“That’s a pretty little thought,” remarked Abel meditatively, as he ground some tobacco up in his hand.
Dr. Stalling ignored him.
“She entreats, but I, Miss Stirling,”—Dr. Stalling remembered that he was an ambassador of Jehovah—“I command. As your pastor and spiritual guide, I command you to come home with me—this very day. Get your hat and coat and come now.”
Dr. Stalling shook his finger at Valancy. Before that pitiless finger she drooped and wilted visibly.
“She’s giving in,” thought Roaring Abel. “She’ll go with him. Beats all, the power these preacher fellows have over women.”
Valancy was on the point of obeying Dr. Stalling. She must go home with him—and give up. She would lapse back to Doss Stirling again and for her few remaining days or weeks be the cowed, futile creature she had always been. It was her fate—typified by that relentless, uplifted forefinger. She could no more escape from it than Roaring Abel from his predestination. She eyed it as the fascinated bird eyes the snake. Another moment—
“Fear is the original sin,” suddenly said a still, small voice away back—back—back of Valancy’s consciousness. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something.”
Valancy stood up. She was still in the clutches of fear, but her soul was her own again. She would not be false to that inner voice.
“Dr. Stalling,” she said slowly, “I do not at present owe any duty to my mother. She is quite well; she has all the assistance and companionship she requires; she does not need me at all. I am needed here. I am going to stay here.”
“There’s spunk for you,” said Roaring Abel admiringly.
Dr. Stalling dropped his forefinger. One could not keep on shaking a finger forever.
“Miss Stirling, is there nothing that can influence you? Do you remember your childhood days—”
“Perfectly. And hate them.”
“Do you realise what people will say? What they are saying?”
“I can imagine it,” said Valancy, with a shrug of her shoulders. She was suddenly free of fear again. “I haven’t listened to the gossip of Deerwood teaparties and sewing circles twenty years for nothing. But, Dr. Stalling, it doesn’t matter in the least to me what they say—not in the least.”
Dr. Stalling went away then. A girl who cared nothing for public opinion! Over whom sacred family ties had no restraining influence! Who hated her childhood memories!
Then Cousin Georgiana came—on her own initiative, for nobody would have thought it worth while to send her. She found Valancy alone, weeding the little vegetable garden she had planted, and she made all the platitudinous pleas she could think of. Valancy heard her patiently. Cousin Georgiana wasn’t such a bad old soul. Then she said:
“And now that you have got all that out of your system, Cousin Georgiana, can you tell me how to make creamed codfish so that it will not be as thick as porridge and as salt as the Dead Sea?”
“We’ll just have to wait,” said Uncle Benjamin. “After all, Cissy Gay can’t live long. Dr. Marsh tells me she may drop off any day.”
Mrs. Frederick wept. It would really have been so much easier to bear if Valancy had died. She could have worn mourning then.
XX
When Abel Gay paid Valancy her first month’s wages—which he did promptly, in bills reeking with the odour of tobacco and whiskey—Valancy went into Deerwood and spent every cent of it. She got a pretty green crêpe dress with a girdle of crimson beads, at a bargain sale, a pair of silk stockings, to match, and a little crinkled green hat with a crimson rose in it. She even bought a foolish little beribboned and belaced nightgown.
She passed the house on Elm Street twice—Valancy never even thought about it as “home”—but saw no one. No doubt her mother was sitting in the room this lovely June evening playing solitaire—and cheating. Valancy knew that Mrs. Frederick always cheated. She never lost a game. Most of the people Valancy met looked at her seriously and passed her with a cool nod. Nobody stopped to speak to her.
Valancy put on her green dress when she got home. Then she took it off again. She felt so miserably undressed in its low neck and short sleeves. And that low, crimson girdle around the hips seemed positively indecent. She hung it up in the closet, feeling flatly that she had wasted her money. She would never have the courage to wear that dress. John Foster’s arraignment of fear had no power to stiffen her against this. In this one thing habit and custom were still all-powerful. Yet she sighed as she went down to meet Barney Snaith in her old snuff-brown silk. That green thing had been very becoming—she had seen so much in her one ashamed glance. Above it her eyes had looked like odd brown jewels and the girdle had given her flat figure an entirely different appearance. She wished she could have left it on. But there were some things John Foster did not know.
Every Sunday evening Valancy went to the little Free Methodist church in a valley on the edge of “up back”—a spireless little grey building among the pines, with a few sunken graves and mossy gravestones in the small, paling-encircled, grass-grown square beside it. She liked the minister who preached there. He was so simple and sincere. An old man, who lived in Port Lawrence and came out by the lake in a little disappearing propeller boat to give a free service to the people of the small, stony farms back of the hills, who would otherwise never have heard any gospel message. She liked the simple service and the fervent singing. She liked to sit by the open window and look out into the pine woods. The congregation was always small. The Free Methodists were few
