Title: Vein of Iron (1936)
Author: Ellen Glasgow
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Title: Vein of Iron (1936)
Author: Ellen Glasgow






'Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.'




CONTENTS

PART I--TOWARD LIFE

PART II--THE SINGLE HEART

PART III--LIFE'S INTERLUDE

PART IV--GOD'S MOUNTAIN

PART V--THE DYING AGE







PART I

TOWARD LIFE


I


Children were chasing an idiot boy up the village street to the
churchyard.

'Run, run, oh, what fun!' sang little Ada Fincastle, as she raced
with the pursuers.  Flushed and breathless, panting with delight,
she felt that the whole round world and the short December day were
running too.  The steep street and the shingled roofs of Ironside
rocked upward.  The wind whistled as it sped on.  Dust whirled and
scattered and whirled again.  The sunshine was spinning.  A bird
and its shadow flashed over the winter fields.  Clouds flew in the
sky.  The road beyond the church reared and plunged into the shaggy
hills.  The hills shook themselves like ponies and rushed headlong
among the mountains.  The Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies toppled
over and tumbled far down into the Valley of Virginia.  'Run, run,
oh, what fun to be flying!'  Then suddenly the world balanced
itself, revolved slowly, and settled to rest.  She had stopped.

Past the old stone church, on the edge of a field, the idiot turned
and spat at his tormentors.  His mouth was only a crooked hole in
his face; his small dull eyes squinted between inflamed eyelids.
Without dropping his pail of refuse, he squawked with rage and
dodged from side to side as the boys pelted his shoulders.  'Go
home, Toby, go home to your mammy!' the little girls mocked,
dancing about him.  'Go home to your piggie--pig--pigs!'

Across the field, beyond the last sunken mound in the churchyard,
the fallow land broke and fell into Murderer's Grave, a bare
ravine, once a watercourse, where the body of a hanged man had been
buried nearly a hundred years before.  Since that time, Ada knew,
there had been no hanging at Ironside; but some people said that
the lost spirit of the murderer, with a red stripe round its neck,
still prowled on stormy nights outside the churchyard.  In a hovel
perched on the rim of the ravine Toby Waters, the idiot, lived with
his mother.

'He's afraid to go home,' Willie Andrews cried.  'His mother got
drunk yesterday and beat him with her hickory stick.  She sold her
last petticoat for moonshine to the people on Lightnin' Ridge.'

Darting into the field, he seized the idiot's cap and stuffed it
with cow droppings.  Willie, the children shrieked, could always
think of something to do.  A great sport, he was, with the funniest
face and the quickest tongue in the village.  'He wants his cap,'
Janet Rowan trilled in her childish falsetto.  She had an innocent
rosebud face, and was fond of sticking out a small rosy tongue
which the Sunday school teacher had once brushed with quinine
because it told fibs.  'He's crying for his dirty old cap.'

'Oh, he won't mind,' Willie retorted.  'He eats slops.  I've seen
him.'

'But it hurts him,' Ada Fincastle answered slowly.  'It hurts him
to cry.'

Excitement had ebbed, and her voice sounded far off and troubled.
She glanced uneasily from the idiot's face to the spoiled cap (such
a ragged cap!) and back again to the idiot's face, which was
sagging with grief.  Sudden light broke within.  It was just as if
her heart, too, had turned over.  'I don't like to hurt things,'
she said, and there was surprise in her tone.

In a flash of vision it seemed to her that she and Toby had changed
places, that they were chasing her over the fields into that filthy
hovel.  But it wasn't the first time she had felt like this.  Last
summer she had seen a rabbit torn to pieces by hounds (their own
young Horace, for all his noble bearing, was among them) and she
had heard it cry out like a baby.  She had watched its eyes
throbbing with fear and pain, like small terrified hearts.  Since
then she had never been able to eat rabbit unless she pretended it
was chicken.  Aunt Abigail Geddy said chickens were not nearly so
much like babies.  She said chickens didn't really mind having
their necks wrung if you did it the right way.

'It does hurt him, Ralph.  I know it hurts him.'  Her voice was
firmer now, and she looked round at Ralph McBride, who was the only
boy she trusted.  She could not remember when her confidence in him
had begun.  From the time she could crawl she had tried to follow
his auburn head everywhere.

'He likes it,' Ralph replied impatiently.  'If he didn't like it,
he could run home.'

'But he's lost his cap.  Maybe he knows his mother will whip him if
he comes home without it.'  Moved by a reckless impulse, she jerked
off her own cap of knitted red wool and held it out to the idiot.
'You may have mine, Toby.  I don't need it.'

'What bedevilment are you up to now?' a voice shouted from the
churchyard, and at the first word the children scattered and fled
squealing down the village street.  'I'm sometimes tempted to
think,' the voice continued, 'that children are more savage than
savages.'

'He won't hurt me.  I shan't run,' Ada thought.  It could be nobody
but Mr. Black, the minister, she knew, and she knew also, though he
was a man of humane instincts, that he preferred children in Sunday
school.

'Can't you leave off tormenting that unfortunate?' he called again,
as he opened the gate and came out into the road where she waited
alone.  'Did he snatch your cap?' he asked, glancing severely at
Toby.

'No, sir, he didn't snatch it.  I gave it to him.'

Standing her ground, she stared up at the ungainly figure in the
long black greatcoat and the scarred face under the slouch hat of
black felt.  His eyes were dark and piercing; his long bony nose
curved in a beak; and his smooth-shaven chin was veined in
splotches like spilled blackberry wine.  A livid birthmark was
branded on the left side of his face between nose and temple, and
this, with the drooping eye above, as defiant as the eye of a caged
hawk, gave him the look of a man who had fought his way through a
forest fire.  Only the fire seemed to be burning not without but
within.  He was a saint, Ada's grandmother, who ought to have
known, had insisted, and because he was a saint he had been able,
in spite of his disfigurement, to attach to himself, with brief
intervals of widowerhood, three excellent wives.

'What will your mother say to that?'  The minister's tone was
stern.

'I have another, sir.  Grandmother knitted two red caps for me.
One for everyday, and one for Sunday.'

He smiled, and she told herself that he no longer frightened her.
'And you have a red lining to your squirrel-skin coat.'

She looked down.  Yes, 'twas true, but she hadn't thought the
minister would notice what she had on.  Her short coat of squirrel
skins stitched together in squares had been lined by Aunt Meggie
with the red flannel from one of grandmother's old petticoats.
Beneath the coat she wore a frock of brown and yellow sprigged
calico, chosen dark to save washing.  She hoped the minister
couldn't see the top of her red flannel underbody, which would poke
up at the neck, though it was sewed to her petticoat of the same
scratchy material.  Was there anything wrong, she wondered, while
her anxious gaze travelled to her brown woollen stockings with
yellow stripes at the top, and farther down, but not so very far,
after all, to her stout leather shoes made by old Mr. Borrows, the
cobbler, who still sewed so neatly that his shoes lasted for ever.
They looked clumsy, she thought; but he had assured her they would
wear until her feet grew too big for them.

Though she flushed when the minister glanced down at her, she was
not ashamed of her appearance.  She had been told, and saw no
reason to doubt, that she had a perfectly good face.  'A large
mouth, but perfectly good,' Aunt Meggie had said, and Ada's mother,
overhearing this, had laughed and added, 'A blunt nose, but
perfectly good too.'  Only, it seemed, her eyes were uncertain, or,
as her mother insisted, 'improbable'.  She had discovered this a
year before, when she was nine, and Aunt Meggie was writing a
letter about the family to a relative they had never seen, a blind
and crippled old lady in Scotland.  'Shall I say that Ada's eyes
are dark grey or smoky blue?' Aunt Meggie had asked, turning, pen
in hand, to the child's father.  'Tell her,' he had replied
quickly, 'that she has eyes like the Hebrides.'  When Ada had
demanded eagerly, 'What are the Hebrides, father?' he had answered
mysteriously, 'The Western Isles'.

She would remember this always because it had happened the day she
won her gold medal for reciting the Shorter Catechism.  The medal
was very thin and scarcely bigger than her thumb-nail, but it was
solid gold, the minister had said when he presented it.  Her name
was engraved on one side in letters so fine she couldn't read them,
and on the other side there was the single word 'Catechism', with
the year 1900 beneath.  She wore the medal threaded on a shoestring
round her neck, except on special occasions when mother would
search in her bureau drawers until she found a bit of old ribbon.

Suddenly, when she thought he had finished, she became aware that
Mr. Black was asking another question.

'Why did you give away your cap?'

'The boys spoiled Toby's.  And he was crying.  He was afraid his
mother might whip him.'

Mr. Black frowned.  He always frowned, as Ada learned afterwards,
whenever he was brought face to face with the misery of the world.
It was not easy, she could see, too, for him to avoid it.  His
sacred calling and the whole scheme of salvation depended upon
misery, mother had once complained when she was having a toothache.

'Well, I shouldn't trust her if she can lay hands on him,' he said.

While he spoke he wagged his head under the slouched brim, and
because she thought it more polite to assent, she wagged back at
him like a solid shadow.

'How old are you, my child?' Mr. Black inquired, after a pause.

'Ten, sir.  I've been going on eleven ever since last summer.'

He nodded abruptly, and then appeared, even more abruptly, to
forget her.  His countenance shone in the sunlight, and her own
small image seemed to wink at her from its glassy surface.  She saw
the drift of red in her cheeks, the freckles that never faded from
her nose even in winter, and her flying hair, between brown and
black, cut short to her shoulders, and curving up till it was like
a drake's tail, Aunt Abigail said.  She couldn't see the colour of
her eyes, but that might be because they had that far-away look.

A stuttering noise at her back made her wheel round, and she saw
that Toby was trying to stretch her cap over his deformed head.
When she looked at him, he threw the cap in the road and held out
his hands, babbling 'Sugar, sugar!'

'Can you understand what this unfortunate is saying?' Mr. Black
asked.

'He's begging for something sweet.  His mother taught him to say
"Sugar, sugar" like that whenever he meets anybody.  No, I haven't
anything sweet to give you, Toby,' she said severely.

'Go home!' Mr. Black commanded, with a queer distortion of his
mouth, and Toby picked up the half-emptied pail of refuse and
trotted obediently along the twisted path that led across the field
to the hovel.

'You ought not to throw away the caps your grandmother knits for
you.'  The minister's voice had saddened.  'Her fingers are not so
nimble as they used to be, and her bones are more brittle.  But in
her prime, before that attack of lumbago last winter, you couldn't
have found her match anywhere.  Many of our people back in the
mountains owe their lives to her and to the medicine in her saddle-
bag.  Often on stormy nights when word came down from Thunder
Mountain that somebody was near death, and the doctor was away on
another case, she would pack her saddle-bag with medicine and
bandages, not forgetting cloth for a winding-sheet, and start with
me on horseback up Lightning or Burned Timber Ridge.'

It's all true, Ada told herself proudly, tossing back the hair from
her shoulders.  Everyone spoke that way of grandmother, especially
her daughter-in-law, who had come from the Tidewater and had been a
belle in the gay, fast set there Aunt Meggie said, until she met
father when he had his first charge in Queenborough.  A fine church
it was, too, the largest Presbyterian congregation in that part of
the country.  Why had they left there, she wondered, and come back
to live with grandmother in the old manse?  Would that always, even
when she grew up, be a mystery?  From a word Aunt Meggie had let
fall, she suspected that the change had had something to do with
losing their church.  And then, when they were all safely at
Ironside and father had begun to preach in the old stone church,
which his great-great-grandfather, John Fincastle, pioneer, and his
flock had built with their own hands, he had lost this charge also
as soon as the second volume of his book had come from the press.
It was dreadful, she couldn't help thinking, though grandmother had
rebuked her for the opinion, the way pastors were dismissed just as
soon as they were comfortably settled.  Father had been obliged to
turn into a schoolmaster and fill the parlour with rows of ugly
green benches.  She had heard somebody say that he was allowed to
teach only profane learning, and even that was on grandmother's
account, because she had done so much good in her life.

'Did your father go to Doncaster, this morning?' Mr. Black's
question trailed off into the sigh she had learned to expect when
anyone spoke of her father.

'Yes, sir.  He went with Mr. Rowan in his two-horse gig.  They
started before day, and he said they would be back, if nothing
happened, about sundown.  It's a long way.'

'Not as the crow flies.  But all ways are long over bad roads.'

'He had to go about the mortgage.'  A mortgage was nothing to be
ashamed of if you were self-respecting.  Nor, for that matter, was
being poor and doing without things, so long as you saved your
pride and didn't stoop to receive charity.

What troubled her was not the mortgage, but the endless sigh that
fluttered about father's name.  He had been a more eloquent
preacher than Mr. Black, mother declared, and after the second
volume of his book was published (the book that had cost him two
pulpits) famous men from all over the world had written to ask his
opinion of the philosophers in the olden time.  For he himself was
one of the greatest.  Had he lived long ago, mother had said,
carefully pronouncing the syllables, he might have walked with
Socrates, he might have been the companion of Plato.

