THE LONG RED ROAD
There was music after dinner, and Mrs. Carson asked Annie Laurie to sing.
It was a great moment in its way—that in which the shy girl with the
oriole’s voice went out before all the company to sing to Mrs. Carson’s
accompaniment. For a second or two she thought that she really could
not. Then it came over her that it was a chance—that she who had lived
that plain drab life was standing now where beautiful colors played about
her. She was, she said to herself, in the heart of a rainbow. And a
song was a song, just as a piece of furniture was a piece of furniture.
She had already decided that she was not to be afraid of upholstering and
silver and fine glass. Very well, then, why should she be afraid of a
song, since she really had a voice and could sing? Her music lessons had
been stopped since her father’s death, but Mrs. Carson often invited her
to sing with her in the schoolroom where Carin’s piano stood, and she was
quite aware that she had learned more from Mrs. Carson with her taste and
her beautiful, delicate fashion of expression than she could from her
teacher. So now, full, free, sad and deep, her young voice arose in:
“All are sleeping, weary heart,
Thou, thou only sleepless art.”
She thought of Sam away in his bare room, bending over those puzzling
accounts of hers, working for her without pay, to redeem so far as he
could his father’s terrible wrong. And as she thought of him, and the
beauty of the song opened the doors of her heart, it seemed as if all
that distrust of mankind which had come to her so bitterly when she first
realized the great wrong that had been done her, went drifting out on the
tide of song. So the lovely words to their noble setting poured from her
lips with a sort of splendor, and when she had ceased, and had stood for
a moment, motionless, her slender straight body tense with the rapture of
it, she had the great happiness of hearing sincere and enthusiastic
applause break from all the company in the drawing room.
Mrs. Carson and Carin were hardly less happy than she. They made her
sing again and again; then Mrs. Carson forbade more.
“We’ll not have our singing bird excited so that she’ll lose her sleep
the first night she stays under this roof,” she said. And then she
herself, at the solicitation of her guests, sang some of those wonderful
songs of hers. Annie Laurie could not understand the words, for they
were now in one tongue and now another; but as the music rose and fell,
shifting in its beauty as a sunset shifts its colors, or as water ripples
in the wind, a great happiness flooded her. She sat thrilling to it,
moved to the core of her being by its rhythm, and Mrs. Carson, arising
from the piano, came straight to her.
“Annie Laurie Pace,” she said in her charming way, “I could feel all the
strings of the piano vibrating again in you. You are a true musician.
Sometime you and I will sit together night after night and listen to
opera.”
“Oh!” Annie Laurie gasped. “It—it couldn’t be!”
“It shall be,” smiled Mrs. Carson. “Wait, child. Wait just a little
while.”
So, with a head full of new, rich ideas, the girl lay down to sleep that
night in the “poppy room,” as the little bedroom opening off Carin’s was
called. Poppies decorated the wall, were embroidered on the linen covers
to dresser, chairs and bed, and the spirit of poppies, sleep, hovered
lightly over the room.
The next day dawned beautifully—one of those Sundays which seem to have
the very breath of holiness in them. Annie Laurie went with the Carsons
to the Episcopal Church, and then they all drove over to the Methodist
Church for the aunts. They could see the two, prim and starched,
awaiting them on the high church steps, and Mr. Carson leaped from the
carriage to assist the ladies down and to help them into his vehicle.
Annie Laurie couldn’t help giving an affectionate chuckle at the labored
propriety of their remarks. They had on their best dresses and they were
determined to use their best language. But Mrs. Carson gave no sign that
she perceived their stiffness. She chatted on in that winning way of
hers, till even the proud and difficult Aunt Adnah felt at ease.
At dinner the conversation turned upon the “doll lady,” and Mr. Carson
had an idea.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll hike it! We’ll trek it! We’ll
mush-mush!”
“Papa,” Carin protested, “what ever _do_ you mean?”
“Mean? I mean we’ll follow the long red road, every one of us. Your
mother, Carin, and your friends Annie Laurie and Azalea, and Miss Zillah
and Miss Adnah. We’ll take to the high road—in mountain wagons—and we’ll
go gypsying. It’s the spring vacation—or we can make it so if we have a
mind. What do you say, Miss Parkhurst? Shall we call it vacation? And
will you go with us over the mountains?”
