The Wishing Carpet

THE continuing marvel was that even then the doctor was not angry. Glen jerked herself free with a force which brought tears to her eyes, and laid a hand on her father’s arm, fearful of the wrath about to descend upon the wild young mountaineer.

“Dad—it’s all right—I don’t mind——”

But Glenwood Darrow was still chuckling, seeming to regard this heavy yokel pleasantry as high comedy.

“By George, that’s a great kid!” he ejaculated, clambering into his sagging buggy. “The old witch was right—wild as a hawk, but what a magnificent young brute he is!”

He saw that his daughter’s hands, gathering up the reins, were not quite steady, and that there was rare color in her golden-olive cheeks. “Lord, Glen,” he gave her knee a reassuring pat, “you don’t want to mind that! Not a bit of harm! He just——”

“I don’t mind,” said the girl, stressing the pronoun, marveling at him still.

“Best blood in the country, as I’ve told you before,” he went on. “Good, solid, Scotch and English stock. Good, clean blood—hot blood, I’ll admit, but it’s an honest red, not a washed-blue like your mother’s idols on The Hill!” He always snapped when he spoke of his dead wife. “Golly, if you could set that boy on the right road, you’d feel you’d done something, by George! There’s something to that lad, lemme tell you, besides a necktie and a shine! Why, he could take one of those young whipper-snappers and wring his neck like a chicken’s, with one hand tied behind him!”

“Yes!” Glen kindled to the picture.

Her father screwed himself round in the seat to look at her. “Yes, and I’d rather see you married to one of his sort, when the time comes, than one of those idle-born, overfed, underworked blue bloods!” he exploded.

His daughter nodded in calm agreement, quite without self-consciousness. “Yes,” she said again.

Darrow stared at her. His slow-footed, plodding imagination had suddenly sprouted wings on its heels. There had been something in the spectacle of those two gorgeous young creatures—the dark and splendid boy, his copper-maned, glowing girl—that instant when his brown fingers were twisted in her blazing hair, her head flung back, the fine fearlessness of her! Two beautiful bold young things! Why wasn’t it a possibility, by George, if he took the lad under his wing? When Glen was grown, of course—ten years from now—and the hill savage tamed—but not too much!

He was silent, dramatizing the situation to himself, and the girl did not speak. How much was she impressed? He wondered.

“And the old woman was great, too,” said the doctor, out of a long meditation. “Like an old tribal priestess! They tell me, for a fact, she’s a hundred and three! Can’t write her name, never seen a town or a railroad train, but she wants her ‘son’s son’s son fotched on!’ Well, we’ll look out for him, won’t we?”

“I guess he can look out for himself,” said Glen, soberly. “I expect he’d kill any one who looked crosswise at him.”

“Oh, he’ll key down when he gets away from that feud stuff! It’s out of date, now, even in the mountains. The Manders family is the last to carry on, I understand. He’s got a head on him, that boy; he’ll learn—learn fast!”

She had never seen him so alertly interested. It became an obsession with him in the weeks which followed; they took toilsome trips far out of their way to find Luke Manders, and they made little progress in confidence or friendship, but this merely added a fillip to their determination. It became a sort of golden legend with them, gilding their dull days. “Well, Glen, I saw him!”

“Oh, did you, Dad?” (One of the rare times when she had not been with him.) “What did he say?”

“I don’t use such language in the presence of ladies,” her father grinned enjoyingly. “Oh, yes—he yelled back at me—‘Where’s the red-head?’ His poor old granny’s pretty discouraged, but I tell her she needn’t be. Wild things are slow to tame.”

Glen told Miss Ada Tenafee about him, but the delicate teacher who kindled pinkly to romance and adventure on the printed page shook her head disparagingly. “I’m sure it’s very kind of your father, but I believe he’ll have his trouble for his pains, dear. I have heard my own dear father say and my Cousin Amos Tenafee as well, that the mountaineers were a lawless lot.” Miss Ada had two oracles, her father, who had been the mildly black sheep of a fine old family, and Amos Tenafee, the silver-headed, gallant old chief of the Tenafee clan. Hector Tenafee had married beneath the Tenafees, perhaps, but decidedly above himself—a pretty, amiable, capable girl whose father ran the livery stable which furnished him with mounts, and who had died when his daughter was a little child. When Glen Darrow was old enough to weigh and balance and catch shadings of feeling she realized that Miss Ada was entirely resigned to her mother’s early demise; it was, she clearly considered, the act of a wise Providence ... the best possible thing for an impossible connection to do was to quietly slip away.... It was interesting to see how wholly Tenafee, how not at all Simpson, Miss Ada considered herself. She said, “My father,” or “my own dear father,” if other sires or personages were under discussion, with a lifted chin, an intake of breath, a gleam in her pale eye, but she said, when absolutely necessary, “My little mother,” or “My poor little mother who left me when I was a tiny child.” Once she described her—“My little mother, who was a sweetly pretty young creature, innately refined.” Pride of blood burned brightly in the faded spinster; she was the flower of chivalry, withered and pale, a flower pressed carefully in a precious old book. It was a great pity that she was obliged to teach in the public schools at forty-four, after her father’s death which came as a climax to a lingering, querulous illness, but Miss Josephine’s select school was full and running over with high-born and reduced maiden ladies whose fathers had not married beneath them, so she became “Miz-zada” to the proletariat, living in a small housekeeping room which was situated as far as possible from the stable now conducted by her Simpson uncles.

