. Wigfall, “and thar wouldn’t nobody take him in, pay or no pay. The choice was between the county gaol an’ the poorhouse, an’ considerin’ everything the poorhouse seemed mo’ hospitable. Doctor Stout can look after him thar, and a bunch of female paupers can take turns at the nursing.”
“If he’s still out of his head, you can hardly expect Martin Flower to want him at Five Oaks,” John Abner suggested.
“Oh, he’s come to himself now,” Samuel Larch rejoined before the sheriff could reply. “I was the first to git to him after Ike Pryde brought word, an’ when I first clapped eyes on him he was clean out of his senses. But even then he was as weak as a baby an’ he couldn’t have lifted a finger against you. Soon as he had a few swallows of soup and a little brandy, he began to pick up, an’ by the time he’d been fed regular he could talk like himself again. Doctor Stout thinks he’ll hang on a few months longer if he gets plenty of milk an’ fresh eggs.”
“Well, I imagine he isn’t likely to get them in the poorhouse,” John Abner observed, with his sarcastic smile.
“Of course there isn’t the slightest reason why we should help him,” Dorinda insisted, as if the deprecating sheriff had started an argument. After a moment’s silence she added in a sharper tone, “But you can’t possibly let him die in the poorhouse.”
Mr. Wigfall, who had occupied a position of authority long enough to feel uncomfortable when he was displaced, shuffled his feet in the rocky path while he fingered uneasily the brim of his hat. “Naw’m,” he replied with as much dignity as he could command, and a few minutes later, he repeated in a louder voice, “Naw’m.”
Dorinda looked over his head at John Abner.
“It isn’t human,” she began, and, correcting herself, continued more deliberately: “It isn’t Christian to let a man die in the poorhouse because he has lost all he had.”
The two men nodded vacantly, and only John Abner appeared unimpressed by her piety.
“Naw’m, it cert’n’y ain’t Christian,” Mr. Wigfall agreed, with a promptness that was disconcerting.
“He can’t possibly be looked after there,” Dorinda resumed, as if she had not been interrupted.
“Naw’m, he can’t be looked after thar.”
For an instant she hesitated. Though she understood that her decision was a vital one, she felt as remote and impersonal to it as if it were one of those historic battles in France, which cost so much and yet were so far away. It even occurred to her, as it had occurred so often during the war, that men were never happy except when they were making trouble. Of course Jason could not be left in the poorhouse. Having acknowledged this much, she, to whom efficiency had become a second nature, was irritated because these slow-witted country officials appeared helpless to move in the matter.
“There isn’t any call to worry Martin Flower’s wife,” she said. “She’s ailing, anyway, and it would put her out to have a sick man, even if he were sober, in the house. You’ll have to bring him here until you can make some other arrangement. It is true,” she repeated harshly, “that he hasn’t the shadow of a claim on us; but we have plenty of milk and eggs, and for a few weeks he may have the spare room on the first floor.”
Mr. Wigfall gasped before he could articulate. Though he had prayed fervently to have the burden of an extra pauper, especially a pauper who had known better days and acquired the habit of drink, removed from his shoulders, he had never imagined, from his acquaintance with the leisurely methods of Providence, that his prayer would be so speedily answered. While he stared at Dorinda, his mute relief was as obvious as if he had uttered it at the top of his voice.
“He’s glad to wash his hands of him,” she thought, and then: “Who wouldn’t be?”
“I don’t reckon anybody will dispute yo’ charity, Mrs. Pedlar,” Samuel Larch was wheezing out. “Thar ain’t nobody stands any higher to-day in this here community than you do. You’re hard on the surface, as my wife says, but you’re human enough when you’re whittled down to the core.”
Dorinda smiled, but her eyes were tired and wrinkles showed in her ruddy skin. If they knew! If only they knew! she reflected; and she wondered if many other reputations were founded like hers upon a flattering ignorance of fact.