“I’ll call it vacation if you please, sir,” smiled Helena Parkhurst.
“But if I have any time away from my duties, I’d love to go home to my
mother. She’s very lonely without me.”
“You shall, then. Of course she’s lonely without you. But what do you
say, ladies?” he asked, turning to Annie Laurie’s aunts.
Miss Adnah wiped her lips carefully before replying.
“You are very kind indeed, sir, but I never have done such a thing in my
life, though I must say that I have rather envied people when I saw them
starting off on such an expedition.”
“Of course you have envied them, and you shall do so no longer. You
shall go and know the joys they have known. As for the dairy, Sam will
look after that. If necessary he can have one of my men to help him.
You are pleased, I hope, Miss Zillah?”
Miss Zillah turned her faded, quiet eyes on him, and smiled slowly.
“Mr. Carson,” she said “all my life I have slept properly under a roof.
I have done my duty as I saw it to do. I have conducted myself, I hope,
in a ladylike and discreet manner, but—” she hesitated.
“But what, madam?”
“But from childhood I have longed to cook my meal in a pot over a camp
fire and to sleep under the pines.”
Everybody laughed.
“What’s more,” went on Miss Zillah, showing the shadow of a dimple in her
withered cheek, “I feel that I would love to run about in a short skirt
and tie a turban about my head.”
“Delightful! Delightful,” declared Mr. Carson. “We’ll go by the middle
of this week.”
“But Mr. Carson, ought we?” Miss Adnah broke in. “The—the expense—”
“Expense, madam? There’s no expense. All that is needed is time, and of
that we have as much as anybody living.”
He held up a hand for silence, and in his rich voice, warm with an almost
boyish enthusiasm, he repeated a poem he had read but whose author he did
not remember:
“‘Beyond the East, the sunrise, beyond the West, the sea—
And East or West, the wander-thirst will never let me be.
It works in me like madness, dear, to make me say good-bye,
For the stars call and the sea calls, and O! the call of the sky.
“‘I know not where the white road leads, nor what the blue hills are,
But a man can have the sun for a friend, and for his guide a star.
And there’s no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard,
For the river calls and the road calls, and O! the call of the bird.
“‘Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night or day,
The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away,
And come I may, but go I must, and if you ask me why,
You may put the blame on the stars and sun, and the white road and
the sky.’
“Only it’s the red road with us, ladies—the long red road, and it winds
up the mountains, and down the mountains, and we’ll follow it till we
long for home again.”
“Oh,” whispered Annie Laurie to Carin as they walked from the dining room
together, “how fine it will be to get the poor aunts away from that house
where they worry and search, and search and worry!”
“And don’t you see,” returned Carin, “that papa is really having in the
back of his mind the idea that he may run across the Disbrows? He thinks
that, after all, Mr. Disbrow won’t quite dare spend that money—at least
not much of it. He could talk about going West but he hasn’t really the
courage to go. He’ll drive around in the mountains, shooting a little,
and grazing his cow and horses, and eating up the chickens. Papa says
that’s the way a man with his rearing would do, probably. So we’re to
take to all sorts of byroads and odd ways in the hope of finding them.”
“Really?” said Annie Laurie. “But—Oh, Carin, if we found them! What a
humiliation for them!”
“Well, so far as Mr. Disbrow is concerned, I think he has some
humiliation coming to him,” said Carin sharply.
Annie Laurie hated to tell Sam they were going to the mountains. She
feared he would read in her eyes her knowledge of this second
intention—this hope of finding the fugitives. Perhaps he did. He was
very silent these days, and he worked furiously. Annie Laurie tried to
get him to sit with them evenings, but he would not. His old-time
light-heartedness, preserved under so many difficulties, seemed to have
passed entirely. Yet he was not sullen nor even sad—only very grave. He
was indeed fighting his battle, and it was not an easy one.
