My Carin:
It is done, my dear, it is done. I am free. And the getting of the freedom has not been so terrible as I feared it would be.
I went home from Miss Ravanel’s that afternoon with my courage, as you remember, screwed to the sticking point. It was a glorious afternoon, Carin, and although the summer was gone, everywhere there were things to remind me of how plenteous it had been. I had not ridden far before I came to the Knox estate, which is marked by low stone posts with the letter “K” upon the top. The sunshine was over everything—over the wide, well-kept fields, the beautiful woodlands, the creeks, the broad, noisy shallows, the winding roads, the houses of the tenants and the noble structure of Mallowbanks. If ever there was a fair domain it is this. And half of it is mine—or was mine. I have given it up—resigned all claim to it. I can hardly realize it yet. But I must soon set my hand to certain signatures, and then my sacrifice will be made regular and legal, and Azalea will go out of this house as poor as when she entered it. Almost, that is. For it is true that I shall have an annuity which will last as long as I do, and will provide for my needs. Once, I suppose, I would have called that a fortune. But it seems very little now. Since I came here, I have spent more a month on gifts than this will come to.
But never mind all that. I must tell you what happened. As I said, it was a glorious afternoon, and I found my uncle and aunt sitting in the great hallway before a fire, laughing and talking together very happily. When I saw how contented they were with each other, and how perfectly they fitted into that beautiful home, I was able to comfort myself by thinking of all they had to make their life rich. They did not, as I have so often said, really need me.
So, without even waiting to change from my habit to my house garments, I went up to them and kissed them both, and then I stood by the side of the great fireplace and prayed for the right words to come. All I could think of was this—or something like this:
“Uncle David,” I began, “Aunt Lorena, I have come to say something very important.”
Uncle David looked up sharply. I had had a letter that morning from Gerald Hargreaves and he knew it. I think he thought that what I had to say related to that. So I shook my head at him, and he knew I had been reading his thoughts.
“It has to do,” I said, “with a princess who was not fit to be a princess. She was a princess with a very queer life. She had her high inheritance, but she was born in poverty for all of that, and she was reared in poverty, and in the days when she was poor she used to dream that some day her kingdom would be given to her, and that she would find her own people and live with them, beloved and loving. There was no reason to suppose this dream would ever come true, and certainly the princess never supposed it would. Dreaming the dream was just a game that she played to pass away the time.
“Then, one day, by the strangest chance, her people found her—her own people—and so kind and noble were they that they at once acknowledged her and took her to her own kingdom—though it might all have been theirs had they not been so good and true that it was a pleasure to them to do right and to divide it between themselves and her. They did all they could to make the princess happy. The great house and the garden, the fields and woods, were for her to enjoy. She was taken on a journey to beautiful lands. She was given tutors and books, gowns and jewels, a horse after her own heart and many luxuries which it would take too long to name. But there was one thing she did not have, and that was the right to make her own choice of the sort of life she wished to lead. She must stay within her kingdom, she must marry the prince that her kin should choose, and she must live as became one of her rank.
“Now it so happened that the manner in which the princess had been reared did not make it possible for her to consent to this, although she wished from the bottom of her heart to pay full duty to these kind and true kinsmen of hers. But she had a higher duty yet than that, and that was to be true to her own soul. Day by day and hour by hour this truth grew upon her: that it would be a great sin for her not to be what she was made to be. ‘Be what thou art’ she had once read in a book. ‘Be what thou art.’ She could not forget it. It seemed to her that there was great wisdom in that saying.
“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.
“Yet she must be free. Will they understand, and forgive?”
Then I cried. I said I wouldn’t, that I mustn’t; but I did. Not with sobs. No, but those miserable tears simply poured out of my eyes over my cheeks and I couldn’t stop them. And Aunt Lorena cried, too. Only she cried slowly. She sat with her long hands clasped and let the big, lazy tears roll down her cheeks. As for Uncle David, he grew red and then white, and for what seemed a long time I stood there, waiting, until after a long time Uncle David said:
“Come to me, child,” and I went to him, and kneeled down by him, and he brushed back my hair and kissed me on the forehead.
“You were never,” he said in a voice that trembled a little, “so true a Knox as you are to-day, my dear.”
Oh, Carin, wasn’t that beautiful? I had been afraid of his disapproval, but now I seemed, in a way I cannot describe, almost more afraid of his approval. It was hard for me to stand his kindness when I had been so determined to go my way.
