In Exile and Other Stories Part 6

"I don't see how he can be so sure," said Dorothy, swaying gloomily to and fro against the wheel. "I don't care for myself, I'm not afraid of work, but thee's not able to do what thee does now, mother. If I have outside things to look after, how can I help thee as I should? And the boys are about as much dependence as a flock of barn swallows!"

"Don't thee fret about me, dear; the way will open. Thy father has thought and planned for us. Have patience while I tell thee. Thee knows that Walter Evesham's pond is small and his mill is doing a thriving business?"

"Yes, indeed, I know it!" Dorothy exclaimed. "He has his own share, and ours too, most of it!"

"Wait, dear, wait! Thy father has rented him the ponds, to use when his own gives out. He is to have the control of the water, and it will give us a little income, even though the old mill does stand idle."

"He may as well take the mill, too. If father is away all summer it will be useless ever to start it again. Thee'll see, mother, how it will end, if Walter Evesham has the custom and the water all summer. I think it's miserable for a young man to be so keen about money."

"Dorothy, seems to me thee's hasty in thy judgments. I never heard that said of Walter Evesham. His father left him with capital to improve his mill. It does better work than ours; we can't complain of that. Thy father was never one to study much after ways of making money. He felt he had no right to more than an honest livelihood. I don't say that Walter Evesham's in the wrong. We know that Joseph took advantage of his opportunities, though I can't say that I ever felt much unity with some of his transactions. What would thee have, my dear? Thee's discouraged with thy father for choosing the th.o.r.n.y way, which we tread with him; but thee seems no better satisfied with one who considers the flesh and its wants."

"I don't know, mother, what I want for myself; that doesn't matter; but for thee I would have rest from all these cruel worries thee has borne so long."

She buried her face in her mother's lap and put her strong young arms about the frail, toil-bent form.

"There, there, dear. Try to rule thy spirit, Dorothy. Thee's too much worked up about this. They are not worries to me. I am thankful we have nothing to decide one way or the other, only to do our best with what is given us. Thee's not thyself, dear. Go downstairs and fetch in the clothes, and don't hurry; stay out till thee gets more composed."

Dorothy did not succeed in bringing herself into unity with her father's call, but she came to a fuller realization of his struggle. When he bade them good-by his face showed what it had cost him; but Rachel was calm and cheerful. The pain of parting is keenest to those who go, but it stays longer with those that are left behind.

"Dorothy, take good care of thy mother!" Friend Barton said, taking his daughter's face between his hands and gravely kissing her brow between the low-parted ripples of her hair.

"Yes, father," she said, looking into his eyes; "Thee knows I'm thy eldest son."

They watched the old chaise swing round the corner of the lane, then the pollard willows shut it from sight.

"Come, mother," said Dorothy, hurrying her in at the gate. "I'm going to make a great pot of mush, and have it hot for supper, and fried for breakfast, and warmed up with mola.s.ses for dinner, and there'll be some cold with milk for supper, and we shan't have any cooking to do at all!"

They went around by the kitchen door. Rachel stopped in the woodshed, and the tears rushed to her eyes.

"Dear father! How he has worked over that wood, early and late, to spare us!"

We will not revive Dorothy's struggles with the farm-work, and with the boys. They were an isolated family at the mill-house; their peculiar faith isolated them still more, and they were twelve miles from meeting and the settlement of Friends at Stony Valley. Dorothy's pride kept her silent about her needs, lest they might bring reproach upon her father among the neighbors, who would not be likely to feel the urgency of his spiritual summons.

The summer heats came on apace and the nights grew shorter. It seemed to Dorothy that she had hardly stretched out her tired young body and forgotten her cares, in the low, attic bedroom, before the east was streaked with light and the birds were singing in the apple-trees, whose falling blossoms drifted in at the window.

One day in early June, Friend Barton's flock of sheep (consisting of nine experienced ewes, six yearlings, and a sprinkling of close-curled lambs whose legs had not yet come into mature relations with their bodies) was gathered in a wattled inclosure, beside the stream that flowed into the mill-head. It was supplied by the waste from the pond, and, when the gate was shut, rambled easily over the gray slate pebbles, with here and there a fall just forcible enough to serve as a douche-bath for a well-grown sheep.

The victims were panting in their heavy fleeces, and mingling their hoa.r.s.e, plaintive tremolo with the ripple of the water and the sound of young voices in a frolic. Dorothy had divided her forces for the washing to the best advantage. The two elder boys stood in midstream to receive the sheep, which she, with the help of little Jimmy, caught and dragged to the bank.

The boys were at work now upon an elderly ewe, while Dorothy stood on the brink of the stream braced against an ash sapling, dragging forward by the fleece a beautiful but reluctant yearling. Her bare feet were incased in a pair of moccasins that laced around the ankle; her petticoats were kilted, and her broad hat bound down with a ribbon; one sleeve was rolled up, the other had been sacrificed in a scuffle in the sheep-pen. The new candidate for immersion stood bleating and trembling with her forefeet planted against the slippery bank, pushing back with all her strength while Jimmy propelled from the rear.

"Boys!" Dorothy's clear voice called across the stream. "_Do_ hurry! She's been in long enough, now! Keep her head up, can't you, and squeeze the wool _hard_! You're not _half_ washing! Oh, Reuby! thee'll drown her! Keep her _head_ up!"

