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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Barren Ground," Ellen Glasgow explores the complexities of Southern society in the early 20th century through the lens of her protagonist, the fiercely independent and contemplative Virginia. The novel employs a rich, descriptive literary style that intricately weaves together themes of gender roles, social class, and the struggle for self-identity within a patriarchal framework. Glasgow's narrative is marked by its psychological depth and sharp social commentary, offering an unflinching look at the constraints imposed on women and the agricultural South's changing landscape, echoed in the protagonist's own metamorphosis. Ellen Glasgow, a prominent figure in American literature and a vocal advocate for women's rights, wrote "Barren Ground" during a period of intense personal reflection and societal change. Her own experiences growing up in Virginia and her keen observations of Southern life informed her portrayal of the limitations faced by women and the quest for autonomy. Glasgow's deep-seated empathy for her characters and her commitment to addressing their struggles make this work a significant contribution to feminist literature. Readers drawn to profound character studies and those interested in the intricacies of Southern culture will find "Barren Ground" to be an insightful exploration of personal and societal transformation. Glasgow's poignant prose invites readers to empathize with the protagonist's journey, making this novel a timeless reflection on the human spirit and its resilience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Barren Ground
Table of Contents
Introduction
Stark yet life-giving, Barren Ground follows a woman’s struggle to wrest purpose from disappointment and to ground her identity in the demanding, cyclical logic of the land, revealing how endurance can harden into a creed even as it sustains survival in a changing South; across seasons and shifting local hierarchies, the novel weighs the cost of self-reliance, measures the bargains struck between feeling and duty, and tests the possibility that cultivation—of fields, of work, of will—can transform barrenness into a formidable, if solitary, strength; in family, community, and the marketplace, it charts how perseverance, once embraced, reshapes desire, reorders loyalties, and reframes success as mastery over time and toil rather than reconciliation or romance.
Written by Ellen Glasgow and published in 1925, Barren Ground is a work of American realism set in rural Virginia during the early twentieth century. Glasgow, a prominent Virginian novelist, explored the social and economic textures of the South with unsentimental clarity, and this book reflects that commitment. Appearing in the years after World War I, it confronts a region negotiating modernization while clinging to tradition. The novel belongs to the tradition of Southern regional fiction yet reaches beyond local color, attending to economic pressures, agricultural practice, and the inner life. Readers encounter a carefully observed community shaped by weather, soil, kinship ties, and the moral claims of work.
The premise is simple and bracing: in a small Virginia community, a capable young woman suffers a profound romantic setback that forces a reckoning with her future. Refusing collapse, she turns decisively toward the only resource that promises both independence and constancy—the land. What follows is not a melodrama but a steady charting of labor, planning, and resolve as she rebuilds her life through farming. Glasgow’s narrative favors process over spectacle, showing the discipline required to plant, wait, and endure. The experience for the reader is immersive and quietly intense, anchored in concrete tasks and the long horizons of rural time.
Key themes emerge from this focus on work and weather: the moral austerity of self-reliance, the tension between individual will and communal expectations, and the often invisible cost of resilience. Glasgow probes how gender norms constrain and provoke resourcefulness, how class and inheritance shape opportunity, and how material success can demand emotional renunciations. The land is more than backdrop; it is a testing ground that rewards foresight and punishes sentimentality. Without relying on sensational turns, the novel examines what it means to persist, and whether survival built on discipline can coexist with tenderness, beauty, or belonging in a society wary of change.
Stylistically, Glasgow’s prose is restrained, exact, and quietly lyrical when describing fields, seasons, and the routines of cultivation. The narration maintains psychological depth without ornament, resisting easy consolations. Scenes move at the pace of weather and work, granting a sense of accumulation rather than shock. Dialogue is plainspoken, reflecting local speech without caricature, and description privileges function—the fence mended, the herd tended, the ledger balanced—over decorative detail. This realism allows the moral questions to surface cleanly, as characters reveal themselves through choices rather than rhetoric. The tone is sober yet humane, attentive to hardship but equally to the dignity of competence.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s concerns feel strikingly current. It speaks to debates about sustainability and the worth of agricultural knowledge in an era of rapid change. It asks how a person might secure autonomy without forfeiting the possibility of connection, and what sacrifices ambition can exact from feeling. Its portrait of a woman claiming authority over resources and decisions challenges persistent assumptions about gender and power. The book also invites reflection on regional identity, economic precarity, and the ethics of caretaking—of land, of kin, of self—offering a measured consideration of what endures when fashions and fortunes shift.
To approach Barren Ground is to enter a world where character is revealed through seasons, where success is slow and provisional, and where the vocabulary of hope is written in hours of work. Glasgow offers a demanding but rewarding reading experience, one that prizes clarity over consolation and steadiness over spectacle. Without telegraphing outcomes, the opening chapters announce a path defined by labor, discipline, and guarded feeling. Readers drawn to psychologically grounded fiction, to the textures of place, and to questions of principle will find an exacting companion here. The novel stands as an enduring meditation on the uses—and costs—of endurance itself.
Synopsis
Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground opens in rural Virginia at the turn of the twentieth century, where Dorinda Oakley grows up on an overworked farm struggling against poor soil and narrow prospects. Her family bears the marks of diminished fortunes and relentless labor, and Dorinda’s childhood is defined by seasonal cycles, religious convention, and the lingering prestige of faded county families. She is intelligent, observant, and quietly ambitious, torn between filial duty and the tantalizing promise of a broader life. The opening chapters establish a landscape of scarcity and endurance, setting the tone for a narrative that intertwines personal destiny with the demands of the land.
As Dorinda approaches womanhood, she experiences a first great attachment that seems to offer escape and fulfillment. The young man is attractive, educated, and restless, with aspirations that extend beyond the county’s boundaries. Their courtship unfolds amid community scrutiny and class sensitivities, while Dorinda’s hopes for love and change intensify. Family caution meets youthful confidence, and plans for a different future begin to take shape. The romance highlights the contrast between dream and circumstance, positioning Dorinda at the threshold of a life that appears to rise above the farm’s persistent hardships and the county’s entrenched expectations.
A decisive turning point arrives when Dorinda’s expectations collapse abruptly, and the promise of transformation gives way to humiliation and loss. The rupture leaves her isolated at a critical moment, and a solitary, wintry landscape mirrors her shock. Confronting despair, she chooses survival over surrender and returns home with a newly tempered resolve. This crisis marks the end of her romantic illusions and the beginning of a stern commitment to the earth. The novel pivots from youthful longing to purposeful labor, and Dorinda, steadied by necessity, sets out to wrest prosperity from fields long thought unyielding.
