Stories by American Authors Volume IV Part 10

"It was thy fault for wetting me!" Dorothy was too excited and angry to cry, but she was as miserable as she had ever been in her life before.

"I didn't _want_ thee to stay. People who force themselves where they are not wanted must take what they get!"

"What did you say, Dorothy?"

"I say I didn't want thee then. I do not want thee now! Thee may go back to thy fiddling and dancing! I'd rather have one of those dumb brutes for company to-night than thee, Walter Evesham!"

"Very well! The reel has begun," said Evesham. "f.a.n.n.y Jordan is waiting to dance it with me, or if she isn't she ought to be! Shall I open the gate for you?"

She pa.s.sed out in silence, and the gate swung to with a heavy jar. She made good speed down the lane, and then waited outside the fence till her breath came more quietly.

"Is that thee, Dorothy?" Rachel's voice called from the porch. She came out to meet her, and they went along the walk together. "How damp thy forehead is, child! is the night so warm?" They sat down on the low steps, and Dorothy slid her arm under her mother's and laid her soft palm against the one less soft by twenty years of toil for others.

"Thee's not been long, dear; was it as much as thee expected?"

"Mother, it was dreadful! I never wish to hear a fiddle again as long as I live!"

Rachel opened the way for Dorothy to speak further; she was not without some mild stirrings of curiosity on the subject herself; but Dorothy had no more to say.

They went into the house soon after, and as they separated for the night, Dorothy clung to her mother with a little nervous laugh.

"Mother, what is that text about Ephraim?"

"Ephraim is joined to idols?" Rachel suggested.

"Yes! Ephraim is joined to his idols!" said Dorothy, lifting her head.

"Let him go!"

"Let him _alone_," corrected Rachel.

"Let him _alone!_" Dorothy repeated. "That is better yet."

"What's thee thinking of, dear?"

"Oh, I'm thinking about the dance in the barn."

"I'm glad thee looks at it in that light," said Rachel.

Dorothy knelt by her bed in the low chamber under the eaves, crying to herself that she was not the child of her mother any more.

She felt she had lost something, which, in truth, had never been hers.

It was only the unconscious poise of her unawakened girlhood which had been stirred. She had mistaken it for that abiding peace which is not lost or won in a day.

Dorothy could not stifle the spring thrills in her blood any more than she could crush its color out of her cheek or brush the ripples out of her bright hair, but she longed for the cool grays and the still waters. She prayed that the "grave and beautiful damsel called Discretion" might take her by the hand and lead her to that "upper chamber, whose name is Peace." She lay awake, listening to the music from the barn, and waiting through breathless silences for it to begin again. She wondered if f.a.n.n.y Jordan had grown any prettier since she had seen her as a half-grown girl; and then she despised herself for the thought. The katydids seemed to beat their wings upon her brain, and all the noises of the night, far and near, came to her strained senses, as if her silent chamber were a whispering gallery. The clock struck twelve, and in the silence that followed she missed the music; but voices, talking and laughing, were coming down the lane. There was the clink of a horse's hoof on the stones; now it was lost on the turf; and now they were all trooping noisily past the house. She buried her head in her pillow, and tried to bury with it the consciousness that she was wondering if Evesham were there, laughing with the rest.

Yes, Evesham was there. He walked with Farmer Jordan, behind the young men and girls, and discussed with him, somewhat absently, the war news and the prices of grain.

As they pa.s.sed the dark old house, spreading its wide roofs, like a hen gathering her chickens under her wing, he became suddenly silent. A white curtain flapped in and out of an upper window. It was the window of the boys' room; but Evesham's instincts failed him there.

"Queer kinks them old Friend preachers git into their heads sometimes!"

said farmer Jordan, as they pa.s.sed the empty mill. "Now what do you s'pose took Uncle Tommy Barton off right on top of plantin', leavin'

his wife 'n' critters 'n' child'en to look after themselves? Mighty good preachin' it ought to be, to make up for such practicin'.

Wonderful set ag'in the war, Uncle Tommy is! He's a-preachin' up peace now. But Lord! all the preachin' sence Moses won't keep men from fightin' when their blood's up and there's ter'tory in it!"

"It makes saints of the women," said Evesham shortly.

"Wal, yes! Saints in heaven before their time, some of 'em. There's Dorothy, now. _She'll_ hoe her row with any saint _in_ the kingdom or out of it. I never see a hulsomer-lookin' gal. My Luke, he run the furrers in her corn-patch last May. Said it made him sick to see a gal like that a-staggerin' after a plow. She wouldn't more'n _half let_ him! She's a proud little piece. They're all proud, Quakers is. I never could see no 'poorness of spirit,' come to git at 'em! And they're wonderful clannish, too. My Luke, he'd a notion he'd like to run the hull concern--Dorothy 'n' all; but I told him he might 's well p'int off. Them Quaker gals don't never marry out o' meetin'. Besides, the farm's too poor!"

"Good-night, Mr. Jordan!" said Evesham suddenly. "I'm off across lots!"

He leaped the fence, crashed through the alder hedge-row, and disappeared in the dusky meadow.