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. We believe if you had waited, you would have come to see opportunities for great good in this life here, but since it truly does not appeal to you, I for one think you ought to be allowed to go your way and live the life you like. I know—we know—that there lies behind this resolution your determination to have a free choice in other matters than your vocation. Am I not right in this?”
“Yes,” I said, and found the courage to look straight into her eyes.
“I do not blame you,” she said. “I married the man I loved, and I believe every woman should do that if she can.”
“At any price?” asked Uncle David, looking first at me and then at her.
“Oh, at any price consistent with honor,” she said.
“The price you pay is a large one,” he said to me. “I doubt if you appreciate how large.”
“It would mean nothing to me if my heart always hung heavily in me,” I said.
“No,” he agreed.
“No,” echoed Aunt Lorena.
They are very tender with me. They deeply regret the conditions of the will, but they have no power to change them. As for me, I do not wish any change made. I want all left as my little grandmother desired. I resent nothing. I have too much for which to be thankful.
Carin, it seems incredible, but in a few days I shall be at Lee. I will wire you when I am coming. Ride up to see Mother McBirney. Let her know everything. Tell everyone I am coming home. Oh, how my heart beats at thought of it! I can write no more. I cannot see my page for these silly tears.
Azalea.
CHAPTER XIV
“WHERE THERE IS A
WILL”
The Shoals, November 24.
Dear Aunt Lorena and Dear Uncle David:
Just a line to say that I am safe here and am sending Semmy back to you with many, many thanks. She asked to stay with me, but it was, I fancy, more to compliment me than for any other reason. I would not keep her, of course. She belongs to Mallowbanks, does dear good Greenville Female Seminary Simms. May heaven bless her. I hated to part with her.
Dear me, how many kinds of homesickness one may have. When I was away from Lee I was longing for it; now that I am here I love to dream of Mallowbanks. Still, I am glad I am here. There is work awaiting me. In fact, it is piled high, and someone was desperately needed to take hold of it. Lee is bulging with nice visitors with fashionable-looking purses, and they are wild to do things and spend money. They would rather purchase these mountain products than anything else, because they are such quaint souvenirs of this lovely place. But, alas, all is in confusion in the little shop. The weavers have been lazy, the basket-makers must have been wool gathering, the pottery makers have all been getting married—just like Ma Kitchell—and there is, to say the least, the dickens to pay.
Mr. and Mrs. Carson had been most eager to have me come back and take up the work, but as you know, there was not a hint from them that they wanted me, because, of course, they would not in any way interfere with me, nor tempt me to return. Anyway, I do not suppose they had the faintest idea that I would do so. But when they found that I was willing and ready to take up the work, they were simply delighted, and now they are doing everything in their power to help my task along. Within two or three weeks I hope to have things running very well. I would like to make a good showing before Christmas.
I am staying with my own Carin Carson for the present, because I am not inclined to take the long ride up and down the mountain. It would be too exhausting. Moreover, since I would not be able to help Mother McBirney with the housework, I would very much object to staying there and making her extra trouble. But of course I went up there the day after I arrived. Things are going on quite in the old way with the McBirneys. Except, of course, that Jim is not there, being still at school. Hi Kitchell’s younger brother is a helper for Father McBirney, and seems a fine, willing boy. Father McBirney is pretty well, considering his condition of a year ago, but he will never be quite so strong and nimble as he once was. Mother McBirney is well and happy in her quiet way, and she sends her respects to you.
I am asking a few friends for subscriptions for the Industries. It would not become me to place any limit on their generosity, would it?
Oh, what an impertinent one I am to badger you, when you have already done so much for me!
How am I to thank you for everything? How, above all, am I to express my gratitude to you for your large-minded consideration for my feelings and preferences? I am now a worker in the world of workers, and I am very happy, for a deep need of my being is finding expression. Try to understand as well as to forgive.
With abiding affection,
Azalea.
The Shoals, December 5.
Dearest Miss Delight, my own beloved twenty-seventh cousin:
Oh, why do you not come to see me? You thought you might come along in a week or two. It is more than a week or two and you are not here. I am having such fun, but it would be yet more fun if you were sharing it with me.
I am selling things!
Yes, selling them at the Mountain Industries.
