The Call of the Cumberlands Part 11

Yet, as the girl came down the slope, gaily singing a very melancholy song, the painter broke off in his reflections, and his thoughts veered. If Samson left, would he ever return? Might not the old man after all be right? When he had seen other women and tasted other allurements would he, like Ulysses, still hold his barren Ithaca above the gilded invitation of Calypso? History has only one Ulysses. Sally's voice was lilting like a bird's as she walked happily. The song was one of those old ballads that have been held intact since the stock learned to sing them in the heather of the Scotch highlands before there was an America.

"'She's pizened me, mother, make my bed soon, Fer I'm sick at my heart and I fain would lay doon.'"

The man rose and went to meet her.

"Miss Sally," he began, uncertainly, "I want to talk to you."

She was always very grave and diffident with Lescott. He was a strange new type to her, and, though she had begun with a predilection in his favor, she had since then come to hold him in adverse prejudice. Before his arrival, Samson had been all hers. She had not missed in her lover the gallantries that she and her women had never known. At evening, when the supper dishes were washed and she sat in the honeysuckle fragrance of the young night with the whippoorwills calling, she had been accustomed to hear a particular whippoorwill-note call, much like the real ones, yet distinct to her waiting ears. She was wont to rise and go to the stile to meet him. She had known that every day she would, seemingly by chance, meet Samson somewhere along the creek, or on the big bowlder at the rift, or hoeing on the sloping cornfield.

These things had been enough. But, of late, his interests had been divided. This painter had claimed many of his hours and many of his thoughts. There was in her heart an unconfessed jealousy of the foreigner. Now, she scrutinized him solemnly, and nodded.

"Won't you sit down?" he invited, and the girl dropped cross-legged on a mossy rock, and waited. To-day, she wore a blue print dress, instead of the red one. It was always a matter of amazement to the man that in such an environment she was not only wildly beautiful, but invariably the pink of neatness. She could climb a tree or a mountain, or emerge from a sweltering blackberry patch, seemingly as fresh and unruffled as she had been at the start. The man stood uncomfortably looking at her, and was momentarily at a loss for words with which to commence.

"What was ye a-goin' ter tell me?" she asked.

"Miss Sally," he began, "I've discovered something about Samson."

Her blue eyes flashed ominously.

"Ye can't tell me nothin' 'bout Samson," she declared, "withouten hit's somethin' nice."

"It's something very nice," the man rea.s.sured her.

"Then, ye needn't tell me, because I already knows. .h.i.t," came her prompt and confident announcement.

Lescott shook his head, dubiously.

"Samson is a genius," he said.

"What's thet?"

"He has great gifts--great abilities to become a figure in the world."

She nodded her head, in prompt and full corroboration.

"I reckon Samson'll be the biggest man in the mountings some day."

"He ought to be more than that."

Suspicion at once cast a cloud across the violet serenity of her eyes.

"What does ye mean?" she demanded.

"I mean"--the painter paused a moment, and then said bluntly--"I mean that I want to take him back with me to New York."

The girl sprang to her feet with her chin defiantly high and her brown hands clenched into tight little fists. Her bosom heaved convulsively, and her eyes blazed through tears of anger. Her face was pale.

"Ye hain't!" she cried, in a paroxysm of fear and wrath. "Ye hain't a- goin' ter do no sich--no sich of a d.a.m.n thing!" She stamped her foot, and her whole girlish body, drawn into rigid uprightness, was a-quiver with the incarnate spirit of the woman defending her home and inst.i.tutions. For a moment after that, she could not speak, but her determined eyes blazed a declaration of war. It was as though he had posed her as the Spirit of the c.u.mberlands.

He waited until she should be calmer. It was useless to attempt stemming her momentary torrent of rage. It was like one of the sudden and magnificent tempests that often swept these hills, a brief visit of the furies. One must seek shelter and wait. It would end as suddenly as it had come. At last, he spoke, very softly.

"You don't understand me, Miss Sally. I'm not trying to take Samson away from you. If a man should lose a girl like you, he couldn't gain enough in the world to make up for it. All I want is that he shall have the chance to make the best of his life."

"I reckon Samson don't need no fotched-on help ter make folks acknowledge him."

"Every man needs his chance. He can be a great painter--but that's the least part of it. He can come back equipped for anything that life offers. Here, he is wasted."

"Ye mean"--she put the question with a hurt quaver in her voice--"ye mean we all hain't good enough fer Samson?"