There was a brief silence while the man and the child gazed up the
steep road from the church to a grove of giant oaks and a red brick
house flanked by a stony hill which was used as a pasture for three
infirm sheep.  The dwelling stood slightly withdrawn from the
village, on land that had belonged to the Fincastles ever since
Ironside had been a part of the frontier and John Fincastle had led
his human flock up from the Indian savannahs, running in wild grass
and pea-vine, to the bowed shoulder of the mountain.  Near the
timbered ridges he had felled trees and built the original manse, a
cabin of round logs with a stone chimney.  He had always believed,
grandmother said, that the Lord had directed him to their grove of
oaks in Shut-in Valley.  Far into the night he had prayed, asking a
sign, and in the morning when he had risen to fetch water he had
seen a finger of light pointing straight from the sky to the
topmost bough of an oak.  After more than a century and a half, in
which the log cabin had given way first to a small stone house and
then to the square brick house, the Fincastle place was still known
as 'the old manse', while the minister's home in the village was
called 'the new parsonage'.  The child, who had heard all this and
much more, imagined that the fine town of Fincastle, and the lost
county as well, had been named after the pioneer for whom God made
a sign.  But the minister might have told her, had he felt the wish
to shatter a harmless myth, that these historic scenes commemorated
not an act of God, but the family seat of Lord Botetourt in
England.

'Is there anybody at the gate?' Mr. Black inquired presently,
shielding his eyes from the sun.  'It may be only a sheep.  It's
queer, isn't it,' he continued solemnly, 'how little difference
there is between a human being and a sheep to near-sighted eyes?'

The child laughed shyly because she knew, though it did not seem
funny, that he expected her to be amused.  ''Tis grandmother,' she
replied.  'She's picking up sticks.  Every evening, just before
sundown, she goes out and picks up all the sticks that have dropped
since the day before.'

The queer frown that bore so strong a resemblance to misery, and
yet was not misery, distorted the minister's face.  'But that is
bad for her rheumatism.'

'She doesn't stoop all the time.  Father made her a pair of wooden
tongs to pick up with.'

'Do you never help her?'

'We all pick up every evening.  Sometimes father and I go down into
the woods and gather the handcart full of light-wood.  'Tis a great
saving,' she explained in an elderly tone, 'on the backlogs father
cut last summer.'

'I dare say.  Well, you'd better run home now and help your
grandmother.'

'I'm not going home.'  Her voice was faltering but brave.  'I'm
going over to the flat rock by the big pine to watch for father.'
Had the minister forgotten that Christmas was coming soon, and the
Ladies' Missionary Society was holding a festival on Tuesday to
raise money for the heathen in China?

'Is he going to bring you something?'  Again he smiled, and again
she thought in surprise, I am not afraid of him.

'He's going to bring me a doll with real hair.'  Her eyes shone and
the red drifted back into her cheeks.

'But won't a doll with real hair cost a good deal?'

'I saved up my berry money.  Mrs. Rowan paid me two dollars and a
half for picking berries for her last summer.'

'Will a doll cost all of two dollars and a half?'

'I hope not.'  She appeared anxious, as indeed she was.  'I had to
spend a dollar.  I simply had to spend a dollar.'

'Well, run on.  He may come sooner than you expect.  Isn't the
nearest way through the village?'

'No, sir, I know a sheep track over the fields.  The track goes by
the flat rock all the way down to Smiling Creek.'

But he had not, she realized after a moment, listened to a word she
had said.  His gaze was sweeping the Appalachian uplands and the
unbroken chain of mountains to the farthest and highest blue
summit.  While she waited for him to dismiss her, she saw his mouth
quiver and move stiffly in silent prayer.  Then, as she was about
to slip away, the words fluttered and came to roost on his lips.
'Whenever I look at God's Mountain, I know what is meant by THE
PEACE OF GOD, WHICH PASSETH ALL UNDERSTANDING.'

Vaguely bewildered, but still eager to be all that he required of a
child who knew the Catechism by heart, she hesitated and raised her
eyes to a face that had become luminous with worship.  Then,
turning away softly, she tied her knitted scarf over her head and
ran into the near field to pick out the old sheep track, which was
scarcely wider than a seam in the ground.


II


The child lay on the flat rock and watched the road that climbed
through the small valleys within the Great Valley.

God's Mountain, father said, was the oversoul of Appalachian
Virginia.  Whenever she gazed at it alone for a long time, the
heavenly blue seemed to flood into her heart and rise there in a
peak.  That must have been the first thing God created, and blue,
she supposed, was the oldest colour in the world.  When she was
studying the Alps in her geography class, father had said that the
Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies were older.  And the streams were
old too.  That was why there were no lakes or ponds in the hollows
of Indian Rock County, not even in Campbell's Valley or Aunt Mary's
Valley or Can't Whistle Creek Valley or, of course, in their very
own Shut-in Valley.  But there were many rivers and creeks and runs
and trickling ice-green freshets from the melted snows in the
mountains.  Scattered among them, she could see the comfortable
farmhouses, with roofs of red painted tin or grey weather-beaten
shingles.  For Shut-in Valley was not really shut in except at the
farther end.

A DOLL WITH REAL HAIR--the thought ran in a bright skein through
her mind.  She had never in all her life had a doll with real hair.
And she was buying it with her own money that she had earned, so
she might look at it as soon as it came, without waiting for
Christmas.  Mother had given her a scrap of pink baby ribbon to tie
round its head; she knew Aunt Meggie was making a dress as a
surprise; and grandmother, she was almost sure, had crocheted a
pink coat, and perhaps tiny shoes, of worsted for it to wear when
she took it into the village.  She would call it Flora because that
name sounded pink and smooth and smiling, with yellow hair.

Leaning down from the rock, she looked far over Little River, which
reflected the sky through shadows of scudding clouds.  Immense,
clear, glittering, the even summit of God's Mountain broke on the
western horizon.  She could smell the crystal scent of winter in
the air, like the taste of wild strawberries.  Nearer, yet still
far away, she could make out the twin crests of Rain and Cloud
Mountains, and when she turned and glanced over her shoulder, there
was Thunder Mountain, the nearest of all.  On the very top of
Thunder Mountain, father said, there was a heap of brown stones.
Nobody could tell how it had come there, or why the Indians had
raised it.  Some people believed it was the burial mound of an
Indian chief.  But father thought that when the Shawnees went by on
the warpath, each brave had dropped a stone as an offering to the
Great Spirit, just as she dropped a penny in the plate Deacon
McClung passed in church.

When she was old enough she meant to climb the mountain and see for
herself.  That was one of the things mother had always longed to do
and had never done.  'Some day when we have nothing important to
do,' mother said, 'and I don't have to lie on a sofa to spare my
back, we'll take a whole day out of life and climb to the very top
of Thunder Mountain.  We'll go up as high as the Indian mount.
From there we can see nearly to the end of the world.'  And ever
since she was little, the child had asked, 'Is the end of the world
blue, mother?'

Lower down on Thunder Mountain you could still see signs of the
Shawnee warpath.  Indian trail, they called it; and Ralph McBride
had followed it with some deer-hunters last autumn.  Over that
trail the Shawnees had come for the massacre of Smiling Creek.
Ralph had found arrow-heads and part of a tomahawk down under the
rocks in the deepest bottom of the creek.  When the Indians went
back they had taken Great-great-grandmother Tod away into
captivity.  A little girl she had been, ten years old, no bigger
than Ada.  She had lived for seven long years a captive in a
Shawnee village.  When she was sixteen, they had married her to a
young chief, and she had gone into his wigwam.  Then peace with the
red men had come soon afterwards, and when she was seventeen she
was returned under the treaty, father said, that ended Pontiac's
War.  After all she had endured, she lived to be over a hundred.

In the middle of the road by the flat rock, two of the mountain
people, a man and a boy, were swinging by with a slow, even gait.
As they passed, they looked up and nodded gravely, and she nodded
back without speaking.  'Somebody must be sick up there,' she
thought; for the mountaineers seldom came down in winter, except to
buy Jamaica ginger, or to summon Dr. Updike to visit the dying.
Father had told her that they were a stalwart breed, the true
American highlanders.  In pioneer days their forefathers had fled
from the strict settlements, some because they could breathe only
in freedom, and others to escape punishment for crimes against the
laws of the Tidewater.  But old black Aunt Abigail Geddy, who had
Indian blood, muttered that there were fearful sights in the hills
if you knew where to look for them.  She had once gone to Panther's
Gap to help grandmother take care of a family of half-wits.  Three
generations of half-wits, from a chattering crone of a granny to a
newborn baby barely a day old!  And the baby was the worst.  If it
had been a kitten, she said, they would have tossed it straight
into Panther's Run.  Aunt Abigail would have mumbled on over her
pipe until the child was quaking with horror.  But just as she
approached the hair-raising part, mother came into the kitchen and
spoke so severely that the old woman could never be persuaded to
return to the subject.  She would only shake her head and mutter
that folks in Panther's Gap were all as poor as Job's turkey.

Ever since she was too little to lace her own shoes, Ada had
wondered what it meant to be poor.  She remembered, too, the very
moment her wondering began.  It was when she was five years old,
and grandmother had taken her frock of yellow sprigged calico to
give to the poor McAllisters, who lived up the road.  She had loved
her yellow sprigged frock, and she had hated to give it away.  When
she had cried, grandmother, who was rummaging in her closets to
find clothes to put into a basket, had reproved her and said she
ought to be glad to divide with God's poor.  'Are we poor,
Grandmother?' she had asked.  'Not so poor,' grandmother had
replied, 'as the poor McAllisters.'  'What does it mean,' the child
had persisted, 'to be poor?'  'It means,' grandmother had answered,
'not to have enough to eat.  It means not to have enough clothes to
cover you.'  'Oh, then, we aren't poor, grandmother,' Ada had cried
joyfully.  'We have two bags of cornmeal in the storeroom, and two
sides of bacon in the smokehouse, and a patch full of sweet
potatoes in the garden.  And all of us,' she had added in triumph,
'have our new red flannel petticoats for next winter.'  Then mother
had dropped on her knees, crying, while she folded her in her arms,
'You're right, darling,' she had said, 'we aren't really poor, and
we have much to be thankful for.'

The shadow of the big pine had fallen aslant the rock, and rolling
over in the crisp air, which was not too cold, Ada looked across
the fields to the village and the stone chimneys of the church
above the bare boughs in the churchyard.  She knew the story of
that church by heart, and she could listen for ever, she thought,
to the adventures of the first settlers, as grandmother told them.

'Ours is a little church, but we have loved it,' grandmother would
begin.  'Even if we've never been so well off as the congregations
at New Providence and Timber Ridge and Falling Springs, still we
were appointed to our humble work in the Lord's vineyard.  The
Fincastles, too, were always simple folk, though they had learning,
and were as good as the best.'

'And are we as good as the best now, Grandmother?' Ada would ask.

'In everything but circumstances, my child.  The Craigies were even
less well-to-do than the Fincastles; but they were rooted like
oaks.'

Scottish-Irish, people called the pioneers, though after they were
driven out of Strathclyde they had stayed to themselves in Ulster,
and had seldom or never crossed blood with the Irish.  John
Fincastle had brought his flock with him from County Donegal, all
the elders and deacons of his church and a few humbler members of
his congregation.  They had sailed from Ulster in the ship Martha
and Mary, and it had taken them one hundred and eighteen days to
cross the Atlantic Ocean to Philadelphia.  At first they had
settled and practised their religion in Pennsylvania; but after a
few restless years, the bolder spirits among the Ulstermen had
pushed southward, with their families, over the old Indian Road,
into Virginia.  The Scholar Pioneer, the immigrants named John
Fincastle, because he had brought not only his Bible, but as much
of his library as he could stow away into a pack.  Grandmother
would chuckle over the legend that he had reduced his wife's pots
and kettles to a single vessel in order to make room for volumes of
profane learning.  'That's how your father came by his reason, if
not by his use of it.  Though I'm far from denying,' she would
sigh, 'that, in spite of his backsliding, he is still a man of good
parts.'

But the worst was not over.  A thrilling quaver would creep into
grandmother's voice.  When the Indian Road led them into Virginia,
they found the settlement too contentious for a worshipper who
wanted peace with his Maker.  After a few months John Fincastle
thrust out toward the frontier.  The mood of the wilderness flowed
into him and ebbed back again.  He was pursuing the dream of a free
country, the dream of a country so vast that each man would have
room to bury his dead on his own land.

The pioneers who had gone ahead had left not a single track, not
even the print of a hoof, in the Indian meadows.  There was nothing
to guide them except the sun and the stars, and occasionally the
faint signs of Indian hunters.  No wagons could travel the
wilderness, and all they needed, even profane learning, had to be
carried on packhorses.  No wonder, after climbing hills, fording
rivers, defying forests, that a spear of light should seem to them
to be the finger of Providence.  Their first act was to drop on
their knees; their first thought was to build a house of divine
worship.  But years passed before they could assemble material for
the Ironside church, with the floor of walnut puncheons, the high-
backed pews, the stone stairways to the gallery.

When the ground was broken, all the families in the clearings left
their brush-harrows and ploughs and hastened with saws, axes, and
hammers to the spot where they had knelt in the sunrise.  Men and
women worked together building the walls, and every grain of sand
to make mortar was brought by the women on horseback.  Mrs.
Ettrick, a woman of great strength, was surprised by a redskin when
she was fording a creek, but she felled him with the single blow of
a hatchet and galloped back to warn the men who bore muskets.
Grandmother's words would drop thick and fast, like the pelting of
hail, while Ada's flesh crawled with fear that was somehow
delicious.

John Fincastle was a merciful man.  Though he was a trespasser on
the hunting-grounds of the Indians, he became their friend and
protector.  Only his renowned piety had saved him from death when
he tried to defend innocent tribes.  He never forgave the settlers,
especially his own militia, for the murder of Cornstalk.  In his
last years, when he was upwards of eighty, and his eldest son, John
II, had succeeded him in his ministry, he abandoned what was then
called civilization (here grandmother would pause to shake her
head), and went alone into the wilderness as a missionary to the
Shawnees.  All his worldly needs, he had declared, could be
strapped on his back.  He carried with him two Bibles and one other
book, a copy in his own handwriting of the Meditations of a Heathen
Emperor who had not even been converted and saved.  That made some
people think his years were beginning to tell on him.  It seemed,
whatever way you looked at it, a strange thing to do.

