_Miss Ada Tenafee is faithful to ancestor worship, while the Darrows
weave a golden legend about a golden lad._
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-_za_da” 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-_za_da 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-_za_da, 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.