The Wishing Carpet

FROM the time she was fourteen—almost, indeed, from the moment of the first meeting, Glen Darrow knew that some day, when she was old enough, she would fall in love with Luke Manders.

She accepted this knowledge without excitement or self-consciousness, as simply as she accepted the other undebatable facts of her life and circumstances. It was just as another girl might know that she was going to college after she finished high school, or a third, that her aunt would take her abroad when she was eighteen.

She knew it, that was all, in a grave preoccupation, in a certain serene young sense of dedication. The thing was settled; it hadn’t to be worried about. It would have been amusing to an observer in possession of the facts to see how sedulously both her father and Miss Ada Tenafee avoided all discussion, all mention even, of such a possibility—the man, because he desired it so heartily and feared to frustrate his hopes by forcing, and the woman because she turned from the idea with all the inhibitions of her caste and type, and was craftily aware that opposition would fan the flame.

It was, therefore, a wordlessly understood thing between the doctor and his daughter during the remainder of his life, but he became vocal about it on his profane and painful deathbed. He was hotly and bitterly rebellious at being obliged to die at forty-eight. His heedless habits of finance would leave her pitifully poor: beyond the dull house on the dull street, midway between The Hill and the mills, there would be something under two thousand dollars. Glen would have to leave high school in her final year and go to business college, and to work. Glenwood Darrow had always told himself that presently he would turn over a new leaf, force collections, invoke the law on long outstanding accounts, set his affairs in order and assure the girl’s future.... The automobile accident put a sudden and gory period to his plans.

He had been persuaded, after long delay, to give up his elderly horse and his battered buggy and buy a machine, and—once he had been actually won over—the salesman and demonstrator found him juvenilely enthusiastic and a quick if careless and cocksure pupil. The demonstrator found that his store of bright and steady patience would not be heeded in this case: the doctor said—“Yes, yes! I get you! All right! All right, I say—Good God, man, do I look like a half-wit?”—at the end of the second lesson and refused a third. He came back from his third attempt with broken bumper and bent fenders, and a chuckling delight in his achievement, though he absolutely refused to take Glen with him until he’d “got the hang of the fool thing in a little better,” and from his fourth trip he was brought home in the ambulance he had summoned so many times for others, and cursed for its tardiness and its meager comforts.

He lived for ten difficult days with the grief-stricken girl and a brow-beaten nurse in attendance, with Luke Manders coming in at night to lift him capably when his position became unbearable, and Miss Ada Tenafee calling conscientiously to inquire every afternoon on her way home from school.

Remorsefully, he laid before his daughter the nakedness of their land. “But it doesn’t matter, Dad, dear,” she comforted him. “I always expected to work; you know I did. It doesn’t matter; nothing matters but you!” Her voice broke on the words but she did not cry. She bore herself, from the moment that he was carried into the house, crushed and broken, until he was carried out of it for the last time, with the same composure she had exhibited on the night of Luke Mander’s exodus from his mountains. She was, after all, the man told himself with satisfaction and pride, his child; the soft-eyed, soft-chinned Effie had been merely the mild receptacle for her embryonic stage; directly she was born, she was triumphantly his, and his child would make her way in the world against any mischance.

She planned with him, steadily: she would leave school and go to business college at once, and fit herself for a job as expeditiously as possible, so as not to draw upon her tiny capital any more than was absolutely necessary. The house, he insisted, she must keep; it would not bring enough to make its sale worth while, and it was a shelter; he didn’t want her knocking round in boarding places. He thought she might rent some of the rooms to school-teachers or decent women of some sort; he didn’t want her there alone, of course.

Glen opened her mouth to say that she would try to coax Miss Ada from her solitary little room, but stopped herself in time; it would only have irritated him. “Yes, Dad; I can get some one, surely, and I will. I promise you I won’t stay alone. You mustn’t worry, Dad!”

He told her, clumsily, since praise came unhandily to his lips, what she had meant to him, and his earnest hope that she would be true to the creeds and convictions he had set up for her. Jerkily, pausing often to rest and husband his fast-failing strength, he renewed for her the standards he had given her in her childhood, particularly on the day of the ill-starred valentine party, when she had gone to drive with him after that tragic festivity. She was to remember always that she was as good as any, and better than most; she was to be the champion of the weak—as represented by the mountaineers and the mill people—and she was to pick her friends from among them; she was to “hate’n despise” The Hill contingent, and to “spike their guns by snubbing them before they got the chance to snub her.”

And on the last day of all, gruffly and ineptly, he approached the subject nearest his heart.

“Look here, Glen,” he began, “about Luke....”

“Yes, Dad,” she met his eyes steadily.