They are going like hot cakes. I haven’t made up my books yet, but from present indications I should say that the Mountain Industries would presently be very, very rich. Of course I’m really not a good judge, because this is the first selling I ever have done, and it may have excited me a bit.
Let me tell you what I have been doing. As I mentioned in the little note I wrote you, things were rather at sixes and sevens here. Mrs. Kitchell, who has had charge of the place from the very beginning, was a fine worker and was and is one of the dearest little things that ever lived, but she wasn’t just the person for managing a growing business. She was better at weaving than at negotiating the weaving of other folk, for example. Actually, when I came to look things over I found quantities of fine saleable stuff tucked away here and there. No one ever had come in and demanded those particular things—not knowing of the existence of them—and they had therefore remained unsold.
I had the whole “kit an’ bilin’” taken out in the yard and spread around on bushes and fences and the ground and aired and aired and aired! Then I had the salesroom calcimined a most magnificent pumpkin color. The decorator was as stupid as a rabbit about mixing the right color, so Carin came over and did it. Then I had racks put around the wall. Some of them hung from the ceiling; some stood on the floor. Also I had a few drawers and shelves put up, and I got some show cases with black finishings, and I furnished the room with mountain furniture stained black. Also I have the floor covered with extra heavy rag carpeting in pumpkin yellow and black.
Fancy, if you please, how beautiful my blue hand-woven coverlets and my brown-and-orange and black-and-red counterpanes look against this wall. Fancy how attractive is the snarl of fine hand-woven baskets that I have tied up on one side of the room.
What is more, we are now opening a regular tea room. Mrs. Kitchell had had one at the beginning, but it had fallen into nothingness. Now I have one—the darlingest room—all in golden brown and white. It complements the other room in the nicest way, and yet is very different indeed. I have some curious Japanese dishes, sort of crackled in effect, white and brown, and odd serving dishes in dull yellow majolica. And we use the mountain-made trays of willow and some of the mountain pottery. I have three neat, sweet, fleet mountain girls in here helping with the tea room, and people simply throng to it. I write out the little menu every morning before I get out of bed, and one of these girls, who really has a head on her, prepares the things in the most appetizing manner.
“People,” I said to her, “don’t come in here because they are hungry. They come because they want to be amused. And they won’t be amused unless everything looks beautiful.”
Carin is doing a lot of the cooking. She is doing it because she wants to know how to cook. She is going to be married before spring, and there is simply no use in her trying to do anything in her own kitchen. The servants won’t let her; or if they do consent they all stand around and watch till she is so nervous she can’t do a thing. But over in our kitchen she can do just what she pleases. She makes those delicious little cakes called “hermits” and “marguerites” and “rocks” and her sandwiches are as good to look at as they are to taste. She has a new kind every day.
I am terribly stern with her about keeping books, however, and she has to put down every cent she spends. The tea room must make money for us or we’ll not run it. I have become fiercely practical.
Oh, how light my heart is! There is so much to do each day that I can hardly get through, and I fall asleep as soon as I touch the bed, and am oblivious to the whole world until my alarm goes off. But I set my alarm pretty early because each day I must think out my work before I get up. I write out my program for the day and insist on following it.
Of course quantities and quantities of people come in the shop who do not purchase, but I do not waste much time with them. I have a little sign on the wall telling our patrons to look around as much as they please, and when they have made their selection to let us know. I add that they are most welcome; whether they purchase or no, they are to make themselves at home.
Meantime, I have a pleasant young girl at hand ready to wait on them when they wish her to, and I, though I appear to be busy with other matters, keep an ear cocked, and if she seems to need reinforcing, I come to her assistance. By the way, who do you suppose that girl is? Why, she is Liza Wixon, from Mount Hebron, the girl whose soup I sampled so generously without invitation. I have persuaded both her mother and her to come down and help me. So they have put their sadness behind them and are working like good fellows. Of course they have a secret of some kind, but I shall never ask what it is.
I am sending off letters to our workers, begging them to hasten their wares to us, telling them the demand for their work is here. All we need is the goods.
No, I don’t go anywhere. Do you wish I would? When I first came home people began giving me teas and all that, but I begged them not to.
“Come and see me Sunday afternoons,” I told them. “I mustn’t indulge in a social life. I wouldn’t have time and strength for that along with all my work.”
I knew the people who really cared for me would come, and as for the others, it would be better for them to visit their chosen friends and not bother with me.
