BY ELIA W. PEATTIE
Illustrations by Joseph Pierre Nuyttens
The long red clay road, winding down from the cabin where the McBirneys lived on their high shelf of Tennyson mountain, was frosted delicately with white, and by the roadside the curious frost flowers lifted their heads, as airy-fine as fern. From the half-hidden cabins all around the semicircle of mountains that skirted the valley of Lee, shafts of smoke arose, showing that the people were about the business of the day. Straight, gray and shadowy these smoke-shafts lifted through the lilac-tinted air; and below in the little town, other shafts of smoke ascended as if in friendly answer.
Azalea McBirney, in her dark riding skirt and bright knitted cap and reefer, came running from the cabin with the manner of a girl very much behindhand.
“Ain’t he there yet, Zalie?” a voice called from the cabin. “Ain’t Jim brought them ponies around yet?”
“No, mother,” Azalea answered over her shoulder, starting toward the stable. “Maybe the ponies have been naughty again. I’ll go see.”
“You just stay where you be,” commanded James Stuart McBirney from the stable. “You’ve got all your work done, ben’t you? Well, that’s all you have to think about. This here is my job and I mean to do it whatever comes, though these here ponies certainly do act up on a morning like this.”
“Well, I would just as soon get my breath for a moment,” Azalea remarked to nobody in particular, seating herself on the bench by the side of the door. “As Hi Kitchell’s mother says, ‘I bin goin’ like a streak o’ lightnin’ since sunup.’”
Her cheeks were, indeed, a trifle over-flushed, and forgetting for a moment how time was hastening along, and that she and Jim ought already to be on the road to school, she leaned her head against the side of the cabin and looked about her contentedly. She loved the scene before her; loved the pines with their light coating of hoarfrost; loved the waterfall with its gleaming icicles; loved the scent of the wood-smoke and the sight of “Molly Cottontail” scampering through the bushes.
Moreover, the kiss of Mary McBirney lay warm on her lips—Mary McBirney who had taken her in when she was a motherless and friendless girl, and whom she found it sweet to call mother. “Mother” was a longer word than Jim—otherwise James Stuart McBirney, the true son of the house—found it convenient to use when he spoke of the woman who was the background of his world. “Ma” was the term he chose, and Mary McBirney would not have cared to have him try any other.
For Jim was just Jim—her own freckled, shy, plucky fellow. He went down to the district school, riding on the pony the Carsons had given him, while beside him, quite as if she were his own sister, rode Azalea, who trusted him to see her through any danger of the road, who laughed as much as anybody could wish at his “hill billy” jokes, and who never, never forgot how he had welcomed her into his home, to share all he had, though there never had, at any time, been very much to share.
Yet, though she had been only the “child wonder” of a wandering “show” when she came to the McBirney’s—her own poor little mother lying dead in one of the wagons—it was she, and not Jim, the carefully reared boy, who had the grand little ways. Jim was a country boy, with a country boy’s straightforward, simple manners. But about Azalea there was something—well, something different. So different was she from the McBirneys that she seemed like a cardinal bird which had been storm-driven into one of the martin gourds that hung in the high cross-trees before the McBirney’s door.
All that was easily understood by the few who knew her story. Her grandfather had been Colonel Atherton, the richest, the proudest, and the most elegant gentleman in all the countryside. He had owned great plantations in the old slave days, and had built the beautiful manor house which their new, wonderfully kind neighbors, the Carsons, recently had bought. Azalea’s mother had exiled herself by a marriage with a man of whom no parent could approve, and as misfortune drove her ever lower and lower, she came at length to be a performer in the miserable roadside show with which she had come, in her last hour, to the scene of her father’s old home. That home had long since passed into other hands, and concerning it Azalea’s mother had told her daughter nothing. It had been by an accident that she later learned the truth.
When Mr. and Mrs. Carson, the friends who had from the first of their acquaintance with her endeavored to add to her happiness, learned her story, they asked her to come into their home to be a sister to their own girl, Carin. And Azalea in her secret heart had longed to go—more than she ever would have told, she longed to be with these accomplished and gracious friends, whose wealth made it possible for them to do almost anything they pleased, and who seemed pleased to do only interesting things. But when she remembered the welcome that had been given her by Mary McBirney, and indeed, by all of the McBirney family, and how she had, in a way, taken the place of their little dead Molly, she was able to put temptation from her; and the hour in which she had made her choice and been gathered in “Ma” McBirney’s arms was the happiest she ever had known.
