He reached the Academy, and walked along under its wonderful white oaks to the Ballenger dormitories, where he knew Heller stayed. Perhaps Heller could get him a room near his own. It was rather a trick to get in the Ballenger dormitories and the fellows who succeeded were considered lucky. But perhaps Heller could manage it for him somehow—they always had been good friends.
He was directed along the corridors, hung with their many pictures, and decorated with plaster casts, to a corner room on the third story.
He knocked expectantly.
“Come!” commanded Heller’s voice.
Sam threw open the door.
“Dick!” he cried, “I’ve come on to school. What do you think of that?”
He dropped his suit case and hastened toward Richard with outstretched hand.
Dick took it silently. His eyes, that used to be so cordial in their glances, turned upon Sam with a scrutinizing look. They searched his drooping face sharply. Then something like the old expression returned. Sam was not slow.He saw that something was quite wrong—that Dick had been thinking evil of him in some way, and that now that he had met him face to face, he was finding it difficult to sustain the suspicion.
“What’s the matter, man?” Sam cried. “What are you looking at me like that for? Why don’t you speak?”
“Sit down,” answered Dick brusquely. “Something is the matter, Sam, but I’d rather be skinned than tell you what it is. All the same I’m not going to go around snubbing you and leaving you in the dark after all the good times we’ve had together.”
“I should think not, indeed,” cried Sam. “Skin away, old man. Let’s have the operation over with.”
Dick, it was evident, dared not give himself time to think. He blurted out what he had to say.
“My dad wrote me that you were thinking of coming down here to school.”
“Well?”
“Well, and he said the neighbors all were wondering where in the dickens your father got the money to send you.”
“I don’t know,” answered Sam angrily, “that it is any of their blamed business.”
“It mightn’t be under some circumstances,” Dick went on. “But—”
“Yes?”
“This is where the skinning process comes in.”
“Rip ahead.”
“But they think it mighty queer, you know, that your dad should come into money just at the time that Simeon Pace’s money disappeared.”
Sam was on his feet.
“Say!” he gasped, “I don’t understand.”
“They say,” went on Dick, gulping with distress, yet determined to finish the whole story then and there, “that Simeon Pace carried his money in his hollow tin arm, and that your father took that arm from Simeon Pace’s body, and helped himself to the money. Now, there you are, and—dang it, Sam,—you’ll have to try to forgive me for telling you.”
Sam sank into his seat again and sat staring. The little clock on the mantel shelf ticked off the seconds briskly—ticked on and on, and still Sam sat and stared, and Dick waited, hardly daring to breathe. He could see that Sam wasgoing over the whole situation—was balancing this against that, thinking over the things he had noticed, “sizing up” the situation with his good clear brain.
Suddenly he got up and seized his suit case.
“Where you going?” shouted Dick.
“Home,” said Sam quietly. “I’m going home.”
Dick ran forward and, grasping Sam’s hand, wrung it with all his strength.
“Oh, Sam,” he cried. “How I wish it could have been otherwise! But I had to tell you. I couldn’t let a thing like that lie between us.”
“No,” said Sam wearily. “It’s got to be cleared up. Living a lie! I remember a sermon—Annie Laurie and I heard it—living a lie! No, I couldn’t. Good-bye, Dick. It—it wasn’t for me, was it?” He looked about the charming room, and through the window at the great campus. “Good-bye. And—thank you. You did right. It was the only thing to do, since we were such old—”
“Friends!” cried Dick with a half-sob. “Such old friends, Sam. Yes, go home and clear it up. And come back, old man—whatever you do, come back!”
Sam saw nothing now of the inviting homes and their lovely gardens as he rode back to the station. The world seemed black shot through with little darts of scarlet. They kept teasing him—these darting flecks of red, sharp-pointed and angry. At the station he found that it was an hour and a half before train time, so he sat down stolidly to wait. He had missed his luncheon, and it was now near dinner time, but it did not occur to him to get anything to eat.
The time, too, raced by, keeping pace with those swift-speeding thoughts of his, on which he could not have drawn the reins had he tried. And presently he was on the train again, going homeward. He soon would see his father, who would not, Sam had to confess with biting shame, look him in the eye nor answer any question frankly. Moreover, it would be his fate to add to his mother’s misery; he would see Hannah turning away from him even more thanshe had. And all the town would be looking at him with the eyes of suspicion. He would read: “Son of a thief! Son of a thief!” in their averted glances.
Of course his father might not be guilty. And yet, somehow, shamefully, heart-breakingly, it was borne in upon him that he was. And why should he, Sam, who had done no harm to anyone, go back to face it? Why should Annie Laurie and her friends see his shame? He could disappear now—slip off the train at the next station—and walk and walk till he reached some place where nobody knew him, and then he could go to work and care for himself, and win an honorable name. That was what America was for, he had heard Mr. Carson say, to give a chance to the individual. A man had a right to prove himself, and to be judged by himself, apart from and regardless of his family.
Yet, to run away from a thing like that, to let the old neighbors think him a poor wretch, to lose the regard of—of all those he cared about, was out of the question. And moreover, he couldn’t let his father go on keeping back the fortune that belonged to others. He’d have to go back and make him right himself.
His thoughts came clashing together as a returning wave meets and breaks against an advancing one upon the seashore. And the tumult and raging was too much for him. He found himself incapable of going on just then. The train stopped for a moment at some woodland siding—the track was but a single one and such stops were occasionally necessary—and almost without thinking, Sam leaped from the platform and slipped away into the twilight.
He walked along, hardly knowing where he was going. His suit case was not much of a handicap, for there was little enough in it. He could not have told, if any one had asked him, why he kept on pounding along the road, nor why, when he came to a heavily wooded hill, he should have gone in through an opening in the trees and begun to climb its gentle slope. He only knew that he was grateful to have the trees closing around him like that, hiding him from the sight of men.