'Remember, my child, that you have strong blood,' grandmother would
end proudly, for her forefathers, the Craigies, had been members of
John Fincastle's flock.  'Never let it be weakened.  Thin blood
runs to wickedness.'

The sun was going down in a blaze, but as it sank behind the hills
it shot up again in a fountain of light and scattered a sparkling
spray into the clouds.  Cramped from waiting so long, Ada felt that
a chill had begun to creep up from the rock, where the sunshine had
vanished, through the thickness of her woollen stockings and
squirrel-skin coat.  Springing to her feet, she jumped up and down
until warmth ran in pinpricks over her arms and legs.  When she
moved to the edge of the rock, she could look through the last
faded leaves on the oaks, which glimmered with a bluish tone in the
flushed light, and see the dormer-windows and the sloping shingled
roof of the manse.  The darkness of ivy was flung over the square
front porch, with ends that groped toward the western wall and
laced back the green shutters.

In the side yard, over the fallen leaves, a dusky shape moved near
the ground, and she knew that it was Horace on his way from Aunt
Abigail Geddy's cabin, which he visited between meals in the hope
of a sop of corn pone and gravy.  The Geddys were the only coloured
family in Ironside; they were all upright and independent, and they
were proud of their Indian blood and straight features.  Aunt
Abigail had lived at the manse for forty-odd years.  After father
lost his church and had no money to pay her wages, she had stayed
on because she said it was respectable to work for a minister,
whether he preached or not, and her cabin between the garden and
the sheep pasture, behind the row of sunflowers Aunt Meggie raised
every summer for chicken feed, was all the home that she wanted.
It was a good cabin.  There were two rooms with a big stone
fireplace and a floor of double boards to defend the old woman's
bones from the dampness.  Her son, Marcellus Geddy, had plastered
the walls and whitewashed them within and without.

Between the green shutters the red eye of a window blinked from
under the ivy, and while the child watched the flickering gleam she
seemed to be in two places at once.  The dusky shape of Horace
barked at the door.  It opened and shut again behind him when he
had padded into the hall.  Grandmother had filled her basket with
sticks long ago, and had gone in to take up the ball of brown yarn
and her steel knitting needles.  She would sit erect in her deep
chair with wings on her own side of the fireplace, near the lamp on
the round table and the front window where the shutters were held
back by ivy.  The big front room was mother's chamber.  A log fire
burned there all the time, and after supper the family gathered in
front of the great fireplace to pray with grandmother, and to
listen to father when he read aloud a chapter from Old Mortality.
In one corner there was a high tester bed, and Ada's own trundle-
bed, in which she had slept ever since she was a baby, was rolled
out at night from under the hanging fringe of the counterpane.  All
the furniture, except a rosewood bookcase and sofa from the
parsonage in Queenborough, was made of walnut or pine and had
furnished the manse in her great-great-grandfather's day.

Grandmother was the kind of person you saw better when you were not
looking straight at her.  Even when she was young, mother said, she
could never have been handsome; but she had the sort of ugliness
that is more impressive than beauty.  Her figure was tall, strong,
rugged; her face reminded the child of the rock profile at Indian
Head; and her eyes, small, bright, ageless, were like the eyes of
an eaglet that had peered out from a crevice under the rock.  At
seventy, her eyebrows were still black and bushy, and in the left
one there was a large brown mole from which three stiff black hairs
bristled as sharply as needles in a pin-cushion.  Summer and
winter, except on the Sabbath, she wore the same dresses of black
and grey calico with very full skirts, and a little crocheted shawl
of grey or lavender wool was flung over her shoulders whenever she
felt the edge of a chill.  Ada had never seen her without a cap on
her thick hair, which was not white but grizzled.  Even when her
lumbago was so painful that she could not get out of bed, and a
fire had to be kept up all night in her room, she would ask for her
muslin day cap with its bunch of narrow black ribbon before she
would swallow a morsel of breakfast.

Mother, who could never sit still, would be moving about, helping
Aunt Meggie in the kitchen (for three days Aunt Abigail Geddy had
been crippled with rheumatism), or running out on the porch to look
for father or for Ada herself.  Then in a flash, hurrying and
laughing as she hurried, she would dart in through another door,
crying, 'I forgot something!  I know I forgot something, but I
can't think what it was I forgot!'  She was always like that, gay,
amused, beautiful, even when she was faded and weather-beaten,
making fun where there was no fun.

For a few years after she lost her two little sons from diphtheria,
Aunt Meggie said, the heart had seemed to go out of her.  But when
father was obliged to resign from his church in Queenborough, and
everything became suddenly so bad that it looked as if it could not
be worse, mother grew brighter than she had ever been.  She talked
all the time, and no matter how poor they were, she could always
find something to laugh at, if it were nothing more amusing than
poverty.  Yet it was true, as she would repeat over and over in her
bright, tremulous voice, they had much to be thankful for.  Never,
as far back as Ada could remember, had they been hungry.  Even if
they needed clothes, and grandmother re-dipped and turned and
pressed the ribbon on her caps until it was worn to a fringe, they
had never been without corn bread and brown gravy and all the dried
beans and peas and tinned tomatoes that Aunt Meggie gathered in
their garden and put up with the help of Aunt Abigail Geddy.


III


The dying flare of the sun cast a rust-coloured light down into the
valley, and across this light a long black shape wavered suddenly
from the blue crook in the hills.

That must be the two-horse gig, with father and Mr. Rowan side by
side on the small seat.  But was it?  She couldn't be sure.
Yes . . . no.  Oh, it was, it was . . .  Lightly as a squirrel, she
balanced herself on the edge of the rock, bounded with a single
flying leap into the road, and raced down toward the bottom of the
hill, where the gig was splashing through a puddle before taking
the climb.  Like an enormous crow, the shadow hesitated, flapped,
and then flitted onward before the vehicle, as if shadow and
substance were two separate bodies.  At last he was coming.  He was
bringing her doll with real hair that she could brush and comb and
perhaps roll up in curl-papers.  As she ran on, her breath came in
gasps and words floated in wisps of fog out of her mouth.  Never
had she been so happy before.  Her heart felt as if it would bubble
over with joy.

'Did you bring it, Father?' she called, and he answered in his
distant voice, so unlike her mother's near and thrilling tones,
'Yes, I brought it, my child.  I did the best I could.'  When the
gig reached her, she was lifted into it and settled snugly between
father's hard lean figure and Mr. Rowan's soft bulging one.

'I reckon he's got something for you stuffed away in that basket
with the coffee and sugar,' Mr. Rowan remarked pleasantly.  She had
always liked him, even if he was Janet's father and Janet would tag
after her when she went climbing with Ralph.  It wasn't any fun to
climb with a baby that fell down and scratched her knee and then
sat in the briars and cried if you didn't come back for her.  But
Mr. Rowan had a pleasant face (a red face was more cheerful,
especially in winter time, than a pale one) and he had a good habit
of carrying pink and white sugar animals in his pocket.  This was
because of Janet.  Aunt Abigail said they had spoiled Janet till
she was rotten, and some day, when the Lord had time to attend to
it, they would be punished.

'It's a doll with real hair.  I bought it with my berry money.'

'Well, well, I wish Janet would turn her hand to making money.
She's never bought anything for herself.'

'But she's always had a wax doll this high.'  She measured the
height in the air.  'It's so beautiful she won't let any of us play
with it.'

'Is that so?  Well, I tell you what we'll do.  You bring your doll
to Janet's Christmas tree and we'll all play together.'

Daylight and shadow had both vanished now, and there was only the
thin dusk on the road.  Past the flat rock into the village, where
she saw Mr. Borrows shutting his shop, and Judge Melrose walking
along the cinder-strewn sidewalk with his brown spaniel Ruddy, and
a white horse before the door of old Mr. Wertenbaker, who had come
from the Shenandoah Valley, and Janet Rowan waving her hand to her
father, and Ralph McBride opening the gate before the small house
where his mother, a widow but proud, worked so hard to keep a roof
over their heads.  Then on beyond the church into the steep short
road which led through the big gate that sagged on its hinges, and
over the crackling dead leaves in the yard of the manse.

'Well, I'll be turning home,' Mr. Rowan said, smiling and friendly,
as he picked her up and swung her to the ground.  'It's been a long
day, and we'll both be glad of a good supper with bed at the end of
it.  A cold wave is coming.  We may have snow again by to-morrow.'

The gig rolled through the gate; the crackling died away in the
leaves; there was the sound of wheels growing fainter; and then
suddenly mother's voice called eagerly from the porch.  'Have you
come, John?'

'May I have it now, Father?' the child asked.

They were standing under the oaks, and she waited while he glanced
down uncertainly at the basket.  His figure, tall, spare, with the
straight spine of an Indian, seemed to sink into and become a part
of the twilight.

'May I have my doll now, Father?' she asked again.

Stooping over the basket, he lifted the lid and drew out an oblong
parcel wrapped in brown paper and neatly tied with a store string.
'I did the best I could, my child,' he repeated, as he put it into
her hands.  'After the mortgage was settled, it took all I had left
to buy coffee and sugar for your grandmother.  She is old, and it's
a deprivation for her to go without coffee.'

But she held the parcel tight, without untying the string or taking
in a word that he said.  Suddenly the whole world was swimming in
bliss, the blue twilight, the dark afterglow, the far-off
benevolent shape of God's Mountain.  'I'll undo it inside,' she
whispered, catching her breath.  'I'll wait for mother and
grandmother.'

Wheeling round, she ran across the yard, over the dead leaves which
sighed as cheerfully as if they were not really dead.  She would
always remember that happy rustling underfoot, and the clinging
smoky scents that sprang up out of the twilight--scents of earth
and winter and frosty darkness, all shot through and mingled with a
sensation of joy, a quiver of expectancy.

The door opened and shut.  She ran into the room, straight to the
fireplace, where grandmother was knitting and mother had hurried
in, after calling father, to throw lightwood knots on the flames.

'He's come, Mother.  He's brought my doll.'

'I'm glad, dear.  I'm glad you have what you've wanted so much.'
Mother's eyes, as she turned from the fire, were like lamps under a
dark shade, and her thin cheeks, where all the dimples were sucked
into hollows, were flaming with colour.

Grandmother peered over her spectacles, though her knitting needles
continued to click busily, and Aunt Meggie, who was tying on an
apron on her way to the kitchen, stopped and glanced back, with her
round cheerful face and funny slanting eyes beneath wisps of sandy
hair that strayed over her forehead.

'The only dolls little girls had in my day were rag dolls,'
grandmother said, with a smile.  'Rag or corncob or hickory nut.  I
remember somebody, 'twas a member of your great-grandfather's
congregation, gave me a wooden doll with arms and legs on hinges,
and I nearly went out of my wits for happiness.' The sense of fun
played over her as dawn skims over a mountain crag.

Mother laughed.  'But your day was different.  The world has grown,
and children have more nowadays.'  She sighed under her breath, the
kind of sigh, Ada knew, that meant she was thinking of all they
used to have before father became a philosopher instead of a
minister.

'Hadn't you better keep it for Christmas?' Aunt Meggie asked.
'There won't be much for Christmas this year.'

'Oh, no, let her open it,' mother said.  'She bought it with her
own money.'

Ada's fingers were trembling so that she could scarcely pick out
the knot in the store string that must be saved.

'I'm going to name her Flora,' she cried.  'I think Flora is the
prettiest name in the world.'  Her voice broke off, rose again in a
sharp cry, and quavered into a sobbing moan.

'Oh, Mother, Mother, she isn't real!  She isn't anything in the
world but china like Nellie.  Her hair is just china!'

It was true.  Mother and grandmother and Aunt Meggie stared down at
the black glazed head as it emerged from the sawdust.  Then,
stooping quickly, mother snatched the doll from the box, and said
in a bright, anxious voice, 'She has a nice face, darling.  Perhaps
there weren't any better.'  Grandmother's needles stopped for a
minute, and Horace, on the rug near the fire, raised his head and
thumped his tail slowly.

'But I don't want a china doll, Mother.  Nellie is china.'
Darkness overwhelmed her.  All the shining bliss was blotted out as
suddenly as it had flashed into light.  Her heart sank down, far,
far down into emptiness, and instead of the happy sighing of the
leaves she heard only a mournful whisper from the flames that
crawled over the lightwood knots on their way into smoke.  Never,
never as long as she lived would she have a doll with real hair
that she could comb and brush.  Something would always stand in the
way.  First she had lost all the money she had saved; it had
slipped through the lining of her squirrel-skin coat before mother
mended the rent in her pocket.  Then one season had been too poor
for berries and the next season they had been too plentiful.  And
she was already outgrowing the age for dolls.  Grandmother reminded
her of this every day.  Little girls of ten years had had their
useful tasks in grandmother's childhood.  They had carded wool or
hemmed cloth or stitched a sampler like the one grandmother herself
had worked when she was only seven, with the picture of a church
and a white steeple and a few birds flying.  At the age of ten,
grandmother insisted, little girls should be taught their
responsibilities.

'I don't want it, Mother.  I don't want china hair.'

'We'll hear what father has to say, darling.  Perhaps it isn't so
bad as it seems.  She has a nice face, and I'll make her a dress
and a bonnet out of that pink gingham I'd put away.'

