THE WISHING CARPET

RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

By RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

THE WISHING CARPET
PLAY THE GAME
JANE JOURNEYS ON
NARRATIVES IN VERSE
CORDUROY
A WHITE STONE

The
WISHING CARPET

BY
RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL
AUTHOR OF “A WHITE STONE,” “CORDUROY,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: 1926 :: LONDON

COPYRIGHT—1926—BY
D. APPLETON & COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY SISTERS
Barbara and Jane

CONTENTS

The
WISHING CARPET

CHAPTER I
Glenwood Darrow, looking only at the eyes, overlooks the chin, and a rarely beautiful Persian rug is overshadowed by golden oak.

ONCE, when Glen Darrow was six years old, she put a hand on her mother’s thin knee and halted the reading of a fairy tale.

“Mummie,” she whispered, “is that one?”

She was pointing at a small and very beautiful Oriental rug which seemed singularly out of place in the ugly and characterless sitting room. Color, design, and texture were exquisite. A fanciful person, contrasting it with the strident carpet, the atrocious vases and pictures, the glistening golden oak furniture, might have thought it was like a nobleman, briefly taking refuge in the mean hut of a peasant.

“Mummie, dear!” The child was insistent. “Is that a Wishing Carpet?”

Her mother did not answer immediately. Her blue gaze, with its habitual expression of brooding pathos, rested on the rug, and she sighed mistily before she spoke, which was her vaguely irritating custom. She had the effect of pleading with the world to be sorry for her. This seemed, to busy and hard-headed people, a waste of time—she was so patently and amply sorry for herself.

“Yes, darling,” she replied at length, gently and tremulously, “it is a Wishing Carpet in a way, because, for nine long years I’ve been looking at it and wishing for things I knew I could never have!”

“Well, maybe,” Glen Darrow suggested hopefully, “you didn’t stand right on it with your eyes shut tight and your left hand on your heart, like the old witch said?” Then, as Mrs. Darrow shook her head—“Well, when I wish I’ll wish the right way!” She patted her mother’s knee again, consolingly, this time. “And I won’t wish till I have to, and then I’ll wish for something I think is going to happen anyway!”

That was her father in her, the woman reflected rather peevishly. That was Glenwood Darrow all over. No striving after higher things, no yearning.... Well, doubtless she would be better off. The fine-fibered, over-sensitive people of the world were never really happy, as no one knew better than herself.... Effie Darrow’s soft eyes filled and her soft chin quivered.

The doctor had married her eyes without noticing her chin. She had played the small, sobbing organ in the church he boredly attended while he earned a summer vacation by caring for a godly and epileptic youth. The top of the hymn book had cut her face in two. Glenwood Darrow saw only a white brow under fine, fair hair, a mild gaze, blue and beautiful, celestially sweet. The chin and the ineffectual mouth with its permanent sag at the corners were not discovered until too late.

Young Glen’s eyes were like her mother’s in size and coloring, but there was a drastic difference in their expression: they were not in the least wistful or appealing. Features, however, were not going to matter very much with Glen Darrow, because of the hair which framed her face in a veritable flame of shimmering, blazing red, bequeathed by some ancestor who was not even a legend on either side of the house.

People stopped and stared at it: sometimes the child could feel them touching it with a tentative finger, as if to see if it really radiated heat.

“All right. Never mind!” she said now, closing the issue of the Wishing Carpet. “Go on, Mummie!”

The woman read steadily in her pretty and plaintive voice, but she was not aware of the adventures of the prince and the princess and the wicked witch, because her thoughts were making a melancholy pilgrimage, walking backward....

When Dr. Darrow had brought her from her prairie town to Chicago she was startled to find that he had already furnished the flat, office and living quarters, in his own exuberant taste. She winced visibly when her eyes fell upon the magenta and mustard colored roses in the carpet, and lifted to the idealized Brussels sprouts on the wall paper, but she had darted toward the Persian rug with a little cry of pure pleasure.

“Oh, Glenwood! How lovely!” Here, at last, was something she could whole-heartedly praise, and she knelt and worshiped it. “I heard a missionary lecture on Oriental rugs, once, and then I got a book and studied, and I know enough to realize that this is really fine!” Her soft little hand was held up to him. “Oh, dearest, I think you were wonderful to choose it for me!”

Her bridegroom was ruefully honest. “Didn’t choose it. It’s a G. P.”

“What’s that?”

“‘Grateful Patient.’ Old Mrs. Ludermann, only rich family on my books. Most of this junk”—he waved a complacent hand—“is wedding presents.”

He had many patients who were grateful, it appeared, but only one with taste. There were appalling ornaments and pictures, among them, inevitably, a feverishly tinted copy of “The Dying Child.” Darrow had stirred the edge of the rug with the toe of his boot. “Well, Effie, I’m glad something makes a hit with you! Fact is, I sort of figured we’d take it back to Field’s and get credit for it. Old Lady Ludermann’d never know the difference, and it’s out a’ place with the rest of our stuff.”

But the bride had cried out in passionate protest. “No, Glenwood, no! Please let me keep it! I think—I feel everything else is out of place with this!”

“Suit yourself.” He had yielded, good-temperedly enough, but he was a little hurt under his crust of gruffness. “It stays. Unless”—he grinned—“unless it takes one good look around and starts crawling back to Persia!”

During the early years of her marriage Effie Darrow had held the lovely rug as a symbol, a goal, but without success. Her husband was a good doctor, and a bad business man. He loved his work, and it bothered him very little when people paid him slowly, in dribblets which never seemed to count, or not at all, but the comfortable, shabby, easy-going poverty which ensued crushed his wife completely.

After the birth of their only child—and Darrow had wanted six, and four of them boys—she began definitely to droop.

A palely pretty creature, Glenwood Darrow continued to love her faithfully, though he had stopped being in love with her rather early in the second year. It is probable that he came to regard her more as a patient than a wife,—a patient who never paid.

At any rate, when two of his colleagues met in consultation, decreed that she must be moved to a milder climate, he submitted without complaint or audible regret.

Effie rallied immediately. With every mile of the journey southward a faint pink warmed in her cheeks and lips. It was not merely the thought of a more indulgent thermometer: it was escape into a new life, a new world. Not even the thought of the hideous carpets and the glistening golden oak, following her slowly but inexorably by freight, could crush her: she and her daughter were on the Wishing Carpet, which was bearing them away to enchanted isles.

She had always been the type of Northerner who applauds violently when the band plays “Dixie,” and now she visualized herself in softly ruffled and gauzy frocks, rocking on a white pillared porch while her child disported herself beneath the magnolia trees, and the dusky, adoring servitors sang at their toil. There were other women in the vision, delicate, high-bred creatures who dropped their r’s and spoke in a sweet, languorous drawl—who understood her, and made her one of them. The doctor did not appear in the picture very prominently. He would be in his office or away on his calls, but even Glenwood Darrow, she dared to hope, would mellow in that rich and golden atmosphere.

It was her slow, reluctant relinquishment of the fiction, her bitter and rebellious acceptance of the fact, which put the seal of permanence on her invalidism. She was better in body for a year or two, but the will-to-live went out of her, never to return.

Dr. Darrow disliked the South and refused to adjust himself to it. He was a rushing, bustling sort of person who enjoyed movement for its own sake, and he went charging about among the slow-stepping, slow-speaking Southerners and found himself with wide margins of time left over, and grew caustic and choleric. He went out of his way to mention that his father and two of his uncles had shared Sherman’s march to the sea, and took pains to contrast the speed and efficiency of Chicago with the meandering methods of the lovely, drowsy old Southern city.

It was both natural and just that they should resent his attitude, but it was hard that Effie, who, like Agag, had come unto them delicately, ready to rise at the first strains of “Dixie,” ready even to drop her r’s as soon as she could get the knack of it, should be so inflexibly ignored.

They were never actively unkind to her: they were simply—and utterly—unaware of her. She felt, to the day of her death, snatching at every chance to blame her heedless husband, that his choice of a house had a great deal to do with her failure. He bought it while they were staying at a hotel, without consulting her.

“Wanted to surprise you!” he beamed, but sensing very soon how thoroughly and disastrously he had done so.

“Oh, Glenwood, dear,”—Effie always employed endearments in italics when she found fault—“why didn’t you select a nicer neighborhood?”

“S’matter with the neighborhood? Darn’ good location, lemme tell you—just halfway between the residence section and town!”