“Tell your wife it is hard things that wear well,” she responded. “After all, somebody has to bear the burden, and I am better able to do it than any of the rest of you, except perhaps,” she concluded indifferently, “James Ellgood.”
“Yas’m. I’m downright glad you take that sensible view of it,” the sheriff replied, as soon as he was capable of speaking. “Everybody about here knows that when they come to you, they’ll get justice.”
Justice! That was Nathan’s favourite word, she remembered. She could hear him saying as plainly as if he were present, “Any man has a right, Dorinda, to demand justice.” Strange how often Nathan’s words, which she had scarcely heeded when he was alive, returned to her in moments of difficulty or indecision. Only in the last few years had she begun to realize her mental dependence upon Nathan.
“I reckon we can manage to get him over here to-morrow evening,” Samuel Larch was saying. “Thar ain’t no call for you to send all the way to the poorhouse. Maybe Reuben Fain will let us have that auto-wagon of his.”
“Oh, I’ll come for him in the big car in the morning,” Dorinda replied. “It isn’t my way to do things by halves.”
The sheriff nodded. “Naw’m, it ain’t yo’ way to do things by halves,” he echoed thankfully.
After the two men were out of sight, she turned apologetically to John Abner. Although he said little, for he was never a great talker, she had observed that his face wore a look of severe disapprobation.
“There wasn’t anything else to do, was there, John Abner?” she asked, in the deferential tone she reserved for a crisis. It was not often that Dorinda deferred, and on the rare occasions when she did so, she was able to administer a more piquant flattery than the naturally clinging woman has at her command.
“It looks to me as if they were letting you down,” John Abner rejoined moodily; but his face cleared under her persuasion. After all, what he liked best was to be treated as an authority not only on farming, but on human nature as well. The fact that he had lived as a recluse, and knew nothing whatever of life, did not interfere with the sincerity of his claim to profound wisdom. Men were so immature, she found herself thinking; and they were never so immature as when they strutted most with importance. Since the emotional disaster of her youth, she had been incapable of either loving or hating without a caustic reservation; and she felt that the hidden flaw in her relations with men was her inability to treat a delusion of superiority as if it were a moral principle. This was a small indulgence, she imagined, to a woman who loved passionately; but to one who had safely finished with love and attained the calm judgment of the disillusioned, it was an indulgence which might prove to be particularly irksome.
Slipping her arm through John Abner’s, she walked with him into the house. “Well, of course, in a way you’re right; but after all, even if they are imposing on us, we couldn’t very well refuse to do anything.”
Though the two farms would go to John Abner at her death, there were moments when, notwithstanding his affection for her, she suspected uncomfortably that he would like complete authority while she was living. Not that he was ever disagreeable or ungenerous about the way she managed him. He was, she knew, honestly devoted to her, and he admired her without the pity that had always tempered her admiration for him. But he shared, she told herself, with all males who were not milksops, the masculine instinct to domineer over the opposite sex.
“Well, if it’s anybody’s business, it’s James Ellgood’s,” he protested.
She raised her straight grey eyebrows with a quizzical smile. “All the same you can hardly blame James Ellgood for not making it his business. Nothing will ever let him forget that Jason drove Geneva out of her mind.”
“Well, perhaps he did, but there was no law to punish him.”
“That’s what James Ellgood feels, of course, and I suppose he is right. If it were simply a question of punishment——”
“You mean it’s more than that?”
“Well, isn’t it?” She had learned that she could always win him to her point of view by disguising a naked fact in the paraphernalia of philosophy. “From our side, I suppose it’s one of humanity.” Though she despised sophistry as heartily as she despised indirectness, she could bend both to her purpose when it was a matter of compulsion.
“If you mean that our humanity is more important than his punishment?” he returned in a mollified tone.
“Yes, I do mean that. You have said it so often yourself.” That would finish his opposition, she knew, and without his opposition, life on the farm would be easier for the next two or three weeks.
“Won’t it make a lot of trouble?” he inquired.