'As soon as my hens begin laying again, I'll buy you a doll, Ada,'
said Aunt Meggie, who possessed the treasure of a practical mind.
'Try not to give way to disappointment.  Think how sad the world
would be if we all gave way to disappointment.'

But the child had ceased to care what became of the world.  She had
waited and saved; she had denied herself sticks of painted
peppermint candy when the other children were sucking; and all the
time she was growing farther from the age of play and nearer to the
dreadful age of tasks.  There was the bedstead, too, that Ralph
McBride, who could carve almost anything, had made for her last
Christmas.  It was waiting now in the cupboard where she kept her
playthings.  The posts were smooth and round and fitted together,
and there was a carved acorn in the middle of the headboard.
Nellie hadn't looked just right in that bed, especially after Aunt
Meggie had given her a tick of feathers to put on the slats and
mother had made sheets and pillows and even a blanket.  A doll with
real hair that opened her eyes in the morning and shut them at
night was what the bed needed.  And now Nellie would have a
companion like herself, with a body that was sawdust as far as the
neck and coal black hair that was as hard as her face.

'Aunt Meggie is right, Ada,' mother was repeating in her voice of
strained sweetness which sounded as if it were on the verge of
breaking, yet never broke.  'Try not to take things so hard.'

'But Janet Rowan takes things hard, Mother, and she has all the
dolls she wants.'

'I know, Ada, but the Rowans are rich, and we are poor.  Don't envy
them, dear.  We are happier than they are.'

Above the murmur of the flames she heard grandmother heave one of
her great sighs which shook her from head to foot, immense as she
was, and remark sternly, yet not without sympathy, to mother, 'The
child has a single heart, Mary Evelyn, and that will always bear
watching.  Jealousy is the flaw in the single heart.'

'Ada has never been jealous,' mother answered quickly, while the
red in her cheeks stained her throat.  'You can't expect a child
not to feel disappointment.'

'I didn't say that to hurt you,' grandmother rejoined gently.  'Ada
is a good child.'

'Don't cry, dear,' mother said, folding the child in her arms.
'Your father is coming in.  Try not to let him see how much this
has meant to you.'

First the hall door and then the chamber door opened and shut.
Horace sprang to his feet with a bark.  The smell of winter was
blown into the room on waves of freshness; and her father entered
with a step that dragged from weariness after his long drive and
his hard day.  Crossing the floor, he kissed his wife and held out
his hand to his mother, who did not favour casual endearments.

'I did the best I could, Mary Evelyn,' he said, flinching from
mental or physical pain.  'I know the child is disappointed, but I
did the best I could.  There wasn't a wax doll with real hair for
less than three dollars.  The cheaper ones had been sold for a
festival.'

'I know you did the best you could, John,' mother replied quickly,
with a gesture as if she were patting and smoothing.  'Ada is
disappointed, of course, but Meggie is going to buy a doll for her
as soon as the hens begin laying well.  This one has a pretty face
even if she has china hair, and she will look lovely after I've
dressed her.  You must be half starved.  Sit down and get warm
while I make the coffee.  Meggie has everything ready, and think
what a treat it will be to have coffee and sugar again.'

With her sprightly walk, she hurried out into the hall, and Ada
heard the rustling of paper as the parcels were carried through the
dining-room into the kitchen.  The other side of the house was dark
now and cold.  The front room was father's library, where he worked
far into the night, though he never had a fire except when his
hands became so frostbitten that he could not close his fingers
over his pen.  Grandmother had knitted a jersey for him of thick
yarn, but in the coldest weather he wrote in his greatcoat and
sometimes even with his hat on, or one of grandmother's little
shawls tied over his head.  Mother begged him to have a fire, and
sometimes she would light one without his seeing her do it.  Yet
even in winter it was a cheerful room, and in summer it was the
nicest place in the house because of the shining backs of books on
the walls and the view from the front windows of God's Mountain,
which seemed closer there than anywhere else.  Some of the books
had always been there.  They belonged to great-great-great-
grandfather's theological library, and this had been increased year
by year in each generation.  Then there were all the works on
philosophy father had bought when he was a student in London.  He
would sometimes talk to them of the two years he had spent there,
and Ada would listen breathlessly to his account of the house and
the landlady in Bloomsbury, where he had lodged.  Every day, as
soon as the doors were opened, he would go into the Reading Room of
the British Museum, and he would stay there until it closed, except
for half an hour when he went out for a cup of tea and some slices
of bread and butter.  It must have been a dull life, mother
thought, but he had loved it.  He had been as happy, he said, as
the day was long.  Yet Ada had overheard grandmother telling Aunt
Meggie in the middle of the night that his years in London and in
the British Museum had been 'the ruination of John'.

The aroma of coffee was wafted in, and grandmother tossed her head
with a spirited gesture, in the way an old mare will do when she
feels the spring in her bones.  Presently mother would call them
back into the kitchen and they would pass the closed door of the
parlour, where all the ugly green benches and the stove for wood
were waiting for Monday morning and the rows of pupils who came to
be taught, among other branches of learning, profane history and
geography, but not sacred.

The kitchen door must have opened again, for a new smell, the warm,
kindling, delicious smell of frying bacon, curled up brown and
crisp at the ends, mingled with the aroma of coffee.  On any other
night, the child would have been the first in the kitchen, helping
and watching, but she still suffered from the memory of Flora, and
all her appetite seemed to have fled.  She thought distantly of the
table mother adorned with flowers or winter berries in the blue
bowl she loved, and would let no one else wash, because it was
exactly the colour of God's Mountain.  The blue bowl had been one
of her wedding presents, but the four silver candlesticks, which
she set out even when she had no candles to put in them, had
belonged to great-grandmother Fincastle, the one who had been a
Graham.  Good food, grandmother said, needed no trimming, but
mother had a way of living that made everything pretty.  She was
glad that the candlesticks were not solid silver, that copper
gleamed through in places where they were worn.  The copper, she
would say with a laugh, was more precious than silver, for it was
the only thing that had kept them from being turned into money.  It
was mother, of course, who kept a row of red geraniums on the
kitchen window-sill and had arranged what she called her 'winter
bouquets' in the old earthenware crocks on the hall table.

'You need something to eat, John,' grandmother said suddenly, as
she let her knitting fall in her lap.  Her nostrils quivered with
pleasure when the smell floated in, for she had a hearty relish for
food.  Not, as she complained, for the dishes provided by her
daughter-in-law's pernickety taste, but for coarse, strong,
nourishing fare with a body of its own that stayed by her.

'Rowan gave me a bite, but I wasn't hungry.'  Father spoke
dreamily, as if only the fringes of his thoughts were engaged in
his answer.  'Yes, I shall be glad of a cup of coffee.'

Going over to the cupboard in the corner, Ada took out the doll's
bedstead and stood it on the floor beside her own trundle-bed.
When she had put a nightgown on the new doll, she laid her beside
Nellie between the sheets.  Even if she couldn't love her, she
might still name her Flora.

Hurrying in, with her sweet and anxious expression, mother said
gaily, 'Supper is ready, and nobody is going to be disappointed.'

Her forehead and temples were pinched with neuralgia; the tendons
jerked like cords in her throat; and the colour in her haggard
cheeks looked as if it had been burned there by a flame.  But the
lovely contour, the perfect oval, of her face had resisted time and
disease.  A strange happiness, more a quality than an emotion, as
ethereal and as penetrating as light, rippled in her voice and
shone steadily in her eyes and smile.


IV


'Twas the three cups of coffee that put the heart into me and will
make me sleep sound, grandmother Fincastle thought; for she had
scant patience with the feeble folk who are at the mercy of nerves
and let anything in the nature of food or drink keep them awake.

Bending over with difficulty, she eased her foot, which had begun
to swell, from the square cloth boot with elastic sides and
stretched it out on the warm bricks, where the kettle steamed, the
firelight shifted, and a skeleton spider, pale as a ghost, was
spinning a single strand of cobweb over the pile of back-logs near
the chimney.  For an instant, while she raised her head, she felt
that the room receded and swam in a ruddy haze before it emerged
again in its true pattern.  The material form had dissolved into a
fluid, into a memory.  Then once more the actuality triumphed; the
immediate assumed its old power and significance.

She saw the big warm chamber glimmering with firelight.  Mary
Evelyn now slept here, but she herself had slept here long ago, as
a bride, a wife, and a mother.  Aye, she had much to be thankful
for, shelter and warmth, and all the creature comforts she had
missed in her youth . . .  There was that mouse again scampering in
the far corner.  She hoped Meggie had not forgotten to put down the
mousetrap.

She liked the soft, bright colours in the rag carpet, woven by her
own hands out of scraps the congregation had saved for her.  She
liked the home-made furniture of walnut or pine better than the
carved rosewood Mary Evelyn had brought from Queenborough.  She
liked the great bed, so substantial that it took two men to push
it, and the patchwork quilt which was brought out at night when the
fringed counterpane was removed.  Nobody nowadays had the patience
or the eyesight to make that Star of Bethlehem pattern.  Work like
that belonged to another time.  But it looked comfortable on the
foot of the bed, with the child's trundle-bed rolled out and
prepared for the night.

All grandmother's children had slept in that trundle-bed, the seven
she had lost, the two who were living, and she had grown fond of
it.  It was the only piece of furniture she had brought from Giles
County, where her father had lived when she was a child.  'I'm
going to make a sofa out of that old trundle-bed, Mr. Fincastle,'
she had murmured, blushing when Adam, her husband (though it would
not have been respectful to think of him by his Christian name),
had smiled at the sight of it.  But she had known when she spoke
that the trundle-bed would never be turned into a sofa.

Her youth had suffered from hardships; she had spent her childhood
in a log cabin, yet she had not been ashamed.  When she was five
years old her father was called to a mission on Wildcat Mountain,
and from that time she had not seen a railway train until she was
grown.  Mr. Fincastle had met her when he came to preach at the
mission, and he had felt from the first minute, he told her
afterwards, that this also was appointed.  That was the Sabbath she
was admitted to sealing ordinances.  But even before she had
reached the years of discretion, her faith had been strong.  When
she was no bigger than a slip of a girl she had felt that she was
ready to do or die, or even to be damned, if it would redound to
the greater glory of God.

Though she knew that bricks are no more than straws in the sight of
the Lord, she would always remember how wonderful the manse had
appeared to her, as a bride, when she had first seen it on a spring
morning.  Everything had seemed to her to be provided; the grove of
oaks to cast shade; the vegetable garden at the back of the house,
the well so close to the kitchen porch; the springhouse at the
bottom of the yard under the big willow; and the house inside, with
the solid furniture, the rows of books that had always been there,
and the shining pewter plates, so bright you could see your face in
them, on the sideboard.  She could imagine nothing more luxurious
than eating in a dining-room, with a cloth on the table, and having
hot water to wash in.  As a bride she used to say that she praised
the Lord whenever she took up that big kettle from the trivet in
front of the fire.  And she thanked Mr. Fincastle's father, too,
for the kitchen, nearly if not quite so large as the front chamber.
He had built that for his wife, Margaret, who had brought a family
of servants.

Margaret Graham was an extraordinary character, and she was still
beautiful as grandmother remembered her.  She had known wealth, for
she was the daughter of Squire Graham of Glenburnie, who had
inherited a fortune in land and died dispossessed.  When she was
married to the third John, she infused a romantic legend, as well
as an aristocratic strain, into the Fincastle stock.  There was a
cherished tradition that the Graham ancestor who had fled from
Scotland to Ireland in 1650 was a near kinsman of the great
Montrose.  'No, we were not always with the Covenanters,'
grandmother thought, shaking her head while she tucked the ball of
yarn between her thigh and the cushion.  Old John, the pioneer, had
said that he fought not against men, but against evil passions both
within and without the Kirk.  The present John had inherited his
grandmother's straight features and her eyes--bright blue, with a
crystal gaze that seemed to pierce the heart in its search for
truth.  When she first came as a bride, the ruling elders had
requested her to wear a veil in church, so that her beauty might
not distract men's thoughts from the eloquence of her husband.
After that, she had worn a green barège veil over her bonnet.  But
it was not Mr. Fincastle's father, John III, who had built the
brick house.  They had John II to thank for that.  When he was well
on in life, a relative in Scotland had left him a legacy.  Not a
fortune as people thought nowadays, but enough to build a brick
manse and to enlarge the church over the old house of worship.
With what was left, he had placed a sandstone slab at the head of
every Fincastle grave in the churchyard.  His father, John I, was
buried there.  A week before his death, when he was out of his
head, the Shawnees had brought him back, mourning as they would
have mourned for a great chief.

How in the world, grandmother still asked herself, had those early
settlers been able to enjoy living without such simple comforts as
feather beds and kettles of hot water?  In fear, too, whenever they
had taken time to stop and think, of the savages.  Yet they also
had loved life.  They had loved it the more, John would tell her,
because it was fugitive; they had loved it for the sake of the
surprise, the danger, the brittleness of the moment.  Her husband,
she knew, had felt this, though what he had said sounded so
different.  Life will yield up its hidden sweetness, she had heard
him preach from the pulpit, only when it is being sacrificed to
something more precious than life.

They had believed this in the old days.  Time and again, they had
risen from the ruins of happiness.  Yet they had gone on; they had
rebuilt the ruins; they had scattered life more abundantly over the
ashes.  There was a near neighbour of her grandfather who had held
his cabin twice when others fled to the stockade.  For the sake of
his crop, he had held his ground.  All within the space of ten
years, he had seen two wives and two families of children scalped
and killed by the savages.  He himself had once been left to die,
and a second time he had escaped from an Indian village and made
his way home through the wilderness.  For the rest of his life he
had worn a handkerchief tied over his head, and one Sunday morning,
while the congregation sang the Doxology, he had fallen down in a
fit.  In his later years he had married a third wife and had
brought up a new family, after the manner of Job, to inherit the
land.  Though he had seen men burned at the stake, he had never
lost his trust in Divine goodness.