Dorinda begins rebuilding the farm with patient, practical measures, learning from observation, trial, and the evolving science of agriculture. She experiments with crop rotation, improved seed, and careful management of livestock, despite skepticism from neighbors who distrust change. Long days and accumulated knowledge yield modest gains, and the household gradually reorganizes around her authority. As she takes charge of finances, contracts, and schedules, a new identity forms: a working landowner whose competence defines her. The early phase of transformation is marked by frugality and vigilance, as Dorinda balances family needs with the slow, disciplined work of restoring the soil.
With persistence, Dorinda expands her operation into a modern enterprise, investing in dairy herds, better equipment, and reliable labor. She navigates credit, market fluctuations, and the practicalities of distribution, acquiring parcels of adjoining land and consolidating control. Droughts, storms, and disease threaten progress, yet careful planning mitigates losses. Her reputation grows, and the community grudgingly recognizes the force of her judgment. The farm becomes a model of efficient management, demonstrating how knowledge and will can coax fertility from barrenness. Financial stability introduces new choices, but Dorinda’s habits of restraint and watchfulness continue to shape her decisions and daily routines.
The past reenters the story when the man who once captivated Dorinda returns to the county in a professional role. Their paths cross in strictly practical contexts, and restrained conversations reveal how time has clarified their values. Domestic situations around him complicate the picture, while Dorinda’s position as an employer and landowner underscores the distance between them. Memories surface but do not govern her actions. The rekindled proximity illuminates what has changed in both characters and what remains constant, emphasizing Dorinda’s allegiance to work, independence, and the measured discipline that has sustained her through reversal and renewal.
Midlife brings a broader field of responsibilities: aging parents, the needs of workers and tenants, and the unpredictability of prices and weather. Dorinda arbitrates disputes, attends to illnesses, and calibrates compassion with the demands of a business that cannot afford sentimentality. Economic pressure from beyond the county tests her resilience, and moments of fatigue hint at the personal costs of relentless stewardship. Offers of companionship and alliance arise, some promising ease, others respect. Each call upon her judgment reveals how firmly her choices are anchored in the rhythms of the farm, which now reflects her character as much as her labor.
Modernization encroaches as roads improve, towns expand, and new attitudes reshape rural life. Dorinda weighs the advantages of progress against the erosion of older ties, considering what must be protected and what can be surrendered. A fresh personal opportunity prompts reflection on how the past has guided her, and whether there is room for tenderness alongside discipline. The landscape, once inhospitable, shows the imprints of sustained care. Standing at another crossroads, she evaluates prosperity’s meaning, measuring success not only by acreage and accounts but also by the steadiness of purpose that has defined her path from crisis to mastery.
The novel closes with an emphasis on endurance, work, and the quiet authority of the earth. Dorinda’s journey traces a movement from illusion to self-command, presenting the land as both constraint and liberation. Glasgow’s narrative highlights the costs of independence and the dignity of competence, situating personal choices within broader social and economic change. Without relying on dramatic revelations, the story underscores how character is formed by daily labor and seasonal patience. Barren Ground ultimately offers a portrait of resilience shaped by place, suggesting that stability and meaning can be cultivated where others see only limits.
Historical Context
Ellen Glasgow situates Barren Ground in the rural Piedmont of Virginia, across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, roughly from the 1890s through the early 1920s. The setting spans worn-out tobacco land, small crossroads communities, and a nearby city thinly veiled as the fictional Queenborough, a stand-in for a place like Richmond. The landscape is central: gullied hills, exhausted topsoil, and isolated farmsteads linked by wagon roads and expanding rail lines. This is a world negotiating the legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction while confronting an oncoming modern order—scientific agriculture, public health regulation, and a market economy that presses upon tradition-bound farms.
The decisive historical background is the postbellum agrarian crisis and the gradual transition to diversified, scientific agriculture in the Upper South. After the Civil War, Virginia’s Piedmont, long reliant on tobacco and one-crop practices, faced severe soil exhaustion, erosion, and falling yields. Farmers struggled under crop-lien credit and volatile prices. From the 1880s onward, agricultural reformers and land-grant institutions promoted recovery: the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (later VPI, now Virginia Tech) disseminated bulletins on liming, crop rotation with clover and cowpeas, and contour plowing to stop gullies. Nationally, Seaman A. Knapp’s demonstration-farm program (1903–1914) showed that scientific methods could restore productivity. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 created the Cooperative Extension Service, placing county agents in Virginia to bring laboratory knowledge to barnyards. Technologies such as the centrifugal cream separator (popularized after 1878) made dairying more profitable, while improved fencing, silage, and pure-bred herds signaled a shift away from soil-depleting monoculture toward dairy and forage systems. The Federal Farm Loan Act (1916) furnished longer-term rural credit through Federal Land Banks, enabling improvements and herd investments. By the 1910s–1920s, Virginia farmers increasingly adopted grasses, legumes, and dairying, supplying urban markets. Barren Ground mirrors this arc: Dorinda Oakley’s rejection of romantic illusion and embrace of rational, laborious farm management embodies the region’s hard pivot from exhausted tobacco fields to soil-building rotations and a modern dairy enterprise. Her Jersey herd, improved pastures, and reinvestment of profits align with extension gospel and the era’s cooperative marketing, dramatizing how scientific agriculture could convert literal and figurative “barren ground” into sustainable livelihood.
Progressive Era public health campaigns reshaped food production and marketing, especially milk. The Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and Meat Inspection Act (1906) spurred standards, while the Virginia State Board of Health, established in 1908, promoted sanitary dairying and safe milk supplies. Cities, including Richmond, adopted stricter milk inspection and, increasingly, pasteurization requirements during the 1910s. Federal and state programs pursued bovine tuberculosis eradication beginning in 1917 and intensified in the 1920s, along with cattle-tick control. Barren Ground reflects this regulatory climate as Dorinda’s business must meet urban health standards, embracing cleanliness, testing, and orderly production to secure reliable markets.
The women’s suffrage movement and the broader emergence of the “New Woman” are critical social contexts. The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, founded in 1909 by leaders such as Lila Meade Valentine and Adele Clark, agitated across the Commonwealth. National victory arrived with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, though Virginia itself did not ratify it until 1952. These years saw women organizing clubs, entering professions, and asserting economic agency. The novel’s portrayal of Dorinda’s autonomous management, her refusal of a constricting marriage bargain, and her long-range planning echoes the suffrage era’s claim that women could exercise civic responsibility and independent judgment in public and economic life.