“That’s just it!” she wailed, hooding her blue gaze under grieving white lids. “Halfway—always halfway....”

He stared for an instant and then cleared his throat. “Now, look here, Effie, you want to get this front family bee out of your bonnet,” he said gruffly. “I’ll never get a sniff of the top-layer practice! Why, there’s doctors doddering around this berg that tapped a drum in the Lost Cause, and their sons are carrying on their practice, and grandsons on the mark, ready to go! It’s a close corporation; no outsider’d ever get a smell! And that suits me,” he finished robustly. “Plain man myself, likes to deal with plain people. I’ll get all I need with the tradespeople and the mill workers and the mountaineers. That’s our kind, Effie! Let small boats keep near the shore!”

The fine old residence section was on softly rolling ridges back of the city and above it: the cotton mills were down on the level. One spoke of The Hill, and the mills, and between the two, inevitably, was a great gulf fixed. Dwellers on The Hill looked down on the rest of the community, literally and figuratively, which was their quite natural and pleasant prerogative, and had never annoyed anybody except the Darrows, while mill hands and villagers looked up to The Hill, again in the double sense and without rancor.

The Darrows’ characterless house was on a dull street which ran from the business section to the heights: beneath the one in birth and breeding and background (Effie was keen enough to know that money mattered little) and above the other....

Often, during the first weeks, she took her child by the hand and walked up to the seats of the mighty at her frail and hesitating gait. The heat was modified by a piney and pungent breeze; they did not even seek the shady side of the street. Fine old houses sat well back from their gracious gateways; vague white and faintly tinted figures moved among the trees and shrubbery; soft voices, light laughter, drifted out to her. Sometimes a gorgeous cardinal would sit on a blossoming bough and make joyous, liquid inquiry:

“What cheer? What cheer? What cheer?”

The woman was almost overborne by her yearning to go up the shaded walks, to cross the ancient lawns, to mount the shallow steps, to enter into and become a component part of the story-book life, but for all their gates swung wide and vines wrapped confidently about rusted hinges she could sense the barriers.

All hope was abandoned, presently, for herself, but surely the little Glen, transplanted so young, must be allowed to take root, to climb and cling, to bud and blossom in this rich soil! Childish friendships were her liveliest hope, and she talked down the doctor’s democracy and sent the child to a private school which had functioned since Civil War days. Nancy Carey, a beautiful, mildly amiable child who had nodded and smiled at Glen, attended Miss Josephine’s little seminary, and Effie built feverishly upon her favor. The Careys owned a cotton mill, and their shabby, stately ante-bellum mansion was her favorite of all the dwellings on The Hill.

“Darling,” Effie urged her daughter, “you must be very nice to that little girl!”

“Why?” She was a downright child, with a measuring glance very like her father’s, for all her startling beauty.

“Because—why, because she’s such a very nice little girl, dearie, and Mama hopes you’ll be little chums. You might walk home with her after school, because the exercise is so good for you, and remember what your father says about holding your shoulders back and taking deep breaths. And if Nancy should ask you to come in for a little while, why, Mama wouldn’t mind!”

Mrs. Darrow’s valentine party for her daughter’s little schoolmates was a gallant but ghastly effort, seared into the child’s memory for all time. She always remembered her mother, hectic red spots on her cheekbones, breathing fast, cutting out fat red hearts and stringing them about the ugly room, making tiny heart-shaped cakes, slackly assisted by the yellow slattern Emma-leen. She had taken the place of the dusky servitor (adoring) who sang and toiled simultaneously in the long-dead northern vision. Emma-leen sang even less than she toiled, and clearly scorned her timid mistress.

The day was mild and fine. Birds perched on greening branches and butterflies balanced delicately on flowering shrubs: doors and windows were wide and there was the feel of spring in the house. They were ready early—Glen in a white dotted swiss with a blue sash and a blue bow in her flaming hair.

Nobody came.

Mrs. Darrow had felt it cannier not to send written invitations. The little girls were merely to trip home and say—“Glen Darrow wants me to come to a party this afternoon!”—and the little girls had doubtless carried out their part of the program perfectly. It was the mothers who had missed their cues.

Lying long awake that night beside her placidly puffing spouse, Effie tortured herself with imagined dialogues——

“Why, honey-lamb, yo’ don’t know that child!— Well, suppose she does go to Miss Josephine’s—I don’t know her and I don’t know her mother and I don’t even know where she lives! No, yo’ just tell little what’s-her-name yo’ thank her just the same, but yo’ motha had otha plans fo’ yo’.”

Not even Nancy Carey! She came as far as the front gate under convoy of a stiffly starched young negress, and called up regretfully:

“Oh, Glen! I’m right sorry, but I can’t come! I have to go visiting with my Auntie Lou-May!”

At four o’clock one guest was among those present, Janice Jennings, a Northern child sojourning at the Bella Vista with a gay grandmother while her parents were being divorced.

“Grammer said I could come for a while but I can’t eat any refreshments,” she announced with sincere regret. “My stummick is upset. She sent for your popper and he said I dassent eat any sweet stuff for a week. Lookit!” She produced, as evidence, an unpleasant tongue.

Pert, sharp with the brittle wisdom of a hotel child, she inspected games and food and favors, contrasting them frankly with more opulent affairs in her native Pittsburg, and when it seemed certain that no one else was coming she retrieved her hat and wrap.

“No fun playing games with just us two,” she said, candidly, “and as long as I can’t eat I’d rather sit on the hotel porch and listen to the ladies talking. They tell about who’s trying to get married, and who’s getting divorced, like my mother and father, and about babies coming, and if I keep awful still they don’t tell me to run away and play like a good girl.”

On departure, shaking hands primly and assuring them that she’d had a perfectly lovely time, shrill mirth laid hold on her.

“Oh, golly,” she giggled, “you know what it makes me think of?

‘Smarty had a party,

And nobody came,

And Smarty ate all the jelly-cake

And nearly died with the stummick ache!’

Of course, it’s really ‘belly,’ to rhyme with ‘jelly,’” she explained engagingly, “but my grammer makes me say ‘stummick’.”

Directly she was out of sight, Effie Darrow had hysterics, entirely against her better judgment, for she well know that Emma-leen would gleefully carry the tale to other kitchens, but she was beyond caring for the moment.

Glenwood Darrow, walking in on the scene, became the target of her revilings.

“If you’d settled in a decent neighborhood! If we had a decent house! If you tried—even tried—to get decent people for patients!” The reproaches came forth in little yelps of woe. “If you ever did anything—not for me—I expect nothing, but for your poor child——”

The doctor picked her up roughly but capably, carried her upstairs and put her to bed with a sleeping potion, and took his red-eyed, hot-cheeked daughter for a ten-mile drive into the hills.

That trip, and her father’s words to her, stayed always in her memory beside her mother’s tragic festivity.

“Now, you listen here to me,” he said sternly. “Don’t you ever think you’re not good enough for those little washed-out blue bloods that wouldn’t come to your party! You’re too good, d’you hear? Too good! And I want you to let ’em see that you know you are, understand? My God, I don’t know what they ever did, these people down here, to feel so dressy about, except get beaten to a pulp! Your mother’s got her head full of sentimental slush—well, she’s a sick woman, but you’re a strong, hearty, sensible young one, and I want you to get this thing straight!” Brutally, competently, he bound up the bleeding wounds of her little pride, cauterizing them first with his own bitter, bracing philosophy of life.

She was able to face her small, giggling world next day with dry eyes and an upheld chin, even—when the hotel child repeated her ditty of the day before—with an outthrust tongue.

The thing, therefore, trivial in itself, had definite consequences. Young Glen Darrow stopped being her mother’s dear little girl and became her father’s boyish daughter. She no longer sought to be very nice to nice little girls in order that they might be nice to her; she strove, instead, and with marked success, to show all little girls that she did not like or heed or want them.

The vivid hair, flaming about her small truculent face, was a red flag of defiance to all other children.

CHAPTER II
Mrs. Darrow seeks further for gentility, and her daughter has her hair pulled and doesn’t mind it.

EFFIE DARROW died when Glen was twelve years old, quite suddenly and excitingly after long and uneventful years of invalidism.

She became, so patently that even the child could sense, if she could not understand it, a person of importance once more in the eyes of her husband. For seven tense and high-keyed days and nights she interested him intensely, though he had never expected her to interest him again. If he could not summon a handsome grief at will, at least he could and did produce an earnest solicitude which satisfied her amply as long as she was conscious.