And nearer still, there was her own grandmother, Martha Tod.  She
had liked the young chief too well, people had whispered.  He was a
noble figure; he had many virtues; she had wept when they came to
redeem her.  One story ran that her Indian husband had come to the
settlement in search of her, and that her two brothers had killed
him in the woods, from ambush, and had hidden his body.  This may
have been true, and again it may not have been.  The age was a wild
one.  Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practise
religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature.  Whatever
happened, Martha Tod's lips were sealed tight.  No one, not even
her mother, had ever won her confidence again, or heard her speak
of her life with the Shawnees.  But as long as she lived, after her
marriage to an elder in the church, she had suffered from spells of
listening, a sort of wildness, which would steal upon her in the
fall of the year, especially in the blue haze of weather they
called Indian summer.  Then she would leap up at the hoot of an owl
or the bark of a fox and disappear into the forest.  When she
returned from these flights, her husband would notice a strange
stillness in her eyes, as if she were listening to silence.  But
gradually, as her children grew up, ten of them in all, fine,
sturdy, professing Christians, her affliction became lighter.  To
the end of her days, even after her reason had tottered, she could
still card, spin, weave, dye, or knit as well as the best of them.
Grandmother had heard that when she was dying, her youth, with the
old listening look, had flashed back into her face, and she had
tried to turn toward the forest.  But that was too much to credit.
It couldn't have happened.  Not when her mind was addled, not when
she was well over a hundred.  Grandmother remembered her well, an
old, old woman with a face like a skull, mumbling over her pipe in
the chimney corner.

Was it true, grandmother wondered, looping the yarn round the
thought, was it true that wildness could be handed down in the
blood?  Could Martha Tod's spells have skipped her own children and
broken out again in John's heresy?  Yet Martha Tod had been as
innocent as a lamb.  Never, even in captivity, had she doubted that
only through the blood of Christ could she be redeemed.

Jerking up her head, which had nodded a moment, the old woman
glanced at her son on the other side of the lamp, and thought in
surprise, 'But he has a fine face!'  Whenever she looked at him, no
matter how many times in the day, she was startled afresh, as if
she had never seen him before.  How could a man who denied the
Virgin Birth wear a countenance that seemed, when he was plunged
within, to be cut out of light?  He had looked like that, she
recalled with a pang, when he had stood his trial for heresy and
schism (nothing, not even the loss of her husband and her seven
children, had caused her such anguish); but in later years, since
his hair had whitened (though he was only forty-four), the thinness
and clearness of his features had become more striking.  She had
ascribed it all, his loss of zeal, his backsliding, the resignation
from his church in Queenborough, the final trial before the
Presbytery that deposed him--all these misfortunes she had ascribed
to the influence of the British Museum, and to the sinister volumes
(never would she have glanced into one of them) that he had bought
at such sacrifices (he had gone without a greatcoat; he had even
gone without food) when he was a student.

Mary Evelyn, too, had encouraged him when she should have
admonished.  A cruel doctrine, she had called predestination, and
once, while the trial lasted, she had cried out that she believed
anything John believed, that she would rather be damned with John
than saved without him.  Yet grandmother had loved her better than
she loved Meggie, who was one of the elect, assured of salvation.
But Mary Evelyn had needed her more.  She had made the heartbreaking
appeal of the dying or the poverty-stricken.  Though she was happy,
her happiness, like her beauty, was too ardent to seem natural.  And
she had never had a family of her own.  Her parents had died before
she was old enough to remember them, and she had been left--an
orphan, and what was far worse in the Tidewater, a poor orphan.
The relatives who had brought her up had been elderly and unkind.
It is true that she had been, for a few years, a belle and a beauty,
but worldliness, as nobody knew better than grandmother, was without
staying power.

After Mary Evelyn's marriage to John her worldly friends had
forsaken her.  Then the last of her relatives had passed away,
and she had turned to grandmother, when her children died of
diphtheria, as she might have turned to the Rock of Ages had her
mind been less given to flightiness.  A cross she had been, 'twas
true, but a cross that pressed into the heart.  If only her love
for John had been a strength instead of a weakness.  And worse than
a weakness.  In some obscure way, almost an infirmity of the flesh.
For how could a man like John, with that queer absent-minded
attitude of a thinker who is more dreamer than thinker, satisfy any
woman?

His father had been different.  Blessed with a robust constitution,
he had loved, as he had lived, robustly.  They had had perfect
sympathy and great satisfaction in marriage.  When grandmother
looked back on it now, it seemed to her that she had enjoyed
everything, even childbirth.  There had been pangs, of course
(though never the long spasms of agony that had tortured Mary
Evelyn's frail body), but the pains were so soon forgotten in the
joy of bringing a child into the world.  Could her children be born
again, she would bear with gladness every pang, great or small,
that she had suffered.  But nothing could take her family away from
her, not even death.  They were still united, the dead and the
living.  And Mary Evelyn was one of them, as dear as her own.  Yet
she was wasting away.  Year by year, she was wasting away under
John's eyes, who had never so much as noticed the change in her.
He thought her perfect, he said, when what she needed was plenty of
milk and custards and delicate food.  That was the worst of being
poor, you couldn't give the right things in sickness.

But it was a mercy, with the mortgage falling due, that John had
been able to pay the premium on his insurance.  Small as it was,
they had had a struggle to meet the payments and to find something
they could turn into money.  There were only a few silver spoons
left, and these were so old and thin and brittle that they would
break when you washed them.  Three thousand dollars wouldn't go far
nowadays.  But if anything should happen to John, even that little
might tide Mary Evelyn over the first year or so.  Neither Mary
Evelyn nor Meggie would let her speak of the insurance.  For her
part, she had a practical mind; she had always looked ahead; she
had never expected life to be easy.  Not after John's trial, not
after he had told the Presbytery he rejected the God of Abraham but
accepted the God of Spinoza.

That was the beginning--or was it the end?--of his ruin.  The most
brilliant mind in the church, they had called him, and then he was
ruined, he was finished, he was forgotten.  For what place was
there for eloquence outside the pulpit?  What future was there in a
Christian country for a man who had denied his Redeemer?  In the
'eighties people were more strict than they were in this new
century, which was already slipping from its foundations.  A
scholar outside the church then was as blind as a bat in the
daylight.  To be sure, he had tried his hand at other work, but
that, too, had ended in failure.  He could not push his own way; he
could not even stand on his feet and sell dry goods.  All he could
do was to think, and nobody (here grandmother picked up a dropped
stitch) could earn a livelihood in America by thinking the wrong
thoughts.  Then, when they had come to their last crust (for a year
there had not been a scrap of meat in the house except bacon for
gravy), they had called in Dr. Updike to see Ada, who coughed as if
she had croup, and he had stumbled, by chance or benign curiosity,
into the bare storeroom.  They had the doctor (a better friend
never lived) to thank for the school in the parlour.  At first the
people in Ironside had protested, but at last they had remembered
her; they had reminded themselves of all they owed to their
Fincastle ministers, from John, the pioneer, down to Adam, her
husband.  A closed memory, unfolded as a fan in her thoughts.  She
saw the pale red loop of the road round the manse on a spring
morning, the narrow valley, deep as a river, and the Endless
Mountains thronging under the April blue of the sky.  More than
fifty years ago, but it seemed only yesterday!  From the changeless
past and the slow accretion of time, the day and the scene emerged
into the firelight . . . from the falling leaves . . . and the
sifting dust . . . and the cobwebs . . . and the mildew. . . .


Suddenly, without warning, descended upon her a sleep that was not
sleep as yet.  Her eyes saw; her ears heard; and in her stiff
fingers the needles did not slacken.  But she was immersed in
profound stillness; she rested upon an immovable rock.  And about
her she could feel the pulse of the manse beating with that secret
life which was as near to her as the life in her womb.  All the
generations which had been a part, and yet not a part, of that
secret life.  The solid roof overhead, the solid floor underfoot,
the fears of the night without, the flames and the shadows of
flames within, the murmurs that had no voices, the creepings that
had no shape, were all mingled now.  Weaving in and out of her body
and soul, knitting her into the past as she knitted life into
stockings, moved the familiar rhythms and pauses now--of the house;
and moved as a casual wave, as barely a minute's ebbing and flow,
in the timeless surge of predestination.

'Grandmother's nodding.  She's dropped off.  She's beginning to
snore,' Ada whispered triumphantly.  'Maybe . . . oh, maybe she
will forget about prayers.  Father,'--she turned to pluck his
sleeve--'Father, doesn't God ever get tired of just listening?'


V


No man who has to provide for a family, John Fincastle thought, has
a right to search after truth.  Perhaps not anywhere in the world.
Certainly not in America.  But were the Renaissance and the
nineteenth century in Europe the only ages when men believed that
they could discover truth as they discovered a gold mine?  When men
believed that the search alone was worthy of sacrifice?
Missionaries, Mary Evelyn declared, sacrificed their families all
the time, but his mother insisted there was a difference when
people were sacrificed to a truth that had been revealed.

Well, there might be.  He didn't know.  He couldn't pretend to
care.  That, he supposed, was what religious education had done for
him--only his mother thought it was the British Museum.  It had
condemned him to poverty and isolation while it denied him the
faith that makes poverty and isolation supportable.  Not that he
had been unhappy.  Working over his book was sufficient happiness
for one lifetime, if only he could have taken care of those who
depended upon him.

Deep within his consciousness, so deep that the wish had never
floated to the surface of thought, there was a buried regret for
the solitary ways of the heart.  In London, as a student, when he
had lived in Bloomsbury on next to nothing, he had felt this
freedom, he had been content to drift.  He was on fire then for
knowledge.  He had believed that, if only he knew enough, he might
defend the doctrine of his church, he might even justify God.
This, he saw now, bending over with his gaze on the fire, was the
first mistake of his youth.  Knowledge does not justify God.  All
the learning in the British Museum does not prove that man can
apprehend God; it proves only that men have invented gods.  A
multitude of gods, and all to be reconciled, one with another,
before they could be vindicated.  He had turned then to translating
Plotinus, and while he pondered the Enneads he had been happy.
Happy, yet a failure.  For he had been born with an otherworldliness
of the mind.  He had never felt at peace except when he had strained
toward something beyond life.

A year later, when he had returned from his studies abroad (he had
held a scholarship for six months in Germany; he had spent two
years in London), any place the church had to offer would have been
open to him.  But he had wanted a charge among the dispossessed of
the earth; he had preferred the independence of spirit that comes
from not owning things.  His world, he knew, was not, and could
never become, the world of facts; he was, and would always remain,
out of touch with what men call realities.

During a brief visit to Queenborough he had received a call from
the largest Presbyterian church in that city.  There had been no
question in his mind of acceptance.  Then the next day, a day in
June, while the letter was still unanswered ('Having good hopes
that your ministrations in the Gospel will be profitable . . .'),
he had met Mary Evelyn; and in an instant, or so it seemed to him,
his past and future had been divided by the clean thrust of a
blade.  Even now, after fourteen years, this was a secret spot in
his memory.  Was it strength?  Was it weakness?  Mary Evelyn had
never suspected that the meeting with her had swept away his
vocation.  Ada believed that he was the pastor of his church in
Queenborough when he had fallen in love with her mother.  But that
first glimpse of Mary Evelyn had brought ecstasy, and the touch of
ecstasy had released the desire for a home and children and close
human ties.  For a moment Mary Evelyn returned to him.  Not the
woman who sat within reach of his hand, frail and worn and used up
by living, but a girl who was tender and radiant, with eyes like
smothered flames under black lashes.

Well, he had loved her.  No woman, only his seeking mind, had ever
divided them.  He would have given all he was for her, but he could
not give what he was not; he could not make himself over; he could
not prevent that involuntary recoil now and then, as if his whole
existence were overgrown and smothered by the natures of women.
Even the wincing of his nerves while her voice ran on, strained,
bright, monotonous, inexpressibly sweet, was beyond his control.

It was true that the external world and all the part of his life
that people called 'real life'--his affections, his daily
activities, teaching the young, hoeing the garden, cutting logs,
picking up sticks (he must remember to tell Ada that the poet
Wordsworth picked up sticks for firewood)--all the outward aspects
of living seemed to him fragmentary, unreal, and fugitive.  He had
not willed this; he had struggled against the sense of exile that
divided him from the thought of his time, from his dearest, his
nearest.  Nevertheless, it was there.  His inner life alone, the
secret life of the soul, was vital and intimate and secure.

He could remember the year, the month, the day, the hour, the very
minute even, when the outline of his system had come to him.  In
the church in Queenborough he had been a success; Mary Evelyn was
happy and more beautiful than she had ever been; they had two
little sons, the eldest only three.  For a few weeks he had come
back to visit his mother, and he was planning to write his work on
God as Idea, a history of religious thought through the ages.  It
was a morning in April.  There was a changeable sky and new life on
the earth.  He had been reading philosophy (was it Schopenhauer?
was it Spinoza?), and when he closed the book he had turned and
looked over the valley to the companionable mountains.  In the very
act of turning in his chair he had seen that sudden light on
reality, that reconciliation between the will and the intellect.