“You and Luke ...” he managed between battled breaths, “I’m not fool enough, no, nor knave enough, to pull the ‘dying father’s wish’ on you, but——”

The girl wedged another pillow behind his heaving shoulders. “I know, Dad.” The infrequent color had surged up in her golden-olive cheeks, but beyond that single manifestation she was entirely calm.

“You’re only seventeen ... child, still.... Wait till you’re nineteen—twenty— No foolishness in meantime, hear me?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“No hand-holding ... mooning ’round....”

“No, Dad,” she promised earnestly and without embarrassment.

“Well, now, remember ... haven’t made any deathbed promise.... I’m not expecting ... run things ... from the grave.”

“I know,” she soothed him, wiping the sweat from his glistening forehead. “I understand, Dad, dear. Please don’t try——”

But he went doggedly on. “You’re free ... free as air ... but if you do— Well, if there’s anything to this ‘hereafter’ stuff ... if I’m—anywhere—you’ll know I’m—glad!” He scowled at the nurse, bringing his nourishment, and sent Glen out for a breath of air.

He died soon after midnight with his daughter beside him, two local doctors and the harried nurse. Luke Manders and Miss Ada Tenafee, on either side of the hideous sitting room, waited downstairs. His mind wandered a little, toward the last, and he spoke of his wife, of her and to her. “Blue eyes,” he muttered, “blue and soft ... gentle ... kind of sad, some way.... Just see her eyes over the top of the hymn book.... What’s the matter, Effie? Oh, you like that fool rug? G. P. present ... old Mrs. Ludermann, my one wealthy patient.... I figured we’d take it back and get credit for it ... doesn’t go with anything else we’ve got— Oh, all right! All right, I say! Keep it! Good lord, keep it!” He murmured snatches of long-forgotten talk, relived a portion of his interview with Granny Manders when she confided her dream of having her son’s son’s son “fotched on,” and at the end looked at the girl with clear and unclouded gaze.

“You keep away from that Hill crowd, hear? You mind me! Poor Effie, your poor mother, she came down here as friendly as a fox terrier, and what’d they do? Snubbed her, and cold-shouldered her, and looked right through her, that’s what they did, damn ’em! Crushed her, and broke her heart, and killed her, damn ’em—killed her! Damn their souls!” shouted the doctor with amazing vigor, and, damning, died, entirely in character, as he had lived.

The two doctors, one old and one young, were kind, and the nurse was kind, and Glen was civil in her appreciation, but she turned to her two friends, stumbling blindly down the stairs to find them.

The shabby teacher put thin arms about her and held her close. She knew, she said, none better, what it meant to lose a father.... Glen was to lie down at once, and she would bring her a cup of tea. She had—happily—put the kettle on a half hour earlier, and she pushed Glen gently down into the easiest of the chairs and tiptoed swiftly to the kitchen.

Luke Manders did not speak to her, but he came and stood before her, towering over her like a young pine, and his black eyes were very bright. He took the hand that she gropingly held out to him and held it hard in his own hard hand, and it went through her mind that it was like taking hold of a stalwart tree for support—like leaning upon solid rock, like the strength of the hills. Looking up at him through tears she wondered, even in that hour, if her father had talked to him as he had to her, but she heard Miss Ada’s pattering return and pulled her hand away. She must be careful now with her two friends—her only friends—who were not friends with each other.

The young mountaineer was no longer openly rude to the faded gentlewoman: to the boldness and poise which he had brought down from the heights he had added a grave courtesy which sat well upon him, and he hooded the scorn in his keen eyes. Miss Ada, for her part, was obliged to admit and did admit, very pleasantly, to Glen, that the youth had made amazing progress, not only in his studies but in his adjustment to civilization. There was still, and Glen secretly hoped there would always be something alien, something distinct and different in dress, in carriage, in speech; it set him apart from the savorlessness of the herd. He had made astonishing speed at the business college course, and at the mill, where he had at once engaged the attention of Mr. ’Gene Carey, the genial senior partner, and was constantly being pushed forward.

It was true, as Miss Ada Tenafee had once allowed herself to remark, very casually, that he did not make friends; he had left the frowsy Tollivers, where the doctor had placed him, at the end of his first month, and found himself a tiny, clean room with strangers who were still strangers to him after three years, but this did not lessen him in Glen’s eyes. Her father did not make friends; she did not make friends herself; it was, in her bleak young creed, rather a pledge of fineness not to make friends.

A respectable number of his patients, the two doctors and the nurse, and three or four good-natured neighborhood people came to the brief, drab little funeral, and Glen sat between Miss Ada and Luke Manders. Just as they drove home from the cemetery Nancy Carey, in a soft blue dress, came down from The Hill with her hands filled with flowers.

