THE STUBBORN HEART.
CALLISTA never referred to what Kimbro Cleaverage had told her;
but she presently began, of necessity, to buy some things at the
store for her own use, where she had formerly purchased only
that which would make good her stay with her father-in-law.
The wild, cool, shower-dashed, sun-dappled, sweet-scented,
growing days of spring followed each other, passing into weeks,
months, until midsummer, with its pause in rural life, was come.
Octavia Gentry, who was a little out of health, had sent word
again and again that she wanted Callista to come home. It was a
Sunday morning in the deep calm of July when she finally came
over herself to the Cleaverage place to try to fetch her
daughter.
The thrush's song that waked Callista that morning at sunrise,
rang as keenly cool as ever; but the frogs were silenced, and
the whirr of the "dry-fly" was heard everywhere instead. Gloss
of honey-dew was on the oak and hickory leaves, and the blue air
veiling the forest shadows spoke of late summer. The morning was
languid with heat; the breakfast smoke had risen straight into
[224] the dawn, and the day burnt its way forward without dew or
breeze; hills velvet-blue, clouds motionless over the motionless
tree-tops, toned with mellow atmospheric tints that were yet not
the haze that would follow in autumn. One or two neighbors had
strolled in, and about mid-forenoon Ajax Gentry and his
daughter-in-law drove up in the buckboard and old Kimbro and
Sylvane went out trying to pretend surprise, yet Callista knew
all the time that the meeting had been arranged--that her people
were expected.
"Honey!" Her mother took her into a reproachful embrace, and then
held her back and looked at her, tears streaming down her face,
"honey--I've come for you. Me and gran'pappy is a-goin' to take
you right home with us when we go this evenin'. Git your things
a-ready. Me with but one child on this earth, and her a-lookin'
forward to what you air, and to stay with--well, of course, not
strangers--but with other folks!"
But Octavia Gentry's pleadings were hushed in her throat--the
preacher's tall old gray mule and dilapidated wagon was seen
stopping at the gate. He had not been expected, and his arrival
brought a sense of apprehension--almost of dismay. Every one
dreaded lest the dour old man comment openly and bitterly upon
the pitiful state of Callista's affairs. Not often had he been
known to spare the "I told you so." Drumright had brought his
wife and brood of younger children, and from [225] the moment of
their advent the house was vocal with them from end to end. Elvira
Drumright inevitably reminded one of a small clucking hen with a
train of piping chickens after her. The deep male note was
missing in the whiffle of sound that fretted Callista's ear;
after unhitching the preacher's mule and turning him in the lot,
the men had loitered--no doubt because of a lingering dread of
the women's activities in the house--to lean against trees and
the fences, talking of neighborhood matters. Some of the elders
sauntered over to inspect a wrongly dished wheel on a new wagon,
and talked for twenty minutes of this phenomenon alone. They
were joined here by Flenton Hands, who came riding down the
road, and went so wistfully slow as he passed the place that
Kimbro could not forbear to hail him and bid him light and come
in.
It was a typical summer Sunday at Kimbro Cleaverage's, and did
its part at explaining the always cruelly straitened means of
the household. Boys were pitching horseshoes in the open space
beyond the barn, uncertain whether or not to quit on account of
the preacher. The hot, white dust lay in the road; the hot,
clear air brooded above the tree-tops.
Inside the house, the women in the kitchen compared quilt
patterns and talked chickens, combining much gossip with the
dinner getting.
Finally it became unbearable to Callista to feel that her affairs
were being more or less covertly [226] inspected from all the
different angles and points of view possible to the visitors.
Passing through the kitchen, she possessed herself of the water
bucket and slipped off down to the far spring. People did not
often bring water from this place. Its clear, cool trickle had a
medicinal tang, and there was red iron-rust around the edges of
its basin. She sat down in the spring hollow on the cool moss
with big ferns coming up about her. Remembrance was strong
within her of that black, raw morning in April when she had
lingered desperately here, and she looked long at the Judas tree
beneath which she had stood.
