Gradually the struggle weakened, and the old cold oppression closed down upon her, stonier, more inexorable than before. She felt drearily lonely and aloof as on the day when she had run away from the stripping of hog guts. Only this time she did not cry. She seemed to have grown too old and hardened for tears.
As her emotions sank and her mind began to work, she told herself coldly how silly she was to care, how stupid to be surprised, how unreasonable to be angry, how senseless every way she looked at it.
Yet she had to keep on looking at it, turning it over and over in her mind, viewing it from this angle and that angle. If it had been almost any other woman it wouldn't have seemed so bad, she told herself. But Hat! How had he allowed himself to sink so low? She felt herself drenched in a bitter flood of contempt for him—and for herself.
The sun had gone down long ago and it was growing dark when she moved at last from the place where she had been standing. But instead of going toward home, she went on down the hill to the old house and peered in at the gaping black doorway. Yes, it was there, looking just the same, the bed of branches and dry leaves that she and the preacher had made. It was still warm, she had no doubt! And suddenly the walls of the old house rang with a hard, sardonic laugh. Whatever sordid tragedies they had witnessed, and doubtless they were many, the rain-streaked walls had never echoed to an unkinder sound. With a shrug she turned away.
Nevertheless, when she started to open up the stretcher that night to make her bed, she found herself hesitating; and there was a softened moment when she almost fled to Jerry. The impulse passed without her giving way to it, and she continued to unfold the ragged quilts.
CHAPTER XXIV
The great after war pestilence called "flu" swept across Scott County that fall and winter, sparing neither the old men nor the young virgins. It knocked at many doors, and often where its knuckles had rapped the undertaker hung his bunch of crape. Sometimes the crape was a rusty black, often a rather soiled white. It took away Uncle Jonah Cobb and left Aunt Selina alone with the bees and rabbits. It took one of Joe Barnaby's children and Aunt Abigail's son, Noey, and Evalina, Aunt Maggie Slatten's second youngest girl. It took babies in arms and young men that the war had spared and women with child. It took Uncle Sam Whitmarsh away from his cheerful traffic in dogs and horses.
"It's allus this way," said Jabez Moorhouse. "War an' pestilence goes hand in hand. The bigger the war the bigger the pestilence. The Bible says them that's near at hand'll fall by the sword an' them that's afur off'll die o' the pestilence. We're a hell of a long ways off, but we're a-dyin' o' the pestilence jes the same."