Well, why don’t you come to visit me and to help me with the Christmas trade? Wouldn’t it be the joy of the world to see the exclusive Miss Delight Ravanel waiting on people and wearing a pleasant saleslady’s smile? It would fill me with great glee. Please come down here and let me see you doing it.
Do you miss me? I miss you very, very much. Evenings, when I leave the drawing-room and go up to my own quiet room, I think of you sitting by yourself, so lady-fine and peaceful beside your lamp, your busy needles and thoughts going, and outside the trees sighing and the wind whistling. How still you can be, dear friend. Is it hard to learn to be as still as that?
I have been telling Barbara Summers all about you. Of course she had met you at the time of my coming-out party, but she couldn’t possibly know you—or even guess you—until she had sat with you evening after evening as I have, in so pleasant a “solitude of two” and mined for your treasures of brain and heart. For you hide your virtues as other people do their faults.
Dear Delight R., I have had occasion whenever I went to Mother McBirney’s, to go by the place I used to call mine. I mean that little, out-looking bench on the mountain-side where the tulip trees rustle and the spring of cold water whispers. I have already told you that a house is going up there. Well, it is beginning really to look like a house now, and I cannot resist dismounting every time I pass it, and looking it over.
It is going to be a bewitching house, nothing less. There is a covered porch which in winter is to be made into a sun room, that literally hangs over the blue abyss, but so firmly is it supported with its foundations of cement and its huge beams of oak, that it is as firm and enduring as the mountain-side itself. There is a long, fine living room; the mantel is to be of blue tile—yes, and the chimney piece, too. It will be curious, will it not? But I think I shall like it. There are two bedrooms on the first floor, and there is, of course, the kitchen and a small dining room. The wood is chestnut, which takes on a beautiful color when it is oiled.
Upstairs there is a bedroom which reminds me of my dear little loft at Mother McBirney’s only that it is, of course, to be very nicely finished off. It looks up the mountain-side, too, and it opens on a sleeping porch. Then there is a long room beside it, the use of which I do not know. Perhaps it is being left undivided merely because it is not needed for present use. I have asked a number of persons who is building this house, but no one seems to know. The contractor is a friend of mine, but even he professes to know nothing. He says that a man at Rutherford is doing all the business with him, but that he understands it is for some gentleman who wishes to have a quiet spot to come to now and then, and who once visited Lee and saw this beautiful building site.
Well, if he had taken any other spot in the whole county except the particular one that he did, he would be welcome. But as it is, he annoys me.
Haven’t I chattered about enough? Mind, I am looking for you. I want you to come down and play at being a “rich merchant” with me.
If you see the good people at Mallowbanks, give them my love, please.
Fondly,
Azalea.
Dear Aunt Lorena:
I have just come home from the wedding of my dear Annie Laurie Pace to Samuel Disbrow. It was quite a sudden affair at the last. Of course they have been in love with each other for years, and it must be a year and a half since they became engaged. But they were both so busy superintending the dairy which Annie Laurie’s father left her, and following up their university extension course, that we had about decided, Carin and I, that they had forgotten all about getting married.
But it seems that we were mistaken. They were thinking about it all of the time.
The wedding was held in the Baptist church, and there were three ministers to make it what it should be. There was the Baptist minister, who belonged there, and the Methodist minister—Mr. Summers—who helped because Annie Laurie loved him, and there was old Mr. Mills, who came back from Florida to put on the finishing touches, because Annie Laurie had known him ever since she was a baby.
She looked glorious, did Annie Laurie, so tall and strong and fine, with her dark red hair burnished like a bird’s breast, all in her white, with her floating veil. Instead of bride’s roses she carried a bouquet of great tawny chrysanthemums the color of her hair. Sam has grown to be a magnificent fellow and everyone likes him. When I remember what a pale-faced, anxious boy he was once, and see what a strong, capable, independent fellow he has become, I feel tremendously proud, not only of him, but of Lee, which helped him to make himself what he is. There was a time when everybody thought him the son of a thief, and when he was broken-hearted with grief and shame, when he might have gone down and become worse than nothing. But he wanted to be good and fine, and everybody in Lee turned in and gave him a boost. Annie Laurie helped most of all, of course.
Now she has her reward.
