Elia Wilkinson Peattie

“ Her door stands open to every wanderer. It stood open to me. The flowers about her walls, and the purple valley below her hill, delight her. Yes, she is a true lover of beauty. May we never lose sight of each other, and to the last may I feel her hand waiting to grasp mine in whatever darkness she or I may have to walk through. I only say I wish I might, sometimes, have someone like you, my Carin, to talk with. Of course, there is Barbara Summers. But she is in the valley and I on the mountain.
Equally of course, there are Keefe O’Connor’s letters. ”

“ Callers came, but she asked to be excused.
“I have been receiving callers all my life,” she said to me, “but never, never before have I sat with a granddaughter of my own—and as true a Knox as ever drew the breath of life. Every tone of your voice, my dear, reminds me of your father; every look and gesture is like him. This is the happiest day I have had for many years.”
“You do not question my identity at all, madam grandmother,” I said. “It is very gracious of you.”
“The story your Uncle David told me was convincing, my child. ”

“ I felt more like crying than I ever had before in my life—yes, I wanted to sob aloud and to call to grandmother to come back. Little sweet, proud, loving, laughing grandmother! But I kept very still. It seemed as if I could read Keefe’s thoughts and as if he were telling me to be quiet. So I said over and over to myself the last line of a lovely poem I read the other day. “‘O waters of quiet, go softly.’”
After so long a life, one must be glad to rest. I found out that night, Carin, how that death, like life, is sweet and all in the course of things and nothing to be afraid of. ”

“ I’ll tell you this, my Carin: Next to a well-loved human face, a well-loved road is the best thing. The sight of a familiar clump of grass can be as dear as a threshold. Twists of tree trunks, odd embankments, colors of the road, above all, the turns of a road, get to be like a part of one’s life. The little smells that come up from earth and grass and flower, rising over and over again from the same place, affect one almost like the voices of “home folk.” Even the wind on the face, though the wind is so wild and strange a thing, makes one feel at ease in one’s world ”

“ But whatever the reason, we are great friends, and I can not think of anything that would give me greater pleasure than to see him loping down the mountain-side, with his fiddle under his arm, and his hair all in a shock, like a windblown haystack.
I had no time to prepare a fit present for Annie Laurie, the announcement of her wedding was so unexpected. So now I am weaving a counterpane for her of blue, orange and white in the wheel and star pattern. It is going to be beautiful, and will bring color into her room, which always has been too austere. ”

“ Both Aunt Lorena and Uncle David have relatives and friends here, and we have been entertained in a number of homes very graciously indeed.
I like the English people. They are not always fizzing and bubbling like Americans. There is a repose about them and a quietness of character that rests me. It even rests me from my fizzly and bubbly self.
But deep down, Carin, beneath all the effervescence, there is something very quiet and peaceful in me. When I am alone, after the day of sight-seeing and chattering and laughing and admiring, I and this Still Soul of mine sit down together and commune. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have explained to you distinctly a number of times, my dear Carin, that when I write this way I do it to ease my feelings. I want your advice. But that is all I do want of you, except, of course, your love and sympathy. I know you ache to play fairy godmother. You’ve tried to do that many times. But I think you understand pretty well by now that that wouldn’t really help me out. I want my own fight, my own life, my own victories. Just at present I’m terribly puzzled, because I want to help Father and Mother McBirney and Jim. ”

“ I am being cheated of my youth. I am so strong and well, so restless and full of energy that I nearly expire in this soft house, where everyone goes quietly, and where we must not even pass things at the table lest we break rules.
Carin, I want to “reach” for the bread and to eat it with mountain honey, and I’m starving for one of Ma McBirney’s corn cakes, and I’d like better than anything to have some bacon and eggs for dinner—with just barely enough to go around. ”

“ I have always loved to read about princes and princesses who have wandered, poor and forlorn, in strange lands, and who finally return to their royal homes and live happy ever after amid a loving people. I think that is the nicest sort of a story in the world, and I often have played, when it was cold and windy in my little loft on Tennyson Mountain, and when Jim teased me, and all the family was looking at something in a different way from what I was able to do, that I was a lost princess and that by and by I would come into my own. ”

“ Martha was set to watch her early and late, and when she was weary Semmy or I took her place. She was sweet and gay at moments. One afternoon she showed me her painted fans and her jewels, and told me they would be mine, some day, and I was naughty enough to say:
“But madam grandmother, what shall little Azalea do with all those? Don’t you think her little string of ‘Job’s tears’ and a peacock fan made by herself become her better?”
That teased her, as I knew it would.
“My dear Azalea,” she said in her most earnest manner, “you are a true Knox, and these jewels and fans will become you. ”