Evesham was by no means satisfied with his experiments in planetary distances. Somewhere, he felt sure, either in his...o...b..t or hers, there must be a point where Dorothy would be less insensible to the attraction of atoms in the ma.s.s. Thus far, she had reversed the laws of the spheres, and the greater had followed the less. When she had first begun to hold a permanent place in his thoughts, he had invested her with something of that atmosphere of peace and cool pa.s.sivity which hedges in the women of her faith. It had been like a thin, clear gla.s.s, revealing her loveliness, but cutting off the magnetic currents. A young man is not long satisfied with the mystery his thoughts have woven around the woman who is their object. Evesham had grown impatient; he had broken the spell of her sweet remoteness. He had touched her, and found her human,--deliciously, distractingly human, but with a streak of obduracy which history has attributed to the Quakers under persecution. In vain he haunted the mill-dam, and bribed the boys with traps and pop-guns, and lingered at the well-curb to ask Dorothy for water, which did not reach his thirst. She was there in the flesh, with her arms aloft, balancing the well-sweep, while he stooped with his lips at the bucket; but in spirit she was unapproachable. He felt, with disgust at his own persistence, that she even grudged him the water! He grew savage and restless, and fretted over the subtle changes which he counted in Dorothy, as the summer waned. She was thinner and paler,--perhaps with the heats of harvest, which had not, indeed, been burdensome from its abundance. Her eyes were darker and shyer, and her voice more languid. Was she wearing down, with all this work and care? A fierce disgust possessed him, that this sweet life should be cast into the breach between faith and works.

He did not see that Rachel Barton had changed, too,--with a change that meant more, at her age, than Dorothy's flushings and palings. He did not miss the mother's bent form from the garden, or the bench by the kitchen door, where she had been used to wash the milk-things.

Dorothy washed the milk-things now, and the mother spent her days in the sunny east room, between her bed and the easy-chair, where she sat and mused for hours over the five letters she had received from her husband in as many months. The boys had, in a measure, justified their father's faith in them, since Rachel's illness, and Dorothy was released from much of her out-door work; but the silence of the kitchen, when she was there alone with her ironing and dish-washing, was a heavier burden than she had yet known.

Nature sometimes strikes in upon the hopeless monotony of life in remote farm-houses, with one of her phenomenal moods. They come like besoms of destruction; but they scatter the web of stifling routine; they fling into the stiffening pool the stone which jars the atoms into crystal.

The storms which had ambushed in the lurid August skies, and circled ominously round the horizon during the first weeks of September, broke at last in an equinoctial which was long remembered in the mill-house.

It took its place in the family calendar of momentous dates with the hard winter of 1800; with the late frost, which coated the incipient apples with ice, and froze the new potatoes in the ground; and with the year the typhus got into the valley.

The rain had been falling a night and a day. It had been welcomed with thanksgiving; but it had worn out its welcome some hours since, and now the early darkness was coming on without a lull in the storm. Dorothy and the two biggest boys had made the rounds of the farm-buildings, seeing all safe for the second night. The barns and mill stood on high ground, while the house occupied the sheltered hollow between. Little streams from the hills were washing in turbid currents across the lower levels; the waste-weir roared as in early spring; the garden was inundated, and the meadow a shallow pond. The sheep had been driven into the upper barn floor; the chickens were in the corn-bin; and old John and the cows had been transferred from the stable, which stood low, to the weighing-floor of the mill. A gloomy echoing and gurgling sounded from the dark wheel-chamber, where the water was rushing under the wheel, and jarring it with its tumult. At eight o'clock the wood-shed was flooded, and water began to creep under the kitchen door.

Dorothy and the boys carried armfuls of wood, and stacked them in the pa.s.sage to the sitting-room, two steps higher up. At nine o'clock the boys were sent, protesting, to bed; and Dorothy, looking out of their window, as she fumbled about in the dark for a pair of Shep's trowsers which needed mending, saw a lantern flickering up the road. It was Evesham, on his way to the mill-dams. The light glimmered on his oil-skin coat as he climbed the stile behind the well-curb.

"He raised the flood-gates at noon," Dorothy said to herself. "I wonder if he is anxious about the dams." She resolved to watch for his return, but she was busy settling her mother for the night when she heard his footsteps on the porch. The roar of water from the hills startled Dorothy as she opened the door;--it had increased in violence within an hour. A gust of wind and rain followed Evesham into the entry.

"Come in," she said, running lightly across the sitting-room to close the door of her mother's room.

He stood opposite her on the hearth-rug and looked into her eyes across the estrangement of the summer. It was not Dorothy of the mill-head, or of Sloc.u.m's meadow, or the cold maid of the well: it was a very anxious, lovely little girl, in a crumbling old house, with a foot of water in the cellar, and a sick mother in the next room. She had forgotten about Ephraim and his idols; she picked up Shep's trowsers from the rug, where she had dropped them, and looking intently at her thimble finger, told him she was very glad he had come.

"Did you think I wouldn't come?" said he. "I'm going to take you home with me, Dorothy,--you and your mother and the boys. It's not fit for you to be here alone!"

"Do you know of any danger?"

"I _know_ of none, but water's a thing you can't depend on. It's an ugly rain; older men than your father remember nothing like it."

"I shall be glad to have mother go, and Jimmy;--the house is very damp.

It's an awful night for her to be out, though!"

"She _must_ go!" said Evesham. "You must all go. I'll be back in half an hour--"

"_I_ shall not go," Dorothy said; "the boys and I must stay and look after the stock."

"What's that?" Evesham was listening to a trickling of water outside the door.

"Oh! it's from the kitchen! The door's blown open, I guess!"