They have gone away on a wedding trip, and I am so glad. Never before has either of them gone outside of the state they were born in. But now she and Sam are off to the North, and will visit New York and Boston, Washington and Baltimore, and a number of other places. Fortunately, they have a good superintendent, and the dairy will get on very well without them. I am going to stay in the house with Annie Laurie’s two aunts until she returns. Aunt Adnah is very restless, and Aunt Zillah cannot manage her very well, but when I am there I can, I think, keep them amused. I move over to-morrow, and shall stay in Annie Laurie’s own room, which is as clean, if not as bare, as in the old days when I knew it first.
How Annie Laurie did want dear old Haystack Thompson to play at the little dance after the wedding! But he is not to be found. Never since he ran away from good little Mrs. Kitchell has he been seen or heard of. But I can’t believe that any harm has come to him. He is off in some other part of his beloved mountains, fiddling for new friends. I miss him terribly. Don’t think me egotistical, but I do wonder if he would return if he knew that I was back here. He always loved me quite out of proportion to my deserts. It was because he helped to find me that time I was kidnapped, I think, and because I was such a queer, unlucky little girl and needed him so much. 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. Carin has ordered a beautiful rug from New York, which will have the same colors in it. And Mrs. Carson will give the hangings of blue for the windows. So we shall have a charming room for her by the time she returns. The truth is, Annie Laurie never pays any attention to herself or to the things which she alone uses, beyond keeping everything spotlessly clean and in order after the immemorial fashion of the Paces.
But she deserves a beautiful bedroom, and she shall have it.
I am so busy in the shop during the day that I have to weave the counterpane at night. I might have someone else do it, only I prefer to do it with my own hands. Anyway, I have to economize a bit. Not that I mind. Which reminds me that the first installment of the annuity dear grandmother provided for me, arrived safely. Enclosed please find receipt. Mr. Carson is paying me a nice little salary for my work at the Industries. So I am well provided for, as you see. But I want to be a bit saving, because now, indeed, Azalea is out for herself, and she does not want to have to fall back on anybody.
I am sorry Uncle David does not write me. He isn’t vexed with me, is he? Oh, I know he is disappointed. I know I seem to him not to have done the right or the grateful thing. But try to make him understand that I love him. I had to go my own way, that is all. And I am justified; I feel that in my heart. I enjoy each moment as it comes, and I continually feel that something yet more glorious is about to happen.
With devotion,
Azalea.
CHAPTER XV
“RING, HAPPY
BELLS”
The Shoals, December 26.
My dear, dear Uncle and Aunt:
A happy New Year! Was it a merry Christmas for you? Oh, I hope it was. You had many of your kith and kin with you, I know. I would have liked to have been there if only I could have been in two places at once. But you know how difficult that is.
And this year I had to be right here.
You still wonder why?
It is not easy to explain. But it had to be. I felt the need of it. I have been working my way back to the true, original Azalea, and she was to be found here and not amid all the luxury and quietude and tradition of Mallowbanks. But now, I think, at last, she is really found, and so she hopes that next year you may be able to include her in your Christmas celebration.
Let me thank you and then thank you again for your beautiful Christmas gifts. A piano of my own, and a music cabinet and folios and folios of music! It was a royal gift and I do not see just how ordinary thanks are going to express my gratitude. All I can say is that it shall be the comfort of my lonely hours, and the joy of my bright ones, and that I promise now that never shall I sit down to this exquisite instrument without thinking of the two who gave it to me, and being thankful that my life met theirs. That my life and theirs could not, for reasons, run along in the same channel, makes the joy of the meeting no less. I look at this wonderful gift and find myself not quite believing that it is really mine. This morning I could hardly wait to dress to run into Carin’s studio to see if it really was there. Having no place of my own, I have had it put in her lovely room for the time being.
I have many things to tell you, and I am going to try to tell them with proper dignity as becomes your niece. I know I write dreadful nonsense at times, and I know, too, that I am too impulsive and enthusiastic. I remember that dear Father McBirney warned me against those faults in my character years ago, when I first came to him. I am afraid I have not improved very much, but at least I am aware that he was right, and that I ought to be a more sober and calm person than I am.
So, quite calmly and soberly, I am happier than I ever thought anybody could be. I have promised Keefe O’Connor to marry him. By Spring I shall have done it—and you two shall be here beside me, to deliver me with all possible conventionality into his hands.
There! Did I not tell that soberly enough?
And now to go back!