He went on, stumbling over roots, half-starting at deep shadows, and reached the summit. Here the trees had been cut away, and though the songs of those beneath him surged up to his ears, he presently found himself standingbeneath the clear sky, perfectly sheltered from view. There was a scythe-like young moon, well toward the zenith, and a few pale stars. The weather had softened and warmed and spring was sending her sweet messages abroad. He stood for a moment looking upward; then he cast himself on the ground, with his face to the earth, and in the solitude his sharp suffering gave vent to itself in sobs.
Nor was it alone for the shame and sorrow of the present that he wept. It seemed as if all the tears he had held back during his lonely and baffled boyhood had their way now and streamed from his eyes. He cried blindly, passionately. He emptied his soul of grief. And then he sat up weakly and looked around him. The whippoorwills were calling to each other. Distant hounds were barking. The delicate little moon was running her fragile skiff over the sky-sea toward its western port. It was night, and the world was asleep. What was it Annie Laurie sang?
“All are sleeping, weary heart.Thou, thou only sleepless art.”
“All are sleeping, weary heart.Thou, thou only sleepless art.”
He hoped she was sleeping—that poor Annie Laurie, who was having so much trouble, andnone of it in any way her fault. And had she, too, been suspecting him? Had she held this terrible idea of his father and kept it to herself? Had she come to his house that day she had been so kind and good, to see what they were like—the Disbrows? He seemed to be on fire from head to foot with shame. Back and forth, like wild beasts pacing, raged his thoughts. He had no idea of the passage of time. Only the stars kept moving on, beautifully, in their wonderful order, and the wind, growing chillier now, blew upon him, and still the whippoorwills called. By and by the color of the world began to change. Something strange happened to the night—it grew pale, thin, transparent. The birds began stirring about, making soft noises. The cattle lowed in the near-by fields. Then a kind of milky lightness, delicate as one of Carin’s scarfs, drifted up into the sky. Presently it turned a soft pink; then rosy red; then it was edged with orange and embroidered with saffron. It was sunup, and Sam Disbrow faced the most important day of his life.
He had to make up his mind whether he was a coward or a brave man—whether he was going to run away or stay and fight. And he didn’tknow. As he got dizzily to his feet, he hadn’t an idea which he was. But the colors in the sky seemed to be cheering him on like trumpets. Something wild, strange and splendid swept into his spirit—something that made him feel as if he were about to set out on a march with brave men—men who could die for an idea. It was as if he had swung into the ranks, and his leader had shouted “Forward, march!”
Sam went down the hill, and struck a road on the far side of it. He followed it to a farmhouse and asked if he might have some breakfast. They gave him good bacon and corn bread, butter and milk. He ate like one famished, and then, having learned the schedule of the trains, and that he had barely time to catch the next one bound toward Lee, he ran as hard as he could to the distant station. The train drew in while he was yet a block away, but he sent out a shout that startled the engineer in his cab. Good-naturedly, they held the train for him. He swung on the rear platform. And, though he could not forget for a moment all that he was going back to, still he was indefinably happy.
“Forward, march,” his invisible leader had commanded. Sam did not stop to find a namefor this leader—to call him God. He obeyed, and having placed himself under marching orders, he fell asleep, and when the conductor called him at Lee, arose refreshed, and went out to fight his battle.
There were not many persons on the street. A mid-forenoon quietude rested over the little town. A few neighbors Sam did meet, but they had no chance to turn the cold shoulder to him this morning for he hardly saw them. He was bent for home, and he strode forward with no thought of anything but meeting his father face to face and hurling at him the question:
“Did you take Simeon Pace’s money?”
He forgot that he was a son, and must pay a son’s deference, or that Hector Disbrow, suspected of being a thief, was his father. He felt as if his soul must put that inquiry to the soul of the man. And on his answer depended honor, happiness, everything.
As he drew near the house, he saw that there was something unusual about it. With a sick feeling, he realized that it looked even more vacant and dejected than ordinarily. He tried the front door; found it locked; sped to the rear; was unable to enter; and then, rushing to thestable, realized the whole truth. His family had gone. They had run away in the night. The whole thing was true. His father was a thief—and now he was making of himself a fugitive.
But the feeling of having come back to fight a battle as a brave man would fight it, did not desert him. The black despair of the night before had been routed by all the better angels of his nature. He was in the thick of the battle now, beyond question. He turned his back on the house and went toward the town.
On his way, he met Hi Kitchell, who had been excused from school because of a toothache, and who was running along, his hand to his face, quite willing to talk about his misery to anyone. Sam called him.
“Hello, Hi. Toothache?”
“You bet!”
“What you going home for? Why don’t you go to a dentist?”
“Naw. I’m going home.”
“No use in that. Turn around the other way. Come on down to the dentist’s.”
Hi wriggled. “I’m afraid.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Will yeh?”
“You bet I will. And Hi, I’ve got a trouble that’s much worse than toothache.”
“Have you, Sam—for sure?”
“For sure I have, Hi. Now if you had a terrible trouble what would you do? I’ve told you where to go to get a toothache cured, but where would you go if—if everything you cared for seemed tumbling to pieces?”
Hi came up close to Sam. He had forgotten about his toothache, and he looked at Sam with his ferret eyes, in which the tears had now gathered.
“Sam,” he said under his breath, “I know about your trouble. I’ve heard of it. And—and you know your people have gone away. They’ve gone over the mountain, I reckon. Why, Sam, if I was in trouble like that I’d go straight to Mr. Summers.”
“But he’s the Methodist preacher, you know, and my folks are Baptists.”
“What’s the difference?” cried Hi defiantly. “I don’t see no difference. Anyway, if Mr. Summers was a Populist I’d go to him just the same.”
Sam was surprised to hear himself laughing.
“I will,” he declared, and he and Hi tramped on toward town. At the dentist’s office Sam started to turn in with Hi, but Hi stopped him.
“You don’t need to come,” he said. “I reckon I can stand a little tooth-tinkering. You get on to Mr. Summers. And—and, Sam—”
“Yes?”
