Mallowbanks, November thirtieth.
Bad,dear,bad Carin:
You didn’t come to my party! Oh, wretched, false friend, best and most cherished, why did you not come? Can it be that a mere desire to have higher marks than anyone else in school caused you to desert me in my hour of triumph? It was that, I know. You are trying to get that old Phi Beta Kappa key—which you’ll not wear after youdoget it. I call it intellectual pride, I do indeed.
Keefe couldn’t come either. He had an order to do a portrait for some Great Lady. So he wouldn’t even think of coming. He said he was in the Right Mood for Work, and he expected me to tremble before those awful words, just as you expected me to tremble before your Phi Beta Kappa record. You two, doing your duty with all your might andleaving me alone in my frivolity! I call it shabby of you.
Well, anyway, Annie Laurie came and Barbara Summers with her. Barbara put little Jonathan in the care of Aunt Zillah Pace, and she kept saying that she felt perfectly all right about him, though one could see that she didn’t. It was the first time she ever had left him overnight, and so it was natural for her to feel nervous. Though, as you know, Jonathan is going to insist on being taken care of, and if there is anything he wants he is going to have it. He is such a dear that no one can refuse him anything, as I know to my cost! The treasures of mine that child has broken!
Yes, those two came, and I leave you to imagine how happy it made me. There was my little brown Barbara with her sweet voice and her shy-eager eyes, all dressed so quaintly, and being so desirous of pleasing everyone, and yet holding to her own ideas with that darling dignity of hers; and there was my big, glorious Annie Laurie Pace with her red hair and her definite ways, trying to be frivolous with the rest of us, and looking like a preoccupied Diana all the time. I had some fearsthat when the folk at Mallowbanks learned that what she really was preoccupied with was her own dairy, that they might cast her into the outer darkness where the vast company of people-the-Knoxes-do-not-know drag out their miserable lives. But no, the vast fields of Annie Laurie—they did not lose a rod in my description of them—the cattle on a thousand hills, more or less, and the well trained force of helpers appealed to their imagination. They regarded her as a Planter—or a Plantress. She was accepted. And she was accepted all the more because she really and truly didn’t care much whether she was or not. Annie Laurie came to Mallowbanks for the sole purpose of making me happy, and she certainly succeeded. I put her in my room, and I slept on a lounge in the dressing room. So we contrived to be together, and of course, just like the girls in the song, we let down our hair before the fire after the ball.
But I must come to the subject of the ball.
To begin with, Mallowbanks was full of guests who had come to stay for two nights, or four, or seven, as the case might be. They were kin or near-kin, or old neighbors whowere as dear as kin, and they all called each other by their first names. All the men, or nearly all, had military or judicial titles; and the women were lovely and, in a way, willful—because they had been much loved, I suppose. From first to last it seemed to me like one of my old dreams and nothing else.
My coming-out party was in several parts.
To begin with, there was the afternoon reception. Ladies, mostly, came to that, though there were some men, too. This was preceded by a luncheon for forty. (There were little tables scattered all over the drawing-room, as well as the dining room.) The next day there was a ball. That was the culmination. And all week there have been rides and drives and dinners and breakfasts and teas. I have met hundreds of people. I like them all. I love none, save the people here in my own house, and Annie Laurie and my little Barbara. I met Ravanels and Grévys and Bryces, but one and all neglected to ask my hand in marriage. There was, indeed, only one I would think of marrying, and, Oh, you yellow-headed little Hun, I had not talked with him three minutes before I knew that he was your Southerner.
“I have a great many messages for you from your friend Miss Carson,” said he to me.
“Oh,” I said right out, like the simple mountain person I am, “are you the—”
Then, of course, I stopped and turned a strange and beautiful red, something, I imagine, the color of a faded American beauty rose.
“Yes,” he said smiling, “I am. At least I hope I am. I’m not sure.”
“What, please,” I said, “is your name? I know all about your noble qualities, but I do not know your name.”
“My name,” he said, “is Vance Grévy.”
“Oh!” was all I could say, thinking how this was probably the particular person madam grandmother had picked out for me. Of course I couldn’t keep back my silly self-conscious grin, and he smiled in much the same way I did.
“May I present you,” I said, feeling very “heady,” the way Paprika used to on a cold morning, “to my madam grandmother?”
“Thank you,” he said, “I have just had the honor of talking with her. You were so surrounded that I waited for a moment before venturing to come to you.”
He smiled more than ever. I summoned my courage. I think it was my courage. Perhaps it didn’t deserve so good a name.
“May I inquire what she said to you?”
“Do you really want to hear?”
“More than anything.”
“And you’ll not lay it up against me?” he badgered.
“On my honor!”
“Then she said: ‘My dear Mr. Grévy, you are, I take it, the grandson of my old friend.’ She put up her lorgnette and looked me over. ‘Yes, you are the living image of him! Ah, your grandfather and I were good friends indeed, at one time, I assure you.’ ‘How I regret,’ I said, ‘that he had two generations the advantage of me.’ The dear little thing let me kiss her hand. ‘You have his turns of speech, also,’ she said. Then she asked: ‘Have you seen my granddaughter, the only child of my dear Jack?’ ‘I am on my way to it,’ I declared. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘we must see to it, we Knoxes and Ravanels, we Bryces and Grévys, that she makes no mistakes, must we not?’ She looked at me again through her lorgnette, appealing apparently to my chivalry.‘We are a solid phalanx,’ said I, ‘to see that she comes to no harm.’ ‘We understand each other,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Your family never did need superfluous words.’”
I laughed and laughed.
“I have a friend, Mr. Rowantree,” I said, “who likes to tell me about the comedy of manners. Isn’t that what madam grandmother plays all of the time?”
“Just! But isn’t she exquisite? A survival of a splendid old time.”
“Yes. Oh, you can’t think how I admire and love her.”
“Yes, I can. I can very easily think how you do. Shall you confine yourself in your associations, Miss Knox, to the Ravanels and the Grévys? Why not cut out the Ravanels?”
“There aren’t many of them left, are there?” I asked more gravely. “And you—shall I have many Grévy’s to choose from?”
“There’s my great aunt and my mother and my married brother and some second cousins—nice girls they are, too.”