Another unlucky douse and another half-smothered bleat,--Dorothy released the yearling and plunged to the rescue. "Go after that lamb, Reuby!" she cried with exasperation in her voice. Reuby followed the yearling, that had disappeared over the orchard slope, upsetting an obstacle in its path, which happened to be Jimmy. He was wailing now on the bank, while Dorothy, with the ewe's nose tucked comfortably in the bend of her arm, was parting and squeezing the fleece, with the water swirling round her. Her stout arms ached, and her ears were stunned with the incessant bleatings; she counted with dismay the sheep still waiting in the pen. "Oh, Jimmy! Do stop crying, or else go to the house!"

"He'd better go after Reuby," said Sheppard Barton, who was now Dorothy's sole dependence.

"Oh yes, do, Jimmy, that's a good boy. Tell him to let the yearling go and come back quick."

The water had run low that morning in Evesham's pond. He shut down the mill, and strode up the hills, across lots, to raise the gate of the lower Barton pond, which had been heading up for his use. He pa.s.sed the cornfield where, a month before, he had seen pretty Dorothy Barton dropping corn with her brothers. It made him ache to think of Dorothy with her feeble mother, the boys as wild as preachers' sons proverbially are, and the old farm running down on her hands; the fences all needed mending, and there went Reuben Barton, now, careering over the fields in chase of a stray yearling.

His mother's house was big, and lonely, and empty; and he flushed as he thought of the "one ewe-lamb" he coveted out of Friend Barton's rugged pastures.

As Evesham raised the gate, and leaned to watch the water swirl and gurgle through the "trunk," sucking the long weeds with it, and thickening with its tumult the clear current of the stream, the sound of voices and the bleating of sheep came up from below. He had not the farming instincts in his blood; the distant bleating, the hot June sunshine and cloudless sky did not suggest to him sheep-washing; but now came a boy's voice shouting and a cry of distress, and he remembered with a thrill that Friend Barton used the stream for that peaceful purpose. He shut down the gate and tore along through the ferns and tangled gra.s.s till he came to the sheep-pen, where the bank was muddy and trampled. The prisoners were bleating drearily and looking with longing eyes across to the other side, where those who had suffered were now straying and cropping the short turf through the lights and shadows of the orchard.

There was no other sign of life, except a broad hat with a brown ribbon buffeted about in an eddy among the stones. The stream dipped now below the hill, and the current, still racing fast with the impetus he had given it, shot away amongst the hazel thickets that crowded close to the brink. He was obliged to make a detour by the orchard and to come out below at the "mill-head," a black, deep pool with an ugly ripple setting across it to the head-gate. He saw something white clinging there, and ran round the brink. It was the sodden fleece of the old ewe, which had been drifted against the head-gate and held there to her death. Evesham, with a sickening contraction of the heart, threw off his jacket for a plunge, when Dorothy's voice called rather faintly from the willows on the opposite bank.

"Don't jump! I'm here," she said. Evesham searched the willows and found her seated in the sun, just beyond, half buried in a bed of ferns.

"I _shouldn't_ have called thee," she said shyly, as he sank pale and panting beside her, "but thee looked--I thought thee was going to jump into the mill-head!"

"I thought _you_ were there, Dorothy!"

"I was there quite long enough. Shep pulled me out; I was too tired to help myself much." Dorothy held her palm pressed against her temple and the blood trickled from beneath, streaking her pale, wet cheek.

"He's gone to the house to get me a cloak. I don't want mother to see me, not yet," she said.

"I'm afraid you ought not to wait, Dorothy. Let me take you to the house, won't you? I'm afraid you'll get a deadly chill."

Dorothy did not look in the least like death. She was blushing now, because Evesham would think it so strange of her to stay, and yet she could not rise in her wet clothes, that clung to her like the calyx to a bud.

"Let me see that cut, Dorothy!"

"Oh, it's nothing. I don't wish thee to look at it!"

"But I will! Do you want to make me your murderer, sitting there in your wet clothes with a cut on your head?"

He drew away her hand; the wound, indeed, was no great affair, but he bound it up deftly with strips of his handkerchief. Dorothy's wet curls touched his fingers and clung to them, and her eyelashes drooped lower and lower.

"I think it was _very_ stupid of thee. Didn't thee hear us from the dam?

I'm sure we made noise enough."

"Yes, I heard you when it was too late. I heard the sheep before, but how could I imagine that you, Dorothy, and three boys as big as c.o.c.kerels, were sheep-washing? It's the most preposterous thing I ever heard of!",

"Well, I can't help being a woman, and the sheep had to be washed. I think there ought to be more men in the world when half of them are preaching and fighting."

"If you'd only let the men who are left help you a little, Dorothy."

"I don't want any help. I only _don't_ want to be washed into the mill-head."

They both laughed, and Evesham began again entreating her to let him take her to the house.

"Hasn't thee a coat or something I could put around me until Shep comes?"

said Dorothy. "He must be here soon."

"Yes, I've a jacket here somewhere."

He sped away to find it, and faithless Dorothy, as the willows closed between them, sprang to her feet and fled like a startled Naiad to the house.

When Evesham, pushing through the willows, saw nothing but the bed of wet, crushed ferns and the trail through the long gra.s.s where Dorothy's feet had fled, he smiled grimly to himself, remembering that "ewe-lambs" are not always as meek as they look.