Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

Doris turned with a dimpling smile, and lifted her wide-open, frank brown eyes to his darker ones. "You must not laugh at dear Miss Judy. I never allow anybody to do that. I can only wish my thoughts were always as good and sweet as hers."

"I haven't made any comparison. I've merely mentioned a difference," Lynn said, laughing teasingly, in the hope that the rare tinge of color might linger longer on her fair cheek.

And yet, in a way, he had been quite in earnest in what he had said. It was a fact that he had marked a great change in Doris, that he had come gradually to see that a simple, sound strength of mind, a sort of wholesome common sense, lay under her gentle purity as solid white rock lies under a limpid brook.

"Well, it is quite true, I suppose, that Miss Judy never thought, in all her life, of what I was thinking of just then, and what I have been thinking of a great deal lately," Doris said, slowly, shyly, as if approaching a difficult subject.

"And what is that? What were you thinking or dreaming of, when I awakened you just now," the young man asked.

"I wasn't dreaming at all. I was wide awake. I was wondering how—" with an effort, after a momentary hesitation, and in a tone so low that he barely heard, "how a girl might earn a living for several persons—for a whole family." And then, after a longer pause, a quick breath, and a sudden deepening of the rare red of her cheek, "So that her mother need not work so hard."

It was the first time that she had spoken to him of this secret wish, so long cherished. She had, indeed, seldom mentioned her mother to him in any manner whatever. The reserve was not in the least because she was ashamed of her—such a feeling was unknown to Doris. She respected her mother and loved her, knowing, as no one else could know, how good a mother she was, how utterly unselfish, how absolutely upright, before the perpetual necessity which drove her to earn the family's bread in the only way that she knew. With her whole heart Doris loved and honored her mother. But, alas! their tastes were so unlike, their thoughts were so different, their whole lives were so far apart. And neither love nor honor nor any other of all the tenderest, noblest feelings of the truest heart, can ever bring together those whom cruel nature has set forever apart. For it is one of the mysteries of the sorrow of living that the deep rivers of many earnest lives are thus set to run side by side, and yet forbidden ever to mingle from the beginning to the end; from the unknown fountain of life to the unsounded sea of death.

Lynn had noticed more than once that a shadow fell over Doris's gentle spirits whenever, on their strolls together, they caught a glimpse of Sidney. It was usually in the distance that they saw her, going up or down the big road, with her long, free, fearless step, her bonnet on the back of her head, and her knitting-needles flying as she walked. For, notwithstanding that Lynn had gone to her house almost daily now for weeks past, she had managed, by hook or by crook,—as she would have expressed it,—to hold to her original intention of keeping out of the way, of giving him a fair field and no favor, as she said to herself. Yet the young man had gathered, nevertheless, although he scarcely knew how, a tolerably correct impression of the compelling personality of Doris's mother. Little by little he had begun, consequently, to perceive the unusual and contending influences which had made this beautiful girl what she was; and the knowledge caused him to wonder what she would become, now that she was beginning to be herself, now that the strong forces of her own character were already in revolt.

He had also divined something of Doris's dislike of her mother's means of earning a living; but he was still far from knowing how strong the feeling was, or that it had grown with her growth, gradually and steadily, until it had taken a great sudden leap—thus coming as close to bitterness as her gentle nature could ever come—soon after she had met himself. Nor had he observed that day, as they climbed the hillside to the graveyard, that Doris had seen her mother far off and that a shadow had fallen at once over the brightness of her innocent talk, through which a soft gayety often shone as color gleams out of the whiteness of the pearl.

"Do you know any girls who work? That is what I was thinking about," she went on timidly, turning her eyes away and looking toward the hills enfolding the valley; the near green hills beyond which she had never been, the far empurpled hills rimming all that she knew of the world.