The alders raised a tent over the basin, a tenderly shadowed
dome, through the midst of which the little-used spring-path
made a bright green vista like a pleached alley. And down this
way she was presently aware of Sylvane walking, his head thrown
back, his clear whistle coming to her before she got the sound
of his feet. She shivered a little. The tune he whistled had in
it reminiscences of Lance's "How many years, how many miles?"
"You here, Callisty?" asked the boy, parting the branches, and
finally coming shyly closer to seat himself on the bank below
her.
"I wanted to get shut of all the folks," she said, her brooding
eyes on the ground at her feet. "Oh, not you, Sylvane--the rest
of them talk so much."
The boy smiled uncertainly. [227]
"Well, I--reckon I was aimin' to sorter talk, too, Callisty," he
began timidly. "I 'lowed to tell you about that place where
Lance is a-workin'. Hit's been some time now, an' I ain't never
said nothin' to ye--I didn't want to pester ye."
Poor Sylvane was trying, in the mountain phrase, "to make fine
weather, an' hit a-rainin'." She made no movement to hush him,
and he even thought she listened with some eagerness.
"They," he began with hesitation, watching her face, "they're
a-gettin' out railroad ties now. That makes the work mighty heavy.
It takes Lance and Bob and Andy to run the mill--and sometimes
they have to have help. They've got generally as many as eight
or ten loggers and woodsmen. They just get the logs up any way
they can. Last week Lance got his foot hurt in a log bunk that
he fixed up on the running gears of two wagons. They wanted me
to come and drive. They do a lot of snaking out the logs without
any wagon at all. Reelfoot Dawson is the best teamster they've
got. That yoke of steers he has can snake logs out of places
where a team of mules or horses couldn't so much as get in."
Callista sighed and turned impatiently towards her young
brother-in-law.
"Where do the men live?" she asked finally, very low, as though
half-unwilling to do so.
"Well, Daggett ain't makin' what he expected to, and first they had
to camp and cook and do for [228] theirselves. Now they've built
shacks--out'n the flawed boards, you know--and all of 'em fetched
a quilt or a blanket or such from home, so they can roll up at
night on the floor. Fletch Daggett's wife is cooking for 'em. The
day I was there they had white beans and corn bread--and a little
coffee. She's a mighty pore cook, and she's got three mighty small
chaps under foot."
Callista's mind went to the new, clean, well-arranged little
home on Lance's Laurel. Did old Fletch Daggett's slovenly,
overworked young wife cook any worse than she, Callista, had
been able to?
"It's hot in them board shacks," Sylvane went on reflectively;
"the hottest place I ever was in. Somebody stole Lance's comb.
There ain't but one wash pan--he goes down to the branch--and he
hid his comb. It's a rough place. They fight a good deal."
And this was what Lance had preferred to her and to the home he
had built for her. She fell into such a study over it that
Sylvane's voice quite startled her when he said,
"I--I aimed to ask ye, Callisty--did you want me to take word
for Lance to come home?"
"No," she answered him very low. "It ain't my business to bid
Lance Cleaverage come to his own home. Don't name it to me
again, Sylvane, please."
The lad regarded her anxiously. More than once [229] he opened his
lips to speak, only to close them, again. Slowly the red surged
up over his tanned young face, until it burned dark crimson to
the roots of his brown hair.
"I--you--w'y, Callisty," he faltered in a choked, husky whisper,
his eyes beseeching forgiveness for such an offense against
mountaineer reserve and delicacy.
Her own pale cheeks flushed faintly as she began to see what was
in the poor boy's mind; but her eyes did not flinch, while in an
agony of sympathy and burning embarrassment he whispered,
"After a while--Sis' Callie--you'll have obliged--after a while
you'll surely send such word."
There was silence between them for a long minute, then,
"I never will," said Callista, in a low, dreary, implacable
voice. "You can fill my bucket and carry it up for me if you're
a mind, Sylvane, I'll set here a spell."
Callista appeared only briefly at the dinner table, where she
said little and ate less, soon slipping away again to her
retreat by the far spring.