She frowned. “I’m afraid it will. Of course, if he gets better, he can move over to Five Oaks, and anyway the authorities ought to make some kind of provision for him. We can’t be expected to take over the poor farm.” Her tone was suddenly bitter with memory; but she concluded hastily: “In the meantime, I’ll warm the spare room and get it ready. If the doctor says he must have fresh air, we can move his bed out on the back porch.”
John Abner looked resentful. “I’m sorry for the poor devil, of course, even if he did drive his wife crazy; but I don’t see the sense in turning the place upside down for somebody who hasn’t the slightest claim on you. He isn’t even a poor relation.”
“He isn’t anybody’s poor relation, that’s the trouble.”
“I’m not so sure.” John Abner could be brutally candid at times. “There are a lot of Idabella’s mulatto children still hanging about Five Oaks.”
She shivered with disgust. “What the law doesn’t acknowledge, I suppose it doesn’t bother about.”
“Well, it isn’t any business of mine,” John Abner said, after deliberation. “If you choose to bring him here, of course you have the right. But I hope you aren’t going to wear yourself out waiting on him. You’ve got no moderation in such things. After Snowbird’s sickness last winter, you didn’t look like yourself.”
She shook her head. “I’d do much more for Snowbird. But I shan’t wait on him. I’ll get Fluvanna’s sister, Mirandy. She’s an old woman, and a good hand with sick people, even if she hasn’t any sense in the dairy.” As she finished, she heard a voice in her mind asking distinctly, “Why am I doing this? Why should I take the trouble?” And there wasn’t any answer. Even when she dragged her mind for an excuse or even an idea, she could not unearth one. She had stopped loving Jason thirty years ago; she had stopped hating him at an indefinite period; she had stopped even remembering that he was alive; yet she could not, without doing violence to her own nature, let him die in the poorhouse. After all, it was not her feeling or lack of feeling for him, it was the poorhouse and her horror of the poorhouse that decided his fate.
“I’ll have to go with you,” John Abner was saying. “You can’t manage it by yourself.”
“No. I’d rather have you. If we start right after dinner, that ought to bring us back before the milking is over. The road is rough, I’m afraid. We’ll have to take some pillows in the back of the car.”
“If he’s bad off, perhaps Doctor Stout won’t let him come,” John Abner suggested hopefully.
“Well, we’ll stop at the doctor’s house on the way. That’s why I want to start early.”
That night, after the last of the day’s work was over, they sat in front of Dorinda’s fire and talked as they used to talk when John Abner was a boy and had not been warped by disappointment. Their thoughts were in the future, not in the past, and Dorinda’s visions were coloured by the optimism which she had won more from perseverance than from any convincing lesson of experience. Because of the very defects of his qualities, John Abner suited her. It was true that his companionship had its imperfections; but she would not have exchanged his sullen reticence for the golden fluency of the new minister at Pedlar’s Mill. Her stepson’s personality was attractive to her, for he gave an impression of inexhaustible strength in reserve; and in the matter of disposition he influenced her less as an example than as a warning, which, after all, she reflected, was the kind of influence she needed.
“When all is said, we are as contented as we could expect to be,” she remarked, when he rose to go upstairs. “If you don’t marry, we’ll have a pleasant old age by the fireside.”
He laughed shortly, for he was in one of his gentler moods. There was a charm, she thought, in his long thin features, his sallow skin with bluish shadows about the mouth, his squinting eyes, and his straight black hair which fell in stringy locks over his forehead.
“You may marry again yourself,” he said abruptly. “You aren’t as handsome as you used to be, but you’re still better-looking than anybody about here.”
She shook her head obstinately. “With white hair and wrinkles!”
“Well, there’s more than white hair and wrinkles. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there,” he answered, as he turned away and went out of the room.
