Ruth Comfort Mitchell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Luke Manders, the splendid young mountaineer; Luke, the doctor’s discovery and pride; the golden lad of their golden legend.
Luke, Luke, Luke!
Surely, if she kept saying it over and over, it would fill her mind, and there wouldn’t be room for anybody—for anything else, and the silly place in her palm would stop pulsing, pulsing....
“Well, here we are!” said her companion, briskly. “A delightful night for a walk, and I have enjoyed it extremely. I try very hard to do a certain amount of walking every day, but in my intensely busy life it is apt to be crowded out.” ”

“ Extremely busy and purposeful married people, such as she and Luke would be, could not, surely, have very much time left over for the sort of scenes which he had started in the lonely lane, on the afternoon of her nineteenth birthday. She visualized a serene and industrious future for them, filled to the brim with welfare work among Luke’s people and the mill hands, with economic triumphs and a new and model Altonia built on the mistakes of the old.
And meanwhile, her loyalty to Luke was doubled; if she was failing him in one way, she would make it up to him in others! ”

“ Mr. Carey was to forget that, and hurry up and get well again. Miss Ada would have been amazed beyond measure at the gentleness, the respect, the veneration of the young savage; it made Nancy Carey’s hazel gaze grow liquid and tender.
The weeks went on in a dull procession; Mr. Carey improved slowly, Gloriana-Virginia grew slowly worse; Luke Manders made himself slowly more and more necessary to his employer; Glen Darrow began slowly to accumulate a small and austere trousseau. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ She kissed him thoroughly. “Don’t wince, Glen. I’ve kissed Peter many times before, and with any sort of luck I expect to kiss him many times again! Cheerio!” She sped away and left the three of them alone together, the pale youth with his bandaged head, the glowing girl with the flame of coppery hair about her face, and the small, preternaturally grave child.
Peter Parker walked to the Persian rug and stood looking down at it. “After to-night,” he said, “we’ll have it framed and hung on the wall. It’s entirely too potent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After an instant’s hesitation she handed it over to Miss Ada, and the faded gentlewoman read it hastily and trembled with indignation.
“Glen, dear, do you suppose”—the little dabs of color which always marked excitement stung on her cheekbones—“is it possible that this woman has the effrontery to think that you are interested in her son?”
“That is exactly what she thinks, Miss Ada. Some one has told her how he has been following me about—it’s very probable that she has a detective watching him all the time, to protect him,” the doctor’s daughter finished with a curling lip. ”

“ How he stood out, Glen exulted, from the men about him—kindly, futile old Mr. ’Gene Carey, slow old Ben Birdsall, the sallow, spiritless mill workers, even the young blades from The Hill! He was a tall pine among garden shrubs.
Going quietly about her tasks at the Altonia, she pulsated with pride at the thought of him, planning the clear and purposeful path before them. They would read together and study together and work together, animated always by the ideal of service to the mill people and the mountaineers. They would preach Dr. Darrow’s sermons of air and clean houses and wholesome food ”

“ It was on the following Sunday afternoon that Miss Ada Tenafee came fluttering upstairs to tell her protégée that Mr. Peter Parker was calling.
Glen had been sitting in her primly charming chamber with the purple rosebuds and weeping willows and humming birds on the wall, with her hands folded in her lap, looking out of the window at the magnolia tree where a cardinal was making liquid inquiry—“What cheer? What cheer? What cheer?” She stood up quickly and turned a paling face to her friend. “I can’t see him, Miss Ada. I—can’t!”
“Oh, honey, you must!” the spinster urged emotionally. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Glen found them odd and interesting. There were graybeards among them with simmering passion in their eyes who exhorted fellow workers at stealthy evening meetings, swarthy youths who flared into open resentment at a word, richly colored, full-breasted girls who moved among the mill workers like sly flames, and one outstanding figure, by reason of fervor and superior intelligence, a man called Black Orlo, who edited a tiny paper named The Torch. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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! ”