After the meal, the dark court-like vista of the entry invited
the guests; from thence a murmur of conversation sounded through
all the drowsy afternoon,--the slow desultory conversation of
mountaineers. Even the play of the children was hushed. [230] It
was one of the few hot days of the mountain season. All the forest
drowsed in a vast sun-dream. The Cleaverage place itself, for
all its swarming life, seemed asleep too. Chickens picked and
wallowed in the dust; there were no birds, except a cardinal
whistling from the hill. The loosed plow-horses drooped in the
stable shadow, listless and _ennuye_, looking as if they would
rather be at work. Only wandering shotes seemed undisturbed by
the broad white glare of the sunlight.
Octavia Gentry went home that day from the Cleaverage cabin in
tears. She waited long and patiently an opportunity to speak alone
with her daughter; but when, toward evening, enormous flowers of
cumuli blossomed slowly, augustly, in the west, flushed petal on
petal opening, to be pushed back by the next above it, and rolling
gently away into shadows delicately gray, she went uneasily out
into the yard and called to old Ajax. While they were talking a
heavier cloud, crowding darkly against the western sun, began to
send forth long diapason tones of thunder. Drumright got suddenly
to his feet and hurried to "ketch out" his mule, while his wife
rounded up the children. At noon the heat had been palpitant. Now a
shadow bore relief over all the land; a breeze flew across the wood,
turning up the whitish under sides of the leaves; and before they
could get started there was a quick thrill of [231] rain--tepid,
perpendicular--and then the sun looking out again within twenty
minutes.
The shower brought them all indoors. Callista came reluctantly
from the thicket by the far spring-branch where she had been
lingering. Octavia made her last appeal publicly, since it might
not otherwise be spoken--and was denied. As old Ajax helped her
into the buckboard, something in her tear-disfigured face seemed
to anger him.
"Well, ye spiled the gal rotten!" he said testily, without
introduction or preface, climbing meanwhile to his seat beside
her. "Ye spiled Callisty rotten, that's what ye did! And then
ye give her to one of the cussedest highheaded fellers I ever
seen--a man that'd as soon take a charge o' buckshot as a dare--a
man that'd die before he'd own he's beat. Lance Cleaverage ain't
the meanest man in the world, and Callisty would do very well if
she could be made to behave; but the two of 'em--"
He sighed impatiently, shook his head, and flogged the old horse
gently and steadily without in the least affecting its gait.
Suddenly he spoke out again with a curious air of unwillingness
and at much more length than Grandfather Gentry usually did.
"Them two was borned and made for each other. Ef they can ever
fight it out and git to agree, hit'll be one o' the finest matches
anybody ever seed. But [232] _whilst_ they're a fightin' it
out--huh-uh,"--his face drew into a look of wincing sympathy--"I
don't know as I want ary one of 'em under my roof. I used to raise
a good deal of Cain o' my own--yes, I played the davil a-plenty.
I got through with that as best I might. I'm a old man now. I like
to see some peace. I did tell you that you could bid Callisty come
home with us; but she's done told you no--an' I ain't sorry. She's
the onliest gran'child I've got left, an'--I think a heap of her.
If she was to come on her own motions--that would be different.
But having spiled her as you have did, Octavy, best is that you
should let her and Lance alone for a spell."
His daughter-in-law looked at him mutely out of her reddened
eyes, and the balance of the drive was made in silence.
And so the slow summer drew forward, Callista in her father-in-law's
house, never going back to the cabin at the head of Lance's Laurel,
sending Polly or the Widow Griever to get things which she now
and again needed from the place; Lance over in the sawmill camp,
working brutally hard, faring wretchedly, and eating his heart out
with what he hoped was a brave face.
Sylvane brought him almost weekly news. He understood that
Callista's foot never crossed the threshold of the home he had
built for her. Ola Derf hinted that the young wife bought
recklessly at the store--and got snubbed for her pains. [233] She
rode out once or twice to try to get him to come and play for a
dance; but he shunned the neighborhood as though pestilence were
in it, and gave her short answers. No one else importuned him.
Lance, the loath, the desired and always invited, found that in
his present mood people fell away from him. He was good company
for nobody, not even for the rough and ready crowd amongst which
he found himself. True, he had lived hard, and been a famous
hunter, able to care for himself in any environment; but the
squalid surroundings of the sawmill camp were almost as foreign
to his fastidious man's way of doing things, as they would have
been to a neat woman.