“Oh, that’s quite a selection. Now tell me about my Carin.”
But just then, of course, we wereinterrupted, and the only other times I got a chance to talk with him was when we were dancing together. That was quite a number of times, because I had him put down three dances for you, and I acted as your substitute.
All joking aside, Carin, I saw as much of him as I could because I was determined to find out what he was like. He would have to be so very, very fine to be worthy of you. I can see, my dear, partly from what you say and still more from what you do not say, that this is a serious matter with you. So I dropped all my nonsense and was grave with him, and he was grave with me, and I liked him—Oh, tremendously. He is earnest and ambitious and full of the new time. He doesn’t care any more about family than is right and sensible, and he’s determined to be a fine and successful man on his own account. What is more, he appreciates you, Carin! He does! I wouldn’t rest till I had found out whether he did or not. It is unnecessary to say what a gentleman I think him; and though he is not exactly handsome, he has a manliness and a grace that is even better.
Yes, my blessings are all ready for you. Justlet me know whenever I am to bestow them.
Annie Laurie has a tiny, beautiful little diamond on a thread of gold which she wears on the little finger of her left hand.
“Annie Laurie,” I said, “that ring looks as if it had a history. It has a kind of a we’d-better-wait-a-while-before-we-tell-our-friends look.”
“Does it, impudent one?” she laughed. “Well, then it looks to be just what it is. Sam gave it to me.”
“Good Sam Disbrow,” I said. “He’ll be a fine person to live with—not ashamed in the wrong place nor proud at the wrong time, nor too selfish nor too unselfish—just sensible and reliable and honest straight through.”
“He and I understand each other,” said Annie Laurie softly, “perfectly.”
“Of course you do. Why shouldn’t you? Haven’t you taken years and years to get acquainted? Tell me, does he ever hear anything of his adopted father, and his family?”
“Not a thing,” said she. “Not one thing.”
“They just ‘went west.’”
“Yes.”
“Have you any other news?”
Annie Laurie burst out laughing.
“Haven’t I, just?”
“About whom, then?”
“Haystack Thompson. Did you know he was courting Hi Kitchell’s ‘ma’?”
“I did. I saw him with a collar on, and no violin. He had combed his hair; and she wore white cotton gloves.”
“Well, we all thought it was settled. The only thing that worried us was how Haystack was to care for a wife when he got one. He has always been more or less like Tommy Tucker, singing for his supper—or rather, playing on Betsy, his violin. But for a time the violin had to stay in the background, which made some of us feel rather sad. We hardly liked to have Haystack settle down like other folks and be domestic and regular. But we needn’t have worried.”
“No?”
“No. Little Mrs. Kitchell got a new gray Henrietta, and a gray velvet hat with a real plume, and made herself twelve new of everything, aprons included, and there was general excitement. The ladies about town began to give her presents and to insist that they should all be invited to the wedding, and to ask whenit was to be. But Mrs. Kitchell didn’t quite know. ‘Very soon,’ she said. ‘In a week or two.’ She said that for quite a while. Then one morning, Haystack disappeared.”
“Oh, Annie Laurie!”
“Yes, he did. Just disappeared. He took Betsy the violin, and left all his new collars behind. Likewise his suit of blue diagonal that he was to have been married in. That was all, except a bunch of bittersweet berries tied with grass, which poor little Anne Kitchell found on her account book. Under it he had written the word ‘Good-bye.’”
“How did she take it?”
“Well, she sent for Aunt Zillah, and of course Aunt Zillah hurried right over to her and kept giving her dry handkerchiefs till she got over the worst of it. I think Aunt Zillah made the reason of his defection clear to her. ‘You couldn’t shut Mr. Thompson up in a house and keep him there any more than you could a catamount,’ she told her. ‘He’s a wander man and a music man. What would he be if he were to settle down and play a respectable part?’ Little Anne Kitchell admitted it. I liked him because he was sodifferent from other folks,’ she said. ‘He didn’t seem to have no care nor trouble, but I suppose if I’d married him, he would have had.’ ‘Of course he would,’ said Aunt Zillah. ‘He would have had stepchildren, and they might not have liked him. And you would have wanted him to be proper and regular in his habits, and he would have fretted like a caged hawk.’ ‘I reckon it’s all for the best,’ said Anne Kitchell, and dried her tears. So no more has been heard from Haystack. He’s free again, drinking out of springs, sleeping in the woods, playing his violin to squirrels and children and lovers. As for Anne Kitchell, she is wearing her fine clothes and is setting her cap for a heavy-set man who has just come to town and set up a feed store.’”
Oh, Carin, isn’t that fun? And aren’t you glad Haystack Thompson got off? I’d hate to have civilization trap him, wouldn’t you?
Well, well, I started to tell you about my ball. It was a wonderful ball. We danced in the drawing-room under the luster candelabra, and we danced down the long corridor with the carved panels. We women were all shining in beautiful garments, but I haven’t anydesire to describe them to you, except that my little grandmother wore a gown of cloth of silver and rose point lace and all of her diamonds; and I, to please her—and it almost drove poor Aunt Lorena wild—chose a queer old silk of hers striped like ribbon grass in white and greeny-white and faded lilac and mauve. Over it I draped the thinnest silken lace. Then grandmother gave me a necklace of darling little pearls, and I had white satin slippers with little butterflies embroidered on them in greeny-white and faded pink, and a fan of the same colors, painted with butterfly wings.
“I never saw a coming-out dress like that in all my life,” said Aunt Lorena.
“Lorena,” said grandmother magnificently, “the Knoxes can afford to do as they please.”
But for my afternoon reception, to please Aunt Lorena, I wore drifting white stuff—white everything—and carried Killarney roses, and was just as conventional as I could be. Aunt Lorena kept pointing to me and saying:
“This is the way I want the child to look,” and at the ball grandmother said to her oldfriends: “Wouldn’t you think she was one of us all over again? Don’t you like a young girl to dress like that?”
Everybody agreed with Aunt Lorena, and everybody agreed with grandmother. And I was very happy all of the time.
No, I find I’m not going to describe the ball.
Why not?