World War I (1914–1918; U.S. entry in 1917) transformed Southern agriculture. Under Herbert Hoover’s U.S. Food Administration, producers were exhorted to “Food Will Win the War,” and many commodities enjoyed high wartime prices. Camp Lee (established 1917 near Petersburg) and other military facilities in Virginia expanded demand for meat and dairy, while rail and refrigerated shipments linked farms to cantonments and cities. The boom gave way to the deflationary farm depression of 1920–1921, when prices for staples fell sharply and credit tightened. Barren Ground tracks these cycles in miniature: Dorinda’s disciplined reinvestment and cost control allow her dairy to survive the postwar bust that ruined less prudent neighbors.
Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement shaped everyday life and labor relations. Virginia’s 1902 constitution entrenched poll taxes and literacy tests, suppressing Black voting, while segregation followed the logic of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Racial Integrity Act (1924) codified rigid racial classifications. In the countryside, tenancy and wage labor underpinned farm operations; after 1916, the Great Migration drew African American workers toward Northern industry, tightening rural labor supplies. While Glasgow’s novel keeps racial politics largely in the background, the social hierarchy of landowners, tenants, and hired hands—and the fragility of community ties—reflect the structured inequalities of Jim Crow Virginia.
Infrastructure and market integration accelerated with the Good Roads movement. Virginia created a State Highway Commission in 1906, and the Federal Aid Road Act (1916) funded state-federal partnerships to improve farm-to-market roads. Rural Free Delivery (launched nationally in 1896) and expanding rail service by lines such as the Southern Railway and the C&O connected Piedmont farms to town depots and urban buyers. Better roads and dependable transport were essential for perishable goods like milk and butter. In Barren Ground, access to nearby town and city markets underwrites Dorinda’s business model, linking her disciplined production to a modern distribution network beyond the farm gate.
The novel operates as a social and political critique by exposing the costs of romantic agrarian myths, patriarchal constraint, and a class system unprepared for modern risk. Glasgow indicts the ecological inheritance of the postbellum South—eroded soils, debt peonage, and improvidence—while honoring the hard knowledge required to rebuild fertility. She challenges gender orthodoxy by showing a woman wielding capital, expertise, and endurance in a marketplace framed by progressive regulation and inequitable labor systems. By threading Jim Crow’s hierarchy, wartime volatility, and public-health oversight through Dorinda’s enterprise, the book critiques a society that valorized tradition yet relied on women’s and workers’ unacknowledged labor to survive modernization.
Barren Ground
PREFACE
If I might select one of my books for the double-edged blessing of immortality, that book would be, I think, Barren Ground. Not only is this the kind of novel I like to read and had always wished to write, but it became for me, while I was working upon it, almost a vehicle of liberation. After years of tragedy and the sense of defeat that tragedy breeds in the mind, I had won my way to the other side of the wilderness, and had discovered, with astonishment, that I was another and a very different person. When I looked back, all my earlier work, except Virginia, the evocation of an ideal, appeared so thin that it seemed two-dimensional. All the forms in which I had thought and by which I had lived, even the substance of things and the very shape of my universe, had shifted and changed. The past was still there, but it was scarcely more solid than the range of clouds on the horizon. And while I realized this, I knew also that different and better work was ahead. Many other writers may have had this experience. I do not know. It is not a conversion of which one speaks often and naturally.
As a young girl, thinking over my first book, I had resolved that I would write of the South not sentimentally, as a conquered province, but dispassionately, as a part of the larger world. I had resolved that I would write not of Southern characteristics, but of human nature. Now, at this turning-point in my life, these early resolutions awoke again with a fresh impulse. It is true that I have portrayed the Southern landscape, with which I am familiar, that I have tried to be accurate in detail, to achieve external verisimilitude; but this outward fidelity, though important, is not essential to my interpretation of life. The significance of my work, the quickening spirit, would not have varied, I believe, had I been born anywhere else. For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination, and the word "experience" conveys something more than an attitude or a gesture. In Barren Ground, as in The Sheltered Life, I felt that the scene, apart from the human figures, possessed an added dimension, a universal rhythm deeper and more fluid than any material texture. Beneath the lights and shadows there is the brooding spirit of place, but, deeper still, beneath the spirit of place there is the whole movement of life.
For the setting of this book, I went back into the past and gathered vivid recollections of my childhood. The country is as familiar to me as if the landscape unrolled both within and without. I had known every feature for years, and the saturation of my subject with the mood of sustained melancholy was effortless and complete. The houses, the roads, the woods, the endless fields of broomsedge and scrub pine, the low immeasurable horizon,--all these objects I had seen with the remembering eyes of a child. And time, like a mellow haze, had preserved the impressions unaltered. They were the lighter semblances folded over the heart of the book.
But Dorinda, though she had been close to me for ten years before I began her story, is universal. She exists wherever a human being has learned to live without joy, wherever the spirit of fortitude has triumphed over the sense of futility. The book is hers; and all minor themes, episodes, and impressions are blended with the one dominant meaning that character is fate. Blended by life, not imposed by the novel. Though I wrote always toward an end that I saw (I can imagine no other way of writing a book), Dorinda was free, while the theme was still undeveloped, to grow, to change, to work out her own destiny. From many parts of the world she has written to me; from Scotland, from Germany, from Australia, from South Africa, and at least once from China.
ELLEN GLASGOW
Richmond, Virginia, January, 1933.
Part First - Broomsedge
Chapter 1
A girl in an orange-coloured shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store and looked, through the falling snow, at the deserted road. Though she watched there without moving, her attitude, in its stillness, gave an impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life.
Bare, starved, desolate, the country closed in about her. The last train of the day had gone by without stopping, and the station of Pedlar's Mill was as lonely as the abandoned fields by the track. From the bleak horizon, where the flatness created an illusion of immensity, the broomsedge[1] was spreading in a smothered fire over the melancholy brown of the landscape. Under the falling snow, which melted as soon as it touched the earth, the colour was veiled and dim; but when the sky changed the broomsedge changed with it. On clear mornings the waste places were cinnamon-red in the sunshine. Beneath scudding clouds the plumes of the bent grasses faded to ivory. During the long spring rains, a film of yellow-green stole over the burned ground. At autumn sunsets, when the red light searched the country, the broomsedge caught fire from the afterglow and blazed out in a splendour of colour. Then the meeting of earth and sky dissolved in the flaming mist of the horizon.