“Oh, Glen, I’m so sorry!” she said, hurrying to meet her as she stepped from the machine. “I’ve just heard, half an hour ago (I’ve been in Augusta, you know) and of course it’s too late, but I just thought I’d bring you these!”

“Thank you,” said Glen hoarsely. The encounter unsteadied her—to come from her father’s grave, from his admonitions, and find the Greeks bearing gifts. Nancy Carey had always been gently, languidly pleasant to her, although they had met rarely since the little days at Miss Josephine’s. Nancy had been years away at Northern finishing schools and would soon, the Social Chat of the leading local paper announced excitedly, go abroad for an indefinite tour of the Continent. She had been a sweetly lovely child and she was a sweetly lovely girl, with tints of rose and cream in her softly modeled face and a liquid hazel gaze, and fine, pale brown hair, like a baby’s, curling loosely about her mild brow. There was a tender, a lyric quality about Nancy Carey ... old ballads ... hearts and initials carved on trees ... keepsakes ... lost causes ... early deaths.... She should have been Barbara Freitchie’s gentle best friend.

Miss Ada was fluttered at the call. “Honey, this is very good of you,” she blushed girlishly. “Glen appreciates your thoughtfulness. I know I may speak for her!” She laid an admonitory hand on her charge’s arm.

“It is ... very kind,” Glen managed obediently.

“And won’t you step in for a moment, Nancy, my dear? I’m just going to make Glen a cup of strong tea, and she’d be so pleased—we both would—” Miss Ada quite clearly thought that grief, at any rate, grief for a person of Dr. Darrow’s caliber, might well be laid aside for the amenities of life when a Carey came to call.

The girl from The Hill was regarding the young mountaineer with mild interest. “Oh, thanks, Cousin Ada,” she said, turning to her—Miss Ada was a connection by marriage in two or three directions—“but I just came to bring the roses and tell Glen how sorry— Auntie Lou-May is waiting for me.”

“Then I’ll walk back with you a piece,” Miss Ada slipped her arm through Nancy’s. “And how is your dear Auntie Lou-May? Is her sciatica better?—Glen, my dear, I’ll be back immediately.”

“Not much better, poor dear,” Nancy answered prettily. “But she’s such an angel about it, and I don’t like to keep her waiting when I’ve promised to play cribbage with her.”

“Of course not!” assented the connection warmly. “I’m sorry you couldn’t stop, but it was just wonderful for you to think of coming!”

“Glen Darrow is a nice girl,” said Nancy vaguely. “I always liked her, some way ... and felt sorry for her....”

“Well, so do I, honey, and that’s why I’m staying with her until she can make some suitable arrangement. It just seems to be my part to look after the poor child, alone as she is. Glen has a remarkably fine character, innately refined,” said Miss Ada, as she had said of her Simpson mother. “So pitifully alone, and almost wholly unprovided for——”

“Who was that boy, Cousin Ada?” Nancy interrupted gently.

“Why—why—that is—that isn’t anybody, you might say, my dear. He is a young lad from the mountain districts to whom Dr. Darrow took one of his odd fancies. A very peculiar person, Dr. Darrow, and I pray his standards will not affect Glen’s life too seriously. He always——”

“Does he live in the mountains now, Cousin Ada?”

“Why, no, not just now—not at present, that is. He is employed at your dear father’s mill in some small capacity, I believe.”

“Oh ... at the mill....”

“Yes. Dr. Darrow took him there, several years ago, and begged employment for him, and your dear father, I understand from Glen, has been especially kind to him. Your father had a high respect for Dr. Darrow, who did a great deal of quiet charity among the mill workers. But the doctor, unfortunately, had no social standards whatever, and that one must always deplore, and now that he is gone I shall try to guide poor Glen— This impossible friendship, for instance——”

“What is his name?”

Miss Ada Tenafee stared at her young kinswoman. The girl had halted and was gazing back. “Why—Manders, Luke Manders. He——”

“Luke Manders!” Nancy repeated in her languid, sweet voice. “Isn’t that quaint, Cousin Ada? It sounds like a story, doesn’t it?”

“Well, possibly it does,” Miss Ada grudged. “It has not occurred to me, however. The doctor admitted this young savage to his household as an equal—he idealized him in the most absurd way, and prophesied the most impossibly brilliant future for him—but now that Glen is alone, I shall try, tactfully, of course, because the child is loyal to her father and his ideas to the point of fanaticism, to give her a better sense of values. And your—graciousness to her to-day, Nancy, honey, will mean more than you can possibly——”

Nancy Carey was looking at that moment even more like a maiden in a ballad than usual; there was a melting sweetness in her hazel gaze and with a distinct sense of shock the shabby teacher heard her say, with soft fervor—“Cousin Ada, I think he’s the handsomest thing I ever saw in my life....”