In the morning she awoke with a feeling of despondency. Dread had come over her while she slept, and she felt it dragging at her memory after she had opened her eyes. Why had she yielded to that erratic impulse the evening before? Why had she allowed those two men to impose on her? “If is because I am a woman,” she thought. “If I were a man, they would never have dared.” Yes, John Abner was right (here was another instance of how right he so often was) and the county authorities had taken advantage of her weakness. “Well, I’ve let myself in for it now, and I’ll have to go through with it,” she said aloud, as she got out of bed and began dressing.
At breakfast, while she tried to eat and could not because of the lump in her throat, she reminded herself of her mother on the day of her journey to the Courthouse. “All I need is a crape veil and a handkerchief scented with camphor,” she said, with a laugh.
“What are you talking about, Dorinda?” John Abner asked, with a frown.
“I was thinking of my mother. Poor Ma! She’d be living now if she hadn’t worried so.”
“Well, she’d be nearly a hundred, I reckon. And don’t you begin worrying. Are you out of temper because you let those men put something over on you?”
“I don’t know. It seems different this morning. I can’t see why I did it.”
“I heard the men talking about it in the barn. Somebody, the sheriff, I reckon, had told Martin Flower, and he said you’d bitten off more than you could chew.”
Dorinda flushed angrily. “When I want Martin Flower’s interference, I’ll ask for it.”
Already a message had gone to Mirandy, and the old negress was waiting outside for directions when breakfast was over. The floor and the woodwork of the spare room must be scrubbed; the bed thoroughly aired before it was made up; a fire kindled in the big fireplace; and the red-bordered towels, which her mother had reserved for the visiting elder, must be hung on the towel-rack. Last of all, Mirandy must remember to keep a kettle boiling day and night on the brass footman.
“I wonder why I am doing all this?” Dorinda asked herself. Was it, as she believed, from impersonal compassion? Or was it because her first lover, merely because he had been the first, was impressed eternally on the unconscious cells of her being? “No, I’m not doing it for Jason,” she answered. “Even if I had never loved him, I couldn’t let the man who had owned Five Oaks die in the poorhouse.”
“Before we bring him here,” John Abner said, “you’d better warn Aunt Mirandy that consumption is catching.” He shook his head with a sardonic smile. “I’m afraid he’s going to be a nuisance; but I believe you would have done the same thing if it had been smallpox.”
She looked at him with inscrutable eyes. “I was never afraid of taking things.”
“But you don’t even like Jason Greylock.”
“Like him? Who could? What has that to do with the poorhouse?”
A look of rare tenderness, for he was not often tender, came into John Abner’s eyes while he squinted at her over the table. “Well, you’re a big woman, Dorinda, even if you’re trying at times. There’s an extra dimension in you somewhere.”
Though praise from John Abner was one of the things that pleased her most, she was incapable, she knew, of draining the sweetness of the moment before it escaped her. When happiness came to her she had always the feeling that she was too dull or too slow to realize it completely until it was, over, when she responded to the memory as she had never responded to the actual occurrence.
“You’re very good to me, John Abner,” she answered. Her words were insufficient, but the habit of reticence was, as usual, too strong for her.
For hours she went about her work with the thoroughness that she exacted of herself on days of mental disturbance. Not until the car was waiting at the door, and Fluvanna was hastening out with robes and pillows, did Dorinda turn aside from her ordinary activities, and go into the room she had selected for Jason. Yes, everything was in order. The floor and walls were clean; the windows had been closed after an airing; and the fire burned brightly on the sunken stones in the fireplace. Even the big iron kettle steamed away on the footman. There was soap in the soap-dish on the washstand; an abundance of soft warm blankets covered the bed; on the candlestand stood a blue thermos bottle, and her mother’s Bible lay beside it, with the purple bookmarker she had embroidered marking a favourite text. “It ought to seem pleasant,” she thought, “after the poorhouse.”
Outside, she found John Abner at the wheel of the car and Fluvanna arranging the pillows on the back seat.
“Would you like to drive, Dorinda?”
“No, but I’ll sit in front with you. When we come back, one of us will have to sit with him, and I’d rather it would be you.”