His eyes blurred for an instant when he heard the dismal dropping of clay upon the coffin, but they brightened again at the thought that his child was now his indeed.

Driving back from the cemetery in a soft, warm rain, he fired his first gun. “Glen, how’d you like to leave Miss Josephine’s and go to public school?”

“I don’t care,” the girl answered, heavy-eyed.

“All right, then—tell her you’re quitting. Suits me fine. Never did like that namby-pamby, cambric tea outfit up there!” He scowled savagely. “Go where you’re good as any and better than most—and they know it,—that’s my idea!”

“I don’t care,” said the child again, her voice sodden with grief.

She started in at public school the following Monday morning, but she did not react to it with especial pleasure, so far as her disappointed father could see. She grew normally cheerful again, however. It was a fact that once her sound young nerves had recovered from the shock of death and burial, life in the ugly house went on more briskly and comfortably without Effie’s pathetic presence. Yellow Emma-leen stayed on, having an even freer hand, carrying a brazen basket home every night, and the doctor and his daughter were well fed, if slackly swept and dusted.

Glen spent all her free time with her father, driving him capably over the deeply rutted country roads, waiting for him in the mud-splashed buggy while he made his calls, her head bent over her lessons. He liked having her with him, but he fretted because she made no young intimacies.

Her one real friend was a curious choice—a fragile spinster who taught English and History, Miss Ada Tenafee, impoverished connection of the ancient and honorable Tenafee clan, in whose thinly fleshed veins the blue blood ran fiercely. The singularly vivid child made an instant appeal to “Miz-zada,” as her hectoring pupils called her, while Glen felt for her something of the chivalrous pity she had given her mother. Her devotion deepened with perspective: Effie’s foolish, futile ways grew dim and dimmer in her memory.

It was the opposite with her father. “Whyn’t you bring young ones home to supper?” he would demand. “Whyn’t you go play with ’em?” He was secretly dashed. Was his system failing as utterly as his wife’s had done? Then it was her fault—because she had spoiled the child in her formative years. He criticized and resented Effie more in her grave than ever when she was moving about his house at her hesitating gait, soft eyes and soft chin tremulous.

Once, tripping over the Persian rug, his temper flared. “Oh, damn that thing anyway! Always did detest it! Get rid of it! Give it to the darky!”

Glen, looking up from her Ancient History, stared at him. She could not know that his sore heart harked back to a honeymoon day, with a blue-eyed bride kneeling and worshiping, setting up her delicate standards to belittle his, but she did remember the incident of the fairy tale.

“For nine long years I’ve been looking at it and wishing for things I knew I could never have!”

The girl left her chair, walked to the rug and smoothed it into place again, looking gravely down at its old rose and mauve, its fawns and deep blues. “No, I won’t ever give it away,” she said, very quietly. “She liked it, and I like it.”

Then the doctor stamped out of the room, swearing, banging the door behind him, ashamed of himself, and furious for being ashamed, and his child looked after him consideringly.

His practice narrowed down to the mill hands and the mountaineers. It was the work which interested him most, and he put heart into it as well as head. They needed him; they were grateful, after their fashion, and though he raged at them for failing to follow his instructions for sanitation and hygiene, he continued to tend them faithfully. The mill workers were a sallow and bloodless lot, in the main, spiritless and indifferent, but the mountaineers gave him the keenest possible pleasure.

“Best stock in the country,” he stated often to Glen. “Just give ’em roads and schooling, and watch ’em come on!”

He took a shameless delight in their blood feuds; it was exactly his own idea of settling disputes, for he grew more testy and truculent with the years. Evenings, when he was not called out, Glen read aloud to him from radical books and certain weeklies of daring and rather destructive opinions, and he got a satisfactory reaction for his vicarious rebellions. Actually, his radicalism was less than skin deep; he was, at heart, rather well content with his government’s behavior, and swarthy soap-box orators (there had been an influx of South European labor to the mills) roused him to heated combat, though the speakers might be voicing, more violently, the very same views as the weeklies.

But to the girl, her bright head bent over the pages, the burning words she read to him became the law and the gospel. The lonesomeness of a snubbed childhood and a proudly detached girlhood fed by these doctrines, grew into a curious creed which was one part Effie Darrow’s blighted dreams and two parts Glenwood Darrow’s determined scorn for things unattainable.

To the neighbors and the townspeople she was an accustomed sight—the doctor’s daughter, that red-headed Darrow girl who carried a chip on her shoulder and flocked alone, but strangers always stared at her as they had done since her babyhood.

At fourteen she was a startling figure, tall, thin with a healthy and proper young thinness, square-chinned, steady-eyed. Her skin was remarkable. It had set out to be the delicate, very thin sort which goes, ordinarily, with red hair—the blue-whiteness of thriftily skimmed milk, prone to burn and peel and freckle unpleasantly, but her early removal to the warmer climate had darkened and thickened it. It was now a sort of golden olive which deeped at certain times and in certain lights to a positive amber. There was no further color in her cheeks and her mouth was red, straight, and unsmiling, but it was her hair which caught and held the eye.

Once, on a Saturday, she drove her father higher into the hills than they had ever gone before to see a very old woman who had sent for him. She was a witch-like crone, clay colored, shriveled and twisted, and her hot little eyes burned still with a horde of mountain loves and hates.

“Hit’s not that I were ailing,” she explained to the doctor. “I’m right peart, and aiming to live two, three year yet, but I have kindly heard of you from all my tribe and kinnery, and I was wishful to name hit to you consarning my boy Luke.”

Darrow sat down beside her, companionably. “Well, what about your son?”

“Hit’s not my son,” she cackled mirthfully, “nor neither yet, my son’s son! Hit’s my son’s son’s son! His maw died a-borning him, and I have kindly raised him up myself. But now hit purely stands to reason I must leave him, hit’s ontelling when, and I do shorely hone to have him fotched on, for he is one young-un with a headpiece!”

Good roads and schooling would come too late for Ailsa Manders, but she had glimpsed the vision for lack of which her people were perishing. The doctor knew the Manders; a hard and reckless lot; killers. The old woman had the look of a ruthless tribal priestess. She caught sight of Glen and beckoned to her to come nearer.

“Howdy, Sis? Red h’ar is my delight!” She ran her gnarled fingers through it, making little mouthing sounds of pleasure. “Hit purely warms a bordy! Air you wedded yet?”

“Lord, no,” the doctor exploded. “She’s a youngster in school—will be, for years!”

The old creature wagged a disapproving head. “When I were her size I had two—one on the floor and one at suck! I had fo’teen, which is a right fam’ly, but a pusson is obliged to start early, and wimmin now days——”

“But how about this boy, Luke?” he brought her back to her main theme.

The lad had learned to read and write and figure—he was smart as a steel trap at figures—at the evening school down on the Branch, but his ancient kinswoman wanted real learning for him, a chance to work for his board in a town family, advanced schooling.

“But, sir, I’m pine-blank skeered he won’t go! Wild as a hawk, he is! Hit’s even ontelling if he’ll see you!” She lifted a gourd horn and blew a surprisingly lusty blast.

After a perceptible pause, long enough to indicate indifference, brief enough to preclude all possibility of fear, a tall youth lounged into the room. There were no windows in the tiny shack, but between the two doors, front and back, was a shaft of golden sunlight, a concentrated radiance in which the boy stood. He was gypsy-dark, richly tinted, bold-fearless, and free, and the modeling of his arms and legs, his lean young torso, was magnificent.

“Well, my lad,” the physician’s eye roved delightedly over the perfection of the splendid young animal, “so you want to come to town and get an education?”

“No!” snarled Luke Manders, shooting a malevolent glance at his great-grandmother.

“Why, I thought——”

“I aim to stay here, where my paw stayed, and live the way he lived! Hit’s my way!” His brown grip tightened on the barrel of the rifle he was carrying.

“But, honey-lamb-chile,” the old woman quavered, “hit’ll pine-blank break my heart to have you stay here and do so fashion!” Her gaze rested on the weapon. “Live and die in battle and bloodshed! You air the smartest of ary Manders heard tell of, and if you was to be fotched on—” She was trembling with eagerness.

Dr. Darrow patted her arm. “Now, don’t you worry, Granny Manders, he’ll come, all right! He’s just a little shy and timid, but——”

The boy wheeled to face him. Who was afraid?—Afraid of the chicken-livered mill hands? He was Luke Manders and his father’d been Luke Manders before him, and his Grandpappy Luke Manders before that! Ask anybody in these mountains if ever a Manders was scared of anything or anybody that walked the earth!