But little by little he could see—everyone could see—that he was winning
the respect of the townspeople. Men went out of their way to speak to
him and to ask him how he was getting on in his new business and to say
they’d be glad to help him out if he got in any difficulty. Some of the
nicest women in Lee invited him to their homes; but to all such
invitations Sam sent a respectful refusal. He seemed determined to keep
to himself until he had won his right to enter other men’s doors as an
honest boy, the son of an honest man.
He helped with the preparations for the mountain, saying nothing of his
shamed and tortured thought that his friends might come upon his skulking
family. Mr. Carson was to drive his own team, and Benjamin, his man, was
to drive Annie Laurie’s horses. So, on a perfumed spring morning the
little caravan set off, with Mrs. Carson and the two Misses Pace in the
Carson wagon, and Carin and Azalea in Annie Laurie’s.
Azalea was strangely excited by the idea of the journey, though she tried
to conceal the fact. She could not forget how often she had gone upon
such long journeys in those wild, curious days when she was a “show
girl.” Those days now seemed like a fantastic dream. She felt as if she
always had been Azalea McBirney, wrapped about with love and
consideration; and even the memory of her poor dead little mother was
like a gray shadow. True, it was a shadow which arose often before her
mental vision, but the outlines of it grew fainter and fainter. Yet
Azalea loved it. She could not think of that brave, yet broken woman, so
out of place with that sorry crew of show people, without a throb of
love. Death had, at last, seemed the only happiness for her, and Azalea
loved to think of her as safe and at rest in that much-cared-for lowly
bed of hers beneath the Pride of India tree beside Ma McBirney’s door.
And, oh, the long red road! How it wound up the hills and over them.
What valleys it glimpsed, what rivers, amber brown beneath the trees,
what spots of quietude and peace beneath the pines, what sunny openings,
where succulent odors of grass, freshly sprung, came to the travelers!
And, oh, the delight of sleeping in the hastily spread tents—which were
really no more than squares of canvas stretched on pointed sticks—and the
appetites that developed for the meals cooked over the coals on the
convenient tripod!
Now one and now another of the ladies cooked the meals, and they vied
with each other in the mixing of stews. They grew bold and tried things
they never had heard of, but which seasoned with mountain air and tested
with mountain appetites, seemed the finest of discoveries. And the day
and the night were sweet; the wind was their playful companion; the
showers were their friends; the sun their great protector; the moon their
comforter and all the stars were their intimates.
So the three girls grew browner and brighter-eyed each day, and the heart
in each of them—even Annie Laurie’s—was light as down.
But not a hint did they have of the Disbrows. Though they plunged deeper
and deeper into the mountains, getting far beyond the towns, they saw
nothing of them. They went so far that they came at last upon the
lonely, sad-eyed people whom Miss Borrow had described. In their
miserable cabins, which were far from weatherproof, they lived their
curious, solitary lives. Their faces were vacant and mournful; their
voices like the soughing of wind in the trees. They walked languidly,
and there was a strange and repellent pallor in their faces. Sometimes
they sang a little, sitting before their doors in the moonlight, and
their voices rose and fell with a curious cadence. The monotony of their
lives rested upon them like a deadly spell, permitting them to nurse
senseless hates and animosities, and to keep up foolish family feuds.
Now and then they came upon a desolate schoolhouse, approached by little
winding paths, over which bare-footed children had run for weary miles.
For they prized their schooling beyond all words to express.
“Whar is her who tells us how?” one little, sallow-faced child had asked
when she had run eleven miles to the schoolhouse to find the teacher
absent. They heard such stories of starved minds and all but starved
bodies, and a deep pity awoke in their hearts for these people of their
own blood and of an inheritance much like their own.
“When we are a little older,” said Azalea, her eyes shining with a deep
purpose, “we will come back and teach them.”
“Yes,” said Annie Laurie. “We will teach them to read and to sing.”
“To read and to sing and to draw,” said Carin.
“Very well,” said Mr. Carson, laughingly and yet with meaning. “And I’ll
send some one along to help with such trifles as arithmetic, geography,
grammar, et cetera, and incidentally I’ll foot the bills. Is it a
bargain?”
“It’s a bargain,” said they in chorus.