For years the idea had lain buried.  Yet in those years all he was,
and thought, and felt had gathered to the bare outline and
clustered over it as barnacles cling to the sides of a sunken ship.
But when he began the Introduction to his history, the idea came
again to the surface and he found that it was not dead but alive.
In the end he had been driven into obscurity, into poverty, into
the strange kind of happiness that comes to the martyr and the
drunkard.  Why?  Why?  Who could answer?  He might have been false
to himself, and who would have suffered?  But he had craved truth
(yet who knows what is truth?) as another man might crave a drink
or a drug.  Was this endless seeking an inheritance from the past?
Was it a survival of the westward thrust of the pioneer?

He had a sudden vision of his grandmother, the one who had been
Margaret Graham, with her young blue eyes and nimbus of snow-white
hair.  Even in her old age she had not lost a certain legendary
glamour.  Women were not supposed to be students in those days, yet
he had never seen her kneading dough without an open book on the
table beside her.  With much difficulty, no doubt, she had gained a
fair knowledge of history and languages.  After her marriage she
had still kept up her studies, and when her husband had died at the
age of thirty-eight and left her with three sons, she had prepared
them for college.  They had made their mark, too, not one but had
done honour to her and her training.  How, he wondered, had she
been able to overcome all those obstacles?  Strong, of course, she
had been in mind and body, but what he remembered most vividly was
the impression she gave of invincible poise.  He had heard his
father say that she would have felt at home in any epoch, in any
circle.

He had never forgotten, though he couldn't have been more than ten,
that several of the elders in the church had surprised her one
September morning before breakfast when she was walking barefooted
in the wet grass on the lawn (somebody had told her that the
Indians considered dew a cure for swollen feet), and she had
received them without a word of excuse, and invited them, with her
grand air, into the house.  Yet she had cherished the queerest
jumble of superstitions.  Though she was scholarly for her sex, she
was not above calling in old Aunt Jerusalem (Aunt Abigail's mother,
and a step nearer the savage) when she wished a mole or a wart
conjured away.  Until they put her to bed for the last time, she
had warded off rheumatism by carrying an Irish potato in her
pocket.  But these beliefs were more absurd nowadays than they had
appeared in that credulous era.  Would the time ever come when all
superstitions, even those about God, would seem as ignorant as his
grandmother's faith in an Irish potato?

The muscles in his leg twitched, and he glanced at Mary Evelyn, who
smiled and said something in a whisper when she saw he was looking
at her.  His mother thought he had not noticed the change in Mary
Evelyn, but she was mistaken.  There were moments when he would
have believed anything, acted any part, if only he could have saved
her.


VI


'I've forgotten something,' Mary Evelyn said under her breath, 'but
I can't think what it is.'  If she didn't remind herself Saturday
night, she would be sure to neglect it on Monday.  There was the
rent in John's greatcoat; there was the turpentine liniment for
Aunt Abigail; there was Ada's best dress to be washed and prettiest
hair ribbon to be pressed for the festival--Oh, the new doll's
dress!  That was what she was trying to think of!  Sunday always
made a breach in her work; but perhaps she might steal into the
closet when they came back from church and look for the pink
gingham she had put away, though, to save her life, she couldn't
remember where she had put it.  It was dreadful the way she forgot
things.  Her memory was growing worse all the time.  Her bringing
up was to blame, said Mother Fincastle, who was upwards of seventy
and never forgot anything . . .  If that mouse scratched under the
wainscoting, she was sure she should scream, and then Mother
Fincastle would make Meggie or John set a trap.  She didn't mind
stepping on spiders, but she couldn't bear to kill things that
squeaked.

Flightiness was her infirmity, Mary Evelyn mused, folding her worn
hands in her lap, and trying to restrain the impulse to jump up and
sweep the hearth clear of the wood embers that had just broken and
scattered.  Little things filled her thoughts.  They rattled about
in her mind, like dried seeds in a pod.  Important facts would slip
away, but her whole inner world was cluttered up with the sweepings
of yesterday--mere straws in the wind.  It wasn't that she hadn't
struggled to be sober and steady.  Nobody knew how ashamed she felt
just now when Mother Fincastle spoke reverently of her husband,
John's father, who had been dead thirteen years.  Mary Evelyn had
the sincerest respect for his memory.  He was a man of God, an
earnest Christian, a great preacher, a true father to the poor and
the afflicted.  All his life he had laboured in the field at
Ironside, and he had built up his church here and founded the
mission on Thunder Mountain.  He was all this, Mary Evelyn knew.
Yet, whenever she heard his name, the first thing she thought about
him was that he chewed tobacco.  His godliness ought to have
obliterated that recollection.  But her mind wouldn't record in the
right way.  No matter how long she lived she would remember that
Father Fincastle chewed tobacco.  And she would think, 'How
dreadful to be the wife of a man who chewed tobacco!'

It was like this, too, in the present.  She was burdened by the
litter of trifles.  Her appetite was so fastidious that the sight
of a bleeding rabbit or a mouse in a trap would take it away.
Mother Fincastle said all that was mere silliness.  She had the
robust relish of the pioneer, and she couldn't understand how one
could be sickened and made to turn away from food when one was
hungry--or at least empty, for Mary Evelyn could never feel hungry
for corn bread and bacon.  Well, love was a great power when it
could make everything else seem so trivial to her that she could
wear rough clothes and eat coarse fare without a regret.

But there were other trials, too, so small that she was ashamed of
them.  Those black bristles in the mole in Mother Fincastle's
eyebrow!  For twelve years, ever since John had brought her to live
in the manse, she had worried over those bristles.  If only
somebody would do something about them!  Again and again, she had
opened her mouth to speak of them and had shut it quickly, deterred
by the austere dignity in the old woman's demeanour.  It was safe,
she knew, to venture just so far, but no farther, with Mother
Fincastle, who commanded respect and disapproved of familiarities.
Not even little Ada would have dared to speak or think of her as
'Granny'.  Still the bristles were preying on Mary Evelyn's mind,
which had become, she felt, more and more flighty.  It's such a
trivial thing, she told herself now, but I shall never bring myself
to the point of speaking about it.  For Mother Fincastle had been
more than a mother to her; she had been a fortress of strength.

The evening was very long.  John was too tired to read.  She had
never seen him more exhausted by a day's trip.  That mortgage was
wearing him out.  If only they had a little money.  Not much, just
enough to keep out of debt.  When she thought of the power of money
to ruin lives a dull resentment against life, against society,
against religion, awoke in her heart.  For there was no sorrow
greater than living day and night, in sickness and in health, in
the shadow of poverty, watching that shadow spread darker and
deeper over everything that one loved.  There was no sorrow
greater, yet there was something, she told herself, greater than
sorrow.

Turning her head on the back of the chair, she looked out into the
night, where the shutter flapped at the side window and the wind
had risen in gusts.  Outside, in the troubled darkness, she heard
the creaking of boughs, the rustle of dead leaves on the ground,
the small tongues of wind lapping the walls under the ivy.  Inside
(she touched Horace with the tip of her shoe, for he had growled in
his sleep) there was the glowing centre of life.  She had much to
be thankful for.  Nobody was ill; nobody was hungry; nobody she
loved was out in the cold.  Aunt Abigail had a good fire, and
Horace (she glanced down at his black and tan head) was warm on the
hearth.

But I must keep Ada happy, she thought the next minute.  I must
keep her as happy as I have been.  For it was true.  Looked at from
any angle, she had been happy.  Life had been eager, piercing in
flashes of ecstasy, tragic at times beyond belief, but never drab,
never tedious; never, not even at its worst, when John was standing
his trial, had it been ugly.


VII


It's blowing up colder, Meggie thought, as she picked up her hooked
needle and returned to the counterpane she was crocheting.  I'm
glad John mended that leak in the roof.  Half of her mind was still
in the next room, where she had turned down her own and her
mother's bed, started a fire to undress by, and hung two outing
nightgowns and two red flannel wrappers on a small clothes-horse in
front of the flames.  The woodhouse had been well filled in the
summer, and with the help of chips and sticks the back logs ought
to last until the winter was over.  While John was away she had had
the place tidied up and the paths swept with a brush broom by old
Beadnell Geddy, who would work for a cast-off flannel shirt or a
worn-out pair of shoes.  She must remember to tell John, who would
never notice the loss, that she had given the old man a pair of
woollen stockings because he suffered from chilblains.

Though she had little patience with John's religious doubts (hadn't
he gone out of his way to borrow trouble when he put unsound views
into his book?) she could not deny that he was unselfish in little
things and ready to help her with any work that she wanted done.
And she could never forget (nobody who saw it could ever forget)
the way he had nursed his wife when she had pneumonia six years
ago.  He had never left her bedside, even to change his clothes,
until the crisis was over, and then he had fallen asleep from
exhaustion with his hand on her pillow.  Mother had covered him
with a blanket and had left him there, with his knee on the floor,
until he awoke.

While she watched him Meggie had felt her heart soften.  She still
loved him; he was her brother and a Fincastle, and she prided
herself upon the strength of the family ties.  But she could not
forgive the headstrong will that had affronted his father's memory
(who should know more of truth than their father, who had been a
servant of God?) and broken his mother's heart.  'Would you have
him live a lie?' Mary Evelyn had asked passionately.  But why
should he set up his own belief for the truth?  Who was John that
he should know more of truth than his forefathers had known or the
Bible had revealed to them?

Bending over the counterpane, she reached down into the big splint
basket near the hearth and tossed a knot of resinous pine on the
fire.  She loved to watch the coloured flames shoot up quickly,
branch out from the stalk, and unfold into flowers.  Another pale
spider (how she hated spiders!) was lowering itself on a cobweb
from the top log on the woodpile.  That was the pile they kept
there in case of a snowstorm.  She must make Uncle Beadnell move
the logs on Monday and look for the spiders.  A mouse, too, had
been worrying mother in the night, and she must remember before she
went to bed to bait a trap with middling rind in case Ada had eaten
the last crumbs of cheese.

Mary Evelyn was as thin as a rail.  Her face was all eyes, and in
spite of her high colour, the skin looked waxen.  She was not
strong like the Fincastles.  When that pain in her back stabbed
suddenly, her hand would fly to her heart, and a look of terror
would flash into her eyes.  Yet she would work on until it killed
her.  Nothing could stop her.  Energy had fastened upon her like a
disease.  John ought to speak to Dr. Updike about her.  Perhaps he
would suggest a tonic of bitters or some cod liver oil.  Mr.
Greenlee, the apothecary, would always let them have medicine and
pay for it when they were able.

Years ago when Meggie was a young girl (she was only thirty-three
now, but she felt older), Dr. Updike had treated her for spring
fever.  His figure was less burly then and there were no pouches
under his eyes.  He couldn't be over forty now, but he had
travelled the roads at all hours in all seasons, and he looked
elderly for his years.  Whenever she thought of him, though it was
so long ago, a pale flush seemed to spread more within than
without.  Not that she had had any sentiment (for her life was too
full of useful activities and her heart was too full of her
family), but for a little while she had wondered if--well, if he
had cared more than he showed on the surface.  She had never
forgotten the time he kept his hand on the inside curve of her arm
(she was noted for her pretty arms), stroking it softly while he
sat by her bed and asked questions about her health.  That was all.
Yet she had felt startled and shy, with this pale glow breaking out
in her mind.  It was queer she should remember that after all these
years, after he had married Hannah Kelso and had a family of
children.

For herself, she had never thought of love-making or marriage.  It
wasn't that she had been plain or unattractive.  She was better-
looking than most, especially when she had been plump and fresh,
with a neat figure.  But she couldn't run after men the way some
girls did even in Ironside.  In the old days there had not been
women enough to go round, and all had been sought after.  There
were belles among simple people like themselves, as well as in the
more distinguished circles of the upper Valley.  Mother said it had
been different ever since the war, with most of the young men going
away to make a livelihood and marrying in strange places.  Well,
she hadn't worried about that.  If the Lord had appointed her to
marriage, He would have arranged it all in His own good time.  As
it was, she had put her hope in little things, and she had been
happy.  She was the only member of the family who was never low-
spirited, not even in the long winters, when sometimes they were
snowed in for a week.


VIII


The taste of sugar is like pinks, Ada thought.  It's like verbena
and sweet alyssum.  If only a taste wouldn't melt and fade as soon
as it had gone down!  And when you hadn't had sweetness for a long
time (Father had waited because he could get coffee and sugar
cheaper from a wholesale house over in Doncaster) it tasted
different and sharper.  She wished pleasant things lasted longer,
and other things, like evening prayers when you were sleepy,
wouldn't drag on for ever.  Father wasn't going to read to-night.
She wanted dreadfully to hear what happened next in Old Mortality,
but mother had whispered in the kitchen that she mustn't ask him to
read.  If she couldn't listen to that, she wished they would let
her shut her eyes tight till morning.

Mother had promised to get up early on Monday (Sunday always came
when you'd rather it wouldn't) and cut out the dress and bonnet for
the new doll before breakfast.  Nellie had never had a pink dress.
She had never even had a sunbonnet.  Maybe, after a long time, she
might get used to Flora and begin to love her.

Nights were always short, except Christmas Eve, which was longer
than anything.  She hoped it would be snowy this Christmas.  Aunt
Meggie said it was blowing up cold.  If there was a deep snow,
Ralph McBride was going to make a big snow man, the biggest they
had ever had, in their yard.  But if there wasn't any snow, he had
promised to take her for a climb to the top of Lost Turkey Hill.
She had never been more than half way up when she was picking
huckleberries, but this time they would start early, with some
bread and meat in their pockets, and climb to the very top.  Then
they could look down into the gap between Thunder Mountain and Old
Man Mountain.