A furious outpouring, vigorous, incoherent, picturesque and profane. Boyish bombast, but something more than that: a seething hatred incompatible with fresh youth.

Glen Darrow, looking and listening with breathless interest, saw with amazement that her father was keeping his temper—the temper which boiled up and over so promptly for less cause than this.

“Well, by George, boy,” he stated with amusement and approval, “I believe your grandma’s right about you! I believe you’ll go pretty far, once you get something under your skull beside fancy cuss words, and learn to do something smarter than aim a pop gun behind berry bushes!”

The pacific speech further enraged the young savage. “I don’t want to know anything but what my pap knew!” he shouted. “I don’t aim to do anything but what my pap did!”

“All right, son, all right! All right!” The choleric doctor was entirely good-humored, immensely entertained. “You just run and play Injun till you’re fed up on it, and then you come to me!”

Luke Manders flung himself out of the cabin, cursing and snarling, and the old crone began to weep the slow and difficult tears of age, bright drops trickling grudgingly from her hot little eyes.

“Don’t you fret yourself, Granny Manders!” Dr. Darrow took her leathery old claws in a warm and reassuring grip. “That’s a great boy, and he’ll come out all right—you mark my words!”

The great-gandmother hung her head. “I am purely shamed of my kin, for unmannerly orneryness! Shamed to my marrow bones.”

“Kid stuff, that’s all! Never you mind,” he insisted cordially. “Just crazy, hot-headed kid stuff! Showing off! I glory in his spunk!”

“I am beholden to you, sir,” the old woman said brokenly. “Hit is shorely mighty kind and mannerly. Good-by, Sis, and you coax your pappy to fotch you again! Red h’ar is purely my delight!” She reverted to her mortification. “That ary kin of mine should act so pizen mean——”

“Now, now, don’t you bother your head about that! Come along, Glen!” Chuckling, he waved his daughter toward the door. “I glory in his spunk! I do, for a fact, glory in his spunk!”

They went out of the frowsy little cabin, into the frowsy dooryard, but before they had traversed the brief distance to their waiting vehicle the young savage had plunged out of a thicket and come after them.

Swooping down upon Glen, he caught up a handful of her glowing mane, halting her sharply and painfully.

“Hi, Sis,” he drawled, “run duck your head in the Branch! Didn’t you know your h’ar was a-fire?”

CHAPTER III
Miss Ada Tenafee is faithful to ancestor worship, while the Darrows weave a golden legend about a golden lad.

THE continuing marvel was that even then the doctor was not angry. Glen jerked herself free with a force which brought tears to her eyes, and laid a hand on her father’s arm, fearful of the wrath about to descend upon the wild young mountaineer.

“Dad—it’s all right—I don’t mind——”

But Glenwood Darrow was still chuckling, seeming to regard this heavy yokel pleasantry as high comedy.

“By George, that’s a great kid!” he ejaculated, clambering into his sagging buggy. “The old witch was right—wild as a hawk, but what a magnificent young brute he is!”

He saw that his daughter’s hands, gathering up the reins, were not quite steady, and that there was rare color in her golden-olive cheeks. “Lord, Glen,” he gave her knee a reassuring pat, “you don’t want to mind that! Not a bit of harm! He just——”

“I don’t mind,” said the girl, stressing the pronoun, marveling at him still.

“Best blood in the country, as I’ve told you before,” he went on. “Good, solid, Scotch and English stock. Good, clean blood—hot blood, I’ll admit, but it’s an honest red, not a washed-blue like your mother’s idols on The Hill!” He always snapped when he spoke of his dead wife. “Golly, if you could set that boy on the right road, you’d feel you’d done something, by George! There’s something to that lad, lemme tell you, besides a necktie and a shine! Why, he could take one of those young whipper-snappers and wring his neck like a chicken’s, with one hand tied behind him!”

“Yes!” Glen kindled to the picture.

Her father screwed himself round in the seat to look at her. “Yes, and I’d rather see you married to one of his sort, when the time comes, than one of those idle-born, overfed, underworked blue bloods!” he exploded.

His daughter nodded in calm agreement, quite without self-consciousness. “Yes,” she said again.

Darrow stared at her. His slow-footed, plodding imagination had suddenly sprouted wings on its heels. There had been something in the spectacle of those two gorgeous young creatures—the dark and splendid boy, his copper-maned, glowing girl—that instant when his brown fingers were twisted in her blazing hair, her head flung back, the fine fearlessness of her! Two beautiful bold young things! Why wasn’t it a possibility, by George, if he took the lad under his wing? When Glen was grown, of course—ten years from now—and the hill savage tamed—but not too much!

He was silent, dramatizing the situation to himself, and the girl did not speak. How much was she impressed? He wondered.

“And the old woman was great, too,” said the doctor, out of a long meditation. “Like an old tribal priestess! They tell me, for a fact, she’s a hundred and three! Can’t write her name, never seen a town or a railroad train, but she wants her ‘son’s son’s son fotched on!’ Well, we’ll look out for him, won’t we?”

“I guess he can look out for himself,” said Glen, soberly. “I expect he’d kill any one who looked crosswise at him.”

“Oh, he’ll key down when he gets away from that feud stuff! It’s out of date, now, even in the mountains. The Manders family is the last to carry on, I understand. He’s got a head on him, that boy; he’ll learn—learn fast!”

She had never seen him so alertly interested. It became an obsession with him in the weeks which followed; they took toilsome trips far out of their way to find Luke Manders, and they made little progress in confidence or friendship, but this merely added a fillip to their determination. It became a sort of golden legend with them, gilding their dull days. “Well, Glen, I saw him!”

“Oh, did you, Dad?” (One of the rare times when she had not been with him.) “What did he say?”

“I don’t use such language in the presence of ladies,” her father grinned enjoyingly. “Oh, yes—he yelled back at me—‘Where’s the red-head?’ His poor old granny’s pretty discouraged, but I tell her she needn’t be. Wild things are slow to tame.”

Glen told Miss Ada Tenafee about him, but the delicate teacher who kindled pinkly to romance and adventure on the printed page shook her head disparagingly. “I’m sure it’s very kind of your father, but I believe he’ll have his trouble for his pains, dear. I have heard my own dear father say and my Cousin Amos Tenafee as well, that the mountaineers were a lawless lot.” Miss Ada had two oracles, her father, who had been the mildly black sheep of a fine old family, and Amos Tenafee, the silver-headed, gallant old chief of the Tenafee clan. Hector Tenafee had married beneath the Tenafees, perhaps, but decidedly above himself—a pretty, amiable, capable girl whose father ran the livery stable which furnished him with mounts, and who had died when his daughter was a little child. When Glen Darrow was old enough to weigh and balance and catch shadings of feeling she realized that Miss Ada was entirely resigned to her mother’s early demise; it was, she clearly considered, the act of a wise Providence ... the best possible thing for an impossible connection to do was to quietly slip away.... It was interesting to see how wholly Tenafee, how not at all Simpson, Miss Ada considered herself. She said, “My father,” or “my own dear father,” if other sires or personages were under discussion, with a lifted chin, an intake of breath, a gleam in her pale eye, but she said, when absolutely necessary, “My little mother,” or “My poor little mother who left me when I was a tiny child.” Once she described her—“My little mother, who was a sweetly pretty young creature, innately refined.” Pride of blood burned brightly in the faded spinster; she was the flower of chivalry, withered and pale, a flower pressed carefully in a precious old book. It was a great pity that she was obliged to teach in the public schools at forty-four, after her father’s death which came as a climax to a lingering, querulous illness, but Miss Josephine’s select school was full and running over with high-born and reduced maiden ladies whose fathers had not married beneath them, so she became “Miz-zada” to the proletariat, living in a small housekeeping room which was situated as far as possible from the stable now conducted by her Simpson uncles.

On holidays, New Year’s Day in particular, Miss Ada put on her gray silk and the jet jewelry and the lace which had been her father’s mother’s, and drove in a hired hack (not a Simpson vehicle, however) in the earlier days and presently in an infirm motor car, to the house of her second cousin, Mr. Amos Tenafee, there for a period of not less than two hours or more than three to disport herself among her kinfolk. She was warmly and affectionately received by her Cousin Amos and his wife (dear Cousin Minnie, who had been one of the Charleston Harringtons) and the rest of the family connection, and presented to strangers with a great deal of impressiveness.