At these quiet seasons, the dwellers near Pedlar's Mill felt scarcely more than a tremor on the surface of life. But on stormy days, when the wind plunged like a hawk from the swollen clouds, there was a quivering in the broomsedge, as if coveys of frightened partridges were flying from the pursuer. Then the quivering would become a ripple and the ripple would swell presently into rolling waves. The straw would darken as the gust swooped down, and brighten as it sped on to the shelter of scrub pine and sassafras. And while the wind bewitched the solitude, a vague restlessness would stir in the hearts of living things on the farms, of men, women, and animals. "Broomsage ain't jest wild stuff. It's a kind of fate," old Matthew Fairlamb used to say.
Thirty years ago, modern methods of farming, even methods that were modern in the benighted eighteen-nineties, had not penetrated to this thinly settled part of Virginia. The soil, impoverished by the war and the tenant system which followed the war, was still drained of fertility for the sake of the poor crops it could yield. Spring after spring, the cultivated ground appeared to shrink into the "old fields," where scrub pine or oak succeeded broomsedge and sassafras as inevitably as autumn slipped into winter. Now and then a new start would be made. Some thrifty settler, a German Catholic, perhaps, who was trying his fortunes in a staunch Protestant community, would buy a mortgaged farm for a dollar an acre, and begin to experiment with suspicious, strange-smelling fertilizers. For a season or two his patch of ground would respond to the unusual treatment and grow green with promise. Then the forlorn roads, deep in mud, and the surrounding air of failure, which was as inescapable as a drought, combined with the cutworm, the locust, and the tobacco-fly, against the human invader; and where the brief haryest had been, the perpetual broomsedge would wave.
The tenant farmers, who had flocked after the ruin of war as buzzards after a carcass, had immediately picked the featureless landscape as clean as a skeleton. When the swarming was over only three of the larger farms at Pedlar's Mill remained undivided in the hands of their original owners. Though Queen Elizabeth County had never been one of the aristocratic regions of Virginia, it was settled by sturdy English yeomen, with a thin but lively sprinkling of the persecuted Protestants of other nations. Several of these superior pioneers brought blue blood in their veins, as well as the vigorous fear of God in their hearts; but the great number arrived, as they remained, "good people," a comprehensive term, which implies, to Virginians, the exact opposite of the phrase, "a good family." The good families of the state have preserved, among other things, custom, history, tradition, romantic fiction, and the Episcopal Church. The good people, according to the records of clergymen, which are the only surviving records, have preserved nothing except themselves. Ignored alike by history and fiction, they have their inconspicuous place in the social strata midway between the lower gentility and the upper class of "poor white," a position which encourages the useful rather than the ornamental public virtues.
With the end of free labour and the beginning of the tenant system, authority passed from the country to the towns. The old men stayed by the farms, and their daughters withered dutifully beside them; but the sons of the good people drifted away to the city, where they assumed control of democracy as well as of the political machine which has made democracy safe for politics. An era changed, not rudely, but as eras do change so often, uncomfortably. Power, defying Jeffersonian theory and adopting Jeffersonian policy, stole again from the few to the many. For the good people, conforming to the logic of history, proceeded immediately to enact their preferences, prejudices, habits, and inhibitions into the laws of the state.
At Pedlar's Mill, where the old wooden mill, built a hundred years before by the first miller Pedlar, was now a picturesque ruin, a few stalwart farmers of Scotch-Irish descent rose above the improvident crowd of white and black tenants, like native pines above the shallow wash of the broomsedge. These surviving landowners were obscure branches of the great Scotch-Irish families of the upper Valley of Virginia. Detached from the parent tree and driven by chance winds out of the highlands, they had rooted afresh in the warmer soil of the low country, where they had conquered the land not by force, but by virtue of the emphatic argument that lies in fortitude.
James Ellgood, whose mother was a McNab, owned Green Acres, the flourishing stock farm on the other side of the railroad. It is true that an uncle in the far West had left him a small fortune, and for five years he had put more into the soil than he had got out of it. But in the end Green Acres had repaid him many times, which proved, as old Matthew, who was a bit of a philosopher, pointed out, that "it wa'n't the land that was wrong, but the way you had treated it."
On the near side of the station, secluded behind a barricade of what people called the back roads, which were strangled in mud from November to June, stood Five Oaks, the ruined farm of the Greylocks. Though the place was still held insecurely in the loose clutches of old Doctor Greylock, who resembled an inebriated Covenanter, the abandoned acres were rapidly growing up in sumach, sassafras, and fife-everlasting. The doctor had been a man of parts and rural prominence in his day; but the land and scarcity of labour had worn on his nerves, and he was now slowly drinking himself to death, attended, beyond the social shadow-line, by an anonymous brood of mulatto offspring.
Adjoining Five Oaks, and running slightly in front of it on one side, with a long whitewashed house situated a stone's throw from the main road, there was Old Farm, which belonged to Joshua Oakley and Eudora Abernethy, his wife. The Oakleys, as the saying ran in the neighbourhood, were "land poor." They owned a thousand acres of scrub pine, scrub oak, and broomsedge, where a single cultivated corner was like a solitary island in some chaotic sea.
Early in the nineteenth century, John Calvin Abernethy, a retired missionary from India and Ceylon, came from the upper Valley into the region of the Shenandoah, with a neat Scotch-Irish inheritance in his pocket. His reputation, as historians remark, had preceded him; and his subsequent career proved that he was not only an eloquent preacher of the Gospel, but a true explorer of the spirit as well, the last of those great Presbyterian romantics whose faith ventured on perilous metaphysical seas in the ark of the Solemn League and Covenant. Since there was no canny bargain to be driven, at the moment, in the Shenandoah Valley, John Abernethy regretfully left the highlands for the flat country, where he picked up presently, at a Dutch auction, the thousand acres of land and fifty slaves which had belonged to one William Golden Penner. One may charitably infer that the fifty slaves constituted a nice point in theology; but with ingenious Presbyterian logic and circumscribed Presbyterian imagination, John Calvin reconciled divine grace with a peculiar institution. The fifty slaves he sold farther south, and the price of black flesh he devoted to the redemption of black souls in the Congo. Dramatic, yet not altogether lacking in delicate irony. For he had observed in foreign fields that divine grace has strange gestures; and life, as even Presbyterians know, is without logic. To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting. From which it must not be concluded that the first Virginian Abernethy was unworthy of his high calling. He was merely, like the rest of us, whether theologians or laymen, seasoned with the favourite fruit of his age. Though he might occasionally seek a compromise in simple matters of conduct, realizing the fall of man and the infirmity of human nature, where matters of doctrine were concerned his conscience was inflexible. His piety, running in a narrow groove, was deep and genuine; and he possessed sufficient Integrity, firmness, and frugality to protect his descendants from decay for at least three generations. A few years after he had settled near Pedlar's Mill, a small Presbyterian church, built of brick and whitewashed within and without, rose on the far side of the railroad, where it stands now at the gate of Green Acres. Conversion, which had begun as a vocation with John Calvin Abernethy, became a habit; and with the gradual running to seed of the Methodists in the community, the Presbyterian faith sprang up and blossomed like a Scotch thistle in barren ground.