So, though she was born Azalea Knox, the granddaughter of Colonel Atherton, she was now known as Azalea McBirney, the waif the McBirneys had taken into their cabin to grow up side by side with their son James Stuart. And all over the Valley of Lee an interest was felt in her; partly because of her being an orphan, and a child of quaint and lovable ways, and partly because of a strange happening. Not long after she had come to live with the good mountain folk, the owner of the show with which she had once traveled had kidnapped her, and the search for her had been long and anxious.
When she was rescued and brought back to the home where she was so welcomed and loved, all of the neighbors had a protective feeling for her, and rejoiced that the Carsons, who had come down from the North, and who seemed so eager to be of help to everybody, should have taken her in to be taught with their daughter. Never had there been such neighbors as the Carsons in Lee. They made goodness their business, it seemed. Through them the mountain folk were finding a market for their homemade wares—their woven cloth and their counterpanes, their baskets and chairs, and comfort had come into many a home where hitherto there had been cruel poverty.
But there on the bench by the doorway in the nipping morning air sits Azalea, with her nose and ears growing redder and redder!
“Jim,” she called, awakening from her reverie, “we’ll be late as sure as anything.”
“Coming right along now, sis,” answered the boy as he came running from the stable with the two ponies. “Hop into the saddle, Zalie, and we’ll just pelt it down the mountain. Here, I’ll hold him. There you are. Hi—they’re off.”
They surely were. Pa McBirney, busy in his little smithy, heard the clatter of hoofs and thrust his head from the door.
“Watch out, you two!” he warned.
“We will,” they called in chorus as they dashed on.
“My sakes,” said pa, coming in from the shop and wiping his hands on his leathern apron, “I trust to luck ma didn’t see ’em going off. Them young uns are getting too much spirit in ’em to suit me; and as for the ponies, I think they ought to be cut down on their feed.”
But neither Azalea nor James Stuart was wanting anyone to cut down on anything. As the firm-footed ponies took the cut-offs, minding neither curve nor steep, the children shouted with delight.
“Late?” yelled Jim mockingly. “Who said late? We couldn’t be late if we tried.”
They reached the parting of their ways, and Azalea, who was leading, turned in her saddle to wave to Jim.
“Good-bye, boy,” she called.
“So long, sis,” he answered, and turned to follow the creek, and then to mount the hill at the top of which stood the district school. But Azalea kept on along the low-winding road till she came to The Shoals, from whose four tall chimneys the smoke mounted into the tinted air. Benjamin, the polite black boy, was at the horse-block to help her dismount and to lead away Paprika, her pony; and Tulula Darthula, the maid, opened the door to welcome her. Azalea spoke a laughing word of greeting and ran on down the corridor to the schoolroom.
It was a small room, semicircular in shape, opening on the wintry garden. The rounding portion of the wall was all of glass, which in summer time gave way to screens, so that it then seemed an actual part of the garden. Now, the polished panes reflected the flames leaping in the fireplace, and revealed the frost-fringed hemlocks without. Before the fire sat Miss Parkhurst, the quiet, gray-eyed governess, and with her, Carin, the friend whose approval was more to Azalea than anything else in the world save the love of the new “mother.”
“Oh, here I am, late!” cried Azalea contritely. “Please forgive me, ma’am.”
Helena Parkhurst gave a pardoning smile.
“I really think we’re ahead of time this morning—Carin and I. Take off your things, child, and come up to the fire. We’ve been trying to have it at its best when you came.”
But Azalea’s fingers, stiffened with holding the bridle reins, made sorry work with her buttons, and Carin flew to her aid.
“You smell like winter, Azalea,” she laughed, sniffing; “all cold and clean.”
Azalea laughed happily. Whatever this blue-eyed, golden-haired friend of hers did seemed right to her—nay, better than merely right—complete. It warmed Azalea more than the glow of the room to have Carin snatch her cap from her, and pull her reefer off, and tumble her with affectionate roughness into the chair before the blaze.