Oh, because it was vague, after all—just meeting strange people and dancing with strange people, and trying to think of the right thing to say when people complimented me—as, of course, they thought they had to do—and being looked over and being told I was a perfect Knox, and hearing the music always, always, and feeling the dance get into my toes, and knowing my cheeks were burning and my eyes flaming, and wanting to put my face down in the cool moss on the bench of the mountain where the three tulip trees grow, and drink and drink of my spring till I was cooled in body and spirit.
Azalea’s Coming Out Party
Yes, Carin, it was like that. I am not ungrateful. I like this life; a part of me answers to it completely. Yet, somehow, Ibelieve it has come too late. I feel that sooner or later I shall go back to the mountain and stay there. I miss the red roads and the misty dawns and the still, still moonlights, with me answering the whippoorwill and the owl. I miss Ma McBirney and the little graves under the Pride of India tree. I am just Azalea the mountain girl after all, I am afraid, though they keep telling me how gay I am and how I fit into my present life, and congratulating me because I never seem to be tired.
But I was secretly very tired when at last the week of festivities was over. There had been a great company of us at Thanksgiving dinner, and we had seen and tasted all that was most splendid in the way of Mallowbanks ham and Mallowbanks turkey, and Mallowbanks artichokes and mince meat, and we had talked and laughed and sung and danced, and bowed and scraped, and shaken hands and kissed, and at last it was all over. Even my darling Annie Laurie and my little Barbara were gone. And then I went up to my own room and closed and bolted the door.
Carin, I wept and wept. I was happy, but I wept. For, someway, after all, this wasnot my life. It was not the silver web I meant to weave. It was something that was being woven for me, and I was only a quite nice little yellow spider sitting in the midst of it and being admired without doing a single bit of spinning.
It was not at all what I had planned for myself. I am doing a great deal of receiving and little or no giving, and it makes me dissatisfied.
Of course I give some happiness to grandmother, and a new responsibility to Uncle David and Aunt Lorena. But what of my vocation? What of all the things I learned to do with these two hands of mine? What of the friendships I made with humble people and needy ones? What of all the good I was going to do in the world?
Carin, I am very happy. You mustn’t think anything else. But I have cried a tremendous lot, and I’m going to cry when I feel like it. And by and by I shall do something. It will not be liked very well at Mallowbanks—at least, not at first. But we have to be our true selves, don’t we? Don’t we owe that to—well I don’t know just Whom or What we owe itto. But we are made so much ourselves that to be anything other than ourselves is to offend what Kipling calls the God of Things as They Are.
Dear me, am I too serious? I, who have been making an art of gayety? I can talk nonsense endlessly, and I rather like to do it. It excites me. I feel like a young colt when it gets the bit in its teeth and whips off down the road. Then, if the person I am talking with, feels the same way, and the two of us dare the other to see who can run away the hardest—as Mr. Vance Grévy does, for example—then I enjoy myself very much indeed. Running away is, I can see, very pleasant for a time.
But after all, I am not of a nature to run very far. I can always be trusted to come home and stand beside the hitching post. It’s my way. I’m dependable old Azalea after all, and however rattle-brained I may sound, you can count on me to sober down at the critical moment. I’m still, Carin, right beside the hitching post.
The only thing I insist on is being hitched up to my own post. And I don’t believeMallowbanks is it. It’s a carved, historic, marvelous post. But is it mine? Well, I’ll not think any more just now.
Father and Mother McBirney write contented letters from Bethal Springs. People have been very nice to them and they are not lonely. Father is doing well and feels some loosening up of his “j’ints.” Mother is sewing for somebody’s baby. Trust her to find someone who needs her. If she was set down in a desert you’d probably find her nursing a sick scorpion. I’m going up to see them soon.
Jim is studying his head off at Rutherford Academy and has started a Young Men’s Christian Association there. Dear Jim! Who would have thought he could have turned so good? Jim who used to put little green snakes in my closet!
Carin, when I see you, if I ever do, I will tell you more about the ball. It was simply grand.
But don’t you just wish we were riding up old Mount Tennyson side by side, with the crickets singing in the grass, and the saddles going creak-creak?
Carin, I believe I’m going to cry again.
Good-bye,
Azalea.
P. S. There, I told you! See that blob? That was the first tear. Keefe O’Connor writes me stately letters. He says he is glad I have come into friends and fortune. What does he mean by that? Is he going to drop me? Carin, he is. He’s that kind of a horrid person who can’t forgive one for prosperity. They’ll stand by you in adversity but not in prosperity. I’d just as soon be cut for one as the other, every bit, wouldn’t you?
A. McB.No,I mean A. K.
Mallowbanks, December 10th.
Carin,my love:
I hear you are to go home for Christmas and that all of your family will be together at the Shoals. I wish I could be with you, but I must be here, of course, and I suppose that if I were to be with you, I should be longing to be at Mallowbanks. That isn’t because I am discontented, but only that there are so many beautiful places in the world where I would like to be, that I find it difficult to choose.
I often think what a lucky thing it is that a person is born in a certain spot and is under the impression that she has to stay there. If we were allowed to flutter around over the earth before we were born, trying to decide whom we would have for parents and where we would live, what a state of indecision we should be in!
But here I am, with my own grandmother, in the home of my ancestors, making Christmas presents, and having—Oh, astonishing fact!—all the money I want to spend on them. But I’m not buying things. I mean I’m not buying already-done things to any great extent. I am making them. I want my loved ones to realize that it is still love that I am sending them, and not just a sign and token of my prosperity.
There are all the Carsons and all the McBirneys and all the Summerses and all the Kitchells and all the Paces and all the Rowantrees, to make things for. Of course I count Keefe in with the Rowantrees, though I’m not sure he would like to have me.
Speaking of Keefe, I wrote him a letter and told him what I thought of him.
“Keefe,” I wrote, “you are haughty. How have I come to fall in your esteem? Why am I suddenly ‘Miss Knox’ instead of Azalea. Do you think I ought to suffer a steady average of trouble, and because I have found my people and my fortune, are you going to make me miserable by turning against me? What harm does it do the world if I am happy?”
He wrote back at once, of course. If hehadn’t, I never should have written to him again. Never.
He said he had no idea he had the power to make me unhappy.