“You know our cousin, I think?” the tribal head would say, a courtly hand at the back of her waist, bringing her gently forward. “Our Cousin Ada?—Hector’s girl? Is it possible? I am amazed, sir! Ada, my dear, may I present Mr. LeRoy Harrison from Atlanta? His queenly mother, you will recall, did us the honor to receive with us two years ago to-day. A great loss, sir, a great loss ... one which we shared with you, my dear wife and I.” Then, as Miz-zada moved delicately away, she would hear always the gentle boom of his voice behind her—“A fine woman, sir, a fine, high-spirited woman ... all Tenafee.”

The excellent eggnog of which she partook with relish made her glow within and without; the sharp modeling of her pinched little face would soften with color; old Amos Tenafee, blinking at her, would step resolutely toward his duty, sweeping her under the mistletoe and kissing her generously. “An old man’s privilege, gentlemen!” he would assert defiantly to the young blades grouped about, although there were never any contenders—“An old man’s privilege!”

Just as the little cakes and sandwiches with the potation filled her with such a sense of luxurious repletion that she got herself no supper on the gas shelf and wakened faint and weak at five in the morning, so did the meeting and mingling, the high converse with her exalted clan nourish her spirit; it would be weeks before the crudities of her immediate environment brought a sense of hollowness again.

Her eyes were always faintly red rimmed, but there was, notwithstanding, a clear and rain-washed looked about her—the chastened brightness of one who has risen betimes and got her weeping out of the way early. There was subtle comedy about her, perhaps, for the discerning, but there was nothing giddy, nothing grotesque, and the young Glen found herself growing steadily fonder of her. She asked her to supper once, pursuant to her father’s wish that she should make friends, but the affair was hardly a success.

“Whyn’t she play round with young ones of her own age?” Dr. Darrow asked himself wrathfully. “Why in time does she want to train with that old hen?” He was crusty, grudgingly hospitable, and Miz-zada, who had her own delicacies about going to widowers’ houses, never went again.

He piled her plate high with food and criticized her slender appetite rudely. She had always been, she stated, a small eater.

“You look it!” he rejoined briefly. “Live alone—cook for yourself? Thought so! Egg’n-cuppa-tea—malnutrition! I know your kind like a book.”

His attitude toward her put her into the same class with Effie; Glen began at once to protect her. It was rather a blow to have Miss Ada refuse to see the romance and drama in young Luke Manders, but she would, the girl privately thought, as soon as she saw him. It would be easy, then, to persuade her to teach him.

But the splendid young savage, it appeared, was not going to need a teacher for the excellent reason that he would not be there. He refused, persistently and profanely, to leave his gun, his trails, his lawless habitat, and when Dr. Darrow came glumly home to supper one night and reported hearing that Granny Manders was dead, Glen shared with him the conviction of failure. The great-grandmother had been his only urge toward civilization: now that she had folded her leathery little old claws for the last time, he could relapse, unhindered, into the wild ways of his forbears.

Glen stared at her lessons that evening without turning pages. She had small concern with their pallid problems—with how many miles A could walk in an hour, and B in three hours, if C could walk two and one-half miles. Lady Jane Grey’s delicate head dropped from the block without especial emphasis. Her whole preoccupation was with young Luke Manders.

So their golden legend was over! The old crone’s “son’s son’s son” would never be “fotched on” now. All that splendid strength and the fine young possibilities would narrow down to a shot from ambush, himself or his hereditary foe. If he held the family luck, he would bring down the ancient enemy of his house, skulking and hiding thereafter from a languid law; if it went against him, then he would topple forward one sunny day, one silver night, coincidentally with a harmless little popping sound, and lie face downward somewhere on the brown earth, high in his hills, a dark stain widening beneath him.

They stopped talking about him. “That’s finished,” said the doctor gruffly, but Glen could see that disappointment gnawed deep.

Miss Ada was frankly relieved.

“I can understand your father’s kind and philanthropic interest in the lad, dear, but, believe me, it would have been a fruitless effort. He would have had his trouble for his pains. I have heard my own dear father say, under similar circumstances, employing a rather common but very forceful expression, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!”

But seven days after Granny Mander’s death, Dr. Darrow’s doorbell rang at midnight. Stumbling sleepily into slippers and robe he went downstairs, swearing heartily, for it was wild weather, wind and rain, and he’d had less than an hour’s rest after his last drenching excursion.

Glen, following to the head of the stairs, with dutiful daughterly concern for his putting on dry things, saw him draw the bolt, making truculent inquiry as to who was there.

Then the fury of the gale wrenched the door from his grasp and flung it wide with a crashing bang, and—as if precipitated by the mad energy of the storm—Luke Manders pitched over the threshold and stretched his length on the shabby linoleum of the entrance hall.

CHAPTER IV
Granny Mander’s curse is potent: the hawk comes down to feed in the barnyard.

“BY gad, Glen,” the doctor shouted, “it’s our boy! And he’s hurt!” He dropped to his knees and gently turned Luke Manders over so that he rested upon his back. “Gimme some light!”

Glen, who had been forcing the door shut in the face of the storm, ran to pull the light from the tiny bead which served at night to its full force. “Oh, Dad,” she wailed, looking down at the inert figure, sensing that her dismal fiction was visualized in fact before her, “he’s dead!”

“Dead, nothing!” her father snapped. “Go get my bag!” He was beginning to unfasten the sodden rain and blood-soaked clothing. “But he’s hurt, all right; hurt bad. ’S’matter with you? Don’t stand there gawping at me! Get my bag!” He scowled up at her horror-stricken face and swore under his breath as she stumbled away. This was the way the soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie would have acted: was the girl, for all his toughening processes, more her mother’s daughter than his?

She redeemed herself in the raw hour which followed. Her father saw, presently, that there had been nothing craven in her shrinking. It had been pure grief for the end of their golden legend, their golden lad.

“Ought to get him on the table,” the doctor fretted, “but—” he regarded the gaunt length of the young mountaineer.

“I can help you carry him, Dad!” the girl interrupted eagerly. “You take the hurt part of him and I’ll carry his feet! Wait—I’ll fix the table!” She flew to spread a folded blanket and a sheet over the glistening golden oak.

The removal was accomplished with comparative ease, the boy coming only to partial consciousness and relapsing instantly into merciful stupor. “He’ll wake up, fast enough, when I get busy after that bullet,” said the man grimly. “You’ll have to hold him steady, Glen, if you can.”

“I can,” she answered palely. She worked quietly and capably, swiftly and intelligently obedient to a curt word or even a gesture. It was a strange, a grotesque scene, and the memory of it was to stay with her as long as she lived—their splendid, wild young savage, bold and fearless and free against his background of rocky hills and rushing streams and dark forests, free no longer, and no longer wild and splendid, lying limp on the dining table in the hideous room Effie Darrow had hated, now slackly swept and dusted by the yellow slattern Emma-leen.

The child, working wordlessly with her father, bringing hot water and soft old linen, setting her teeth when he probed into the raw flesh, putting all her young muscle into holding the twisting shoulders down, tried vainly to make a reality of it all. The stark reversal was what made it so crassly unbelievable. One day he had been leaping away into his mountain fastnesses like a young stag, scorning them, and another day he had come crawling down from his heights to their level, scorning them still, no doubt, but begging their bounty. It hurt her conception of him, her pride in him.

The doctor, panting, and glistening with sweat, and sharply impatient with her, suddenly barked: “Well, how clean’d you be, without a bathtub or hot water, huh?” He had followed her gaze to the griminess of hands and feet. “He’s cold water clean, brook clean, at that. How much better’d you be? Huh? Answer me that?” It was amazing how he championed the wild lad from the first hour of their knowledge of him.

“I was thinking that,” said Glen flushing. “He’s tried to be clean, and his clothes——”

“You go get some sheets and blankets and make up a bed here on the couch,” her father snapped. “I’ll get his clothes off and wash him. You throw a nightshirt of mine downstairs.” He had sensed, dimly, that too much intimacy with the inelegancies of the young mountaineer’s toilet would not enhance the golden legend, and she was not called in again until the patient was made ready for his bed.

The girl made up the couch swiftly and capably and helped to carry him to it. “Bring a hot-water bag, and then heat up some soup,” the doctor directed. “He’ll come to for keeps any minute now, and I miss my guess if he’s eaten to-day.”

When Glen came back with her bowl of steaming broth Luke Manders was, quite as her father had predicted, wholly conscious. He dragged himself up on the elbow on the uninjured side and fell upon the food with wolfish hunger.