“ They were arrived at the little brown church. “Well, that’s the whole scenario, Peter Pan. You’ll have to do your own continuity.”
“Meaning which?”
“Meaning—” she stood still and put one thin hand with its pointed and glistening nails on his arm, and her bright eyes under their plucked brows were steady and serious. “Say, listen, Peter Pan, she’s there a billion, Glen Darrow. What more do you want? Beauty—gobs of it; brains to burn; good blood; pep ’n ginger, I’ll say! And a straight shooter if ever there was one in a crooked world!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Luke was always right. It would have been, nevertheless, a comfort to secure the expert opinion of a woman, some woman who had been successfully loved and married, which qualification, of course, eliminated Miss Ada, even if Glen had been willing to confide in her about her mountaineer. There was nothing for it, then, but time. Time, she knew, would help her to correct her own peculiarities, and time would likewise, she earnestly hoped, so increase Luke’s interests that he would hardly miss or notice the limitations of his wife. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He spent delightful days prowling about, amiable figure in his spotless white with his bright blue tie, driving with Nancy Carey, playing cribbage with his senior partner, riding with Cousin Mary-Lou Tenafee over her gracious acres, dining with the people he had met on his first evening at the Carey’s house, wandering aimlessly through the Altonia, stopping always to talk to Gloriana-Virginia [174] Tolliver and Henry Clay Bean, and making a languid but persistent pursuit of Glen Darrow. ”

“ There were no museum pieces, but they were honest in line and color, and with fresh upholstering in flowered chintz and hours of polishing took on an air of stable worth. These, together with Miss Ada’s beautiful old sofa carved in great bunches of grapes, her own dear father’s armchair, which she now brought down from her chamber, a gate-legged table and a prim rocker and a stern old bookcase and writing desk in one, furnished the house sparingly, almost austerely, but very restfully. ”

“ The affair had started so beautifully—two callers for Glen at once, and one of them a Carey—and now the young savage had to walk into the scene, like—as her own dear father would have said—a bull in a china shop. If he must be there and some one must talk to him, let it be the Northern girl: Miss Ada interposed herself swiftly between Nancy and the intruder and talked brightly to her kinswoman. ”

“ Glen Darrow stood staring after him; it was a strange chance, a plethora of episode, which gave her two scenes with two different suitors in ten minutes in the same dingy old office, but they were poles [188] apart, for one was the golden lad of the golden legend, her father’s familiar friend, the splendid young savage, the bold and beautiful mountaineer who had made full use of his time and talents, and one was the slim and fair young waster, the cumberer of the earth, on whom she and Black Orlo were utterly agreed. ”

“ Glen Darrow, meanwhile, returning by way of the spinning room, found a stranger in light and pleasant converse with Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver, who was smiling at him wanly and shyly.
He was a very young man, she saw at a glance, and his slimness and extreme fairness increased the boyishness—the almost childishness—of his appearance. [152] He was dressed all in spotless white, save for the bright blue of his cravat, and he looked cool and serene in contrast to the palely sweating Glory.
“Yes,” he was saying cordially, “I certainly do like fairy tales, and I believe ’em, too! ”

“ You, yourself, are one, my dear. I’d be head over heels this minute, if I weren’t fathoms deep in love with Glen Darrow.”
“Glen Darrow!” She gave a little gasp and stared at him.
“Glen Darrow. From the first moment, almost.”
Mrs. Bob Lee sighed. “Well, of course—she’s a mighty fine person, I reckon! I’ve heard Cousin ’Gene Carey say wonderful things about her, and Cousin Ada’s devoted to her. But, Peter—it would be a lot more suitable; you know that. And we certainly would love to have you in our family.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Peter Parker wrote to his mother that night of his charming first impressions; the Careys and their friends like people out of a delightful book; the Carey girl would melt in your mouth, and there was a young widow who filled the eye most pleasantly. How would she like to have him marry a handsome young widow and settle down to be a country gentleman on a plantation? He rather felt himself slipping. The mill wasn’t bad at all ”