"Oh, Doctor Greylock! Thar's no disputin', ma'am, that you owe him nothin' in the matter of Five Oaks."
"I haven't seen him for five years," she said with deliberate slowness. "I thought he was still living in that house by Whippernock River."
"So he was till this morning; that's what they told me. But it seems they've heard nothing of him since Aunt Mehaley Plumtree stopped doin' for him six months ago because he told her he didn't have the money to pay her wages. He'd put everything he had, which was mighty little, I reckon, in some wild-cat scheme of oil wells in Mexico, and they'd either burst or leaked, if they ever was thar in the beginnin', which I doubt. Everybody knows he never paid his taxes, but that thar little old place in the backwoods wasn't worth a cent, so nobody troubled about tryin' to collect 'em. Anyhow, he had to do for himself ever since Aunt Mehaley left him, an' he's been gittin' sicker an' sicker with consumption all the time. When Ike Pryde was over that way squirrel huntin' yesterday, he stopped in thar an' found Jason out of his head, without a bite to eat in the house. The whole place, henhouse and all, Ike said, was as bare as the pa'm of his hand. Wall, he ran home an' got his wife to come over, and she did the best she could till they could lay hands on the sheriff. Jason had just kept alive on whiskey and some persimmons he'd managed to pick up from the ground. He must have been that way for weeks."
The colour had ebbed from Dorinda's cheeks and she looked as if she had withered. There was no distress in her mind, only a cloud of horror through which she could not see clearly. She lifted her hand and drew it across her eyes, brushing away the mist that obscured them. There was nothing there. Nothing but the drooping shadows over the road, the shocked corn against the sunset, the blur of scarlet and gold and wine-colour in the woods. There was no horror in these things; yet while she looked at them they became alive and struck out at her like a serpent.
"I have no sympathy to waste on him," she said harshly, and then, "Won't James Ellgood take care of him?"
Mr. Kettledrum shook his head, vaguely apologetic. "Not James. He hates him like poison. Maybe thar's something in the notion that Jason drove his wife crazy. I ain't takin' sides. But like most soft-hearted men James is like a rock when he gets set against a thing. Thar wa'n't no place for Jason to go but the poorhouse. The old women thar can look after him when he needs it."
"Well, you can't blame James Ellgood," Dorinda replied. "As far as I can see nobody owes Jason Greylock anything but trouble."
She was determined not to make excuses for him simply because he was dying. Everybody died sooner or later, and the vein of posthumous sentiment was not, she told herself sharply now, her affliction. Nothing was altered in the past because Jason had drunk himself into the poorhouse or the grave. Nothing was altered, she repeated, and yet she could not see the past any longer because of the present. Neither love nor hate but the poorhouse was the reality.
"It is a hard thing to have to die in the poorhouse," she said.
"So 'tis, ma'am," assented Mr. Kettledrum, who had stinted himself all his life in the hope of attaining an honourable old age. "But he's light-headed most of the time and don't know it. Anyhow," he continued astutely, "it ain't so hard on him as it would be on a man who had lived more respectable. He wasted mo' on drink, I reckon, than it would cost to bury him decently."