I did not write to Keefe nor he to me. We had promised you that we would not, and we kept our word. I did not even let him know that I was here at Lee, or that I had renounced all of my right to my grandmother’s splendid legacy in order to be free to weave my own silver web. No, I just worked and kept still.
But I confess that I knew that Annie Laurie had written to Keefe’s sister, Mrs. Rowantree, all about it, and that I was morally sure she would write to Keefe. But that, as you will plainly see, was something over which I had no control. Not, I will confess, that I tried to have.
Meantime, I tried to be content, and I was, really, but it was a contentment made up largely of expectation. You see how frank I am with you. Do you mind? It is Azalea’s way. You don’t want her to try to be any other way than is natural to her, do you?
Yes, I had a beautiful, deep-down, reassuring sense of expectation. I felt as if Happiness was journeying toward me.
“Maybe,” I often said to myself, “she will be a long while coming, but she is on the way. By putting my ear to the ground, I am sure I can hear her footsteps.”
So I kept on working and working, and the work thrived and I thrived. At night I slept the sleep of the very weary, and all day long I was playing the fine exciting game of building up the business of the Mountain Industries.
Then, when I had nothing else to do, I dreamed dreams.
There was only one thing in the world that bothered me, and that was the little house up on the mountain. It seemed too outrageous that anybody—a stranger at that—should have come down into the Blue Ridge and bought and built on the one spot of all the whole range that I had selected for myself. To add insult to injury, he was putting up precisely, identically, the sort of a house that I had designed for the place. There was only one way to account for that, and that was that both he and I had selected the most appropriate sort of a house for the place. Such a house, I finally decided, must be inevitable in such a spot. And yet, after all, that didn’t quite account for the strangeness of the fact that the place was such a materialization of my dream. It really annoyed me. I did not like that man. I was prepared to be disagreeable to him.
And then, one day, I saw him.
It was a Sunday, clear and crisp and cold, and I had been up to have dinner with Mother McBirney. Jim was home, too, for the holidays, and the four of us sat in the quaint, dear old room just as we used years ago. Only now it was Jim and not Father McBirney who said grace at table. It was he who carved the turkey too. For it was a feast, and we ate one of the turkeys which usually are kept for market. But nothing is too good for Jim, home from college. Or for Azalea, who is keeping him there.
Yes, turkey we had, and yams cooked in sugar and wild crab apple jelly and green tomato pickles and molasses bread and biscuits and gravy, and coffee and “stickies” for dessert. To make stickies, you make a pie crust and roll brown sugar in it. You are always glad when you see them and sorry after you have eaten them. Ma makes the best ones in the South. Oh, yes, we were very happy. The fire leaped in the old black fireplace, and the hounds curled up before it and whined with joy. Ma was a dream in her blue dress and white apron with her dear face shining with goodness and love, and Pa McBirney was a picture with his whitening hair. Outside the mountain dreamed and dreamed, and told us how long mountains lived, and what a little while mere folks had for enjoying themselves, and warned us to gather up all the sweetness we could while we have a chance.
So we did. We ate and laughed and were glad together; we tidied the little house and then we sang and read. But all the time I noticed Mother looking at me in a new way, and sometimes the tears would come to her eyes, and it seemed as if she never passed me without dropping a hand on my head or my shoulder. And Jim was tender too. He neither teased me nor preached to me. He was just sweet. As for Pa, he asked me if I didn’t think all of our ways were laid out for us by One Who Knew What Was Best. Oh, yes, it surely was a day long to be remembered.
But it surprised me a little when they urged me to start on my way.
“You mustn’t be out after dark, my dear,” said Mother McBirney, patting my hand. “I want to think of you as safe at the Shoals before the twilight comes. So you’d better be on your way, honey-girl.”
“But I want to stay,” I pleaded.
“No, no,” she laughed, “you want to go. You may not know it, but you do.”
So among them they got me into my things and onto my horse. I miss my little Paprika when I ride these mountain roads, and sometimes wish I could buy her back again. The horse I ride is from the Carson stables, of course, and is a fine, gentle creature which Mrs. Carson often uses and which knows every inch of the way.
To my surprise, Jim insisted on coming along.
“But no,” I said. “What is the use, Jim? Stay with the folks.”
“I need exercise, sister,” he answered, still in that surprisingly gentle way. “You must let me do what I like when I am home so seldom. I get discipline enough at college.”
