Chapter 13

The same demand and the same answer, varied but slightly, had been exchanged between them every Saturday night for years. Dorcas replied now without thinking. Her mind had spread its wings and flown out into the sweet stillness of the garden and the world beyond; it even hastened on into the unknown ways of guesswork, seeking for one who should be coming. She strained her ears to hear the beating of hoofs and the rattle of wheels across the little, bridge. The dusk sifted in about the house, faster and faster; a whippoorwill cried from the woods. So she sat until the twilight had vanished, and another of the invisible genii was at hand, saying, "I am Night."

"Dorcas!" called the parson again. He had been asleep, and seemed now to be holding himself back from a broken dream. "Dorcas, has your mother come in yet?"

"No, father."

"Well, you wake me up when you see her down the road; and then you go an' carry her a shawl. I dunno what to make o' that cough!" His voice trailed sleepily off, and Dorcas rose and tiptoed out of the room. She felt the blood in her face; her ears thrilled noisily. The doctor's, wagon, had crossed the bridge; now it was whirling swiftly up the road. She stationed herself in the entry, to lose no step in his familiar progress. The horse came lightly along, beating out a pleasant tune of easy haste. He was drawn up at the gate, and the doctor threw out his weight, and jumped buoyantly to the ground. There was the brief pause of reaching for his medicine-case, and then, with that firm step whose rhythm she knew so well, he was walking up the path. Involuntarily, as Dorcas awaited him, she put her hand to her heart with one of those gestures that seem so melodramatic and are so real; she owned to herself, with a throb of appreciative delight, how the sick must warm at his coming. This new doctor of Tiverton was no younger than Dorcas herself, yet with his erect carriage and merry blue eye she seemed to be not only of another temperament, but another time. It had never struck him that they were contemporaries. Once he had told Phoebe, in a burst of affection and pitying praise, that he should have liked Miss Dorcas for a maiden aunt.

"Good evening," he said, heartily, one foot on the sill. "How's the patient?"

At actual sight of him, her tremor vanished, and she answered very quietly,--

"Father's asleep. I thought you wouldn't want he should be disturbed; so I came out."

The doctor took off his hat, and pushed back his thick, unruly hair.

"Yes, that was right," he said absently, and pinched a spray of southernwood that grew beside the door. "How has he seemed?"

"About as usual."

"You've kept on with the tonic?"

"Yes."

"That's good! Miss Dorcas, look up there. See that moon! See that wisp of an old blanket dragging over her face! Do you mind coming out and walking up and down the road while we talk? I may think of one or two directions to give about your father."

Dorcas stepped forward with the light obedience given to happy tasking. She paused as quickly.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "I can't. Father might wake up. I never leave him alone."

"Never mind, then! let's sit right down here on the steps. After all, perhaps it's pleasanter. What a garden! It's like my mother's. I could pick out every leaf in the dark, by the smell. But you're alone, aren't you? I'm not keeping you from any one?"

"Oh, no! I'm all alone, except father."

"Yes. The fact is, I went into your school to-day, and the teacher said she was coming here to-night. She offered to bring you a message, but I said I should come myself. I'm abominably late. I couldn't get here any earlier."

"Oh, yes! Phoebe! She was here over an hour ago. Phoebe's a real comfort to me." She was seated on the step above him, and it seemed very pleasant to her to hear his voice, without encountering also the challenge of his eyes.

"No, is she though?" The doctor suddenly faced round upon her. "Tell me about it!"

Then, quite to her surprise, Dorcas found herself talking under the spell of an interest so eager that it bore her on, entirely without her own guidance.

"Well, you see there's a good many things I keep from father. He never's been himself since mother died. She was the mainstay here. But he thinks the church prospers just the same, and I never've told him the attendance dropped off when they put up that 'Piscopal building over to Sudleigh. You 'ain't lived here long enough to hear much about that, but it's been a real trial to him. The summer boarders built it, and some rich body keeps it up; and our folks think it's complete to go over there and worship, and get up and down, and say their prayers out loud."

The doctor laughed out.