“Colonial history again this morning,” said Miss Parkhurst after a time. “We’re to read about the Delaware and the Virginia Colonies, since Carin’s ancestors came from the first and Azalea’s from the second.”
“Well, they’ll be different enough, won’t they?” remarked Carin. “They were different sort of folk before they crossed the Atlantic, and their differences grew after they settled here. And yet here Azalea and I are, as alike as can be.”
“But I don’t think the differences of the colonists grew, Carin,” said Azalea, “and I’m terribly afraid you and I aren’t alike. I couldn’t be like you if I tried for ever and ever.” She gave a wistful sigh, and Miss Parkhurst, watching her without seeming to do so, saw the light of hero-worship in her eyes. She knew that Azalea was one of those who are born to love hungrily, and to live eagerly; and she was thankful that, having so hungry a heart, she was able, when it came to a matter of opinion, to form her own ideas, and to hold to them. Azalea’s heart was in leading strings to Carin, but her excellent little brain went on its independent way, though Carin had traveled and studied, and been all her life with charming and cultivated people, and Azalea had been tended no more than a patch of wayside daisies.
Miss Parkhurst brought the books they were needing from the library, and Carin taking hers, sighed happily: “Isn’t it beautiful to be here by ourselves—just the three of us? No one else would fall into our way of doing. How nice it is of you, Miss Parkhurst, to let us follow up whatever idea we’re interested in, and to help us learn all we can about that subject, instead of making us dash from one thing to another, till we haven’t a notion what we are trying to learn. I’d never get anywhere, studying in the old-fashioned way, jumping from subject to subject, and having to wait for a whole class of stupid creatures to come tagging along.”
“But you might be the stupid one, you know, Carin,” smiled Miss Parkhurst. “I’m afraid it doesn’t do to go around the world supposing yourself to be the cleverest one.”
Carin shrugged her pretty shoulders.
“I don’t think that,” she said. “I always think Azalea the cleverest one. I’m only saying that we three understand each other, and that we don’t have to spend half our time explaining, and that we’re just as contented together as mortals can be.”
And just then the door opened and Mrs. Carson came into the room. Her face had lost something of the look of transparency it had worn when she first came to Lee, when she had been fresh from a terrible sorrow, but it was still pale and strangely tender to Azalea’s admiring eyes.
“I do hope you’ll excuse me, Miss Parkhurst,” she said in her soft voice, “for breaking into the study hour. But I’ve something important to talk over, and so I’ve come while all the members of the academy are together.”
She shook hands with Azalea as she spoke, and patted Carin caressingly on the shoulder.
“I’ve come,” she went on, “to talk to you about taking in another girl.”
“Another girl!” cried Carin in dismay. “What girl, please, mamma?” She had sprung to her feet, and stood before her mother with the color sweeping over her face; but Azalea, keeping her thoughts to herself, grew paler, and pinched the edge of the table in her effort to keep the tears of vexation and disappointment from coming to her eyes.
Another girl! And this perfect possession of Carin would be taken from her, and there’d be, as Carin put it, need to “explain” all of the time. How could Mrs. Carson spoil such a perfect thing as their association there? Who else would love to study, and to write, and paint and sing the way they did? Who else would make a game out of it all, and long to get to the schoolroom in the morning and hate to leave at night?
“It’s Annie Laurie Pace,” went on Mrs. Carson, apparently taking no heed of their misery. “Have you met her? Perhaps not, since she goes to the Baptist Meeting House, and you, Azalea, are such a faithful young Methodist, and Carin goes with me to the Episcopal Church. But anyway, I think you must have seen her—a tall girl, with red hair. She’s been helping me some at The Mountain Industries rooms, and I’ve become well acquainted with her. She’s ahead of anything she can get at the district school. Of course I don’t mean that she couldn’t do more mathematics and that sort of thing, but I am convinced that she has a strength and originality of thought which is very unusual. She came here this morning to borrow some books I had offered to lend her, and I have been talking with her for the last hour. I am so convinced that the work here under Miss Parkhurst and with you two shining little stars will give her precisely what she is hungering for, that I have invited her to join you.”
“But, mamma,” expostulated Carin, “we’ll be wretched with her! She’s a nice enough girl, I’m sure, and no doubt she’s bright, but she’ll never be able to really understand Azalea and me, will she, Azalea?”