I wrote back and asked him since when had he stopped telling the truth. And I said I could see he was looking around for ways of discontinuing our friendship, and that at first I had been rather stupid and hadn’t seen what he was trying to do. But now I understood, and naturally, I would protest no more.
Then I got a letter from him which—well, which changed everything. He said he had not been sure but that I meant to enter upon a new life altogether, and if I had, he did not mean to stand in the way. He said we had been thrown together by accident and that he had forced his acquaintance upon you and me, and that we had been endlessly kind to him, but he did not mean to take advantage of that kindness, but that if I wished to continue our friendship upon the old basis that it would make all the difference in the world to him; that he had had no heart for work or life since the idea had come to him that he ought to let our friendship go in justice to me.
Well, of course I had guessed from the first that all the trouble came from some absurd idea like that!
So I wrote him that my friendships did not depend on the state of the money market. But I didn’t say, Carin, that I would rather talk with him than anyone I ever met (except you, sister of my heart). Perhaps he will never know that. He said he would love to come down and see me, but that, to be quite frank, he couldn’t afford it just now.
That reminded me of an old idea of mine. So that night I said to grandmother:
“Don’t you think, madam grandmother, that you ought to have a portrait painted of yourself as you are now?”
“I?” cried my grandmother. “At my age! Why, my dear, I am hideous! A wrinkled, white-headed, shriveled old woman! What do I want of a portrait?”
Then she arose and said as she often does: “Your arm, Azalea, if you please.”
So I gave her my arm, guessing that she was going once more to show me the portraits of herself in the paneled hall. And sure enough she did.
“This,” she said, stopping before the first one, “was by the greatest portrait painter in the South. At the time he painted me I was eighteen and already engaged to your father—your grandfather, I mean. I should not like to have you repeat it, but the painter fell desperately in love with me, my dear—desperately. Painters always fall in love with one, I fancy. That is why the picture has a slightly unfinished appearance. He left before he had quite completed it.”
“Poor man,” said I.
“Ah, I dare say he recovered. These loves that are founded on mere admiration amount to but little. We will proceed, if you please.”
I led her on to the next portrait of herself.
“This,” she said, quite as if she had not told me the same things half a dozen times before, “was done by an English artist just after my Jack was born. I wanted him to paint it with my little David sitting at my feet and my Jack in my arms, but he was not in favor of it. He said he preferred to paint me by myself. For one thing, he considered me too small to paint with such fine large sons. He said it made me look ridiculous. But Itruly think, Azalea, that he did not regard me as motherly enough. I know I was and am a vain woman. But my vanity, my dear, is only skin deep—only skin deep. It is a manner, nothing more. In my time it was fashionable for girls in my class to act as if they were self-indulged and vain. But in reality—” she paused, and stood out before me, and I saw there were tears in her eyes, and her face grew tender and quiet—“in reality, my dear granddaughter, my motherhood was more to me than anything else.”
She drooped her head down among the laces on her gown, and I heard her say under her breath:
“I have almost died of it!”
I put my arm around her and drew her close to me—such a tiny creature as she is!
“Little madam grandmother,” I whispered, “come back to the fire, and I will make some tea. Then perhaps you will tell me a story. I love your stories very, very much.”
She straightened up again, calling on her courage and her pride.
“But there is one more portrait which I wish to show you, my dear. It was done bya celebrated South American when I was just turned forty—my autumnal picture, I call it. Here I am, in my spring, in my summer, in my autumn.”
She smiled up at me suddenly.
“And now, I suppose, you wish me to round out my year, and have my winter picture painted? Well, I can provide the snow.” She touched her silver hair with her wrinkled hand.
“Dear grandmother,” I said right out from the heart, “you are quite right. It needs the beautiful winter picture to complete the set.”
We went back to the fire then and she sat thinking while I made the tea. At last she spoke.
“Do you chance to know anyone who is particularly well adapted to painting such a portrait, Azalea? For, mind you, it will no longer be the picture of a beautiful woman; it will be what is far harder to paint, the record of a character. For every wrinkle tells its story, if only one is wise enough to read, and though my eyes are old, they still have their revelations to make, my dear. Who looks in them can read the book of experience there.”
“I think I know such an artist, ma’am,” I said. “He has painted many portraits recently and has had much praise for them. His name is Keefe O’Connor.”
“Keefe O’Connor,” she said musingly. “Do you know him personally, Azalea? But I think I have heard you say so.”
“He is the brother of my dear Mary Cecily Rowantree,” I said.
“Oh, yes, the Rowantrees of Rowantree Hall!”
She never forgets that the Rowantrees are of Rowantree Hall. You and I love the ramshackle old place so that we forget what a grand name it has. Grandmother, I suppose, thinks of it as a magnificent ancestral estate. What would she say if she could see that the gallery, instead of being supported by pillars, is held up by barked chestnut logs, and that there never has been a second coat of paint on the place. Ugh, how the wind can blow through those unfinished rooms! I sometimes think it is the most uncomfortable place I ever was in. A little mountain cabin is twenty times as warm and cosy in the winter time.
I would have liked to have told grandmotherall this, but I knew it would be fatal; that if I did, she would just set the Rowantrees down as people I ought not to know, so I said nothing. By and by she remarked:
“Have you any idea of the prices of your friend’s portraits?”
Again I knew that I must mention a good price to make her respect him, so I said:
“I think he would paint your portrait, grandmother, for a thousand dollars. And we could entertain him, I suppose? That would make it so much more agreeable, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, we would entertain him, certainly,” said grandmother. “We have a room built especially for studio purposes. I believe you never have seen it. It is in the west wing, and faces north. There is a bedroom attached. It always has been the custom of the Knoxes to have their portraits painted in the house and by someone with whom they were in daily association. Such intercourse assists in the understanding so necessary to the production of a good likeness.”
So I asked her if I had her permission to write to Keefe, and she said yes. I have written him.
No more for the present, Carin.
By the way, was I rather down-in-the-mouth in my last letter? Please forget about it. I suppose it was only a spell of homesickness. Seeing so many strangers and being expected to like them all, and to act as if I always had known them, rather upset me.
But as I said, no more at present.
