The Wishing Carpet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, I thought——”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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