"No. I only mean that Samson wants to grow--and he needs s.p.a.ce and new scenes in which to grow. I want to take him where he can see more of the world--not only a little section of the world. Surely, you are not distrustful of Samson's loyalty? I want him to go with me for a while, and see life."

"Don't ye say hit!" The defiance in her voice was being pathetically tangled up with the tears. She was speaking in a transport of grief.

"Don't ye say hit. Take anybody else--take 'em all down thar, but leave us Samson. We needs him hyar. We've jest got ter have Samson hyar."

She faced him still with quivering lips, but in another moment, with a sudden sob, she dropped to the rock, and buried her face in her crossed arms. Her slender body shook under a harrowing convulsion of unhappiness. Lescott felt as though he had struck her; as though he had ruthlessly blighted the irresponsible joyousness which had a few minutes before sung from her lips with the blitheness of a mocking- bird. He went over and softly laid a hand on her shoulder.

"Miss Sally--" he began.

She suddenly turned on him a tear-stained, infuriated face, stormy with blazing eyes and wet cheeks and trembling lips.

"Don't touch me," she cried; "don't ye dare ter touch me! I hain't nothin' but a gal--but I reckon I could 'most tear ye ter pieces. Ye're jest a pizen snake, anyhow!" Then, she pointed a tremulous finger off up the road. "Git away from hyar," she commanded. "I don't never want ter see ye again. Ye're tryin' ter steal everything I loves. Git away, I tells ye!--git away--begone!"

"Think it over," urged Lescott, quietly. "See if your heart doesn't say I am Samson's friend--and yours." He turned, and began making his way over the rocks; but, before he had gone far, he sat down to reflect upon the situation. Certainly, he was not augmenting his popularity. A half-hour later, he heard a rustle, and, turning, saw Sally standing not far off. She was hesitating at the edge of the underbrush, and Lescott read in her eyes the effort it was costing her to come forward and apologize. Her cheeks were still pale and her eyes wet, but the tempest of her anger had spent itself, and in the girl who stood penitently, one hand nervously clutching a branch of rhododendron, one foot twisting in the moss, Lescott was seeing an altogether new Sally.

There was a renunciation in her eyes that in contrast with the child- like curve of her lips, and slim girlishness of her figure, seemed entirely pathetic.

As she stood there, trying to come forward with a pitiful effort at composure and a twisted smile, Lescott wanted to go and meet her. But he knew her shyness, and realized that the kindest thing would be to pretend that he had not seen her at all. So, he covertly watched her, while he a.s.sumed to sit in moody unconsciousness of her nearness.

Little by little, and step by step, she edged over to him, halting often and looking about with the impulse to slip out of sight, but always bracing herself and drawing a little nearer. Finally, he knew that she was standing almost directly over him, and yet it was a moment or two more before her voice, sweetly penitent, announced her arrival.

"I reckon--I reckon I've got ter ask yore pardon," she said, slowly and with labored utterance. He looked up to see her standing with her head drooping and her fingers nervously pulling a flower to pieces.

"I reckon I hain't a plumb fool. I knows thet Samson's got a right ter eddication. Anyhow, I knows he wants. .h.i.t."

"Education," said the man, "isn't going to change Samson, except to make him finer than he is--and more capable."

She shook her head. "I hain't got no eddication," she answered. "Hit's a-goin' ter make him too good fer me. I reckon hit's a-goin' ter jest about kill me.... Ye hain't never seed these here mountings in the winter time, when thar hain't nothin' green, an' thar hain't no birds a-singin', an' thar hain't nothin' but rain an' snow an' fog an' misery.

They're a-goin' ter be like thet all the time fer me, atter Samson's gone away." She choked back something like a sob before she went on.

"Yes, stranger, hit's a-goin' ter pretty nigh kill me, but--" Her lips twisted themselves into the pathetic smile again, and her chin came stiffly up. "But," she added, determinedly, "thet don't make no difference, nohow."

CHAPTER X

Yet, when Samson that evening gave his whippoorwill call at the Widow Miller's cabin, he found a dejected and miserable girl sitting on the stile, with her chin propped in her two hands and her eyes full of somberness and foreboding.

"What's the matter, Sally?" questioned he, anxiously. "Hes that low-down Tamarack Spicer been round here tellin' ye some more stories ter pester ye?"

She shook her head in silence. Usually, she bore the brunt of their conversations, Samson merely agreeing with, or overruling, her in lordly brevities. The boy climbed up and sat beside her.