I do wish you could see the room I call my Christmas room. It used to be a sort of morning room, but no one sits in it any more, so I have a work table in there, and my sewing machine and embroidery frame and my pyrography outfit, and my photographic stuff, and I am working early and late. Of course I interrupt myself to do whatever Aunt Lorena or grandmother wish me to. And people call, and I return calls, and there are little parties. But I like best to be working. Outside the window are honey locust trees, and they are very lovely even when stripped of their leaves. In the distance, on a hill, is a group of dark hemlock, and now that the sky is gray, they look particularly solemn. I have a fireplace in my Christmas room, and young James keeps it so that I need never be without a blazinghearth. My wood box is simply heaped. There are apples on my table, and a funny old writing desk stands in the corner. It is a terribly messed up room, and I love it. Not that I’m really disorderly. You wouldn’t say I was disorderly, would you, Carin? Come, now! No, I believe I like it because I have made it myself. I have in it what I can use. I amlivingin it. In the other rooms I only look on; and that, emphatically, is not living.
No more for the present!I mean it!
Azalea.
Glidden Siding, December 24th.
Merry, merry Christmas, dear Carin. Dear old friend,sucha merry Christmas to you!
I am sitting here in the station, having come from Bethal Springs on the queerest little train ever you saw, and I am waiting for the train that is to take me home. It is cold, and I think it is going to rain. Seeing that I do not expect to reach home till after dark, this sounds a bit dismal. Semmy is with me. I wrote you about Greenville Female Seminary Simms, didn’t I? I wanted to travel alone,of course, but neither Aunt Lorena nor grandmother would hear of it.
I have just asked Semmy where she got her name, and she tells me that her mother was a “pore misfortunate so’t of a woman who nevah did git on in de worl’ nohow. An’ jes’ befo’ Ah was bo’n, she went fo’ to wuk in de Greenville Female Sem’nary. An’ theah dey was dat good to heh, dat she neveh did see! Yassum, dey jes’ cheered heh along and heartened heh up, an’ nussed heh, and when de baby come—that was me—dey gave heh a whole set of clo’s. An’ ma she jes’ had a change of heart. Yassum. She jes’ made up heh mind dat she wa’n’t goin’ to be downcas’ no moah. She might ’a’ been misfortunate, but dat didn’t keep de worl’ f’om havin’ any numbah o’ good, kind folk in it. No’um. So she named heh baby fo’ the Sem’nary, she did, sho’ ’nough, and she was glad of it to de las’ day of heh life. And Ah was glad of it too. Greenville Female Sem’nary Simms shore am a fine name.”
* * * * * * * * *
Well, I’ve been down to see Father andMother McBirney. I couldn’t let Christmas go by without visiting them, could I, Carin? I went down on the twentieth, and had three whole days with them, and a Christmas celebration of the happiest sort.
The two dears were down to meet me at the train, and they took me up to their little cottage, which is in the pine woods, with a very pleasant vista which shows them the river and the river road, and though they are far enough from the road to be quiet, they can see the people coming and going. Mother wheels Father to the springs twice every day, and that gives them little excursions and helps to pass the time. Father McBirney says the waters are benefiting him, so that he has hardly any pain at all now. I can see for myself that the swelling is going down in his joints. The only thing is he can not walk steadily yet, and then only a short distance.
Oh, Carin, maybe it wasn’t fun to go to them with a big trunkful of things they needed! I had a suit for Father McBirney, and a suit for Jim, and a fine Scotch wool dress for dear Mother, and a knitted jacket for her for common, and a fine soft black coat forbest, and gloves and stockings and warm underwear, and pretty curtains for the windows, and a turkey which Aunt Lorena sent, and a barrel of flour and one of apples from Uncle David, and some foot warmers and a coffee percolator from grandmother, and various small things too numerous to mention from all of us.
Then along in the afternoon of the day that I got there, Jim came over from Rutherford College, and so we four were all together again. Yes, Carin dear, there we sat in the little strange room and looked at each other, and thought of all we had gone through together, and how we loved each other, and yet—
And yet, we knew, each and every one of us, that my path and theirs had begun to part. Yes, we knew it. They felt a little differently toward me, and I felt a little differently toward them. But that didn’t keep me from loving my McBirneys.
Jim had a thousand things to tell me. He has been studying terribly hard, and he has made some good friends, and is full of noble, loving ideas. He wants me to be a missionaryto foreign lands, and I’m afraid I hurt Mother McBirney’s feelings a little when I laughed at him.
“Do I look like a missionary, Jim?” I asked him. But he insisted on being serious.
“If you have the heart of a missionary,” he said, “that will be all that is necessary. Your looks don’t matter a particle, Zalie.”
The way he said it, you would have thought I was something frightful to look at, but that it might be lived down.
“I want very much to help my neighbors along,” I said, “and to be helped by them, I hope, but to go to a foreign country and set up my ideas against theirs doesn’t appeal to me personally. You’ll have to excuse me, Jim.”
After a little while he got off his religious themes and was just good old jolly Jim, and then we had a fine time. For I confess that I felt a little strange with him when he talked religion. We made candy together—nut candy—and we popped corn, and got the supper, and played chess, and had prayers and went to bed. And the next two days were like unto this day.
Only, of course, we had our Christmas feast.They insisted on cooking the turkey and all the other good things while I was there, so that took a good deal of work, as you may imagine. But it was great fun, too. The little cottage reeked with delicious odors, and it was charming to see with its new curtains and the walls all trimmed with bittersweet and holly, and the pine knots burning in the fireplace.
Then, this morning, Semmy and I left.
“Don’t forget us, Zalie, don’t forget us,” dear Ma McBirney said when I kissed her good-bye.
“Never while life lasts, dear,” I told her. “Never while I have any brain to remember with.”
“I’m grateful to you, Zalie,” Pa told me, shaking my hand till it ached. “You’ve given me comfort and peace, girl, and there ain’t a day or a night I don’t thank you.”
“Pa,” said I, “it’s hard getting even with you and Ma, but I’m going to do it if I can.”
Jim took me down to the station and told me he hoped to be a credit to me, and that he never forgot that he owed his education to me, and he hoped I wouldn’t become worldly.
“Jim, you old silly,” I said to him, “I’m just as worldly as I can be. I simply love the old world.”