“Uh-huh,” Dr. Darrow wagged his head. “When’d you eat last, boy?”

“Yes’dy mawning,” he said thickly, without lifting his head.

The man handed the emptied bowl back to his daughter, and chuckled at the hungry pleading in the boy’s eyes. “That’ll hold you for a while, son. Can’t let you founder yourself. Now, then, how’d you pick up that lead, and what brought you here?”

Glen, on her way to the kitchen, halted silently in the doorway to look and listen.

The gaunt young face darkened and his words came hoarsely and jerkily. “Reckon hit were Olivers.” (The Olivers were hereditary foes of his house, the other side of the feud four generations long.) “And yet—” his eyes widened—“hit’s ontelling how.... Farley Oliver, he’s abed with a misery, and Jake’s down to the county seat, and Link has got his right arm broke, and Eddie, which is the least one, is purely too small....” He drew a quick breath and spent a moment in brooding silence. “My gran’mammy, she named hit to me when she were a-dying ... if I crossed her wish ... if I didn’t come down hyar to yo’all, she’d ha’nt me, day and night, night and day, twel I did!”

“Well?” the doctor prodded him.

To Glen, flattening herself against the kitchen door, hardly breathing in the tenseness of her interest, it seemed as if a chill and eerie wind stole into the room which had no kinship with the gale outside.

The youth’s pallor deepened. “I know in reason hit were some Oliver,” he insisted stubbornly, more to himself than to his interrogator. “Hit were purely erbleeged to be! But my gran’mammy were a right quare woman....” His lean young frame began to shake violently, so that the old couch vibrated with it.

“All right,” said the doctor briskly. “Lie still, now, and keep covered up warm! Got your feet on that hot-water bag? Well, your Grandma was a wise old woman! Maybe you didn’t mind her as well as you might, but I guess you will now!”

“Reckon so, suh,” he answered unsteadily, with the first note of respect he had ever shown.

“You get to sleep now. Here—swallow this!” The doctor eased the dark head back on the pillow and tucked the blankets about him, stirred up the fire, and opened a window to admit a breath of snarling storm. “I’ll leave my door open; you just shout if you need anything or if you get to feeling bad. I’ll be down, two—three times before morning, anyway.” He snapped off the light and herded Glen out of the kitchen.

“Glen, you get to bed fast as you make it! Nice time of night for you—” he fumed as he always did, but halfway upstairs he gave her a commendatory pat. “Good girl. Nerve. Kept your mouth shut and minded me. ’Night.”

Help was summoned in the morning to move the young mountaineer to an upper chamber where he spent three days in feverish pain, and when he was able to sit up in a high-backed rocker he made his position plain. The old woman had carried her point in death as she had not done in life. He had come down, and he would stay down, and permit himself to be “fotched on,” to the fulfilling of the old crone’s dream for him.

“But I am not aiming to be beholden,” he stated with his scant civility. “If yo’all will get me work in the mill and a place to live, and tote me, just once, to the night school, I will make out to do fo’ myself.”

“All right, son.” Dr. Darrow was carefully casual about it. “Guess I can fix you up. Tollivers—know ’em?—come from up your way—they’ll feed and sleep you for next to nothing, and there’ll be no trouble about getting into the mill. But about school—I believe the best thing’d be for Glen, here,” he nodded toward his daughter, waiting silently for the patient’s tray, “to find out how much you know, and maybe coach you a little. It’ll save you time.”

Young Manders turned his hawklike gaze upon her. He looked at her rather often, but always with an impersonal scrutiny.

“Is she fotched on?” Patent disapproval in look and tone. “I was not aiming to get me wimmin larning.”

His diction was curious, richly colored with accent and interlarded with crudities, and yet giving an effect of dignity. Glen thought the fact that he never slighted a final g had something to do with it.

Dr. Darrow grinned. “You’ll find it’s all of a piece, down here, Luke.” But he ceased to urge his daughter as a tutor and undertook the examination himself, fitting it in between calls.

The lad had learned to read and write, in limited fashion, at the moonlight school when he was several years younger, before he had dedicated himself to a career of violence, and had retained a good deal, but it was his figuring which amazed the physician.

“By George!” He sat back, beaming. “Quick as greased lightning! Got me beat, boy! Have, for a fact!”

It was indeed a matter for marveling. Luke Manders knew little of means or methods or rules, but he arrived at correct conclusions with a speed and accuracy which stopped barely short of magic.

“You keep on like this,” the man blinked and chuckled, “and I’ll have you keeping my books for me, before you can say ‘Jack Robinson!’” He sobered. “Now listen here, Luke. What you want is business college. Just get so you’re a little smoother on the reading and writing, and then we’ll start you in right off the bat, figuring and——”

“I would be beholden to you,” the boy interrupted with a show of eagerness. “I do not crave story-tale and song-ballad larning, suh. I crave numbers!”

“And that,” said Dr. Darrow to his daughter, following her downstairs, “is just what they do ‘crave’ generally, those mountaineers—stories and songs. (People claim, you know, that the things they sing and the yarns they spin have come straight down from the real old stuff in Scotland and England—read all about it in a magazine, two—three months ago!) But how he gets this bent for figures beats me! Goes to it like a duck to water, and he’s a wiz at it. By gad, he’s a wiz! He is, for a fact!”

Miss Ada Tenafee, requested to examine him and give a professional opinion as to the point at which he should start in school, came reluctantly, and only after considerable pleading on Glen’s part. Her expression on entering the Darrow’s unpleasant sitting room and encountering the young mountaineer was that of a well-bred lady detecting an unclean odor and genteelly endeavoring to ignore it. She was vague and non-committal, and said something under her breath about the probable briefness of his stay in the lowlands, and Glen, watching her, knew that she was mentally recalling “her own dear father’s rather common but very apt simile of the silk purse and the sow’s ear.”

Luke Manders, for his part, regarded her with frank scorn. It was clearly displeasing to him to find the font of learning guarded by this faded vestal. He answered grudgingly and did himself small credit until the doctor took charge of the quizzing and began to exhibit his prowess with numbers. Then, like a dancer compelled by the lure of rhythm, he performed.

“Well, now, Miss Tenafee,” the doctor demanded, “what do you think about that? Pretty keen, huh? With no more chance— Keen, huh?”

“Miz-zada” drew in her breath and a small quantity of dull color seeped into her sallow cheeks. “He is indeed—very—very—” she paused, visibly sorting her adjectives, choosing, rejecting.

“Well? Well?” the man prodded, impatiently.

The faded gentlewoman had found her word. “He is very sharp,” she said definitely.

“You’ve said it!” Darrow was not subtle himself and rarely detected subtlety in others. “Sharp as a lancet! Lemme tell you, this lad’s going to get ahead in the world.”

“I daresay,” Miss Ada conceded, her upper lip spelling faint distaste. “Glen, my dear—I have so many papers waiting for correction....” She half rose, but seated herself again at the doctor’s peremptory gesture, and discussed without enthusiasm the question of his grading.

It disappointed Glen to sense the dislike and distrust which her friends felt for each other. She had wanted “Miz-zada” to thrill over their golden legend, but the shabby teacher, pausing at the door, took a long, measuring look at the bold and beautiful young mountaineer and returned his frank scorn with a delicate, futile, birdlike antagonism which the girl found pathetically amusing.

CHAPTER V
Dr. Darrow damns the first families with his last breath, and little Miss Nancy Carey meets the young mountaineer.

FROM the time she was fourteen—almost, indeed, from the moment of the first meeting, Glen Darrow knew that some day, when she was old enough, she would fall in love with Luke Manders.

She accepted this knowledge without excitement or self-consciousness, as simply as she accepted the other undebatable facts of her life and circumstances. It was just as another girl might know that she was going to college after she finished high school, or a third, that her aunt would take her abroad when she was eighteen.

She knew it, that was all, in a grave preoccupation, in a certain serene young sense of dedication. The thing was settled; it hadn’t to be worried about. It would have been amusing to an observer in possession of the facts to see how sedulously both her father and Miss Ada Tenafee avoided all discussion, all mention even, of such a possibility—the man, because he desired it so heartily and feared to frustrate his hopes by forcing, and the woman because she turned from the idea with all the inhibitions of her caste and type, and was craftily aware that opposition would fan the flame.