"I've heard about it," said he. "You know what Brad Freeman told Uncle Eli Pike, when they went in to see how the service was managed? Somebody found the places in the prayer-book for them, and Brad was quick-witted, and got on very well; but Eli kept dropping behind. Brad nudged him. 'Read!' he said out loud. 'Read like the devil!' I've heard that story on an average of twice a day since I came to Tiverton. I'm not tired of it yet!"

Miss Dorcas, too, had heard it, and shrunk from its undisguised profanity. Now she laughed responsively.

"I guess they do have queer ways," she owned. "Well, I never let father know any of our folks go over there. He'd be terrible tried. And I've made it my part in our meeting to keep up the young folks' interest as much as I can. I've been careful never to miss my Sunday-school class. They're all girls, nice as new pins, every one of 'em! Phoebe was in it till a little while ago, but now she comes here and sits in the kitchen while I'm gone. I don't want father to know that, for I hope it never'll come into his head he's so helpless; but I should be worried to death to have him left alone. So Phoebe sits there with her book, ready to spring if she should hear anything out o' the way."

The doctor had lapsed into his absent mood, but now he roused himself, with sudden interest.

"That's very good of her, isn't it?" he said "You trust her, don't you?"

"Trust Phoebe! Well, I guess I do! I've known her ever since she went to Number Five, and now she's keeping the school herself. She's a real noble girl!"

"Tell me more!" said the doctor, warmly. "I want to hear it all. You're so new to me here in Tiverton! I want to get acquainted."

Miss Dorcas suddenly felt as if she had been talking a great deal, and an overwhelming shyness fell upon her.

"There isn't much to tell," she hesitated. "I don't know's anything'd happened to me for years, till father had his ill-turn in the spring, and we called you in. He don't seem to realize his sickness was anything much. I've told the neighbors not to dwell on it when they're with him. Phoebe won't; she's got some sense."

"Has she?" said the doctor, still eagerly. "I'm glad of that, for your sake!" He rose to go, but stood a moment near the steps, dallying with a reaching branch of jessamine; it seemed persuading him to stay. He had always a cheery manner, but to-night it was brightened by a dash of something warm and reckless. He had the air of one awaiting good news, in confidence of its coming. Dorcas was alive to the rapt contagion, and her own blood thrilled. She felt young.

"Well!" said he, "well, Miss Dorcas!" He took a step, and then turned back. "Well, Miss Dorcas," he said again, with an embarrassed laugh, "perhaps you'd like to gather in one more church-goer. If I have time tomorrow, I'll drop in to your service, and then I'll come round here, and tell your father I went."

Dorcas rose impulsively. She could have stretched out her hands to him, in the warmth of her gratitude.

"Oh, if you would! Oh, how pleased he'd be!"

"All right!" Now he turned away with decision. "Thank you, Miss Dorcas, for staying out. It's a beautiful evening. I never knew such a June. Good-night!" He strode down the walk, and gave a quick word to his horse, who responded in whinnying welcome. An instant's delay, another word, and they were gone.

Dorcas stood listening to the scatter of hoofs down the dusty road and over the hollow ledge. She sank back on the sill, and, step by step, tried to retrace the lovely arabesque the hour had made. At last, she had some groping sense of the full beauty of living, when friendship says to its mate, "Tell me about yourself!" and the frozen fountain wells out, every drop cheered and warmed, as it falls, in the sunshine of sympathy. She saw in him that perfection of life lying in strength, which he undoubtedly had, and beauty, of which he had little or much according as one chose to think well of him. To her aching sense, he was a very perfect creature, gifted with, infinite capacities for help and comfort.