“ You are surrounded all the time with fine teachers and brilliant friends, and moving, shifting life. I am just here by myself, so to speak. Yes, yes, dear, I know my own McBirneys are beside me. I have no desire deeper than the desire to help them. Yet, Carin, are they my kind of people? You know they are not; they know it. We try to be alike, but we cannot be, really.
I am the granddaughter of Colonel Atherton on one side; the granddaughter of some other proud old gentleman on the other side. For it was pride that made my grandfather Knox turn his son, my father, adrift. ”

“ Then I heard Aunt Lorena talking, but for a moment or two my heart and brain were in such an uproar that I could not really make out what she was saying. But at last the words got through to me.
“We know, Azalea, many things which you, perhaps, do not give us credit for knowing. We know that you are full of ambition and that the life here seems meaningless to you. Life has trained you in a different school from what it has us. ”

“ Do you know, I couldn’t resist getting something for those two lonely women, the Wixons, up on Hebron mountain—the ones whose soup I ate uninvited. If ever I get back to Lee, I shall ride up and get acquainted with those women. Isn’t it curious how people draw you and draw you, even people you have never met, but know only by report? As for those you do know, they can draw you half around the world. Yes, out of the millions and millions of human beings on this old globe, there will be but two or three, perhaps, who are verily your own, and those you must have. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They hedge me around in every way. A maid or a chaperon must be with me every minute. How I wish I were free to go about and get acquainted with people! They—I mean Aunt Lorena and all the powers of propriety—seem to think that if I did I would have some awful mishap. But do you know, Carin, I don’t think that would be the case. I feel as if right at my hand there may be someone I ought to be knowing and who ought to be knowing me. ”

“ As you know, sometimes our sweet, unselfish Mother McBirney gets melancholy. She has lived so long away up here on the mountain that her thoughts get to turning inward, and she remembers about Molly’s death, and then for days she is silent and brooding, and we all tremble for her. She looks far, far away and pays almost no attention to what we say to her. ”

“ So she has come to tell her dear kinspeople that she must let the fortune go. The houses and lands, the streams and forests, are dear to her, but they are not so dear as liberty. No, not nearly so dear. But there is one thing that is dear to her beyond words, and that is the love of her kinspeople, and that she never means to let go if she can hold on to it. Whatever the cords are that tied them and her together, she wants to make stronger and faster, for as long as she lives she will love them and be grateful to them. ”

“ 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 loved her, Aunt Lorena, and I always shall.”
“Are you willing to abide by the terms of her will? Are you willing to marry the man your uncle approves of—the man who will, according to your grandmother’s idea, bring credit to the family?”
She looked so intense and sympathetic that I couldn’t help laughing.
“I am willing to marry just one man,” I found courage to say. “I hope uncle will approve of him.”
“If you mean Keefe O’Connor,” she said in her high voice, “you will see that your hopes are not realized. Your uncle likes him very much personally, but your grandmother did not. ”

“ We are endlessly polite. We all say the same thing. We all do the same things. At times, it is true, I see someone looking at me with the eyes of true friendship, but we are parted by the people about us, and we do not really become acquainted. So I am very lonely, in spite of all that is interesting and beautiful about me, and I wish you and I and Annie Laurie were sitting together up in your little studio-room, with the world far from us, and just we three opening our hearts to each other. ”

“ Aunt Lorena came to my rescue and between us we got that band undone and I was able to draw a long breath.
“In my day,” said my little grandmother, “girls were more delicate than they are now. I grieve, Lorena, to discover that Azalea’s foot is far too substantial for these slippers.”
She looked regretfully at some yellowed satin slippers with tarnished sequins on them. Aunt Lorena and I looked down at my good sizable feet—they have done a powerful lot of mountain climbing, as you know—and we both laughed.
“Come,” said Aunt Lorena, “we must forget dressmaking for the day and go for a drive. ”

“ Yet I realize that it is a hard task I have before me—the hardest that ever has come to me. How I do hope I shall prove myself brave. I want to be brave more than anything. I mustn’t cry! I won’t cry! It is too important a matter to cry about.
Miss Ravanel says she will come to Lee to visit me. She hasn’t been anywhere for twelve years, except to Charleston now and then, and sometimes to a distant neighbor’s. I want her to come and show my mountain women how to make blue and white work. It is a kind of embroidery and lace combined, made on a linen base. She says she will. Isn’t she a dear? ”