It was, therefore, a wordlessly understood thing between the doctor and his daughter during the remainder of his life, but he became vocal about it on his profane and painful deathbed. He was hotly and bitterly rebellious at being obliged to die at forty-eight. His heedless habits of finance would leave her pitifully poor: beyond the dull house on the dull street, midway between The Hill and the mills, there would be something under two thousand dollars. Glen would have to leave high school in her final year and go to business college, and to work. Glenwood Darrow had always told himself that presently he would turn over a new leaf, force collections, invoke the law on long outstanding accounts, set his affairs in order and assure the girl’s future.... The automobile accident put a sudden and gory period to his plans.

He had been persuaded, after long delay, to give up his elderly horse and his battered buggy and buy a machine, and—once he had been actually won over—the salesman and demonstrator found him juvenilely enthusiastic and a quick if careless and cocksure pupil. The demonstrator found that his store of bright and steady patience would not be heeded in this case: the doctor said—“Yes, yes! I get you! All right! All right, I say—Good God, man, do I look like a half-wit?”—at the end of the second lesson and refused a third. He came back from his third attempt with broken bumper and bent fenders, and a chuckling delight in his achievement, though he absolutely refused to take Glen with him until he’d “got the hang of the fool thing in a little better,” and from his fourth trip he was brought home in the ambulance he had summoned so many times for others, and cursed for its tardiness and its meager comforts.

He lived for ten difficult days with the grief-stricken girl and a brow-beaten nurse in attendance, with Luke Manders coming in at night to lift him capably when his position became unbearable, and Miss Ada Tenafee calling conscientiously to inquire every afternoon on her way home from school.

Remorsefully, he laid before his daughter the nakedness of their land. “But it doesn’t matter, Dad, dear,” she comforted him. “I always expected to work; you know I did. It doesn’t matter; nothing matters but you!” Her voice broke on the words but she did not cry. She bore herself, from the moment that he was carried into the house, crushed and broken, until he was carried out of it for the last time, with the same composure she had exhibited on the night of Luke Mander’s exodus from his mountains. She was, after all, the man told himself with satisfaction and pride, his child; the soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie had been merely the mild receptacle for her embryonic stage; directly she was born, she was triumphantly his, and his child would make her way in the world against any mischance.

She planned with him, steadily: she would leave school and go to business college at once, and fit herself for a job as expeditiously as possible, so as not to draw upon her tiny capital any more than was absolutely necessary. The house, he insisted, she must keep; it would not bring enough to make its sale worth while, and it was a shelter; he didn’t want her knocking round in boarding places. He thought she might rent some of the rooms to school-teachers or decent women of some sort; he didn’t want her there alone, of course.

Glen opened her mouth to say that she would try to coax Miss Ada from her solitary little room, but stopped herself in time; it would only have irritated him. “Yes, Dad; I can get some one, surely, and I will. I promise you I won’t stay alone. You mustn’t worry, Dad!”

He told her, clumsily, since praise came unhandily to his lips, what she had meant to him, and his earnest hope that she would be true to the creeds and convictions he had set up for her. Jerkily, pausing often to rest and husband his fast-failing strength, he renewed for her the standards he had given her in her childhood, particularly on the day of the ill-starred valentine party, when she had gone to drive with him after that tragic festivity. She was to remember always that she was as good as any, and better than most; she was to be the champion of the weak—as represented by the mountaineers and the mill people—and she was to pick her friends from among them; she was to “hate’n despise” The Hill contingent, and to “spike their guns by snubbing them before they got the chance to snub her.”

And on the last day of all, gruffly and ineptly, he approached the subject nearest his heart.

“Look here, Glen,” he began, “about Luke....”

“Yes, Dad,” she met his eyes steadily.

“You and Luke ...” he managed between battled breaths, “I’m not fool enough, no, nor knave enough, to pull the ‘dying father’s wish’ on you, but——”

The girl wedged another pillow behind his heaving shoulders. “I know, Dad.” The infrequent color had surged up in her golden-olive cheeks, but beyond that single manifestation she was entirely calm.

“You’re only seventeen ... child, still.... Wait till you’re nineteen—twenty— No foolishness in meantime, hear me?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“No hand-holding ... mooning ’round....”

“No, Dad,” she promised earnestly and without embarrassment.

“Well, now, remember ... haven’t made any deathbed promise.... I’m not expecting ... run things ... from the grave.”

“I know,” she soothed him, wiping the sweat from his glistening forehead. “I understand, Dad, dear. Please don’t try——”

But he went doggedly on. “You’re free ... free as air ... but if you do— Well, if there’s anything to this ‘hereafter’ stuff ... if I’m—anywhere—you’ll know I’m—glad!” He scowled at the nurse, bringing his nourishment, and sent Glen out for a breath of air.

He died soon after midnight with his daughter beside him, two local doctors and the harried nurse. Luke Manders and Miss Ada Tenafee, on either side of the hideous sitting room, waited downstairs. His mind wandered a little, toward the last, and he spoke of his wife, of her and to her. “Blue eyes,” he muttered, “blue and soft ... gentle ... kind of sad, some way.... Just see her eyes over the top of the hymn book.... What’s the matter, Effie? Oh, you like that fool rug? G. P. present ... old Mrs. Ludermann, my one wealthy patient.... I figured we’d take it back and get credit for it ... doesn’t go with anything else we’ve got— Oh, all right! All right, I say! Keep it! Good lord, keep it!” He murmured snatches of long-forgotten talk, relived a portion of his interview with Granny Manders when she confided her dream of having her son’s son’s son “fotched on,” and at the end looked at the girl with clear and unclouded gaze.

“You keep away from that Hill crowd, hear? You mind me! Poor Effie, your poor mother, she came down here as friendly as a fox terrier, and what’d they do? Snubbed her, and cold-shouldered her, and looked right through her, that’s what they did, damn ’em! Crushed her, and broke her heart, and killed her, damn ’em—killed her! Damn their souls!” shouted the doctor with amazing vigor, and, damning, died, entirely in character, as he had lived.

The two doctors, one old and one young, were kind, and the nurse was kind, and Glen was civil in her appreciation, but she turned to her two friends, stumbling blindly down the stairs to find them.

The shabby teacher put thin arms about her and held her close. She knew, she said, none better, what it meant to lose a father.... Glen was to lie down at once, and she would bring her a cup of tea. She had—happily—put the kettle on a half hour earlier, and she pushed Glen gently down into the easiest of the chairs and tiptoed swiftly to the kitchen.

Luke Manders did not speak to her, but he came and stood before her, towering over her like a young pine, and his black eyes were very bright. He took the hand that she gropingly held out to him and held it hard in his own hard hand, and it went through her mind that it was like taking hold of a stalwart tree for support—like leaning upon solid rock, like the strength of the hills. Looking up at him through tears she wondered, even in that hour, if her father had talked to him as he had to her, but she heard Miss Ada’s pattering return and pulled her hand away. She must be careful now with her two friends—her only friends—who were not friends with each other.

The young mountaineer was no longer openly rude to the faded gentlewoman: to the boldness and poise which he had brought down from the heights he had added a grave courtesy which sat well upon him, and he hooded the scorn in his keen eyes. Miss Ada, for her part, was obliged to admit and did admit, very pleasantly, to Glen, that the youth had made amazing progress, not only in his studies but in his adjustment to civilization. There was still, and Glen secretly hoped there would always be something alien, something distinct and different in dress, in carriage, in speech; it set him apart from the savorlessness of the herd. He had made astonishing speed at the business college course, and at the mill, where he had at once engaged the attention of Mr. ’Gene Carey, the genial senior partner, and was constantly being pushed forward.

It was true, as Miss Ada Tenafee had once allowed herself to remark, very casually, that he did not make friends; he had left the frowsy Tollivers, where the doctor had placed him, at the end of his first month, and found himself a tiny, clean room with strangers who were still strangers to him after three years, but this did not lessen him in Glen’s eyes. Her father did not make friends; she did not make friends herself; it was, in her bleak young creed, rather a pledge of fineness not to make friends.

A respectable number of his patients, the two doctors and the nurse, and three or four good-natured neighborhood people came to the brief, drab little funeral, and Glen sat between Miss Ada and Luke Manders. Just as they drove home from the cemetery Nancy Carey, in a soft blue dress, came down from The Hill with her hands filled with flowers.

“Oh, Glen, I’m so sorry!” she said, hurrying to meet her as she stepped from the machine. “I’ve just heard, half an hour ago (I’ve been in Augusta, you know) and of course it’s too late, but I just thought I’d bring you these!”