But the footfalls ceased, and the garden darkened by delicate yet swift degrees; a cloud had gone over the moon, fleecy, silver-edged, but still a cloud. The waning of the light seemed to her significant; she feared lest some bitter change might befall the moment; and went in, bolting the door behind her. Once within her own little bedroom, she loosened her hair, and moved about aimlessly, for a time, careless of sleep, because it seemed so far. Then a sudden resolve nerved her, and she stole back again to the front door, and opened it. The night was blossoming there, glowing now, abundant. It was so rich, so full! The moonlight here, and star upon star above, hidden not by clouds but by the light! Need she waste this one night out of all her unregarded life? She stepped forth among the flower-beds, stooping, in a passionate fervor, to the blossoms she could reach; but, coming back to the southernwood, she took it in her arms. She laid her face upon it, and crushed the soft leaves against her cheeks. It made all the world smell of its own balm and dew. The fragrance and beauty of the time passed into her soul, and awakened corners there all unused to such sweet incense. She was drunken with the wine that is not of grapes. She could not have found words for the passion that possessed her, though she hugged it to her heart like another self; but it was elemental, springing from founts deeper than those of life and death. God made it, and, like all His making, it was divine. She sat there, the southernwood still gathered into her arms, and at last emotion stilled itself, and passed into thought; a wild temptation rose, and with its first whisper drove a hot flush into her cheeks, and branded it there. Love! she had never named the name in its first natal significance. She had scarcely read it; for romance, even in books, had passed her by. But love! she knew it as the insect knows how to spread his new sun-dried wings in the air for which he was create. Sitting there, in a happy drowse, she thought it all out. She was old, plain, unsought; the man she exalted was the flower of his kind. He would never look on her as if she might touch the hem of wifehood's mantle; so there would be no shame in choosing him. Just to herself, she might name the Great Name. He would not know. Only her own soul would know, and God who gave it, and sent it forth fitted with delicate, reaching tentacles to touch the rock set there to wound them. She began to feel blindly that God was not alone the keeper of eternal Sabbaths, but the germinant heat at the heart of the world. If she were a young girl, like Phoebe, there would be shame. Even a thought of him would be a stretching forth her hand to touch him, saying, "Look at me! I am here!" but for her it was quite different. It would be like a dream, some grandmother dreamed in the sun, of rosy youth and the things that never came to pass. No one would be harmed, and the sleeper would have garnered one hour's joy before she took up her march again on the lonesomest road of all,--so lonesome, although it leads us, home! Thus she thought, half sleeping, until the night-dews clung in drops upon her hair; then she went in to bed, still wrapped about with the drapery of her dreams.

Next morning, when Dorcas carried in her father's breakfast, she walked with a springing step, and spoke in a voice so full and fresh it made her newly glad.

"It's a nice day, father! There'll be lots of folks out to meeting."

"That's a good girl!" This was his commendation, from hour to hour; it made up the litany of his gratitude for what she had been to him. "But I dunno's I feel quite up to preachin' to-day, Dorcas!"

"That'll be all right, father. We'll get somebody."

"You bring me out my sermon-box after breakfast, an' I'll pick out one," said he, happily. "Deacon Tolman can read it."

But, alas! Deacon Tolman had been dead this many a year!

A little later, the parson sat up in bed, shuffling his manuscript about with nervous hands, and Dorcas, in the kitchen, stood washing her breakfast dishes. That eager interest in living still possessed her. She began humming, in a timid monotone. Her voice had the clearness of truth, with little sweetness; and she was too conscious of its inadequacy to use it in public, save under the compelling force of conscience. Hitherto, she had only sung in Sunday-school, moved, as in everything, by the pathetic desire of "doing her part;" but this morning seemed to her one for lifting the voice, though not in Sunday phrasing. After a little thought, she began thinly and sweetly,--

"Early one morning, just as the sun was rising, I heard a maid sing in the valley below: 'O don't deceive me! O never leave me How could you use a poor maiden so?'"

A gruff voice from the doorway broke harshly in upon a measure.

"Yes! yes! Well! well! Tunin' up a larrady, ain't ye?"

Dorcas knew who it was, without turning round,--a dark, squat woman, broad all over; broad in the hips, the waist, the face, and stamped with the race-mark of high cheekbones. Her thick, straight black hair was cut "tin-basin style;" she wore men's boots, and her petticoats were nearly up to her knees.

"Good morning, Nancy!" called Dorcas, blithely, wringing out her dishcloth. "Come right in, and sit down."

Nance Pete (in other words, Nancy the wife of Pete, whose surname was unknown) clumped into the room, and took a chair by the hearth. She drew forth a short black pipe, looked into it discontentedly, and then sat putting her thumb in and out of the bowl.

"You 'ain't got a mite o' terbacker about ye? Hey what?" she asked.

Dorcas had many a time been shocked at the same demand. This morning, something humorous about it struck her, and she laughed.

"You know I haven't, Nancy Pete! Did you mend that hole in your skirt, as I told you?"