So off we went together, just as we used in the old days when we were boy and girl.
“Jim,” I said, “you aren’t at all sorry that you chose to be a minister?”
I never had had a chance to ask him this, seriously, and I was glad of the opportunity.
“Sis,” he said, “every day of my life I am more and more thankful that I decided to be one. It is only that—only living the best I can and giving all my heart and life to the service of the God who made this beautiful earth and our wonderful bodies and souls—that can satisfy me. I must do it. I live in the thought of it.”
I looked at him as he rode beside me and saw how his face had strengthened and beautified, and I wondered how such things happened; how it was that little commonplace teasing boys grew up to be men like the one beside me.
“Oh, Jim,” I cried, holding out my hand to him, “I congratulate you from my deepest heart. I feared that your taking up of the ministry might be a mood; that you might change. But now I see you never will. You will be a tower of strength, brother Jim, and in the years to come when I am troubled about life, I shall come to you for help.”
“It is you who always have helped me, Zalie,” he said. “It is you who are making it possible now for me to prepare for my great work.”
I write you all this, dear Uncle and Auntie, to show you how sweet he is and how interesting and peaceful my life is here, so you’ll not be sorry, thinking of all I let go from me.
Well, we went on down the road, looking at the purple valley with the shafts of smoke arising straight from the houses below and towering, silver bright, in the light of the lowering sun. I was so absorbed with it all that I did not realize how rapidly we were covering the road, till suddenly I saw we were beside the house on the bench.
And what do you think? There was a shaft of silvery smoke arising from that chimney, too, and it was shot through with little sparks like stars, as if the fire it came from had been newly lighted.
“Oh,” I cried, “the owner of the house has come!”
I had been so happy all day that I forgot to be disagreeable, and though I had quite made up my mind to dislike this person intensely, I neglected to do it at that moment, for thinking of how happy he must be to have come to his beautiful little house. I wondered too if his wife was with him, and what she was like. Then I remembered that I had heard he was not married, and I thought:
“He can never be lonely amid such beauty. To look off on a scene like this will be company enough.”
But I knew that wasn’t really so. No beauty, however great, can comfort one for a lonely hearth; no meal is delicious for which only one place is set.
Then, out of that purplish gloom and from the shadow of the porch at the side of the house I heard a voice saying lazily:
“Won’t you be pleased to ’light and come in?”
It had the mountain drawl and the mountain way, but there was something wrong with it, and it made me look inquiringly at Jim. He was wearing a broad grin—a perfectly wonderful, old-time-Jim grin.
“Shall we?” said he.
Curiosity got hold of me and flung me off that horse and sent me right up to the stranger on the porch.
“It is very kind of you,” I said in a fine Mallowbanks manner, “and we shall be delighted. We have so long been interested in the building of this beautiful little house, and we did not know its owner—”
Then I said no more.
It was Keefe O’Connor who stood there holding out his hands to me.
“I’ll put up the horses, sis,” said Jim with a little funny break in his voice. And then Keefe drew me into the lighted room.
You two have been such true lovers for so many years, that I need tell you nothing about what that moment meant. No, I need not tell you anything at all.
After a while we went into the long room where the fire was leaping.
“Oh,” I cried, “it is perfect!”
For the room completely suited me.
“It is bare,” said Keefe. “But I left the furnishings to you.”
I said nothing. I laughed. It was different from any other laugh I ever had. I laughed and laughed.
“What is so amusing?” asked Keefe at last.
“Nothing is amusing,” I said. “I am not amused. I am happy.”
“Oh,” he said, and then he laughed too. By and by he asked:
“Ought I to have waited longer?”
“Why should you?”
“I shall paint here half the year or more,” he explained. “Then, when I must, I shall go to the cities. It will be necessary. I must hold my exhibits, visit the art academies, see what other men are doing—keep in touch with the world. But this shall be my home—our home.”
“Shall we give it a name?”
“I have thought of hundreds and rejected them.”
“Perhaps Jim can name it for us.”
We went to look for him and found him star-gazing. His teeth were beginning to chatter a little, I am afraid, with the sharp chill of the air.
“Jim,” I said, giving him a good hug and kiss, “I didn’t think you would keep a secret from your Zalie.”
Dear old Jim! He gave me such a squeeze and let loose a big, blundering kind of a laugh, and then we brought him in and we all sat around the fire and talked. I never knew just how much like a brother he seemed to me till that moment.