Azalea said nothing. She was dreadfully embarrassed. She was wondering if Mrs. Carson had some secret reason for forcing another girl in with them? Could it possibly be that she—Azalea—who had been a wandering child, traveling with coarse people in a low circus, was, without knowing it, doing harm to Carin? Perhaps. Carin was so fine, so gay, so sweet, so “like a flower” as the song had it which Mrs. Carson sang, that very likely she seemed no more than a weed beside her.
“Probably that is all I am—a horrid, stupid weed,” said Azalea to herself bitterly as her thoughts flashed this way and that like troubled birds, seeking for what was wrong.
“You can see how Azalea hates the idea, mamma,” said Carin. “And as for me, if that girl comes in here, my education will be ruined.”
She looked a haughty and determined young person as she stood there, her chin lifted and her blue eyes darting cold fires. Mrs. Carson had a twinkle in her eye as she surveyed her. Carin had been a gentle princess in the schoolroom, with Miss Parkhurst for her willing guide and Azalea her adoring servitor. The truth was, the two girls had become so bound up in each other that they saw nothing beyond their own horizon. The dark-eyed girl from the mountain cabin, with her strange, romantic history, and the blue-eyed one from the mansion, loving romance above all imaginable things, had made a compact of undying friendship; and unconsciously, they had also determined to exclude the rest of the world.
“It may seem a little hard for you and Azalea to take Annie Laurie in just at first, Carin,” Mrs. Carson went on, with no show of yielding—indeed, quite as if everything were settled—“but she desperately needs the schooling, and I believe that, without realizing it, you need her. What do you think, Miss Parkhurst; am I right?”
To the increasing dismay of the friends, Helena Parkhurst nodded her nice little head.
“One of the chief reasons why a girl should go to school,” went on Mrs. Carson, smilingly, “is to learn to get along with other girls. You and Azalea are so wrapped up in each other that you actually don’t see other girls as they pass you on the road, and it never seems to occur to you to visit their homes, or to ask them here. It has been borne in upon me for some time that if I don’t watch out, you’ll become a pair of horrid little snobs. Of course you wouldn’t know that you were, and equally of course I wouldn’t admit it to anybody else. But such would be the case, I feel sure.”
“Oh, mother, we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t!” protested Carin. “Just try us a little longer and see.”
But at that moment there came a knock at the door, and Mrs. Carson arose to open it. The girls could see without in the hallway the figure of Annie Laurie Pace, the red-haired, surprisingly tall girl whom they had occasionally seen in town; and now it occurred to each of them that they had not particularly wished to know her.
“Did you say I was to come down here, Mrs. Carson, after I had found that book?” she asked shyly.
“Why, no,” said Mrs. Carson impulsively, “I didn’t say that, Annie Laurie, but now that you are here, come in and meet my daughter and her friend.”
She entered with a quiet dignity, and it took but one second for Carin and Azalea to see that here would be no timid imitator of their whims. If “follow-my-leader” was played, it was not at all certain that they would be in the fore.
“Carin,” said Mrs. Carson, recovering herself from a moment’s embarrassment, “make your new schoolmate welcome. Annie Laurie Pace, Azalea McBirney.”
Carin held out a chilly white hand.
“How do you do?” she said stiffly.
Azalea arose and gave her hand to the new girl. She had been a stranger herself—had many a time been among men and women unknown to her, waiting wistfully to see if she would be welcomed—and she understood, as Carin could not possibly, what brought the veiled look in the new girl’s eyes. Yet she could not venture to offend Carin—her own Carin, whose ways always seemed charming to her.
“How do you do?” she echoed. “I—I hope you are well, Annie Laurie. This—this is a very—pleasant school.”
The words stuck in her throat, and she was ashamed to find how much she wanted to cry.
The new girl looked toward Mrs. Carson.
“Ought I to stay, ma’am?” she asked. “You know I could manage at the other school some way. Wouldn’t it be better if—”
“You will do us a favor if you stay with us,” Mrs. Carson said. And: “Yes, stay, my dear,” urged Helena Parkhurst, making the girls realize for the first time that Annie Laurie had not been presented to Miss Parkhurst, and that the two must have been acquainted before. How long, the girls wondered, had this conspiracy been in the air? Had it really been decided only that morning?