Nance laboriously drew a back breadth of her coarse plaid skirt round to the front, and displayed it, without a word. A three-cornered tear of the kind known as a barn-door had been treated by tying a white string well outside it, and gathering up the cloth, like a bag. Dorcas's sense of fitness forbade her to see anything humorous in so original a device. She stood before the woman in all the moral excellence of a censor fastidiously clad.

"O Nancy Pete!" she exclaimed. "How could you?"

Nance put her cold pipe in her mouth, and began sucking at the unresponsive stem.

"You 'ain't got a bite of anything t' eat, have ye?" she asked, indifferently.

Dorcas went to the pantry, and brought forth pie, doughnuts and cheese, and a dish of cold beans. The coffee-pot was waiting on the stove. One would have said the visitor had been expected. Nance rose and tramped over to the table. But Dorcas stood firmly in the way.

"No, Nancy, no! You wait a minute! Are you going to meeting to-day?"

"I 'ain't had a meal o' victuals for a week!" remarked Nance, addressing no one in particular.

"Nancy, are you going to meeting?"

"Whose seat be I goin' to set in?" inquired Nance, rebelliously, yet with a certain air of capitulation.

"You can sit in mine. Haven't you sat there for the last five years? Now, Nancy, don't hinder me!"

"Plague take it, then! I'll go!"

At this expected climax, Dorcas stood aside, and allowed her visitor to serve herself with beans. When Nance's first hunger had been satisfied, she began a rambling monologue, of an accustomed sort to which Dorcas never listened.

"I went down to peek into the Poorhouse winders, this mornin'. There they all sut, like rats in a trap. 'Got ye, 'ain't they?' says I. Old Sal Flint she looked up, an' if there'd been a butcher-knife handy, I guess she'd ha' throwed it. 'It's that Injun!' says she to Mis' Giles. 'Don't you take no notice!' 'I dunno's I'm an Injun,' says I, 'I dunno how much Injun I be. I can't look so fur back as that. I dunno's there's any more Injun in me than there is devil in you!' I says. An' then the overseer he come out, an' driv' me off. 'You won't git me in there,' says I to him, 'not so long's I've got my teeth to chaw sassafras, an' my claws to dig me a holler in the ground!' But when I come along, he passed me on the road, an' old Sal Flint sut up by him on the seat, like a bump on a log. I guess he was carryin' her over to that Pope-o'-Rome meetin' they've got over to Sudleigh."

Dorcas turned about, in anxious interest.

"Oh, I wonder if he was! How _can_ folks give up their own meeting for that?"

Nance pushed her chair back from the table.

"Want to see all kinds, I s'pose," she said, slyly. "Guess I'll try it myself, another Sunday!"

"Anybody to home?" came a very high and wheezy voice from the doorway. Dorcas knew that also, and so did Nance Pete.

"It's that old haddock't lives up on the mountain," said the latter, composedly, searching in her pocket, and then pulling out a stray bit of tobacco and pressing it tenderly into her pipe.

An old man, dressed in a suit of very antique butternut clothes, stood at the sill, holding forward a bunch of pennyroyal. He was weazened and dry; his cheeks were parchment color, and he bore the look of an active yet extreme old age. He was totally deaf. Dorcas advanced toward him, taking a bright five-cent piece from her pocket. She held it out to him, and he, in turn, extended the pennyroyal; but before taking it, she went through a solemn pantomime. She made a feint of accepting the herb, and then pointed to him and to the road.

"Yes, yes!" said the old man, irritably. "Bless ye! of course I'm goin' to meetin'. I'll set by myself, though! Yes, I will! Las' Sunday, I set with Jont Marshall, an' every time I sung a note, he dug into me with his elbow, till I thought I should ha' fell out the pew-door. My voice is jest as good as ever 'twas, an' sixty-five year ago come spring, I begun to set in the seats."

The coin and pennyroyal changed ownership, and he tottered away, chattering to himself in his senile fashion.

"Look here, you!" he shouted back, his hand on the gate. "Heerd anything o' that new doctor round here? Well, he's been a-pokin' into my ears, an' I guess he'd ha' cured me, if anybody could. You know I don't hear so well's I used to. He went a-peekin' an' a-pryin' round my ears, as if he'd found a hornet's nest. I dunno what he see there; I know he shook his head. I guess we shouldn't ha' got no such a man to settle down here if he wa'n't so asthmy he couldn't git along where he was. That's the reason he come, they say. He's a bright one!"