“That, Zalie, is not what I mean, and you know it.”
“Don’t lecture me, Jim,” I warned him, “or it will make me more and more frivolous. Just leave me alone and I’ll work out my own salvation.”
But he said he would pray for me. He looked so dignified that I didn’t dare remind him of those little green snakes he used to put in my closet. There’s no doubt about it; Jim is getting ministerial already. Growing up is a queer thing, isn’t it, Carin? Little freckled Jim trying to make a foreign missionary out of me!
To-morrow we shall have a great celebration at Mallowbanks. There are to be some “kin” present, of course, and we are to have a tree and a great dinner and in the evening a sing around the fire. I am to sing for them, alone, at grandmother’s request, and I have been rehearsing. I wish I had a voice like Annie Laurie, rich and full like a robin, or a thrush-like voice such as your mother has. Idon’t think much of my voice, and I wish they wouldn’t ask me to sing. But I’ll do my best, and I have some lovely songs. Aunt Lorena plays my accompaniments.
There, I hear the train coming!
How good it will be to get out of this stuffy little station. The light is so dim I can hardly see. But why should I fret? In two hours I shall be in Mallowbanks, my own home. My own! And I know now, Carin, that it will be a pretty fine thing to go up to my own room and feel that I possess it, and to sit at supper with my own people. Yes, Carin, I realize it more to-night than ever before.
And, dear me, I shan’t get in bed till after midnight, I know, with so many Christmas presents to do up and label and all. I’m tying everything with corn-colored ribbon and it looks very pretty. The little presentation cards have daffodils on them. Don’t you like dainty things like that?
“It is all very silly,” said Preacher Jim to me. “This money should have gone to the poor.”
“Jim,” said I, “it is going to the poor. Foreverybody in the world is poor. Everybody needs help. Some need money, but more need love, and all this silliness is just a girl’s way of showing love.”
“Humph!” said Jim.
Isn’t he funny, Carin? Who would have dreamed he would be so solemn?
I do hope you’ll like what I’ve sent you; and I’m wild to get home and find your package for me.
And Oh, Oh, if there isn’t one, what an Indignant Person I shall be! But there will be, for when have you or your darling parents forgotten me?
A thousand Christmas greetings to you all. There is no joy I do not wish you. Salute your hearthstone for me.
Lovingly,
Azalea.
Mallowbanks, January fifth.
Carin,my own one:
Mallowbanks is entertaining an artist—a painter of portraits. His name is Keefe O’Connor; his residence is New York. He was wired for imperatively by Madam Knox who offered him more for the painting of her portrait than he had previously received for any such commission. Telegrams were exchanged. The artist, it appeared, was much engaged. Madam Knox wished more than ever to secure him. She increased her offer. He came—he is here in “the artist’s suite.” Madam Knox sits to him in gray velvet and pearls. Her hair is as white as the drifted snow; her eyebrows are dark and pointed, her little mouth looks secret and proud, her aristocratic nose is a straight line, her old, beautiful eyes are full of vanity and wisdom, sternnessand kindness, memories and hopes. She is very wrinkled and very beautiful. The portrait painter appears to be in raptures, and he works early and late and is growing hollow-eyed. My own conviction is that he does not eat enough nor sleep very well. Semmy seems to think he has a secret sorrow.
“Miss Zalie,” said she to me—she learned to call me Zalie from the McBirneys—“that theah painter man has somethin’ gnawin’ him, suah.”
The painter man avoids me. When I come near, he goes—as soon as politeness permits. I retire to my room and read his assurances of friendship; I remember my own, and wonder if my imagination is not running away with me. But no—he avoids me. The other day, however, we were left together at the breakfast table and conversation became absolutely necessary. What he said was:
“How changed you are, Miss Azalea.”
“And you don’t like the change, Mr.—Keefe?”
“My liking or disliking it has nothing to do with the case,” he answered gloomily. “I repeat, you are changed.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I have changed a number of times in the course of my life, but so, I suppose, have others.”
“Yes.”
“Should you say I had changed for the worse or the better?”
“It is not a question of better or worse. You wrote me that you were the same old Azalea, but I do not find you so. Why, how meek you used to be!”
“Meek! I never was! I wouldn’t be! Meek!”
“When I think of you teaching those mountain children so lovingly, going around in your little pink sunbonnet, chatting by the hour with Mrs. Medicine Bottle—what was her name?—and look at you as you are now, and hear you talk as you do now—”
“Oh, very well,” I said. “I will withdraw my presence and my voice.”
So I did. I ran up to my room, and I found that pink gingham I used to wear up at Sunset Gap, and the funny little sunbonnet you used to think too becoming for a school-teacher. I put on the pink dress, though it was halfway up to my knees; I let my hair down my backin braids, and pulled the sunbonnet over it. Then I waited till I knew grandmother was sitting for her painter and I got Semmy to go down and knock on the door and call Mr. Painter out for a minute.
In that minute I ran in, kissed madam grandmother and bribed her to get behind a screen, and when our portrait painter returned, I was on the dais looking as demure as a kitten.
He came in looking at a letter Semmy had given him, and said:
“Will you pardon me, ma’am, for one moment?” He glanced through his letter. Then he bowed, and took up his brushes again. That was when he saw me. He gave a sort of a gasp and broke into the good old, beautiful smile we used to see on him up at Sunset Gap.
“Azalea!” he cried.
Then he frowned.
“I do not like to paint a person in masquerade,” he said.
“But this,” I said, “is a return to type.”
He still frowned.
“Perhaps you don’t like the type?”
He did not answer.
“Are we keeping Madam Knox waiting?” he asked.
I dropped a curtsy and found grandmother behind the screen. She too, was looking not particularly well pleased.
I kissed her again and helped her up to her chair.
“Grandmother,” I explained, “was not a party to the deception which has moved you to such violent rage, Mr. O’Connor. She was taken by storm; was overcome by force of arms and a superior enemy. I withdraw. I never did see why anybody wanted to go to the Arctic regions.”