“Will you take up your studies to-day, then, Annie Laurie?” Miss Parkhurst asked. “Mrs. Carson, do you think her father would object?”
“I can telephone him,” Mrs. Carson replied. “We already have had some conversation about the matter. He has been thinking of sending Annie Laurie away to school, but to do such a thing, he said, would leave him very, very lonely, since Annie Laurie is his only child.”
“Oh, it could be managed,” the girl broke in. “I know it could, but—”
Mrs. Carson raised a white hand.
“It will be quite all right,” she said with gentle firmness. “Miss Parkhurst, you have three pupils.”
She withdrew smilingly; and in spite of the leaping flame in the fireplace, and the sunshine stealing like pale gold in at the window, a chill settled down over the room. It crept into the farthermost corners, and gleamed cold as little bergs from the eyes of the three girls.
The three girls?
There were two girls—and one girl. And the sum was not yet three.
Annie Laurie Pace was making ready for church.
Her Sunday frock of dark blue serge lay on the bed; her silk petticoat rustled as she stepped briskly about the room; and her heavy coat and gloves, and her hat with the ostrich plumes, were primly awaiting her need. All was durable about her clothing, and orderly within the room.
A very clean room it was, somewhat bare and bleak, with a ceiling too high for its size. The floor was uncarpeted, the walls white and without pictures. No unnecessary thing was in sight—not even a pretty foolish trinket on the dresser. Through the windows with their dark green shades Annie Laurie could look out into the dairy yard with its whitewashed houses. Beyond stretched the pastures in which grazed the fine herd that was the pride of her father, Simeon Pace.
Usually, Annie Laurie sang as she dressed for church. She had a warm full voice, with notes in it not unlike the whistle of an oriole. But this morning no song came from her lips. She had a set, almost stern look; her chin came out a little farther than was necessary, and there was battle in her eye.
Her aunts, dressing in the next room, spoke of it.
“Annie Laurie is not herself,” declared Miss Adnah to Miss Zillah. “I can see that she is terribly put about. I do hope and pray that we haven’t made a mistake in letting her leave the district school and go in with Carin Carson and that other girl. It looks to me as if Mrs. Carson was the only person that wanted her—except, perhaps, the governess, Miss Parkhurst—and staying where we’re not wanted is not a thing that we could ever put up with, we Paces.”
“Don’t worry about Annie Laurie, sister,” replied Miss Zillah, setting her queer lid-like hat on her short gray curls. “She made the change of her own free will, remember. She’s run up against a stone wall for the first time in her life, and I’ll be interested to see whether she climbs over or burrows under it. Those two girls she’s studying with don’t like her—or at least they don’t like to have her intruding on them. I don’t know as I blame them very much. There they were, enjoying each other’s society, and in comes a stranger and thrusts them apart, you may say. Annie Laurie is as unlike them as she can be—quite of a different class, indeed.”
Miss Adnah snapped the fasteners of her gloves sharply.
“What do you mean by a different class, sister?” she said reprovingly. “Is it possible you consider the Paces inferior to anyone in this community?”
“Now, Adnah dear, I didn’t say anything about inferiority. I spoke of a difference. What the Paces know, they’ve mostly taught themselves; and what they have, they’ve honestly earned. They’re proud of it. But they’re no prouder of being what they are—well-to-do, reliable, respectable members of the community—than the Carsons are of being highly cultivated, rich, much-traveled gentle-folk, or the McBirneys of being industrious, independent mountain people. The truth is, Adnah, if there were fewer kinds of pride in this community, and less of each kind, it would be a better thing.”
“The team is up, aunts,” called Annie Laurie in her clear voice.
“Very well, child; we are ready,” came the reply.
Of course they were ready. It was seldom, indeed, that anyone in that house kept anyone else waiting. Simeon Pace, holding his fine large grays in check, knew almost to a second how long before the front door would open and three tall, upright figures emerge. And this morning was no exception. At the right instant his sisters, in their well-preserved cloaks, came out together, followed by his daughter. The door was locked, the key placed in the crotch of the sycamore, the aunts were helped to their places by Annie Laurie’s strong arms and then she swung herself into the seat beside her father, and took the reins from his hands. As she did so, she happened to hit her father’s left arm, which gave forth a sound like the rattling of an eave trough in the wind.