“If you don’t want to stay up there to the house alone, you come down to our place. My ma, she’d love to have you. Sam—”
“Yes.”
“We know what trouble is, ma and me, see? Don’t nobody around these parts know better than we do. Mr. Carson, he set us on our feet, and now we can hold up our heads and look people in the face. My, but it feels good! But we know what trouble is—all kinds, pretty near. You come to us.”
Sam held out a tense hand.
“Put it there, Hi.”
Hi “put it there” and turned valorously up the dentist’s terrible stairs.
As for Sam, he kept vigorously on his way. He thought of those automobiles he had seen the day before, and he felt as if he were all cranked up, with a good spark on, and was ready for along hard run. So he turned up Burchard Avenue, and in at the gate of the little Methodist parsonage.
The first person he saw was Mrs. Summers, who had just got baby Jonathan asleep and was setting him out of doors in his carriage, to grow. She held up a small brown finger to warn Sam that conversation was not to be permitted in the vicinity of the sleeping prince, and led the way into the living room. Then she went in search of her husband, who, it appeared, was shut up in the cell-like room he called his study. He came striding out of his retreat and grasped Sam by the hand.
“Thought you were off to Rutherford, son.”
“So I was, sir, but—I came back.”
“So I see. Why?”
“I—I heard what they were saying about my father, sir. Dick Heller told me.”
“Well, well, he did, eh? It was better on the whole, I reckon. I had two minds to tell you myself, and then I just lacked the ginger. But now you know what you’re up against, don’t you? And your folks left last night, too. Some of the neighbors wanted to have a posse set out after them and bring them back, but Mr.Carson said Annie Laurie Pace was dead set against it. So he forbade it. You don’t mind my speaking right out? It’s best that way, isn’t it?”
“Best that way,” murmured Sam with dry lips.
“But you’ve come back, son, to face the music. Well, what can I do to help you?”
“Mr. Summers, do you think my father guilty? Do you think he took the money?”
“I’ve no more information on the subject than you,” said Mr. Summers. “What do you think—as man to man?”
“But you’ve come back, son, to face the music.”
They faced each other silently. Each knew that the other gave verdict and that it was “guilty.”
“And yet,” said Mr. Summers, “circumstantial evidence is a shaky thing. A very shaky, tricky thing.”
“Yes,” said Sam. But there was no hope in his tone.
“What do you mean to do, Sam?”
“I’ve come to ask you, sir. I’ve a hundred dollars that father gave me. I’d like to give that to Annie Laurie if it would help her out any. But what is a hundred dollars? Why, Mr.Pace had thousands and thousands! And I hear they’re having a terrible hard time altogether—that they can’t get fit helpers, and that Miss Adnah isn’t turning out so good a boss after all, and that the accounts are getting all mixed up. It looks as if the whole thing was going to pieces.”
“It needn’t,” said Mr. Summers rather sharply.
Sam looked up questioningly.
“If they had one good strong, capable helper on the place, say a man who was willing to work for nothing for the time being, a man with sense enough to find out the best ways of feeding cattle and caring for them, and peddling milk, and who wouldn’t mind sitting up after a hard day’s work to straighten out books, and who’d try to build up instead of putting in his best licks tearing down—the way those fool hands they have now seem to be doing—why, there’d be some hope. See?”
Sam got to his feet.
“Do you mean, Mr. Summers, that I—”
Mr. Summers took his pipe from the mantel shelf, deliberately knocked the tobacco out ofit, refilled it from a generous tobacco can and lit a match. While the match burned he turned toward Sam.
“You can just stake your life I mean it, son,” said he.
“But will Annie Laurie—will the aunts let me?”
The reverend Mr. Summers nodded his long, thin head.
“I’ll tell ’em to,” he said. “Mr. Carson will advise ’em too. You’ll be making reparation, Samuel. You’ll be squaring yourself and your family. You’ll get back what belongs to you, the respect of the community, the regard of your—particular friends. And you’ll live here, in my house, understand?”
“Oh, Mr. Summers, I couldn’t do that.”
“I say you’ll live here,” roared the tall preacher. “Do you think I’d let you go back to that forsaken house and sit there with all the sneaking ghosts of memory putting their miserable noses in the doors and windows o’ nights, making goblin faces at you? Not much. Barbara! Barbara, I say!”
Mrs. Barbara came running on her little feet.
“Absalom,” she whispered excitedly, “what’sthe use in waking the baby? Don’t you know any better than that?”
The giant collapsed.
“Willow waly,” he gasped. “Can’t I ever remember about that young-un? But, Barbara, I suppose you have been listening to our conversation?”
“I have been sitting in the next room,” replied little Mrs. Summers with dignity. “It would have been impossible for me to avoid hearing parts of it.”
“Well, then, what do you think? Is this boy going back to that shut-up house of his, or is he going to stay here at the parsonage? That’s what I want to know.”
Mrs. Barbara smiled her sidelong smile.
“What’s the use of asking such a silly question as that?” she inquired. “Of course he’s going to stay here. I was just thinking I’d run up that rosebud muslin into curtains for his room.”
The Reverend Summers turned a radiant smile on Sam.
“That’s the woman for you!” he cried. “You think you can get ahead of her, but you can’t! You’d have to be smarter than a possum to get ahead of her. Rosebud curtains! Now, whatdo you think of that, Sam? Could you have got as far as rosebud curtains in that length of time?”
He caught his little wife up in his great arms and tossed her toward the ceiling as if she had been a baby. Then he kissed her so loud that the smack must have been heard in the street, and dropped her in his sleepy hollow chair.
“Where’s my hat?” he demanded. “My nice, six-year-old Panama—the Panama of many journeys, of my courtship, of my marriage, and probably of my old age? Why, Sam, you ought to count the rings on that hat. It’s more’n a hundred, I reckon—if you judge it like you do oaks. Come, sneak out the back way so as not to shake the royal bed of the slumbering potentate. Where are we going? To talk with Miss Adnah Pace. Yes, I know she’s rather a difficult one to manage. But I can manage her. That’s my specialty, managing women.”