In his long white house, encircled by the few cultivated fields in the midst of his still-virgin acres, John Calvin Abernethy lived with learning, prudence, and piety until he was not far from a hundred. He had but one son, for unlike the Scotch-Irish of the Valley, his race did not multiply. The son died in middle age, struck down by an oak he was felling, and his only child, a daughter, was reared patiently but sternly by her grandfather. When, in after years, this granddaughter, whose name was Eudora, fell a victim of one of those natural instincts which Presbyterian theology has damned but never wholly exterminated, and married a member of the "poor white" class, who had nothing more to recommend him than the eyes of a dumb poet and the head of a youthful John the Baptist, ()Id Abernethy blessed the marriage and avoided, as far as possible, the connection. Knowing the aptitude of the poor for futility, he employed his remaining years on earth in accumulating a comfortable inheritance for his great-grandchildren. When he was dead, his granddaughter's husband, young Joshua Oakley, worked hard, after the manner of his class, to lose everything that was left. He was a good man and a tireless labourer; but that destiny which dogs the footsteps of ineffectual spirits pursued him from the hour of his birth. His wife, Eudora, who resembled her grandfather, recovered promptly from the natural instinct, and revealed shortly afterwards signs of suppressed religious mania.
Of this union of the positive and the negative virtues, three children survived. Two of these were sons, Josiah and Rufus; the other was a daughter, Dorinda, the girl who, having thrown the orange shawl over her head, had come out of the store, and stood now with the snow in her face and her eager gaze on the road.
Chapter 2
She was a tall girl, not beautiful, scarcely pretty even according to the waxen type of the 'nineties; but there was a glow of expression, an April charm, in her face. Her eyes were her one memorable feature. Large, deep, radiant, they shone beneath her black lashes with a clear burning colour, as blue as the spring sky after rain. Above them her jutting eyebrows, very straight and thick, gave a brooding sombreness to her forehead, where her abundant hair was brushed back in a single dark wave. In repose her features were too stern, too decisive. Her nose, powdered with golden freckles, was a trifle square at the nostrils; her mouth, with its ripe, beestung lower lip, was wide and generous; the pointed curve of her chin revealed, perhaps, too much determination in its outward thrust. But the rich dark red in her cheeks lent vividness to her face, and when she smiled her eyes and mouth lighted up as if a lamp shone within. Against the sordid background of the store, her head in the brilliant shawl was like some exotic flower.
Straight, tranquil, thin and fugitive as mist, the snow was falling. Though the transparent flakes vanished as soon as they reached the earth, they diffused in their steady flight an impression of evanescence and unreality. Through this shifting medium the familiar scene appeared as insubstantial as a pattern of frost on the grass. It was as if the secret spirit of the land had traced an image on the flat surface, glimmering, remote, unapproachable, like the expression of an animal that man has forced into sullen submission. There were hours at twilight, or beneath the shredded clouds of the sunrise, when the winter landscape reminded Dorinda of the look in the faces of overworked farm horses. At such moments she would find herself asking, with the intellectual thrill of the heretic, "I wonder if everything has a soul?" The country had been like this, she knew, long before she was born. It would be like this, she sometimes thought, after she and all those who were living with her were dead. For the one thing that seemed to her immutable and everlasting was the poverty of the soil.
Without knowing that she looked at it, her gaze rested on the bare station; on the crude frame buildings, like houses that children make out of blocks; on the gleaming track which ran north and south; on the old freight car, which was the home of Butcher, the lame negro who pumped water into the engines; on the litter of chips and shavings and dried tobacco, stems which strewed the ground between the telegraph poles and the hitching-rail by the store. Farther away, in the direction of Whippernock River, she could see the vague shape of the ruined mill, and beyond this, on the other side of the track, the sunken road winding in scallops through interminable acres of broomsedge. Though the snow had fallen continuously since noon, the air was not cold, and the white glaze on the earth was scarcely heavier than hoar-frost.
For almost a year now, ever since Mrs. Pedlar had fallen ill of consumption[2], and Dorinda had taken her place in the store, the girl had listened eagerly for the first rumble of the approaching trains. Until to-day the passing trains had been a part of that expected miracle, the something different in the future, to which she looked ahead over the tedious stretch of the present. There was glamour for her in the receding smoke. There was adventure in the silver-blue of the distance. The glimpse of a rapidly disappearing face; a glance from strange eyes that she remembered; the shadowy outline of a gesture; these tenuous impressions ran like vivid threads in her memory. Her nature, starved for emotional realities, and nourished on the gossamer substance of literature, found its only escape in the fabrication of dreams. Though she had never defined the sensation in words, there were moments when it seemed to her that her inner life was merely a hidden field in the landscape, neglected, monotonous, abandoned to solitude, and yet with a smothered fire, like the wild grass, running through it. At twenty, her imagination was enkindled by the ardour that makes a woman fall in love with a religion or an idea. Some day, so ran the bright thread of her dream, the moving train would stop, and the eyes that had flashed into hers and passed by would look at her again. Then the stranger who was not a stranger would say, "I knew your face among a thousand, and I came back to find you." And the train would rush on with them into the something different beyond the misty edge of the horizon. Adventure, happiness, even unhappiness, if it were only different!