So he grew to avoid and to be avoided; to sit at a little
distance from his mates in the evening; to drop out of their
crude attempts at merrymaking, to hold aloof even from the
fighting. He was neither quarrelsome nor gay, but sat brooding,
inert yet restless, interrogating the future with an ever
sinking heart. Here was come a thing into his life at which he
could not shrug the shoulder. He could not fling this off
lightly with a toss of the head or a defiant, "Have it as
you please." What was he to do? Was he not man enough to rule
his domestic affairs? Could he not command the events and
individuals of his own household by simply being himself? To go
to Callista and exert authority in words, by overt actions, by
use [234] of force--this was not his ideal. It was impossible to
him. Well, what then? Must his child be born under the roof of
another?
Summer wore to autumn with all its solemn grandeur of coloring,
all its majestic hush and blue silences over great slopes of
tapestried mountains, and still the question was unanswered.
Callista herself was in the mood when she found it hard to think
of anything beyond her own body, the little garment she was
fashioning, the day which rounded itself from morning into night
again.
And now came a new complication. Daggett asserted that he had no
money to pay. "I'm a-dickerin' with the company," he told his
men. "I've got good hopes of sellin' out to 'em. Them that stays
by me, will get all that's due an' comin'; but I hain't got a cent
now; an' a feller that quits me when I cain't he'p myse'f--I'll
never trouble to try to pay him."
Now what to do. Credit at the store was all very well for
Callista's present needs; but Lance Cleaverage's wife must have
a sum of money put at her disposal for the time which was
approaching. Lance walked from North Caney to Hepzibah one
Saturday night to offer Satan for sale, and found the black
horse lame. The man who had agreed to buy him expressed a
willingness to take Cindy in his place--the black filly which he
had, in the first days of their marriage, given to Callista for her
own use--presented with sweet [235] words of praise of his bride's
beauty and her charming appearance on the horse--a lover's gift,
a bridegroom's. Yet the money must be had, and the next time
Sylvane came across to the lumber camp, he carried back with him
and put into his young sister-in-law's listless hand the poor
price of the little filly.
Nothing roused Callista these days, not even when Flenton Hands
went down to the Settlement and bought Cindy from the man who
had purchased her. That was his account of the transaction, but
Sylvane said indignantly to his father that he believed Flenton
Hands got that feller to buy Lance's filly. Flenton rode up on
his own rawboned sorrel, leading the little black mare who
whinnied and put forward her ears to Callista's caresses.
"Yes, I did--I bought her," he repeated. "I hadn't nary bit of
use for such a animal, but I couldn't see yo' horse--yo's,
Callista--in the hands of a man like Snavely."
Callista held a late apple to the velvety, nuzzling mouth that
came searching in her palms for largess. She made no inquiry,
and Flenton Hands went on.
"Snavely's the meanest man to stock that I ever did see. He
overworks and he underfeeds, and he makes up the lack of oats
with a hickory--that's what he does. He'd nigh about 'a' killed
this little critter, come spring." [236]
And still Callista had nothing to offer.
"How's all your folks, Flent?" she said finally.
"Tol'able--jest tol'able," Hands repeated the formula absently.
"Callisty, ef you'll take the little mare from me as a gift,
she's yourn."
Lance's wife drew back with a burning blush.
"Take Cindy--from you?" she echoed sharply. There rushed over
her heart, like an air from a kinder world, memory of that
exquisite hour when Lance had given Cindy to her--Lance whose
words of tenderness and praise, his kiss, the kindling look of
his eye, could so crown and sceptre her he loved. Her lips set
hard.
"I'd be proud to have ye take her," Flenton repeated.
"Thank you--no," returned Callista, briefly, haughtily.
Her small head was crested with the movement that always
fascinated the man before her. That unbending pride of hers, to
him who had in fact no real self-respect, was inordinately
compelling. He had felt sure she would not take the horse, and
he was the freer in offering the gift.
"Well, ef ye won't, ye won't" he said resignedly. "But ef you
ever change yo' mind, Callisty--remember that Cindy and me is
both a-waitin' for ye." And with this daring and enigmatic
speech, he wheeled the sorrel and rode away, the little black's
light feet pattering after the clumsier animal. [237]