He stopped at the window to throw a kiss to his smiling wife.
“Come on, son,” he commanded; “forward, march!”
Had he heard the words ringing in Sam’s brain?
Perhaps so. Anyway he spoke them. “Forward, march!” he said. He, too, knew Sam was going into battle.
“My dear Annie Laurie,” said Mrs. Carson one Friday afternoon not long after this, “will you do Carin and myself the favor of spending the week end with us? I will send for you to-morrow morning, if you will do so, and we’ll have a chance to talk. Whenever we try to talk nowadays, Miss Helena Parkhurst cries out ‘Physiography!’ or ‘Grammar!’ or ‘American History!’ Anyone would think she didn’t want us to become acquainted.”
She shook her finger smilingly at Miss Parkhurst, who was putting the schoolroom in order at the close of five hard days of teaching, and was well pleased at the thought that she could retire to the peace of her own little sitting room and follow her own inclination for a day or two. There were stitches to take and letters to write and thoughts to think, and the young woman who gave so unstintingly of her time and knowledge to three restless girls, sighed with relief atthe thought of being her own mistress for a while.
“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Carson,” Annie Laurie had answered. “I should love to come. You can’t think what a pleasure it would be. But ought I to leave the aunts? They just sit and watch for me to come home.”
“The aunts shall be bidden to Sunday dinner,” said Mrs. Carson. “We’ll all be gay together.”
She did not say it, but she knew that the flutter of getting ready for such an event as going out to The Shoals to dinner would keep Miss Adnah and Miss Zillah well occupied over Saturday.
“Please come, Annie Laurie,” begged Carin. “I’m getting quite dull, really.”
Annie Laurie turned to laugh at her friend. Quite dull! It seemed impossible that anyone could be dull in the Carson house. Something was nearly always going on. Mrs. Carson would be giving a luncheon to the ladies interested in the Mountain Industries, or Mr. Carson would have gentlemen to dinner—gentlemen who came down from New York or Chicago—or there would be a moonlight picnic, or a riding party, or a musicale, or Mr. and Mrs. Carson would be packing up for one of their sudden journeys.It was the first time that Annie Laurie had been asked to stay overnight at the mansion. She had been Carin’s schoolmate, but hardly more than that, as she understood very well. She had a clear mind, capable of seeing things as they were, and it seemed to her to be a sort of victory that she should, at last, be asked to join them in so intimate and social a manner. It showed her that perhaps she was not so “stiff” after all.
Her thoughts flew to her clothes, as the thoughts of any girl will when bidden for a visit. The wardrobe that used to be so well kept up, in its narrow limits, had grown shabby now. She had been wearing black for her father, and her mourning had consisted of frocks which originally had been colored and which had been dyed. They had not taken the dye very well, and they felt either rough or flimsy to the touch. Annie Laurie would have liked to put charming clothes on that big strong body of hers. Her ideal of beautiful dressing was before her daily, in Mrs. Carson, whose dresses, lovely in color and texture, never seemed to have too much trimming on them, or to do anything but drape and decorate her slender graceful figure. But Annie Laurie had more sense than vanity, andshe said to herself that she would not miss such a pleasure and privilege as a two-day visit at The Shoals because of shabby garments.
She sat, however, late that night, pressing her best black frock, and sewing fresh ruchings into it, curling her plume with her sharp little penknife, polishing her boots, putting new bows on her slippers, and running fresh ribbons in her underclothes. She packed her satchel daintily, wrapping up her garments in fresh tissue paper and dropping in a little bag of lavender. Carin should see that she had the tastes of a lady, at least.
There was much to do the next morning, too, for the Pace house was a systematic one, and the Saturday routine must in no way be neglected. But by half-after-ten, Annie Laurie, fresh, and glowing with anticipation, stood with her hat and jacket on waiting for Carin; and not more than a minute behind time, Carin drove up to the door, all in charming spring green, and carrying a bunch of pink tulips in her hands for the aunts.
“We’re to take a little drive the first thing, Annie Laurie,” announced Carin. “The valley is delightful. Everything is bursting into bloomat once. Mother said we must go and look and look and smell and smell till we have soaked in the spring.”
What care-free, happy people the Carsons were, Annie Laurie thought. One had only to be with them a very short time to be convinced that the world was an immensely pleasant place.
So on they went up the sweet valley, over which the mountains hung with a friendly and benevolent air. The Judas trees were in bloom and the orchards budding; on every branch the fresh leaves were starting out, and the crimson maple had flung forth its beautiful foliage. Annie Laurie felt her heart leaping in her, and the black care that had been hanging over her of late lifted like mist before the sun. Looking up, she could see where Azalea’s house was perched fairly upon the edge of the mountain ledge. There it hung, like an eagle’s great nest, daringly near the long slope of old Mount Tennyson.
“Isn’t she a dear—that Azalea girl?” asked Carin enthusiastically. “Never was there such a friend! Why, just having her believe in me the way she does, makes me long to do things. For example, I had known since I was a very,very small girl that I could draw and paint a little, and I was forever asking for a studio. But when mama had given me one, I was so lazy and dreamy that I hardly did anything in it. Then Azalea got after me. She said I was going to be a great painter. She found trees and hills for me to paint. She sat for me herself, patiently, hour after hour, while I made horrible daubs of her. But she kept saying I could do better if I tried, and do you know, by and by I actually did do better. Then papa decided I had a bit of talent, and he arranged with Mr. Bascomb to come up from Rutherford once a week to give me instruction. And by and by when I’m old enough I’m to go back to Chicago to the Art Institute, maybe; or to New York; and afterward if I show I’m worth it, to Paris or Rome.”
“Oh, oh!” sighed Annie Laurie in a sort of rapture. “Paris! Rome! Will you really be able to go to places like that, Carin? But I forget—you already have been to them.”