That was yesterday. To-day the miracle had occurred, and the whole of life had blossomed out like a flower in the sun. She had found romance, not in imagination, not in the pallid fiction crushed among the tomes in her great-grandfather's library, but driving on one of the muddy roads through the broomsedge. To the casual observer there was merely a personable young man, the son of old Doctor Greylock, making the scattered rural calls of a profession which his father was too drunk to pursue. A pleasant young man, intelligent, amiable, still wearing with a difference the thin veneer of the city. Though he was, perhaps, a trifle too eager to please, this was a commendable fault, and readily overlooked in an irreproachable son who had relinquished his ambition in order to remain with his undeserving old father. Filial devotion was both esteemed and practised in that pre-Freudian age[3], before self-sacrifice had been dethroned from its precarious seat among the virtues; and to give up one's career for a few months, at most for a possible year, appeared dutiful rather than dangerous to a generation that knew not psychoanalysis.
And he was not only an admirable young man, he was, what admirable young men frequently are not, attractive as well. His dark red hair, burnished to a copper glow, grew in a natural wave; his sparkling eyes were brown-black like chinkapins[4] in the autumn; his skin was tanned and slightly freckled, with a healthy glow under the surface; his short moustache, a shade lighter than his hair, lent mystery to a charming, if serious, mouth, and his smile, indiscriminating in its friendliness, was wholly delightful. To Dorinda, meeting him in the early morning as she was walking the two miles from Old Farm to the store, it was as if an April flush had passed over the waste places. She recognized love with the infallible certainty of intuition. It was happiness, and yet in some strange way it was shot through with a burning sensation which was less pleasure than pain. Though her perceptions were more vivid than they had ever been, there was an unreality about her surroundings, as if she were walking in some delicious trance. Beautiful as it was, it seemed to be vanishing, like a beam of light, in the very moment when she felt it flooding her heart. Yet this sense of unreality, of elusiveness, made it more precious. Watching the empty roads, through the veil' of snow, she asked herself every minute, "Will he come this way again? Shall I wait for him, or shall I let him pass me in the road? Suppose he goes back another way! Suppose he has forgotten--"
The door behind her opened, and old Matthew Fairlamb came hobbling out with the help of his stout hickory stick. Though he was approaching ninety, he was still vigorous, with a projecting thatch of hair as colourless as straw and the aquiline profile of a Roman senator. In his youth, and indeed until his old age, when his son William succeeded him, he had been the best carpenter at Pedlar's Mill. His eyes were bleared now, and his gums toothless; but he had never lost his shrewd Scotch-Irish understanding or his sense of humour, which broke out in flashes as swift and darting as dry-weather lightning.
"You'd better be startin' home, Dorinda," he remarked as he passed her. "The snow means to keep up, and yo' Ma will begin to worry about you." Turning, he peered at her with his cackling laugh. "Yo' face looks like a May mornin' to my old eyes," he added. "I ain't seen you about here fur a couple of weeks."
With her gaze still on the distance, Dorinda answered impatiently, "No, Ma had one of her bad spells, and I had to help out at home. But no matter how sick she is she never gives up, and she never worries about anything smaller than eternal damnation."
"Yes, she's a pious one," old Matthew conceded. "It's faith, I reckon, that's kept her gain', sence the Lord must know He ain't made it none too easy for her."
"Oh, it's hard work that she lives on," replied Dorinda. "She says if she were to stop working, she'd drop down dead like a horse that is winded. She never stops, not even on Sundays, except when she is in church."
Old Matthew's hilarity dwindled into a sigh. "Well, thar ain't much rest to be got out of that," he rejoined sympathetically. "I ain't contendin' against the doctrine of eternal damnation," he hastened to explain, "but as long as yo' Ma is obleeged to work so hard, 'tis a pity she ain't got a mo' restful belief." Then, as he observed her intent gaze, he inquired suspiciously, "You don't see nary a turnout on the road, do you?"
The dark red in the girl's cheeks brightened to carnation. "Why, of course not. I was just watching the snow."
But his curiosity, once aroused, was as insatiable as avarice. "I don't reckon you've seen whether young Doctor Greylock has gone by or not?"
She shook her head, still blushing. "No, I haven't seen him. Is anybody sick at your place?"
"It ain't that," returned the old man. "I was just thinkin' he might give me a lift on the way. It ain't more'n half a mile to my place, but half a mile looks different to twenty and to eighty-odd years. He's a spry young chap, and would make a good match for you, Dorinda," he concluded, in merciless accents.
Dorinda's head was turned away, but her voice sounded smothered. "You needn't worry about that." (Why did old age make people so hateful?) "I haven't seen him but once since he came home."
"Well, he'll look long befo' he finds a likelier gal than you. I ain't seen him more than a few times myself; but in these parts, whar young men are as skeerce as wild turkeys, he won't have to go beggin'. Geneva Ellgood would take him in a minute, I reckon, an' her Pa is rich enough to buy her a beau in the city, if she wants one, hee-hee!" His malicious cackle choked him. "They do say that young Jason was sweet on her in New York last summer," he concluded when he had recovered.
For the first time Dorinda turned her head and looked in his face. "If everybody believed your gossip, Mr. Fairlamb, nobody at Pedlar's Mill would be speaking to anybody else."
Old Matthew's mouth closed like a nut-cracker; but she saw from the twinkle in his bleared eyes that he had construed her reprimand into a compliment. "Thar's some of 'em that wouldn't lose much by that," he returned, after a pause. "But to come back to young Jason, he's got a job ahead of him if he's goin' to try farmin' at Five Oaks, an' he'll need either a pile of money or a hard-workin' wife."
"Oh, he doesn't mean to stay here. As soon as his father dies, he will go back to New York."
The detestable cackle broke out again. "The old man ain't dead yit. I've known some hard drinkers to have long lives, an' thar ain't nothin' more wearin' on the young than settin' down an' waitin' fur old folks to die. Young Jason is a pleasant-mannered boy, though he looks a bit too soft to stand the hard wear of these here roads. I ain't got nothin' to say aginst him, but if he'd listen to the warnin' of eighty-odd years, he'd git away before the broomsage ketches him. Thar's one thing sartain sure, you've got to conquer the land in the beginning, or it'll conquer you before you're through with it."
It was all true. She had heard it before, and yet, though she knew it was true, she refused to believe it. Whether it was true or not, she told herself passionately, it had no connection with Jason Greylock. The bright vision she had seen in the road that morning flickered and died against the sombre monochrome of the landscape.
"I must go in," she said, turning away. "I haven't time to stand talking." Old Matthew would never stop, she knew, of his own accord. When his cackle rose into a laugh the sound reminded her of the distant who--who--whoee of an owl.
"Well, I'll be gittin' along too," replied the old man. "My eyes ain't all they used to be, and my legs ain't fur behind 'em. Remember me to yo' Ma, honey, and tell her I'll be lookin' over jest as soon as the mud holes dry up."