“Thank you,” said Glen hoarsely. The encounter unsteadied her—to come from her father’s grave, from his admonitions, and find the Greeks bearing gifts. Nancy Carey had always been gently, languidly pleasant to her, although they had met rarely since the little days at Miss Josephine’s. Nancy had been years away at Northern finishing schools and would soon, the Social Chat of the leading local paper announced excitedly, go abroad for an indefinite tour of the Continent. She had been a sweetly lovely child and she was a sweetly lovely girl, with tints of rose and cream in her softly modeled face and a liquid hazel gaze, and fine, pale brown hair, like a baby’s, curling loosely about her mild brow. There was a tender, a lyric quality about Nancy Carey ... old ballads ... hearts and initials carved on trees ... keepsakes ... lost causes ... early deaths.... She should have been Barbara Freitchie’s gentle best friend.

Miss Ada was fluttered at the call. “Honey, this is very good of you,” she blushed girlishly. “Glen appreciates your thoughtfulness. I know I may speak for her!” She laid an admonitory hand on her charge’s arm.

“It is ... very kind,” Glen managed obediently.

“And won’t you step in for a moment, Nancy, my dear? I’m just going to make Glen a cup of strong tea, and she’d be so pleased—we both would—” Miss Ada quite clearly thought that grief, at any rate, grief for a person of Dr. Darrow’s caliber, might well be laid aside for the amenities of life when a Carey came to call.

The girl from The Hill was regarding the young mountaineer with mild interest. “Oh, thanks, Cousin Ada,” she said, turning to her—Miss Ada was a connection by marriage in two or three directions—“but I just came to bring the roses and tell Glen how sorry— Auntie Lou-May is waiting for me.”

“Then I’ll walk back with you a piece,” Miss Ada slipped her arm through Nancy’s. “And how is your dear Auntie Lou-May? Is her sciatica better?—Glen, my dear, I’ll be back immediately.”

“Not much better, poor dear,” Nancy answered prettily. “But she’s such an angel about it, and I don’t like to keep her waiting when I’ve promised to play cribbage with her.”

“Of course not!” assented the connection warmly. “I’m sorry you couldn’t stop, but it was just wonderful for you to think of coming!”

“Glen Darrow is a nice girl,” said Nancy vaguely. “I always liked her, some way ... and felt sorry for her....”

“Well, so do I, honey, and that’s why I’m staying with her until she can make some suitable arrangement. It just seems to be my part to look after the poor child, alone as she is. Glen has a remarkably fine character, innately refined,” said Miss Ada, as she had said of her Simpson mother. “So pitifully alone, and almost wholly unprovided for——”

“Who was that boy, Cousin Ada?” Nancy interrupted gently.

“Why—why—that is—that isn’t anybody, you might say, my dear. He is a young lad from the mountain districts to whom Dr. Darrow took one of his odd fancies. A very peculiar person, Dr. Darrow, and I pray his standards will not affect Glen’s life too seriously. He always——”

“Does he live in the mountains now, Cousin Ada?”

“Why, no, not just now—not at present, that is. He is employed at your dear father’s mill in some small capacity, I believe.”

“Oh ... at the mill....”

“Yes. Dr. Darrow took him there, several years ago, and begged employment for him, and your dear father, I understand from Glen, has been especially kind to him. Your father had a high respect for Dr. Darrow, who did a great deal of quiet charity among the mill workers. But the doctor, unfortunately, had no social standards whatever, and that one must always deplore, and now that he is gone I shall try to guide poor Glen— This impossible friendship, for instance——”

“What is his name?”

Miss Ada Tenafee stared at her young kinswoman. The girl had halted and was gazing back. “Why—Manders, Luke Manders. He——”

“Luke Manders!” Nancy repeated in her languid, sweet voice. “Isn’t that quaint, Cousin Ada? It sounds like a story, doesn’t it?”

“Well, possibly it does,” Miss Ada grudged. “It has not occurred to me, however. The doctor admitted this young savage to his household as an equal—he idealized him in the most absurd way, and prophesied the most impossibly brilliant future for him—but now that Glen is alone, I shall try, tactfully, of course, because the child is loyal to her father and his ideas to the point of fanaticism, to give her a better sense of values. And your—graciousness to her to-day, Nancy, honey, will mean more than you can possibly——”

Nancy Carey was looking at that moment even more like a maiden in a ballad than usual; there was a melting sweetness in her hazel gaze and with a distinct sense of shock the shabby teacher heard her say, with soft fervor—“Cousin Ada, I think he’s the handsomest thing I ever saw in my life....”

CHAPTER VI
Mr. ’Gene Carey finds a right-hand man for the Altonia, and Glen Darrow joins the noble army of labor.

IF Dr. Darrow, in the celestial realms of whose actuality he had expressed a deathbed doubt, was cognizant of terrestrial affairs he must have grinned triumphantly and complacently over Luke Mander’s swift fulfillment of his prophesies. His progress was little short of being marvelous. He had galloped through business college at a speed which broke all their comfortable records, and his rapid rise at the mill was a never-ending wonder to his fellow workers. He was silent, tireless; he was the first one at work in the morning and the last one to leave at night; work was an obsession with him, a rapture and a dear delight.

“By gad,” ejaculated Mr. ’Gene Carey to his superintendent, “you know that boy likes to work! He does, by the eternal! And you listen to me, Ben, I want him pushed on, fast as he can go!”

The middle-aged and work-weary superintendent was nothing loath. The genial and gentle old owner knew very little more about the actual working of his mill than his daughter did, far away in her Northern finishing school, and Ben Birdsall, a dour and conscientious employee, carried all the load. He was an industrious, slow-minded, well-meaning creature, and after the death of the old superintendent and his own promotion from foreman he had felt decidedly out of his depths.

“I haven’t got the head fo’ it, suh, an’ that’s the Lawd’s truth,” he said earnestly, protesting his advancement. “I’m a willing worker, suh, yo’ know that; I’m free to admit it fo’ myself, but I’m no office man, and that gal that’s markin’ up our books, suh, she’s a little worse’n what I am!”

Mr. Carey put a kind hand on his shoulder. “Now, now, Ben, you just quit running yourself down! You suit me! I reckon I know honesty and ability when I see ’em. You’ve been with us——”

“Oh, I know all that, suh,” old Ben shook his head. “I’m honest, and I can boss the hands, but I’m no office man. Now, if you was to get rid of Miss Minnie——”

“But what do you reckon you’d find for her to do, Ben?” the owner worried.

“Lawd, I wasn’t fixing to find her another job, suh! I was just aiming to get her out of this one, and get that boy Luke in!”

“I could give her a mighty nice letter, of course,” Mr. Carey mused. “Luke, did you say? Why, Ben, do you reckon that boy could do our books, young as he is, and green?”

“He’s young, but he’s not green,” the superintendent contested. “Why, that feller handles figgers as easy as you’n me handles a knife and fork! And he’s right from business college, you might say—two—three years—right hot off the griddle, and you know in time there never was a harder worker.”

Mr. Carey, a little dazed at the suddenness of it, agreed with the proviso that Miss Minnie be provided for, and the thing worked out for Luke Manders as swiftly and smoothly as if Dr. Darrow had motivated it by his wishes, or the ancient granddam who had seen in him “a young-un with a headpiece, smartest of ary Manders ever heerd tell of.” Miss Minnie was comfortably placed in a needlework shop and the young mountaineer climbed up on her stool in the dim and breathless office of the Altonia Mill, and dived deep into the sea of difficulties and discrepancies which she had abandoned to him.

“By gad, Luke,” the owner wiped his steaming forehead, “I never dreamed poor Minnie was getting us into such a snarl! Of course, I knew she was no lightning striker, but her father was my father’s third cousin, and when he died and left her without a penny, why I naturally had to keep an eye on her—blood’s thicker than water— But, good Lord, I believe it’d have been cheaper to board her at the hotel and hire a man here!”

“I reckon so, sir,” Luke Manders agreed with him gravely. Gravely was the word for Luke Manders. He talked gravely, and walked gravely, and worked gravely, and it was to be seen that he thought gravely. There was no jest and youthful jollity in the young man from the mountains. He was as silent as one of the tall trees he had left behind him, and as strong, yet with always the sense of leashed action—action and power. Mr. ’Gene Carey and old Ben Birdsall felt it and leaned on it, and Miss Ada Tenafee felt it and feared it, and Glen Darrow felt it and rejoiced and exulted.