Oh, she wished Christmas would hurry up!  Mrs. Tiller, who kept a
cake and candy store down in the village, had sent grandmother some
raisins and currants and citron for a fruit cake.  Aunt Meggie was
trying to save enough sugar and butter, pinch by pinch.  Nobody was
going to have any sugar until Christmas, except Ada, because mother
said children couldn't be expected to do without sweets.  Children
and old people, she had said, handing the sugar bowl to
grandmother.  But grandmother had replied that she wasn't old
enough yet to be childish.  'Wait until I'm a hundred, my dear.
Don't hurry me into my dotage.'

Last Christmas (it seemed miles away!) had been splendid.  Ralph
had given her the doll's bedstead, and she had had a good package
of fire-crackers for him.  They had gone out together, and he had
set off the fire-crackers, only not all at a time.  He had shown
her how to light one and let it go off a little and then stamp it
out, so it would last longer.  She had another package for him this
year.  His mother had to give him only useful presents, like shirts
and stockings, and things to keep him warm when he hadn't a
greatcoat.  Grandmother had knitted a thick jersey for him, like
the one she gave father.  He wore it over a flannel shirt, under
his thin coat, and he said the cold never really got to him.

Ralph was the brightest boy in school, though grandmother insisted
he was too headstrong.  Already he was saving money to go to
college, and he worked part of the day in Mr. Rowan's machine shop.
In summer he and his mother lived on the vegetables they raised in
their back yard.  Ralph was a fine gardener, too, but no matter how
hard he worked he could never put by enough, father said, to take
him to college.  A gifted boy, though, might find some other way,
and father was teaching him everything that he could.  Ralph was
going to be a lawyer when he grew up.  Though he was only twelve,
he knew already what he wanted to be, and he read everything he
could find about law and lawyers.  He would make up all kinds of
games with a trial in them, and a judge and a jury.  Ada would be
the prisoner on trial for her life.  She didn't know why, but that
was the part she could act best.  Janet would want to be the judge,
but he wouldn't let her.  He didn't like Janet.  She fibbed, he
said, and was a telltale.  Blue eyes and yellow curls didn't make
her any better to play with.  She trotted after them wherever they
went, and she was always begging him to make her a doll's bedstead.

There was that white spider again.  Did spiders have ghosts?  Did
they have skeletons?  Did they have hearts?  She must remember to
ask father when he woke up.  But Ralph might know better than
father about things like spiders.  There was a mouse, too, that
crept out when it thought they were all asleep.  She wondered if
Aunt Meggie had caught it in her trap.  Mother hated to hear them
squeak when they were caught.  But grandmother didn't mind any more
than Aunt Meggie.  She said the Lord had made mice to be caught in
traps.  'Why?' Ada had asked, but nobody had answered.  Only when
she had asked a second time, mother had replied sharply, 'Your
father must tell you.'  Then she had asked over again, 'Why,
Father?' and he had answered slowly, 'God alone knows why, my
child.'  Father and mother worried over such questions.  Why God
does this?  Why God does that?  What is the reason for everything?
But grandmother and Aunt Meggie knew straight off, without any
thinking.  Grandmother said she answered questions 'out of
conviction'.

The wind was blowing loud and rough.  She could hear it crashing
through the trees, as if it were bringing snow.  Lots of sticks
would be shaken down.  They would have to lie there till Monday,
because nobody ever did any work, except cooking and making fires,
on Sunday.  Picking up sticks didn't look like work, but even if
'twas only useful play, that also was profaning the Sabbath.  Wind
made mother feel jumpy, she said, and she didn't like the tap-tap-
tapping of the ivy on the window-pane.  'I hope Aunt Abigail has
plenty of cover,' she would say.  Or, 'Have the sheep sense enough
to go into that shelter?'  Or, 'Are you sure none of the chickens
were shut out, Meggie?'  It did seem dreadful that their sheep had
so little sense.  They were old sheep, and Job, the pet ram, was
almost as rheumatic as grandmother.  When Ada was little they had
had more.  One of the first things she could remember was going
into the kitchen one morning in the midst of a spring blizzard and
seeing a new lamb, wrapped in grandmother's red flannel underbody,
lying on an old feather bed in front of the stove, while Aunt
Meggie fed it from a rag dipped in a mixture of milk and water and
a little sugar.  That was the sort of recollection, she felt, that
stayed with you till you grew up.

She was glad she didn't have to live out in winter, like a bird or
a sheep or a wild animal.  She wondered if the small furry
creatures in the woods could snuggle down under the dead leaves at
night and keep the cold wind from nipping them.  The wind was the
worst.  It sounded then as if it had blown off a bough.  She hoped
the wind would spare their oldest oak, 'the pioneer', even if it
damaged the younger trees.  So many bird and squirrel families
would be made homeless if the storm stripped the pioneer.  When you
looked up in the branches you could see nests sprinkled like houses
in a village, and in spring and summer the tree hummed all the
time, mother said, as if 'twere a harp in a breeze.  Last year,
when Aunt Meggie raised three turkeys (though one of them was
mistaken for a wild turkey and shot by a hunter, who took it away
with him) they would never roost anywhere but on that low-hanging
bough near the gate . . .  Toby Waters must be frightened, out by
Murderer's Grave.  You'd think the hovel and the pigsty would be
swept down into the gully, with all the pigs squealing.
Grandmother said the church helped Mrs. Waters because, though she
was a bad woman, Toby was not to blame for being an idiot.

Well, she was glad, too, that she wasn't an idiot.  But why did God
make idiots?  It seemed worse than making mice to be caught in
traps.  When she had tried to find an answer to that, grandmother
had replied tartly, 'If you ask any more foolish questions, Ada, I
shall be tempted to box your ears'.  And father had said over
again, 'God alone knows why, my child'.  But, whatever God's reason
might be, it was a mercy that they lived almost in the village and
not, like the Waterses, in a pigsty on the rim of a gully.  They
couldn't be too thankful, mother kept saying, though she must know
that she had said it before, for a warm room and a good fire and
plenty to eat.  The words had a singing sound that Ada enjoyed, and
they reminded her that the taste of sweetness was still somewhere
far down inside her.  'Twas nice, too, to feel Horace's head, as
soft as velvet, resting on her foot and keeping it cosy.  If the
evening didn't stop soon, she was going to slip down on the rug and
let Horace be her pillow and sink away, away, while the flames
crooned and the kettle sang and the shadows danced and the spider
swung to and fro on his cobweb.

Suddenly father was saying, 'It's almost time for bed.  Shall I
read a page, Ada?'

'Oh, if you would, Father!'  She raised her head from the softness
of Horace and sprang to her feet.  'I want dreadfully to know if
they caught Morton.'

The leaves fluttered as John Fincastle opened the book.  Well,
every day had an end.  He glanced at his mother's face, furrowed
into an expression of grim goodness, at Meggie's cheerful features,
which were still comely, at the drooping head of his wife,
transfigured by the firelight into its old loveliness.  A sigh
passed his lips, but his voice when he began reading was strong and
thrilling.

'"Hist," he said, "I hear a distant noise."

'"It is the rushing of the brook over pebbles," said one.

'"It is the sough of the wind among the bracken," said another.

'"It is the galloping of horse," said Morton to himself, his sense
of hearing rendered acute by the dreadful situation in which he
stood.  "God grant they may come as my deliverers!"'

The pages rustled as they turned, and the book was closed.  'He's
safe, my dear, until Monday.  I'll let Horace out for a minute, and
then we'll lock up and have prayers.'  Every night Horace ran as
far as the gate before he went to sleep in the front hall on the
sofa with the sagging bottom.  The chamber door was left open, and
sometimes Ada would be awakened by the nose of the hound on her
cheek.  'He's had a bad dream,' she would think.  'I reckon dogs
have bad dreams just like other people.'

To-night, after she had said her prayers and slipped into her
trundle-bed and drawn the blanket up to her chin, she dropped to
sleep saying, 'It is the sough of the wind among the bracken'.
Those were glorious words to have in your head; they seemed to go
round by themselves.  At midnight, when she awoke suddenly, they
were still turning.  Outside, the wind was blowing harder than
ever.  Could the last leaves hold on until morning?  Underneath the
crashing and the whistling she could hear the murmur of the dying
flames in the fireplace, and then the sudden squeak of the mouse in
Aunt Meggie's trap.  She hoped Aunt Abigail knew when she said mice
didn't mind being caught.  Perhaps her Indian blood made her wise
in such matters.  Well, anyway, Flora wouldn't have heard about
that.  Rising softly, she picked up the new doll from beside
Nellie, who was used to sleeping alone, and brought it to bed with
her.  Grandmother thought it was only silliness to pretend that
things like trees and dolls had real feelings.  But they may have,
she thought; you never can tell.




PART II

THE SINGLE HEART


I


Yes, it was true, Ada thought, she couldn't remember the time when
they had not cared for each other.  Ralph had always been there, no
matter how far back she went, with his bright auburn head, his gay
nut-brown eyes, his sudden smile that had a power over her heart.
There was an Irish strain in his blood.  Mother said this gave him
his charm and his amused, friendly manner.

Midway between the garden and the front porch, she stopped in the
June sunshine and looked toward the rocky road, which plunged down
from the manse to the church and then swerved abruptly, as if it
shied away from the houses.  While she stood there she felt that
the little girl of ten years before was pausing close beside her in
the tall bright grass.  She thought of this other Ada, who had
never grown up, not as herself, but as a shadowy companion.  She
would be happy now, even though she was invisible, because the girl
of twenty, who was herself and yet not herself, would be married to
Ralph as soon as he had finished his law course.  One year at
college had used up whatever he had been able to put by, and even
then he had worked as a porter in an hotel at night and had sent
home every penny he made to provide for his mother.  After that, he
had thought he would be obliged to give up the study of law and
accept a position Mr. Rowan had offered him in his machine shop.
But father, who could do everything except earn a living, had made
the way easy.  Dr. Ogilvy, one of the professors at Washington and
Lee University, had engaged Ralph as his secretary for several
hours every afternoon; and father had arranged with the Dean of the
Faculty that all the classes of the law course might be taken in
one year.  'With Ralph's wide reading and fine memory, he will be
able to do the work,' father had said.  'The boy has a brilliant
mind, he has a natural bent for the law, and he has read and
remembered now more than most lawyers ever know and forget.  It is
not often,' he had concluded, 'that life is so straight and so
simple as this.'

In front of her swallows circled over the steep roof from which
shingles were peeling.  When she moved nearer the porch, she could
see the outline of mother's head at the window, while a shadow
darted as swiftly as a grey wing into her mind.  All the past year
mother had suffered from an obscure malady, an injury to the spine,
Dr. Updike suspected, though he wasn't sure.  Every day she sat
from morning till night in a wheel-chair sent to her by one of
grandmother's friends in the Ladies' Aid Society.  The strangest
part to Ada was that she still wore her cheerful look and talked
breathlessly, without stopping or waiting for a reply.  She looked
as pale now as a wax flower under the greenish light cast by the
ivy, with her lovely head, which was still brown and glossy,
turning as quickly as a bird's when anyone came into the room.
Presently the bulk of grandmother's figure moved toward the window.
The girl could see her massive features, carved into granite
fortitude, bending down over mother.  At eighty, grandmother was
still the strongest member of the family, except for her
rheumatism.  And the happiest, too, until Ralph came home from his
year at college, and surprised that shy, startled ecstasy in Ada's
face when she looked at him.

'Love, love, love,' she said over to herself, as if she were trying
a strange word on her lips.  Sudden stillness dropped into her
mind, and through this stillness there floated presently the absurd
recollection of the doll with china hair father had brought her
from Doncaster.  Why should she think of that now?  Some minds are
no better than ragbags, grandmother had remarked disapprovingly.
But there was Flora beside Nellie in the bedstead Ralph had carved,
just as she had them tucked away in that old tin trunk in the
attic.  For she had never had the doll with real hair, and Flora
still wore, even in bed, her pink sunbonnet.  Aunt Meggie had
promised her a doll.  Then something had happened.  She couldn't
think what it was.  Had the hens refused to lay?  Had they needed
the money for medicine?  Well, it did not matter now.  It seemed
silly that she should ever have wanted a doll so much.  Grandmother
thought it was because she was jealous of Janet.  But it wasn't.
No, she had never been jealous of Janet, not even when Janet tried
to make Ralph fall in love with her.

Was that because she felt safe?  Was it because she knew that Janet
had always wanted Ralph, but Ralph in his heart had always disliked
Janet?  The other boys in Ironside admired her.  It may have been
because Ralph had never liked her that she ran after him.  For it
was no secret; everybody but her parents had talked of her ways
with men.  'That was the trouble of a village,' father had said.
'All likes and dislikes are inbred until they become like the half-
wit families over in Panther's Gap.'  Grandmother had added
severely, 'Too much tittle-tattle, that is the worst of it'.  Then
mother had asked, 'But what can you do?  If you're different, you
have to be sacrificed, just as they used to sacrifice living things
on an altar.  Heaven knows you were sacrificed, John'.

Father had looked at her with his vague but hopeful smile.  'Don't
make a martyr of me, my dear.  You might tempt me to make one of
myself.  And a self-made martyr is a poor thing.'

'I can never understand,' grandmother had insisted, 'what has got
into the young folks nowadays.  It looks to me as if they were
clean daft, every one of them.  Well, well, I reckon I've outlived
my time.  Things were not like this when I was young.'