And truth to tell, it was made of the same material, for where Simeon Pace’s muscular member of flesh and blood had once swung, there now was an unjointed tin substitute for it, hollow as a drum. An ill-advised visit to a sawmill five years before was responsible for this defect, which indeed, might have been all but concealed had Mr. Pace been willing to buy one of the excellent modern imitations of an arm. His sisters and his daughter continually urged him to do this, but Simeon said that his tin arm had helped him when his trouble was new, and that he refused to throw it on the trash heap as a reward for faithful service. It was nothing to him that his gestures startled nervous folk. He remained loyal to his battered, awkward tin convenience, and seemed to take an innocent joy in waving it in the air, offering it as a support to old ladies, and sawing it up and down when he became excited. All the Paces were independent and Simeon was the most independent of them all.
He led his women folk well up to the front of the church and eyed them with critical kindness as they filed past him into the pew, confident that their thoughts would not wander from the preacher’s words during the service. So it was good for his fatherly satisfaction that he did not look into his daughter’s mind, for barely a sentence of the sermon did she hear that day. Her thoughts were slipping back and forth like shuttles in a loom. The past week in Mrs. Carson’s home has been a strange—and in some ways, a distressing—one. True, never had she learned so much in so short a space of time. If she asked a question everyone tried to answer it. Little as the other two girls had seemed to like her, when it came to a question of ideas, they paid instant and warm attention. An idea was an idea with them, and entitled to respect.
If the combined wit of Miss Parkhurst and her pupils failed to supply a good answer to an inquiry, plenty of books were at hand to consult, and as a last reference, there were Mr. and Mrs. Carson, who seemed to have been almost everywhere and to know something about almost everything. As Annie Laurie had heard them talk, speaking with interest about all manners of people, her little local standards began to vanish like mist before the sun. For the first time it was borne in upon her that Lee, North Carolina, was not the center of civilization. All the world, it appeared, was full of interest—full of good neighborly folk. All one had to do was to learn their language to find out how very nice they really were. It was such a new and brilliant idea to Annie Laurie that it almost dazzled her.
She had been used to thinking herself a bright girl—a girl who could keep at the head of her classes—so it was but natural in those first angry hours when she raged at the cold reception Carin and Azalea had given her, that she should have thought: “Just wait till we get down to lessons, and then I’ll show them.”
But to her surprise, she had not been able to “show them.” Carin and Azalea did not attack their studies so fiercely as she did. They seemed to make more of a game of them and less of a task. They laughed over things that puzzled her. But for all that they were clever, and it did not seem strange to them that Annie Laurie should be clever too. Her cleverness, as they knew, was Mrs. Carson’s excuse for asking her to join them. After that first chilly day they had been polite enough. But they somehow put her in the wrong. She felt awkward and strange. She fatally said the wrong thing—or the right thing in the wrong place. Even her clothes had seemed stiff and unlovely beside theirs, though they were of good material and honestly and thoroughly made. However, as Annie Laurie had more than once reflected, their clothes were made for them by their mothers, who asked nothing better than to see them looking their best. That Mary McBirney was not really Azalea’s mother made no difference—she loved Azalea almost as much, judging from what Azalea said.
Annie Laurie stole a glance at her two excellent aunts—always so really kind and just to her—but rather stern, like her father. The Paces seldom laughed; they almost never kissed each other; they said what they thought—and they quite lacked that pretty foolishness which Mrs. Carson sometimes indulged in with Carin.
Annie Laurie could remember that her own mother had been something like Mrs. Carson. It was she who had given her the name after the sweet old song. She had laughed and danced and sung, and the aunts had not quite liked it, although they mourned her deeply when she died, still in her youth. And they had treasured as keepsakes the things which had been hers.
But what was the preacher saying all this time? Something about Ananias and the doom which overtook him because of his lies. It was not a subject in which she could feel much interest. Sometimes, up at her house they suffered from too much truth telling—hard, cold truth telling—but not a soul of them would have been guilty of a lie.
“Plant a lie in the garden of your soul,” said the minister, “and it will flourish worse than any poisonous weed.