“Yes, I’ve been,” said Carin. “And you’ll go too, sometime, if you want to badly enough. Of course, it happened to be easy for me. Papa and mama took me, and I didn’t half appreciate it,I was so young and the chance came so easily. But I shall appreciate it next time; and maybe you’ll go with me. Who knows?”
Annie Laurie drew back in her seat with a sort of shudder.
“Oh, Carin,” she said, “I’m afraid things aren’t going to be like that with me. Fine chances aren’t going to come my way. Once I might have thought they would, but now everything is changed. There seems to be so little chance of finding poor dad’s money, and I know so little about earning any. Of course since Sam came, it’s better. The cows are being properly cared for, the milk gets off in time, and the bills are sent out correctly, and all that.”
“Wasn’t it fine of him to come back and work for you like that?”
“Fine? I think it was magnificent. At first, the aunts couldn’t understand it at all. You know I hadn’t told them my suspicions about Mr. Disbrow, and I had begged the neighbors not to do so. The idea hadn’t occurred to them. It was better for them to go on hunting and prying around all their lives than to get to hating some one and feeling revengeful. So they couldn’t see what Sam meant by saying he wouldcome and work for us for nothing. Aunt Adnah never had liked him very well. She called him ‘that Disbrow boy.’ But Mr. Summers and Mr. Carson persuaded her that Sam was going into the dairy business sometime and that he would consider it a privilege to work for us and learn the business, and that contented her. It made her think he was practical and she began to like him better. As for Sam, he works from early morning till late at night, and the place begins to look the way it did when dad was managing it.”
“And does he seem happy—Sam?” asked Carin.
“No—o, I can’t say he does quite. But he’s something better than happy. He goes around with a strange look on his face, as if his own thoughts interested him more than anything else. He’ll hardly talk with me at all. I’d think that he disliked me, only I know better. He’s ashamed for his family and he won’t intrude on me. That’s what he’s thinking. At first I tried to make him feel differently, but then I saw I was bothering him, and so I made up my mind to let him alone. I reckon he knows I’ll never go back on him.”
“And he hasn’t an idea where his people are?”
“Not an idea.”
“If they were going West why didn’t they take the train here at Lee? What made them go wandering away in the mountains?”
“Well, I’ve talked with Mr. McBirney about that, and he says Mr. Disbrow was a mountain man born and bred, although he’s been living in town the last few years, and he says no mountain man would go off and leave his chickens and cow and dogs behind him. It wouldn’t so much as occur to him to do it. Then, too, he thinks Mr. Disbrow didn’t dare try to take the train at Lee. If the people had seen him going they would have stopped him. Besides that, I don’t believe Mrs. Disbrow would be willing to go on the train where everybody could see and stare at her. You know she can’t bear to be looked at. I suppose it’s because she’s so like a ghost. Why, her clothes just hang about her like the rags on a scarecrow, and her face is the color of dough and all fallen in. It’s a fact; everyone would turn to look at her. She doesn’t look as if she had lived in the world at all—and she hasn’t for a good many years.”
“Well, how do you account for Sam? Howcould a boy like that come from such a family?”
“Mr. Summers says that there’s no inheritance for souls—that every soul comes fresh from the hand of God. Sam’s soul is too brave to be overcome by his surroundings. That’s all I can make out of it.”
Carin shook her head doubtfully.
“Well, maybe that’s so. Yet it seems to me there’s more of a mystery to it than that. Your Aunt Adnah may think he’s a ‘Disbrow boy,’ but he certainly doesn’t seem like it to me.”
They were turning in at the gate of The Shoals now, and Annie Laurie looked about her with delight. Gardeners were busy all over the place; fresh awnings of orange and black had been hung from the many windows; yellow tulips appeared in flaming companies along the walks and about the house. Chairs and tables of brown rattan were on the porches; swinging couches heaped with pillows invited one to take one’s ease; books and magazines were placed temptingly at hand. Annie Laurie thought what a contrast all this was to her own meager home, and gave a sharp little sigh. But she was determined to enjoy herself without stint for these two bright days.
And this, indeed, was easy to do. Luncheon was served to the girls in Carin’s studio, and there for the greater part of the afternoon the two read, sang and laughed together. Carin had at least three books which Annie Laurie “simply must read”; and Annie Laurie was insistent that Carin should do some painting, “beginning at the very beginning,” and show her how it was done.
“Then I’ll paint you,” declared Carin, and made her friend stand, straight and tall before a draping of red-brown velvet which was just a shade browner than Annie Laurie’s hair.
“But I ought to be a fine artist to do you justice,” Carin protested, “not just a silly niggling beginner. Just you wait, Annie Laurie! Some day you are going to be a beautiful woman, and by that time I hope to know enough to paint you the way you ought to be.”
Then there was a walk in the late afternoon, and tea with Mrs. Kitchell at the Industries, and then the stroll back in the lilac-tinted air, and the fun of dressing together for dinner.
Annie Laurie could hardly make her own toilet for watching Carin, as she came all fresh from her bath, in her dainty garments, andslipped into her simple, exquisite frock of clinging white silk. A maid came to tie her corn-colored scarf, and to wind the broad corn-colored ribbon about her wonderful hair, which was almost the same color, only full of light and shine as no ribbon ever could be. Her slender feet were in white, too, and about her neck was a necklace of clouded amber beads.
“What a love you are,” cried Annie Laurie.
“No more a love than you are yourself,” retorted Carin. “Look!”
She swung her friend around to face the cheval glass, and Annie Laurie saw her own tall, almost haughty, young figure mirrored there, in its plain, well fitting gown of black. She caught a glimpse of her own pretty slippers with their smart bows, of her straight fair neck—Carin had forbidden her to wear her net yoke—and of her red-brown hair wound around and around her head.
“Talk about loves!” said Carin, and led her friend down to the drawing room. There were a number of persons there, it seemed, and Annie Laurie had a confused moment as she was presented to them. She had not been in this room before—at most had glimpsed it from thecorridor. Now that she was in it, with the many candles burning in their sconces, the flowers everywhere in vases little and great, with the delicate pinks and yellows of the draperies and furniture making an effect like a wonderful manufactured flower garden all about her, she had a sick feeling of shyness and almost wished that she had not accepted Mrs. Carson’s invitation.