'Nor when I was young, and that wasn't so long ago,' Aunt Meggie
had agreed.  'If you'd told us in the 'eighties that boys and girls
would be so wild in 1911, we'd have laughed in your face.  Mrs.
Tiller was saying yesterday that some of the boys, sons of decent
parents, too, think it manly to go up to Lightning Ridge to buy
moonshine.  Mrs. Melrose had to break up her daughter's birthday
party, she said, because several boys were unsteady on their feet.
She thinks 'tis all this round dancing that has ruined their
morals.'

'But the waltz is the only dance worth dancing,' mother had
laughed.  'I adore it still, and I was so sorry for John when I
found he had never learned even to heel and toe in his childhood.'

'Mark my words,' grandmother had retorted, 'when customs like that
come in, moral responsibility is the first thing to go.  I may not
live to see it, but remember what I have said when you are
compelled to live in a world that has lost the sense of
responsibility.  I doubt if you'll find it any more to your taste
than the one you were brought up in.'

'There's a point in your argument, Mother,' father had replied,
after a pause.  'I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to
do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for
whatever he does.'

Grandmother and Ada had exchanged a mystified look.  It wasn't
always easy to decide how strong or weak was the tincture of irony
in father's remarks.

'I don't know what you mean, John,' the old woman had rejoined
tartly, 'but I know very well what your grandfather meant when he
used to say, "If you flosh the water, you will have scum without
fish".'

No, she wasn't jealous of Janet--well, not what you would call
really jealous.  But there had been a queer twisting pain far down
beneath a tight lid in her heart when Ralph had seemed to like
Janet for a few weeks last summer.  Janet might have all the pretty
clothes she wanted, even pink nightgowns, which grandmother and
Aunt Meggie agreed were unrefined, and silk stockings for the day
as well as the evening.  She might even have a dogcart with red
wheels and a high-stepping bay.  All these things did not matter.
But when it came to Ralph, Ada knew that she wouldn't give up
without a struggle, that she would fight for her own.  That was
what grandmother meant by the flaw in the single heart, she
supposed.  The single heart holds on to its own.  'I won't let her
have him,' she had resolved, 'no matter what happens.'  Then Janet
and Ralph had stopped speaking to each other after a quarrel (they
were always fussing about trifles), and immediately Janet appeared
to become infatuated with Hunt Patton, the son of a well-to-do
farmer in the Shenandoah Valley.  All the winter they had been
together from morning till midnight.  But early in March, Hunt gave
up his work in Judge Melrose's office and returned to the farm.
When he went away so hurriedly everybody was astonished that
nothing was said of Janet's engagement, that the very next week she
should begin flirting with Charlie Draper.  In April, Ralph went
into Mr. Rowan's big store and machine shop, which dealt in
everything you could need on a farm, from a garden rake to a
reaping machine or one of the new automobiles, and after that Janet
was obliged to be friendly with him, on the surface at least.
Fortunately, Ralph wouldn't be there long, only until he went to
Washington and Lee in the autumn.

She had been looking towards the house, and when she turned her
head she saw that Ralph had entered the gate and was coming across
the lawn, where the sheepmint in the grass gave out an aromatic
scent when it was crushed.  Whenever he came back, after even a
brief absence, a sensation of freshness and surprise rushed over
her, as if she had never seen him before--as if she had never seen
anyone else.  He was tall and thin and strong; he was warm and
sunburned and eager.

'You're early,' she said, smiling.  When she was happy words seemed
to stop coming.

'I'm on my way to work.  I had to see you a minute.'

They had turned away under the oaks, and she was in his arms while
the whole June landscape and the unearthly blue of the mountains
spun round them.

'I simply had to see you,' he repeated.

'I know.'  She loved the leanness and hardness of his body, as if
his warm young flesh had turned to bone and muscle.  Suddenly, she
felt that she wanted to stoop and kiss the dark freckles and the
reddish down on the back of his hand.  But all she could bring
herself to say was, 'I know.  But you mustn't be late.'

He laughed.  'Do you want me to go?'

She shook her head while a quivering sweetness ran over her.

'I know you don't,' he said presently.  'I can tell by your eyes
even when you don't speak.  They are dark grey in the shade, but in
the sunshine they are exactly the colour of huckleberries.  That's
why I like you in that blue dress.'

Her glance dropped quickly.  It wasn't that she was shy, she told
herself, only she couldn't let him break down some deep reserve he
had struggled against ever since he had known she loved him.  'It's
worn out,' she said, stroking his hand.  'I have two blue cotton
dresses, but both are worn out.  I wish,' she added, 'I had
something better than my pink gingham to wear to the dance on
Wednesday.'

'You'll look all right.  You'll look right in anything.'

'Janet has a white organdie.  Her mother ordered it from a
catalogue.'

'It doesn't matter.  You'll look better than Janet.'

'But Janet's lovely.  She has real blue eyes.'  Why had she said
that?  Was it to hurt herself?  Was it to make him praise her?

'I don't care about Janet's eyes.  I like yours better.'  Taking
her face in his hands, which were eager and strong, he began
kissing it very slowly all over, from the backward wave of dark
hair to the full white throat.  'There's something about you.  I
don't know what it is, and I don't care.  It's different, that's
all.  It's you, and if you've got faults, then I like faults.  I
like a blunt nose better than a sharp one.  I like a large mouth
better than a small one.  I like sunburn better than a peach-bloom
skin.  Sometimes I think I fell in love with you because of those
silly freckles on the top of your nose.'  His arm slipped to her
bosom, crushing her to him.  'Well, I ought to go.  I'll come as
early as I can to-night.'

He took a step away and turned back to kiss her again.  'It won't
be much more than a year,' he said.  'I'll be through by next
summer, and then I'll go into somebody's office, perhaps down in
Queenborough.  Would you like to live in Queenborough?'

Her eyes dwelt on him.  'Anywhere with you.  I don't care, except
for mother, and of course father.'

'Well, a year isn't long.'

She loved the husky quiver that ruffled his voice.

'No, a year isn't long.'

'But it's hell waiting.'

She laughed tenderly.  'If grandmother heard that, she wouldn't
want me to marry you.  She thinks all the young people to-day are
headed to ruin.'  Then she caught his arm.  'Did you ask Judge
Melrose to lend us his buggy for the dance?  How are we going out
to the Padgetts'?'

'I forgot to tell you.  Janet wants us to go with her in her
father's spring wagon.'

'I thought we were going alone.'

'I wish we were, but I didn't see how I could refuse.  While I'm
working for Mr. Rowan I have to be nice to Janet.  Do you know, he
is going to buy an automobile,' he added in an interested tone.

'Is he?' she answered indifferently.  'I'd like to see Janet in the
sort of motor veils and goggles they put in the papers.  Who else
is going with us to the dance?'

'Charlie Draper.  And she has asked Willie Andrews to take a girl
who is spending the night with her.'

'That's Bessie McMurtry.'

'It's all right, isn't it?  But why do you always get miffed when I
mention Janet?  The only quarrels we've ever had were about her.'

'I don't.'  Her face felt scorched--but it was true, though she
denied it.  Once she had left him at a picnic for a whole afternoon
because Janet had dared him to take a drink of moonshine whisky
with Willie Andrews and he hadn't had the courage to refuse.  No
man, he had said to her then, would 'refuse to take a dare from a
girl'.

'You don't?' he laughed teasingly.  'Well, you don't, darling.
It's all right, isn't it?'

He had started away, and when he looked round, she saw the shadow
of the leaves flickering over his eyes, which changed from nut-
brown to yellow as the sun touched them.  Then, while she
hesitated, the sudden smile broke on his lips, and she felt that
her heart was a wheel turning.

'Oh, yes, it's all right,' she answered in a voice that vibrated
with tenderness.  At the house she saw him stop for a minute to
speak to Horace, who awoke from a nap on the sunken millstone at
the foot of the steps and greeted him with the air of an elder
statesman.

I ought to go in, she told herself, but they would see that I am
all in a flutter.  There was plenty of work to do helping Aunt
Abigail.  Or, perhaps, grandmother would be waiting on the kitchen
porch beside the big splint basket.  Grandmother liked to lean on
the garden fence, or walk along the paths, if the dew was not on
the weeds, and watch her gather the early vegetables, while they
talked of the way the corn and tomatoes and black-eyed peas were
ripening.

In the effort to steady her mind she walked over to the sagging
gate which failed even to keep out the hens.  Inside the broken
palings, once straight and white, Aunt Meggie's sunflowers were
shooting up in tall rows which would bloom in July and August.
Beyond Aunt Abigail Geddy's cabin the narrow hayfield ran on until
it sank and was lost in the stony hill, where three sheep and two
lambs were nibbling the high weeds.  Job was gone, but a sprightly
young ram had inherited his place.  From where she stood she could
barely distinguish the huddled grey stones from the browsing sheep.

Though they had had the little flock only three seasons, the wool
had come in well for grandmother's knitting and to make warm, light
interlinings for several of the old quilts.  Grandmother and Aunt
Abigail Geddy were still as good as ever at washing wool, carding,
and spinning.  Aunt Abigail and Marcellus sheared the sheep, but
grandmother always watched because she said she couldn't trust
either African or Indian blood not to enjoy nipping.  Grandmother
looked after everything, and father said she could feed a whole
family on what Aunt Abigail threw away.  When she was a child they
never saw a store, she would say proudly.  Their coffee was made of
sweet potatoes, just as in wartime, and once or twice her father
had been obliged to write his sermons in pokeberry juice.  Yet she
had been as happy as she was after she learned to crave real
coffee.

I hope she has taught me how to live, Ada mused, as if she were
smoothing out some tumult within, some exultation and overflow of
the heart.  I hope she has taught me how to make the right kind of
wife.  There was no fear of poverty in her mind.  She was prepared
to meet the future on its own terms, and to take what it gave.  If
only she had Ralph, she could find happiness, and no one could be
easier to make happy than Ralph.

Grandmother called urgently, and Ada turned away from the garden.
Over the springhouse at the bottom of the yard she could see the
nearer valley laced with the crystal blue of streams, and beyond
the valley the throbbing azure light on the mountains.  God's
Mountain ranged far and free toward the west, beyond the heavenly
twins, as father called Rain and Cloud Mountains.  But directly in
front of her the dark brow of Thunder Mountain frowned through its
summer foliage, with the coloured hills flowing away from it fold
on fold.

I never knew before that happiness hurt, she thought.  Happiness
like this hurts.

Suddenly, from an old lilac tree by the side of the house, a bird's
song sprinkled the air with joy.  It was a catbird.  The pair (was
it the same pair?) came back every spring.


II


On the porch her grandmother was waiting.  'You must run down to
the store, Ada, for a box of mustard.  'Twas all used up last
night.'

'Is mother worse?'

'That stitch in her back is troubling her again.  She's had mighty
little sleep for the last two nights.'

'I'll go straight down.  It won't take me any time.'  At the sound
of her voice Horace peered inquiringly from the side of the house,
shook himself twice, and ambled after her when she hurried through
the gate into the road.

As she went on, picking her way among stones, Thunder Mountain
seemed to push back the brushy hills and move nearer.  She had seen
the mountain in all aspects and in all seasons, dark-browed,
frowning, remote, or ringed with flame while terrified deer and the
humble furred and feathered creatures of the forest fled, with the
eagles, the buzzards, and the hawks, from the furnace that had once
sheltered them.  But to-day she felt only the June softness of the
fields, sown with small powdery daisies which looked as if they had
been plucked from the stem and strewn over the long grass.  Wild
lupins were still running in a bluish fire down by Smiling Creek,
and clusters of chicory had just flowered along the roadside.  All
this light and softness and colour streamed within and became a
part of her mood.  But mother was in pain.  Resolutely, prompted by
some inherited instinct, she accepted the fact of pain as the
deeper reality.

When she reached the church she threw a glance over the field to
the hovel and the evil-smelling pigsty, where Mrs. Waters and Toby
scratched the hard soil on the edge of the ravine.  She had never
spoken to Mrs. Waters, and she tried not to look at her if they met
in the road.  Though she pitied the old woman (it seemed so
hopeless to be old and bad together), she was embarrassed when they
passed each other, as if a bodily disfigurement had been thrust
under her eyes.  Years ago, she had wondered how Mrs. Waters, who
was then robust and not ugly, with plump legs in tight black
stockings that bulged over her shoes, was able to live and even
gain flesh on a pigsty alone.  That earlier banishment, for Mrs.
Waters had been expelled from church in her youth, differed in some
curious particular from the present self-inflicted retreat.  In the
past she had at least kept her curves in those places where curves
were desirable, and she had never failed in summer to flaunt a few
gaudy blossoms, usually prince's feather or cockscomb, before the
door of her hovel.  One spring, it is true, she had come down with
pneumonia at planting-time.  Then the church had paid Uncle
Beadnell Geddy to hoe her garden and to look after the hogs which
Toby would neglect whenever he was given an opportunity.

For a week or more the woman had lingered near death.  It was only
natural, Ada realized now, that Ironside should have been divided
between relief over the removal of sin and reluctance to accept the
burden of Toby, who would remain an idiot boy if he lived to be
eighty.  Dr. Updike had attended Mrs. Waters as faithfully as if
she were one of the redeemed; grandmother had made mustard plasters
and sage tea, and had carried a soft pillow and a wool-lined quilt
to the cabin; the Ladies' Aid Society had taken up a collection and
had engaged Uncle Beadnell's wife, Aunt Pomona, to sit up at night.
But the minister and the elders, supported by the entire
congregation, including grandmother and Dr. Updike, had decided
that she could not be buried among professing Christians in the
churchyard, but must sleep beside the hanged, and no doubt damned,