I curtsied again—twice—once to grandmother and once to him. They both looked sulky. I got into my riding habit, called for Sally McLean, the darling little mare they let me use, and went off for the rest of the morning. At noon I found myself at the house of a Ravanel—Delight Ravanel. She is a spinster, quite wrinkled and rather depressed, but she got her Christian name when she gave promise, I suppose, of other things. She asked me to stay to luncheon. I did, and found her a dear. She told me storiesabout who married whom and why. She proved to me that I was some sort of a cousin of hers. It was the middle of the afternoon before I started for home.
A rain had set in and the roads were very muddy, so Sally McLean had a bad time of it. She is such a dainty thing that mud makes her miserable. Besides, she was shivering with cold and nervousness, though I can’t quite see what made her nervous. But Sally has her moods, like the rest of us. I made up my mind, however, that Paprika was the last horse that was ever going to throw me, and so I gentled poor Sally, and made my way along the road in the best spirit I could command. I fell to thinking about little Paprika, and Jim’s Mustard, and how we used to scamper down the long mountain road to school, and about the times when you and Annie Laurie and I used to race down the valley; and then I thought over the excursion Haystack Thompson and Miss Pace and Keefe and you and I made with Paralee Panther away over the nag road to the Panther’s, and how we dug them out of their cave, so to speak. I hear from Paralee quite often, by the way. Sheis teaching now in the Industrial School. Yes, she is really a teacher, just as she said she would be. Of course that is owing to the start you gave her, Carin; but I’m very proud to think how she has got on. She has been independent of all help for two years at least, hasn’t she? Perhaps she has written you about her teacher’s position, but I mention it, thinking she might not have ventured to write. She always stood in some awe of you, you were so beautiful and so far removed from her.
She, reminds me, someway, of those people I did not meet in the little cabin that lay between Mount Tennyson and Mount Hebron—the cabin, I mean, where I went in and helped myself to soup and firewood, and where I left the cake and sugar and things in exchange. I told you Mother McBirney met them afterward and learned their name. Wixon, it was, by the way. Well, just for fun, I sent them some Christmas presents—nothing really sensible and necessary, but something perfectly luxurious—a talking machine with a lot of records of various kinds. Also a year’s subscription to a good magazine which has many illustrations. I thought thesethings might help them to become alive. Oh, it certainly is glorious to have money!
But I am still out in the rain on Sally McLean’s back, in a bad fit of homesickness, am I not? These homesick spells do not come as often as they did and they are not as bad as they were, but still I have them, and while they last I am miserable enough. I could feel my tears trickling down my cold nose, but I was having such work to keep Sally on her feet that I couldn’t wipe them away. I suppose we made a pathetic pair, struggling along in the sodden afternoon in that friendless, forsaken way. (I’m not sure but Sally was crying too. I think I heard her sniffle.)
Then, just as we were in the worst of our dumps, who should appear on the landscape but “a solitary horseman”! He was riding Wellington, a tall, elegant looking horse belonging to Uncle David, and he himself—of course it was Keefe—looked tall and elegant, too, though he had on a raincoat and a little cap which fitted close to his head. He didn’t seem to mind the rain, but rode with his face turned up to it as if he liked it. When he saw me he stopped riding that way andtried to look as commonplace as he could.
“How do you do?” he said as if we were not very well acquainted neighbors meeting by chance on the road.
“Very well, thank you, Rain-in-the-Face.”
“You are angry with me! You have been away all day because you were angry with me.”
“I fled, Rain-in-the-Face, from the Arctic chilliness of Mallowbanks. I have in my time lived among strangers, I have danced and sung to stupid audiences, I have been hungry and wet through with the rain, I have slept on mouldy straw in a wretched tent, but never was I so chilled as to-day.”
“Azalea!”
He seemed shocked.
“Do you mean,” I asked him, angry, Carin, for one of the few times in my life, “that I ought not to mention that I was once a poor little waif, a show girl, a sad-hearted dancer? Yes, I was an ill-cared for, shamed little Infant Phenomenon, and I don’t care who knows it. And then I was poor Ma McBirney’s beloved child, and I took the place to her of her little dead daughter; that warmed and saved me and taught me love and faith, and I don’tcare who knows that, either. Then I was Carin Carson’s friend, and we worked and learned together, and you saw us, and you liked me as I was then. Now I’m Azalea Knox of Mallowbanks, with such relatives and acquaintances as Fate has given me, and I’m grateful and proud of that, too. I take all as it comes, Rain-in-the-Face, and I cannot for the life of me understand what you are sulking about.”
“Am I sulking? I am unhappy. How could you change so? You used not to talk as you do now, nor dress as you do now. You asked me to forgive you your fortune and your place in the world, and I liked it and laughed at it and—and forgave it. Though it was hard. But still I didn’t want to come down here. I fought against it. I had too dear a memory of you, Azalea, to want to come down here in any other way than as your lover, and I knew it would never be fair to come that way—that your relatives would object. So I found one excuse after another for not coming, but your grandmother over-persuaded me. And my heart out-argued me, too. I had to come. I thought: ‘All theworld may change, but she never will. She will be the same.’ But you aren’t—you aren’t!”
“Are you?” I retorted. “Do you imagine for a moment, Rain-in-the-Face, that after three years in New York City, making your way among artists and other clever, charming people, that you are the same boy who went singing over Sunset Gap? You are not, at all. Now you are not afraid to be rude or disagreeable or masterful, but then you would not have been one of those things. You were too kind.”
“So you think me unkind?”
“Horribly.”
“I am sorry.”
“But I’m sorrier.”
“What can I do to make you change your mind?”
“Reform.”
“If I stay here where you are, I shall say something to be regretted.”
“Who will regret it?”
“I. Your uncle and aunt, above all, your grandmother, will look on me as an adventurer. They will even accuse you of—”
“Of what?”
I could see him turn scarlet.
“I can’t say it.”
“You must.”
“Of having asked me down here knowing that—that I was fond of you.”
“Well, what of that? I’m not ashamed of that. I don’t believe that girls have to sit around without making any effort to get what they want in life.”
Carin, you are horrified, aren’t you? Darlin’, it just slipped out. But it was the truth.
“Do you mean—” he cried, putting his horse up beside Sally McLean. But I told you Sally was in a mood. She didn’t like that way of doing things. Perhaps she thought he meant to brush me off of her, or maybe she imagined that it was a race. I can’t say, because Sally and I do not understand each other very well yet. But at any rate, she was off down the road, mud or no mud, and I did not even try to hold her in.