“But that’s being cowardly,” she told herself sharply. “And I’m not afraid of these people, really. They’re all kind and good. What I’m afraid of is merely furniture! Now, who would be afraid of wood and cloth and brass! Silly goose!”
Some one—a pleasant-faced gentleman with white hair—offered his arm to the “silly goose,” and the next moment they were all making their way to the dining room. It was wonderful there, too. The lights seemed to be picked up by the silver and the crystal and to be thrown back in little sparks at Annie Laurie’s dazzled eyes. There was a bright, hurried talking all about her; a talking she could not quite follow. But she had got that new idea in her head, that she was not to be afraid of things like silver andglass and linen, and that certainly no reasonable person could fear kind friends, and so, in a minute or two, her shyness passed, and she was herself again.
There were delicious things passed her to eat, and Annie Laurie wondered what they really could be and why they tasted different from anything she ever had eaten before. The gentleman who had taken her out to dinner was very kind, and talked to her about her lessons, and the early coming of the spring, and how he had not been in those parts previously, and how much he liked it, and how he wished he did not have to go back to Town. By Town, Annie Laurie discovered that he meant New York.
Then, presently, the conversation died down, and everyone seemed to be listening to the lady who sat at Mr. Carson’s right. Her name, it seemed, was Miss Borrow, and she was known, as Mrs. Carson explained, over the mountains as “the doll lady.” She had made a great study of the mountain country, its flowers and trees, its little wild, harmless creatures, furred and feathered, and its lonely, quiet people. Sometimes she traveled for months in a wagon, sleeping in a mountain cabin or in her wagon as thecase might be, eating at the simple, hospitable tables of the mountaineers, or cooking by the roadside. And because she was simple and earnest and truly, truly, a friend to all the world, she had been permitted to enter the hearts of the people and they had learned to trust her and to speak out to her almost as freely as they would to one of themselves.
“But please tell us why you are called the ‘doll lady,’ Miss Borrow,” said Carin. “I think I know, but I would so love it if you would explain to Annie Laurie, ma’am.”
“Well,” said Miss Borrow, turning her dark, rather sad eyes upon Annie Laurie, “it was this way. I had not traveled far in the lonely, silent country that lies back among the mountains, before I discovered that the saddest thing about it all was the children—the little children who had nothing to look forward to, and who did not know how to laugh in the happy, free way that children should. They got into bad and silly ways because there was nothing for them to do. So I fell to wondering how I could help them enjoy themselves, and to tell the truth, I hadn’t to wonder very long, for almostimmediately it occurred to me that I would give them toys.
“I decided that I would take the boys good knives, so that they could make things, and marbles and balls, so that they might have games; and to the girls I would take dolls. I have gone out from my starting point with hundreds of the dearest, most delightful dollies you could think of, tucked away in my wagon. I have even had to have a second wagon to start with, because of the many things I was carrying along. At first there would be no need to give these things at the houses at which I stayed—the houses nearer the towns. But as I went on and on, over this mountain, and down into that valley and up over the next mountain, I would come on the people who lived in the hollow land.
“They had few friends, or none. They went nowhere. They had nothing to do, except scratch the ground for a little food. One day was like another; and in the faces of the children was a look like that to be seen in the face of a dog—a look of terrible wistfulness, as if there was that in the soul which never could be expressed. To these children I brought my gifts.The boys were glad of the knives and marbles and balls; but nothing like so glad as the girls were of the dolls. Many and many of them never had seen a doll at all. Yet never once did I have to tell them what they were for. They simply reached out their arms and took them, and hugged them up to them—not before people, understand, but as soon as ever they were alone.
“Some of these lonely little girls had hardly known what it was to be kissed, and they would have been ashamed to throw their arms around their mother’s necks and hug and kiss them; but when they got alone with dolly—their own, own dolly—they kissed and hugged it as if they had been starved for want of things like that. Then when I could take along some extra things, so that they could really change the doll’s clothes, and wash and iron for their pets, then, at last, they really had something to do. They seemed to come to life—not the dolls, but the little mothers. Perhaps the dolls did, too. I’m not sure. They were loved enough to make them.”
“Oh, Miss Borrow,” cried Mrs. Carson, “youlucky, lucky woman, to be able to think of such a lovely thing and to carry it out!”
“Lucky is that lucky does,” said the old gentleman beside Annie Laurie, twisting an old saying to suit his purposes.
“Well,” said Carin across the table, under cover of the conversation, “that’s why she’s called the ‘doll lady,’ Annie Laurie. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Beautiful,” replied the other. “And—and why couldn’t we help get some of the dolls ready, Carin? And my aunts—if I could get them to working on those dolls, perhaps they wouldn’t be worrying and wondering so much.”
Mr. Carson overheard her remark, though it was intended only for Carin.
“Excellent and sensible, Annie Laurie,” he said in his light way—that way which meant so much yet seemed to mean so little. “You have said a wise thing. I believe the Misses Pace are to honor us with their presence at dinner to-morrow, are they not, Lucy?”
“Yes,” responded Mrs. Carson, “I am glad to be able to say that they are.”
“We will try then, as you say, my dear Annie Laurie, to help the aunts find a new andinteresting occupation. We will give them—some dolls to play with,” smiled Mr. Carson.
For he knew, and Annie Laurie knew, that the poor fretted old ladies needed them as much as any heart-starved mountain child.