We asked him to name the cottage for us, but he could think of nothing, and then, quite suddenly it came to me. I would call it “Delight Cottage” in honor of my own dear Delight Ravanel.
Don’t you agree with me that it is a good idea?
But I haven’t told her yet. I thought I would keep it a secret until she came to visit me, which will be in a few days now. Keefe said he would himself make the sign and place it at the gateway—the same gateway being nothing less than two of my beloved tulip trees.
Keefe told me he had come down to finish some paintings, and that he would go on living right there in the cottage, working on certain parts of the house himself, such as the staining of the wood, the making of fire screens and benches for the chimney side, and various other things. He said there was work enough to keep him busy in his odd moments for a year or two. Mrs. Babb is coming over to cook for him and to keep “Delight Cottage” tidy.
Well, a little later in the evening Jim started me on my way again, only this time both he and Keefe were my cavaliers, and I burst into the drawing-room at the Shoals expecting to give them the greatest sort of a surprise, but I was vastly disappointed. They only laughed at me. They had known all along that Keefe was building the house, and they had met him at the train and had taken him up to Delight Cottage themselves, I all the while toiling away in my shop. He wanted, it seems, to make the place look as well as it could in its incomplete state before I saw it.
Ah, what a happy, happy girl I am! Only one thing troubles me, and that is your possible disapproval. Keefe is writing you, I believe. He said to me more than once:
“I do hope your uncle and aunt are not going to think that I have done wrong. I have cared more for your happiness, Azalea, than for anything on earth, and if I had for one moment believed that you would have been happier if I had withdrawn myself entirely from your life, I would have done so without regard to my lifelong loneliness. But when I heard that you had resigned your inheritance and come back here, I was forced to conclude that it was a sign and token to me.”
“It was,” I confessed. “Just that.”
Well, my dear kinfolk, Christmas came with all its pleasures, and it brought me your beautiful gift, also my ring from Keefe, and lovely things from the Carsons and from many other friends. Even there were many remembrances from my mountain people.
There was one gift—or token, rather—which filled me with the greatest surprise. It was a copy of Delight Ravanel’s will, bequeathing to me all of her possessions when the day comes that she must go into the Other Land. Oh, I hope it will be many, many years till then!
Try to fancy my amazement. Truly, I never was more surprised in my life, although, as you know, I have had a good many surprises for a person of my age.
Moreover, she is coming to see me next week, and in preparation for her visit I have had Mrs. Kitchell’s old living rooms fitted up all fresh for us. There is a little sitting room, and a kitchen and two bedrooms. With the help of my always kind Mrs. Carson, the place has been made—or is being made—as cosy and dainty as you can imagine. Mrs. Wixon will help me keep house, and I shall be quite independent and settled. Of course Mrs. Carson and Carin beg me to stay with them, but I feel I have been their guest quite long enough. Now—only fancy—I shall be able to entertain them at times, and to return in some small measure the endless hospitality they have shown me. I think Cousin Delight will love this little experiment in housekeeping, and I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see her taking an interest in the weaving and basket-making and in the little shop. It would be the best thing in the world for her if she would, for life certainly is pretty drowsy at Monrepos, where she has lived so long alone, remembering and brooding and doing her little solitary tasks. If I have my way she shall stay with me or near me altogether.
So you see into what a shining and rapid current my little life has been swung. And you will forgive me for everything I did not do and for everything I am doing. I insist on being forgiven—and loved. You must love me when I love you so much.
When I am married you must be my first guests. Until you come, I shall have no one. I would never be satisfied if you did not dedicate my house for me by your presence.
The wedding day is not yet set exactly. It will be in the early summer, after Keefe has finished some orders he has, and so is feeling quite rich, and after I have really got the Mountain Industries in such a condition that I can safely pass them on to others. Even after I am married I shall keep an overseeing eye on them, and Mrs. Carson and Carin will help me. Then, of course, there is my trousseau to make. I am so glad you let me have dear little madam grandmother’s chests. I think I can make over her wedding dress so that I can wear it, and of course I shall wear her veil.
If you will send on the portrait that she had painted for me, I can hang it above my new piano in my little sitting room. Or shall I hang it above my fireplace? I must try and see in which place it looks the best.
My heart is singing with joy, and I send you a thousand little carefully wrapped packages of love. Undo them one by one and think of
Azalea.