I could hear Keefe thundering along behind me, crying:
“Can’t you hold her? Throw yourself off.”
But not I. I let her go as fast as she wished.At least, until I got near home and on the macadam, and then I gently drew her in. I didn’t know but she might be beyond all reason by that time, but she wasn’t, and I felt terribly ashamed of having let uncle’s fine mare get in such a fume.
“I do hope and pray, Sally,” I said, “that I haven’t ruined your disposition with my wretched temper.”
Just then it came over me that there was nothing at all the matter with Sally’s disposition. The trouble was all with me. I had been in a trembling rage all day and the sensitive creature had taken it from me. I was disgusted with myself.
“Little Sally,” I whispered in her ear as I dropped off her at the house door, “I’ll never, never act like that again.”
She has wonderful eyes. I wish I had eyes like that creature. She looked at me straight and we kissed and made up. That is to say, I made the boy hold her till I got her some sugar, and I told him to rub her down well and blanket her and feed her very lightly.
“She got a little excited,” I said. It was young James, and he looked at me curiously.I wondered if he, too, saw that I was the excited one.
“Yassum,” he said. “No-um. Yassum.” I thought it covered the ground.
I saw Keefe swinging around the drive just then, and I ran straight up to my room.
Oh, Carin, how safe and sweet it seemed there. I called Semmy and had her draw my bath and help me off with my wet things, and I told her to lay out my new flame-colored silk. It is gorgeous in hue but modest in make. “For dull nights,” said Aunt Lorena when she gave it to me. “A country house, my dear, can be particularly gloomy. I trust you to brighten this one up at such times. Perhaps you can do it successfully without the aid of a flame-colored gown, but in case—” Well, I put on the flame-colored dress; likewise the slippers that went with it. No jewels. I have only my little pearls, and the gold beads and the amber ones. The dress would have put any of those out. I did my hair low. I took off my one ring. The dress, I thought, could have the whole road to itself.
I was one minute late to dinner, and grandmother was watching for me.
“Madam grandmother,” I said, “will you do me the honor?” I gave her my arm, and we went out to the dining room. Grandmother, of course, always precedes the others.
I minded my manners and did not speak till I was spoken to.
“Where were you to-day, Azalea?” asked Aunt Lorena. “Not in your room, I know. You should not go out, child, without letting us know where you were going.”
I apologized.
“I went for a little ride, Auntie, and the imps took hold of my bridle and led me farther than I meant. I lunched with Miss Delight Ravanel. You wished, I think, to have me with the Ravanels as much as possible.”
“It was your grandmother who recommended the Ravanels to you particularly, I think.”
“I thank whoever it was. I had a beautiful time. Miss Ravanel is as quaint as an old gift book, and as lonely as—as a rook.”
“Rooks are not lonely,” said Keefe. “They go together in swarms.”
“Lonely rooks are lonely,” I said.
“I hope Miss Ravanel had received the apricot jam I sent her?”
“I have a note from her, aunt, to that effect. She has been meaning to thank you in person. She also—in the note—begs that I may spend the next fortnight with her.”
“Should you like to?” asked Uncle David in great surprise.
“Oh, immensely.”
“My dear Azalea!” cried Aunt Lorena incredulously.
“Why not? You advised me to make new friends. I have. She is my new friend.”
“But Delight Ravanel is old enough to be your mother! And she’s always raging at things and people. How can you possibly endure her for two weeks?”
“She was very pleasant indeed to-day. Perhaps she is grouchy because she is lonely.”
“Azalea,” gasped my grandmother, “what was the word you used? Grouchy? What does that mean, pray? No such word was in use in my day.”
Then I saw myself as I was, a very naughty young person, setting all these lovely folks at odds.
“It means what I am to-night—cross and hateful, dearest grandmother. Please, please forgive me for using it. I ought never to use anything but the nicest words I know in your presence.”
I picked up her little wrinkled hand and squeezed it, and she looked at me as I love to have her, with something of the love in her eyes which she gave in the old days to my unforgotten, wayward father.
“Aunt Lorena,” I said, “she really does want me to visit her. But I’ll make it a weekend instead of two weeks if you think best.”
“We couldn’t spare you for two weeks, Azalea,” said Uncle David kindly. “Make it a week-end, do. For my part, I am glad you like her. Particularly glad. She is a lonely and hurt soul, is poor Delight, who delights nobody.”
At that, Carin, things I had heard came back to me, and I knew she once had loved uncle. It must be a terrible thing to love someone, always, who cares nothing for you. I can’t think of anything worse.
“I already had made up my mind to like her,” I said.
When we went to the drawing-room it was raining so terribly, and the wind was blowing so wildly, that the great room was unbearable.
“Let’s go to the writing room,” said Aunt Lorena.
The writing room is a delightful little place, mostly occupied by a great sofa. There is a wide fireplace, too, and seats coming out from it at right angles. Young James built a great fire for us, and Semmy brought in some marvelous nut candies she had made, and Martha served the coffee there.
“No light but the firelight, please, Lorena,” commanded grandmother.
So we sat there by the light of the fire and listened to the storm. Uncle and auntie were together on one of the cushioned benches beside the fire; grandmother was on the huge lounge, wrapped in her camel’s hair shawl and heaped about with pillows; I sat down on the other bench beside the fire. Keefe looked at me a moment as if undecided what to do. Then he bowed and asked:
“Have I your permission?”
“Oh, yes,” said I as simply as I could. So we sat side by side for the first time in all ourlives, and after a time—after quite a time—I felt his hand touching mine under the folds of my flame-colored dress. It has a scarf to it, that floats from the shoulders. It is quite vol—how do you spell it?—voluminous. That is why we could hold hands.
But I was afraid uncle and auntie were watching us. So I had an idea.
“Oh, dearest dear grandmother,” I said, “this is the night of all the world for a story. Grandmother, youmusttell us a story—if youplease.”
Grandmother gave a little laugh.
“I will do it,” she said. “I will tell you the story of an ancestress of yours.”
I have partly written that story, Carin, and when I have finished it I shall send it to you.
Love—love from
Azalea.