There was music after dinner, and Mrs. Carson asked Annie Laurie to sing. It was a great moment in its way—that in which the shy girl with the oriole’s voice went out before all the company to sing to Mrs. Carson’s accompaniment. For a second or two she thought that she really could not. Then it came over her that it was a chance—that she who had lived that plain drab life was standing now where beautiful colors played about her. She was, she said to herself, in the heart of a rainbow. And a song was a song, just as a piece of furniture was a piece of furniture. She had already decided that she was not to be afraid of upholstering and silver and fine glass. Very well, then, why should she be afraid of a song, since she really had a voice and could sing? Her music lessons had been stopped since her father’s death, but Mrs. Carson often invited her to sing with her in the schoolroom where Carin’s piano stood, and shewas quite aware that she had learned more from Mrs. Carson with her taste and her beautiful, delicate fashion of expression than she could from her teacher. So now, full, free, sad and deep, her young voice arose in:
“All are sleeping, weary heart,Thou, thou only sleepless art.”
“All are sleeping, weary heart,Thou, thou only sleepless art.”
She thought of Sam away in his bare room, bending over those puzzling accounts of hers, working for her without pay, to redeem so far as he could his father’s terrible wrong. And as she thought of him, and the beauty of the song opened the doors of her heart, it seemed as if all that distrust of mankind which had come to her so bitterly when she first realized the great wrong that had been done her, went drifting out on the tide of song. So the lovely words to their noble setting poured from her lips with a sort of splendor, and when she had ceased, and had stood for a moment, motionless, her slender straight body tense with the rapture of it, she had the great happiness of hearing sincere and enthusiastic applause break from all the company in the drawing room.
Mrs. Carson and Carin were hardly less happythan she. They made her sing again and again; then Mrs. Carson forbade more.
“We’ll not have our singing bird excited so that she’ll lose her sleep the first night she stays under this roof,” she said. And then she herself, at the solicitation of her guests, sang some of those wonderful songs of hers. Annie Laurie could not understand the words, for they were now in one tongue and now another; but as the music rose and fell, shifting in its beauty as a sunset shifts its colors, or as water ripples in the wind, a great happiness flooded her. She sat thrilling to it, moved to the core of her being by its rhythm, and Mrs. Carson, arising from the piano, came straight to her.
“Annie Laurie Pace,” she said in her charming way, “I could feel all the strings of the piano vibrating again in you. You are a true musician. Sometime you and I will sit together night after night and listen to opera.”
“Oh!” Annie Laurie gasped. “It—it couldn’t be!”
“It shall be,” smiled Mrs. Carson. “Wait, child. Wait just a little while.”
So, with a head full of new, rich ideas, the girl lay down to sleep that night inthe “poppy room,” as the little bedroom opening off Carin’s was called. Poppies decorated the wall, were embroidered on the linen covers to dresser, chairs and bed, and the spirit of poppies, sleep, hovered lightly over the room.
The next day dawned beautifully—one of those Sundays which seem to have the very breath of holiness in them. Annie Laurie went with the Carsons to the Episcopal Church, and then they all drove over to the Methodist Church for the aunts. They could see the two, prim and starched, awaiting them on the high church steps, and Mr. Carson leaped from the carriage to assist the ladies down and to help them into his vehicle. Annie Laurie couldn’t help giving an affectionate chuckle at the labored propriety of their remarks. They had on their best dresses and they were determined to use their best language. But Mrs. Carson gave no sign that she perceived their stiffness. She chatted on in that winning way of hers, till even the proud and difficult Aunt Adnah felt at ease.
At dinner the conversation turned upon the “doll lady,” and Mr. Carson had an idea.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll hike it! We’ll trek it! We’ll mush-mush!”
“Papa,” Carin protested, “what everdoyou mean?”
“Mean? I mean we’ll follow the long red road, every one of us. Your mother, Carin, and your friends Annie Laurie and Azalea, and Miss Zillah and Miss Adnah. We’ll take to the high road—in mountain wagons—and we’ll go gypsying. It’s the spring vacation—or we can make it so if we have a mind. What do you say, Miss Parkhurst? Shall we call it vacation? And will you go with us over the mountains?”
“I’ll call it vacation if you please, sir,” smiled Helena Parkhurst. “But if I have any time away from my duties, I’d love to go home to my mother. She’s very lonely without me.”
“You shall, then. Of course she’s lonely without you. But what do you say, ladies?” he asked, turning to Annie Laurie’s aunts.
Miss Adnah wiped her lips carefully before replying.
“You are very kind indeed, sir, but I never have done such a thing in my life, though I must say that I have rather envied people when I saw them starting off on such an expedition.”
“Of course you have envied them, and you shall do so no longer. You shall go and know the joys they have known. As for the dairy, Sam will look after that. If necessary he can have one of my men to help him. You are pleased, I hope, Miss Zillah?”
Miss Zillah turned her faded, quiet eyes on him, and smiled slowly.
“Mr. Carson,” she said “all my life I have slept properly under a roof. I have done my duty as I saw it to do. I have conducted myself, I hope, in a ladylike and discreet manner, but—” she hesitated.
“But what, madam?”
“But from childhood I have longed to cook my meal in a pot over a camp fire and to sleep under the pines.”
Everybody laughed.
“What’s more,” went on Miss Zillah, showing the shadow of a dimple in her withered cheek, “I feel that I would love to run about in a short skirt and tie a turban about my head.”
“Delightful! Delightful,” declared Mr. Carson. “We’ll go by the middle of this week.”
“But Mr. Carson, ought we?” Miss Adnah broke in. “The—the expense—”
“Expense, madam? There’s no expense. All that is needed is time, and of that we have as much as anybody living.”
He held up a hand for silence, and in his rich voice, warm with an almost boyish enthusiasm, he repeated a poem he had read but whose author he did not remember:
“‘Beyond the East, the sunrise, beyond the West, the sea—And East or West, the wander-thirst will never let me be.It works in me like madness, dear, to make me say good-bye,For the stars call and the sea calls, and O! the call of the sky.“‘I know not where the white road leads, nor what the blue hills are,But a man can have the sun for a friend, and for his guide a star.And there’s no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard,For the river calls and the road calls, and O! the call of the bird.“‘Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night or day,The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away,And come I may, but go I must, and if you ask me why,You may put the blame on the stars and sun, and the white road and the sky.’