"Yes, I'll tell her," answered the girl more gently. Old Matthew had known her great-grandfather; he had added the wings to the house at Old Farm and built the Presbyterian church on the other side of the track. In the prime of his life, forty years ago, he had been the last man at Pedlar's Mill to see Gordon Kane, her mother's missionary lover, who had died of fever in the Congo. It was old Matthew, Dorinda had heard, who had broken the news of Kane's death to the weeping Eudora, while she held her wedding dress in her hands. Disagreeable as he had become, it was impossible for the girl to forget that his long life was bound up with three generations of her family.
When she entered the store, she felt for a moment that she should suffocate in the heated air from the wood stove at the far end. The stuffy smell, a mingling of turpentine, varnish, bacon, coffee, and kerosene oil, was so different from the crystal breath of the falling snow that it rushed over her like warm ashes, smothering, enveloping. Yet there was nothing strange to her in the scene or the atmosphere. She was accustomed to the close, dry heat and to the heavy odours of a place where everything that one could not raise on a farm was kept and sold. For eleven months she had worked here side by side with Nathan Pedlar, and she was familiar with the usual stock-in-trade of a country store. In a minute she could put her hand on any object from a plough-share to a darning-needle.
"You'd better be going home early," said Nathan Pedlar, looking round from the shelf he was putting in order. "The snow may get heavier toward sunset."
He was a tall, lank, scraggy man, with a face that reminded Dorinda of a clown that she had once seen in a circus. Only the clown's nose was large and red, and Nathan's looked as if it had been mashed in by a blow. Aunt Mehitable Green, the coloured midwife, insisted that his features had been born like other children's, but that his mother had rolled on him in her sleep when he was a baby, and had flattened his nose until it would never grow straight again. Though he possessed a reserve of prodigious strength, he failed to be impressive even as an example of muscular development. Dorinda had worked with him every day for eleven months, and yet she found that he had made as little impression upon her as a pine tree by the roadside. Looking at him, she saw clearly his gaunt round shoulders beneath the frayed alpaca coat, his hair and eyebrows and short moustache, all the colour of dingy rabbit fur, and his small grey eyes with blinking lids; but the moment after he had passed out of her sight, the memory of him would become as fluid as water and trickle out of her mind. A kind but absurd man, this was the way she thought of him, honest, plodding, unassuming, a man whose "word was as good as his bond," but whose personality was negligible. The truth about him, though Dorinda never suspected it, was that he had come into the world a quarter of a century too soon. He was so far in advance of his age that his position inspired ridicule instead of respect in his generation. When his lagging age had caught up with Nathan Pedlar, it had forgotten what its prophet had prophesied. Though he made a comfortable living out of the store, and had put by enough to enable him to face old age with equanimity, he was by nature a farmer, and his little farm near the mill yielded a good harvest. Unlike most Southern farmers, he was not afraid of a theory, and he was beginning to realize the value of rotation in crops at a period when a corn-field at Pedlar's Mill was as permanent as a graveyard. Already he was experimenting with alfalfa, though even the prosperous James Ell-good made fun of "the weed with the highfalutin' name from the Middle West." For it was a part of Nathan's perverse destiny that people asked his advice with recklessness and accepted it with deliberation.
"I am going as soon as I speak to Rose Emily," Dorinda replied. "Did the doctor say she was better this morning?"
Nathan's hands, which were fumbling among the boxes on the long shelf, became suddenly still.
"No, he didn't say so," he answered, without turning. Something in his tone made Dorinda catch her breath sharply. "He didn't say she was worse, did he?"
At this Nathan pushed the boxes away and leaned over the counter to meet her eyes. His face was bleak with despair, and Dorinda's heart was wrung as she looked at him. She had often wondered how Rose Emily could have married him. Poverty would have been happiness, she felt, compared with so prosaic a marriage; yet she knew that, according to the standards of Pedlar's Mill, Nathan was an exceptional husband.
"Perhaps she'll pick up when the spring comes," she added when he did not reply.
Nathan shook his head and swallowed as if a pebble had lodged in his throat. "That's what I'm hoping," he answered. "If she can just get on her feet again. There's nothing this side of heaven I wouldn't do to make her well."
For an instant she was afraid he would break down; but while she wondered what on earth she could say to comfort him, he turned back to the boxes. "I must get this place tidied up before night," he said in his usual tone, with the flat, dry cough which had become chronic.
While she watched him, Dorinda threw the shawl back on one arm and revealed her fine dark head. The heavy eyebrows and the clear stern line of her features stood out as if an edge of light had fallen over them, leaving the rest of her face in shadow. She was wearing an old tan ulster, faded and patched in places, and beneath the hem her brown calico dress and mud-stained country shoes were visible. Even at Pedlar's Mill the changing fashions were followed respectfully, if tardily, and in the middle 'nineties women walked the muddy roads in skirts which either brushed the ground or were held up on one side. But shabbiness and a deplorable fashion could not conceal the slim, flowing lines of her figure, with its gallant and spirited carriage.
"I'm going to say a word or two to Rose Emily before I start," she said in a cheerful voice. "I don't mind being late." Walking to the end of the store, beyond the wood stove, which felt like a furnace, she pushed back a curtain of purple calico, and turned the knob of a door. Inside the room a woman was sitting up in bed, crocheting a baby's sacque of pink wool.
"I thought you'd gone, Dorinda," she said, looking up. "The snow is getting thicker."
Propped up among her pillows, winding the pink wool through her fragile hands, Mrs. Pedlar faced death with the courage of a heroic illusion. Before her marriage, as Rose Emily Milford, she had taught school in the little schoolhouse near Pedlar's Mill, and Dorinda had been her favourite pupil. She was a small, intelligent-looking woman, pitiably thin, with prominent grey eyes, hair of a peculiar shade of wheaten red, and a brilliant flush on her high cheek bones.
Ball after ball of pink wool unwound on the patchwork quilt, and was crocheted into babies' sacques which she sold in the city; but crocheting, as she sometimes said, "did not take your mind off things as well as moving about," and it seemed to her that only since she had been ill had she begun to learn anything about life. The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living. If death ever entered her mind, it was as an abstraction, like the doctrine of salvation by faith, never as a reality. Every afternoon she said, "If it is fine, I shall get up to-morrow." Every morning she sighed happily, "I think I'll wait till the evening."