Dorcas left her sweeping, and ran out after him. For the moment, she forgot his hopeless durance in fleshly walls.

"Did he look at 'em?" she cried. "Did he? Tell me what he said!"

"Why, of course I don't hear no better yit!" answered old Simeon, testily, turning to stump away, "but that ain't no sign I sha'n't! He's a beauty! I set up now, when he goes by, so's I can hear him when he rides back. I put a quilt down in the fore-yard, an' when the ground trimbles a mite, I git up to see if it's his hoss. Once I laid there till 'leven. He's a beauty, he is!"

He went quavering down the road, and Dorcas ran back to the house, elated afresh. An unregarded old man could give him the poor treasure of his affection, quite unasked. Why should not she?

Nance was just taking her unceremonious leave. Her pockets bulged with doughnuts, and she had wrapped half a pie in the Sudleigh "Star," surreptitiously filched from the woodbox.

"Well, I guess I'll be gittin' along towards meetin'," she said, in a tone of unconcern, calculated to allay suspicion. "I'm in hopes to git a mite o' terbacker out o' Hiram Cole, if he's settin' lookin' at his pigs, where he is 'most every Sunday. I'll have a smoke afore I go in."

"Don't you be late!"

"I'm a-goin' in late, or not at all!" answered Nance, contradictorily. "My bunnit ain't trimmed on the congregation side, an' I want to give 'em a chance to see it all round. I'm a-goin' up the aisle complete!"

Dorcas finished her work, and, having tidied her father's room, sat down by his bedside for the simple rites that made their Sabbath holy. With the first clanging stroke of the old bell, not half a mile away, they fell into silence, waiting reverently through the necessary pause for allowing the congregation to become seated. Then they went through the service together, from hymn and prayer to the sermon. The parson had his manuscript ready, and he began reading it, in the pulpit-voice of his prime. At that moment, some of his old vigor came back to him, and he uttered the conventional phrases of his church with conscious power; though so little a man, he had always a sonorous delivery. After a page or two, his hands began to tremble, and his voice sank.

"You read a spell, Dorcas," he whispered, in pathetic apology. "I'll rest me a minute." So Dorcas read, and he listened. Presently he fell asleep, and she still went on, speaking the words mechanically, and busy with her own tumultuous thoughts. Amazement possessed her that the world could be so full of joy to which she had long been deaf. She could hear the oriole singing in the elm; his song was almost articulate. The trees waved a little, in a friendly fashion, through the open windows; friendly in the unspoken kinship of green things to our thought, yet remote in their own seclusion. One tall, delicate locust, gowned in summer's finest gear, stirred idly at the top, as if through an inward motion, untroubled by the wind. Dorcas's mind sought out the doctor, listening to the sermon in her bare little church, and she felt quite content. She had entered the first court of love, where a spiritual possession is enough, and asks no alms of bodily nearness. When she came to the end of the sermon, her hands fell in her lap, and she gave herself up without reserve to the idle delight of satisfied dreaming. The silence pressed upon her father, and he opened his eyes wide with the startled look of one who comprehends at once the requirements of time and place. Then, in all solemnity, he put forth his hands; and Dorcas, bending her head, received the benediction for the congregation he would never meet again. She roused herself to bring in his beef-tea, and at the moment of carrying away the tray, a step sounded on the walk. She knew who it was, and smiled happily. The lighter foot keeping pace beside it, she did not hear.

"Dorcas," said her father, "git your bunnit. It's time for Sunday-school."

"Yes, father."

The expected knock came at the door. She went forward, tying on her bonnet, and her cheeks were pink. The doctor stood on the doorstone, and Phoebe was with him. He smiled at Dorcas, and put out his hand. This, according to Tiverton customs, was a warm demonstration at so meaningless a moment; it seemed a part of his happy friendliness. It was Phoebe who spoke.

"I'll stay outside while the doctor goes in. I can sit down here on the step. Your father needn't know I am here any more than usual. I told the doctor not to talk, coming up the walk."