“‘Beyond the East, the sunrise, beyond the West, the sea—And East or West, the wander-thirst will never let me be.It works in me like madness, dear, to make me say good-bye,For the stars call and the sea calls, and O! the call of the sky.
“‘I know not where the white road leads, nor what the blue hills are,But a man can have the sun for a friend, and for his guide a star.And there’s no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard,For the river calls and the road calls, and O! the call of the bird.
“‘Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night or day,The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away,And come I may, but go I must, and if you ask me why,You may put the blame on the stars and sun, and the white road and the sky.’
“Only it’s the red road with us, ladies—the long red road, and it winds up the mountains, and down the mountains, and we’ll follow it till we long for home again.”
“Oh,” whispered Annie Laurie to Carin as they walked from the dining room together, “how fine it will be to get the poor aunts away from that house where they worry and search, and search and worry!”
“And don’t you see,” returned Carin, “that papa is really having in the back of his mind the idea that he may run across the Disbrows? He thinks that, after all, Mr. Disbrow won’t quite dare spend that money—at least not much of it. He could talk about going West but he hasn’t really the courage to go. He’ll drive around in the mountains, shooting a little, and grazing his cow and horses, and eating up the chickens.Papa says that’s the way a man with his rearing would do, probably. So we’re to take to all sorts of byroads and odd ways in the hope of finding them.”
“Really?” said Annie Laurie. “But—Oh, Carin, if we found them! What a humiliation for them!”
“Well, so far as Mr. Disbrow is concerned, I think he has some humiliation coming to him,” said Carin sharply.
Annie Laurie hated to tell Sam they were going to the mountains. She feared he would read in her eyes her knowledge of this second intention—this hope of finding the fugitives. Perhaps he did. He was very silent these days, and he worked furiously. Annie Laurie tried to get him to sit with them evenings, but he would not. His old-time light-heartedness, preserved under so many difficulties, seemed to have passed entirely. Yet he was not sullen nor even sad—only very grave. He was indeed fighting his battle, and it was not an easy one.
But little by little he could see—everyone could see—that he was winning the respect of the townspeople. Men went out of their wayto speak to him and to ask him how he was getting on in his new business and to say they’d be glad to help him out if he got in any difficulty. Some of the nicest women in Lee invited him to their homes; but to all such invitations Sam sent a respectful refusal. He seemed determined to keep to himself until he had won his right to enter other men’s doors as an honest boy, the son of an honest man.
He helped with the preparations for the mountain, saying nothing of his shamed and tortured thought that his friends might come upon his skulking family. Mr. Carson was to drive his own team, and Benjamin, his man, was to drive Annie Laurie’s horses. So, on a perfumed spring morning the little caravan set off, with Mrs. Carson and the two Misses Pace in the Carson wagon, and Carin and Azalea in Annie Laurie’s.
Azalea was strangely excited by the idea of the journey, though she tried to conceal the fact. She could not forget how often she had gone upon such long journeys in those wild, curious days when she was a “show girl.” Those days now seemed like a fantastic dream. She felt as if she always had been Azalea McBirney, wrapped about with love and consideration; andeven the memory of her poor dead little mother was like a gray shadow. True, it was a shadow which arose often before her mental vision, but the outlines of it grew fainter and fainter. Yet Azalea loved it. She could not think of that brave, yet broken woman, so out of place with that sorry crew of show people, without a throb of love. Death had, at last, seemed the only happiness for her, and Azalea loved to think of her as safe and at rest in that much-cared-for lowly bed of hers beneath the Pride of India tree beside Ma McBirney’s door.
And, oh, the long red road! How it wound up the hills and over them. What valleys it glimpsed, what rivers, amber brown beneath the trees, what spots of quietude and peace beneath the pines, what sunny openings, where succulent odors of grass, freshly sprung, came to the travelers! And, oh, the delight of sleeping in the hastily spread tents—which were really no more than squares of canvas stretched on pointed sticks—and the appetites that developed for the meals cooked over the coals on the convenient tripod!
Now one and now another of the ladies cooked the meals, and they vied with each other in themixing of stews. They grew bold and tried things they never had heard of, but which seasoned with mountain air and tested with mountain appetites, seemed the finest of discoveries. And the day and the night were sweet; the wind was their playful companion; the showers were their friends; the sun their great protector; the moon their comforter and all the stars were their intimates.
So the three girls grew browner and brighter-eyed each day, and the heart in each of them—even Annie Laurie’s—was light as down.
But not a hint did they have of the Disbrows. Though they plunged deeper and deeper into the mountains, getting far beyond the towns, they saw nothing of them. They went so far that they came at last upon the lonely, sad-eyed people whom Miss Borrow had described. In their miserable cabins, which were far from weatherproof, they lived their curious, solitary lives. Their faces were vacant and mournful; their voices like the soughing of wind in the trees. They walked languidly, and there was a strange and repellent pallor in their faces. Sometimes they sang a little, sitting before their doorsin the moonlight, and their voices rose and fell with a curious cadence. The monotony of their lives rested upon them like a deadly spell, permitting them to nurse senseless hates and animosities, and to keep up foolish family feuds.
Now and then they came upon a desolate schoolhouse, approached by little winding paths, over which bare-footed children had run for weary miles. For they prized their schooling beyond all words to express.
“Whar is her who tells us how?” one little, sallow-faced child had asked when she had run eleven miles to the schoolhouse to find the teacher absent. They heard such stories of starved minds and all but starved bodies, and a deep pity awoke in their hearts for these people of their own blood and of an inheritance much like their own.
“When we are a little older,” said Azalea, her eyes shining with a deep purpose, “we will come back and teach them.”
“Yes,” said Annie Laurie. “We will teach them to read and to sing.”
“To read and to sing and to draw,” said Carin.
“Very well,” said Mr. Carson, laughingly and yet with meaning. “And I’ll send some onealong to help with such trifles as arithmetic, geography, grammar, et cetera, and incidentally I’ll foot the bills. Is it a bargain?”
“It’s a bargain,” said they in chorus.