The room was a small one, divided off from the brick store, which adjoined the new frame house Nathan had built for his bride; and there was a confusion of colour, for Mrs. Pedlar's surroundings reflected the feverish optimism of her philosophy. The rag carpet and the patchwork quilt were as gay as an autumn flower-bed; the kerosene lamp wore a ballet skirt of crimson crepe paper; earthen pots of begonias and geraniums filled the green wooden stands at the windows. On the hearthrug, before the open fire, three small children were playing with paper dolls, while the fourth, a baby of nine months, lay fast asleep in his crib, with the nipple of a bottle still held tight in his mouth.
"I'm glad I chose that orange colour for your shawl," said Mrs. Pedlar, in the excited manner that had come upon her with her rising temperature. "It goes so well with your black hair. You ought to be glad you're a big woman," she continued thoughtfully. "Somehow life seems to go easier with big women. I asked young Doctor Greylock if that wasn't true, and he said small women seemed to think so."
Dorinda laughed, and her laughter contained a thrill of joy. Some inward happiness had bubbled up and overflowed into her voice, her look, and her shy dreaming movements. There was sweetness for her in hearing of Jason Greylock; there was ecstasy in the thought that she might meet him again in the road. Yet the sweetness and the ecstasy were thin and far off, like music that comes from a distance. It seemed incredible that anything so wonderful should have happened at Pedlar's Mill.
In front of the fire, the three children (Minnie May, the eldest, was only ten) were busy with their paper dolls. They had made a doll's house out of a cracker box, with the frayed corners of the rug for a garden. "Now Mrs. Brown has lost her little girl, and she is going to Mrs. Smith's to look for her," Minnie May was saying impressively.
"You've got your hands full with those children," remarked Dorinda because she could think of nothing else that sounded natural. Her mind was not on the children; it was miles away in an enclosed garden of wonder and delight; but some casual part of her was still occupying her familiar place and living her old meaningless life.
"Yes, but they're good children. They can always amuse themselves. Minnie May cut those paper dolls out of an old fashion book, and the younger children are all crazy about them."
"Minnie May is a great help to you."
"Yes, she takes after her father. Nathan is the best man that ever lived. He never thinks of himself a minute."
"He gave me some sugar for Ma," Dorinda sighed as she answered, for the thought had stabbed through her like a knife that Rose Emily was dying. Here we are talking about sugar and paper dolls when she won't live through the summer.
"There's a pat of butter too," said Rose Emily. "I told Minnie May to put it in your basket. I don't see how your mother manages without butter."
"We've had to do without it since our cow died last fall. I'm saving up, after the taxes are paid, to buy one in the spring." Again the thought stabbed her. "As if cows made any difference when she has only a few months to live!" Were the trivial things, after all, the important ones?
"And Mrs. Brown found that her little girl had been run over and killed in the middle of the road," Minnie May whispered. "So she decided that all she could do for her was to have a handsome funeral and spend the ten dollars she'd saved from her chicken money. That's the graveyard, Bud, down there by the hole in the rug. Lena, stop twistin', or you'll pull it to pieces."
"Nathan says you can get a good cow from old Doctor Greylock for thirty dollars," said Mrs. Pedlar. "He's got one, that Blossom of his, that he wants to sell." Then an idea occurred to her and she concluded doubtfully, "Of course, everything may be changed now that Jason has come back."
"Yes, of course, everything may be changed," repeated Dorinda, and the words, though they were merely an echo, filled her with happiness. Life was burning within her. Even the thought of death, even the knowledge that her friend would not live through the summer, passed like a shadow over the flame that consumed her. Everything was a shadow except the luminous stillness, which was so much deeper than stillness, within her heart.
"He is just the same pleasant-mannered boy he used to be when I taught him," resumed Mrs. Pedlar. "You remember how mischievous he was at school."
Dorinda nodded. "I was only there a year with him before he went away."
"Yes, I'd forgotten. I asked him to-day if he remembered you, and he said he knew you as soon as he saw you in the road this morning." She paused for an instant while a vision flickered in her eyes. "It would be nice if he'd take a fancy to you, Dorinda, and I'm sure you're handsome enough, with your blue eyes and your high colour, for anybody to fall in love with, and you're better educated, too, than most city girls, with all the books you've read. I sent Minnie May to find you while he was here, but she brought Nathan instead; and the doctor had to hurry off to old Mrs. Flower, who is dying."
So they were all pushing them together! It was no wonder, thought Dorinda, since, as old Matthew said, young men were as scarce as wild turkeys, and everybody wanted to marry off everybody else. Almost unconsciously, the power of attraction was increased by an irresistible force. Since every one, even the intelligent Rose Emily, thought it so suitable!
"I've seen him only once since he came home," said the girl.
"Well, I told him about you, and he was very much interested. I believe he's a good young man, arid he seems so friendly and kindhearted. He asked after all the coloured people he used to know, and he was so pleased to hear how well they are getting on. His father couldn't remember anything about anybody, he told me. I reckon the truth is that the old doctor is befuddled with drink all the time." She laughed softly. "Jason has picked up a lot of newfangled ideas," she added. "He even called broomsedge bromegrass' till he found that nobody knew what he was talking about."
"Is he going to stay on?"
"Just for a little while, he says, until he can get the place off his hands. What he meant but didn't like to say, I suppose, was that he would stay as long as his father lives. The old man has got Bright's disease, you know, and he's already had two strokes of paralysis. The doctor up at the Court-House says it can't be longer than six months, or a year at the most."
Six months or a year! Well, anything might happen, anything did happen in six months or a year!
On the floor the children were busily pretending that the oblong hole in the rug was a grave. "Mrs. Brown bought a crape veil that came all the way down to the bottom of her skirt," Minnie May was whispering, alert and animated. "That paper doll in the veil is Mrs. Brown on the way to the funeral."
"Well, I'd better be going," Dorinda said, throwing the orange shawl over her head, while she thought, "I ought to have worn my hat, only the snow would have ruined my Sunday hat, and the other isn't fit to be seen."
Picking up the basket by the door, she looked over her shoulder at Rose Emily. "If the snow isn't too heavy, I'll be over early tomorrow, and help you with the children. I hope you'll feel better."
"Oh, I'm planning to get up in the morning," responded Rose Emily in her eager voice, smiling happily over the pink wool.
Chapter 3
Outside, there was a little yard enclosed in white palings to which farmers tied their horses when the hitching-rail was crowded. Everything was bare now under the thin coating of snow, and the dried stalks of summer flowers were protruding forlornly from heaps of straw. Beyond the small white gate the Old Stage Road[5]