On holidays, New Year’s Day in particular, Miss Ada put on her gray silk and the jet jewelry and the lace which had been her father’s mother’s, and drove in a hired hack (not a Simpson vehicle, however) in the earlier days and presently in an infirm motor car, to the house of her second cousin, Mr. Amos Tenafee, there for a period of not less than two hours or more than three to disport herself among her kinfolk. She was warmly and affectionately received by her Cousin Amos and his wife (dear Cousin Minnie, who had been one of the Charleston Harringtons) and the rest of the family connection, and presented to strangers with a great deal of impressiveness.

“You know our cousin, I think?” the tribal head would say, a courtly hand at the back of her waist, bringing her gently forward. “Our Cousin Ada?—Hector’s girl? Is it possible? I am amazed, sir! Ada, my dear, may I present Mr. LeRoy Harrison from Atlanta? His queenly mother, you will recall, did us the honor to receive with us two years ago to-day. A great loss, sir, a great loss ... one which we shared with you, my dear wife and I.” Then, as Miz-zada moved delicately away, she would hear always the gentle boom of his voice behind her—“A fine woman, sir, a fine, high-spirited woman ... all Tenafee.”

The excellent eggnog of which she partook with relish made her glow within and without; the sharp modeling of her pinched little face would soften with color; old Amos Tenafee, blinking at her, would step resolutely toward his duty, sweeping her under the mistletoe and kissing her generously. “An old man’s privilege, gentlemen!” he would assert defiantly to the young blades grouped about, although there were never any contenders—“An old man’s privilege!”

Just as the little cakes and sandwiches with the potation filled her with such a sense of luxurious repletion that she got herself no supper on the gas shelf and wakened faint and weak at five in the morning, so did the meeting and mingling, the high converse with her exalted clan nourish her spirit; it would be weeks before the crudities of her immediate environment brought a sense of hollowness again.

Her eyes were always faintly red rimmed, but there was, notwithstanding, a clear and rain-washed looked about her—the chastened brightness of one who has risen betimes and got her weeping out of the way early. There was subtle comedy about her, perhaps, for the discerning, but there was nothing giddy, nothing grotesque, and the young Glen found herself growing steadily fonder of her. She asked her to supper once, pursuant to her father’s wish that she should make friends, but the affair was hardly a success.

“Whyn’t she play round with young ones of her own age?” Dr. Darrow asked himself wrathfully. “Why in time does she want to train with that old hen?” He was crusty, grudgingly hospitable, and Miz-zada, who had her own delicacies about going to widowers’ houses, never went again.

He piled her plate high with food and criticized her slender appetite rudely. She had always been, she stated, a small eater.

“You look it!” he rejoined briefly. “Live alone—cook for yourself? Thought so! Egg’n-cuppa-tea—malnutrition! I know your kind like a book.”

His attitude toward her put her into the same class with Effie; Glen began at once to protect her. It was rather a blow to have Miss Ada refuse to see the romance and drama in young Luke Manders, but she would, the girl privately thought, as soon as she saw him. It would be easy, then, to persuade her to teach him.

But the splendid young savage, it appeared, was not going to need a teacher for the excellent reason that he would not be there. He refused, persistently and profanely, to leave his gun, his trails, his lawless habitat, and when Dr. Darrow came glumly home to supper one night and reported hearing that Granny Manders was dead, Glen shared with him the conviction of failure. 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! 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.

They stopped talking about him. “That’s finished,” said the doctor gruffly, but Glen could see that disappointment gnawed deep.

Miss Ada was frankly relieved.

“I can understand your father’s kind and philanthropic interest in the lad, dear, but, believe me, it would have been a fruitless effort. He would have had his trouble for his pains. I have heard my own dear father say, under similar circumstances, employing a rather common but very forceful expression, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!”

But seven days after Granny Mander’s death, Dr. Darrow’s doorbell rang at midnight. Stumbling sleepily into slippers and robe he went downstairs, swearing heartily, for it was wild weather, wind and rain, and he’d had less than an hour’s rest after his last drenching excursion.

Glen, following to the head of the stairs, with dutiful daughterly concern for his putting on dry things, saw him draw the bolt, making truculent inquiry as to who was there.

Then the fury of the gale wrenched the door from his grasp and flung it wide with a crashing bang, and—as if precipitated by the mad energy of the storm—Luke Manders pitched over the threshold and stretched his length on the shabby linoleum of the entrance hall.