ON THE THRESHOLD
Toward evening Dale rode back to Arden. His mind was a confusion of
happy impressions, the result of having laid its touch upon the throttle
of power. From the dusky room where his life had sat wondering, he felt
now that a hand had pressed his shoulder, aroused him, and led him to
the silver threshold whose outlook was a landscape of golden
opportunity. As, twenty-four hours earlier, when his eyes for the first
time rapturously feasted on this valley of plenty, so now his mind
roamed across a dazzling future--a future which was his, his very own.
Tossing back his head he gave a yell, a wild, joyous yell, that startled
the horse and sent scurrying to higher branches an inquisitive squirrel
which had been looking down at him with chattering interest.
When he turned into the circle, the Colonel stood up and stretched,
welcoming him with an open smile of approval. He could imagine what tact
Bob had employed to bring about this new attire, but little did he guess
at what sacrifice to personal comfort. For the donation of clothes was
not what stamped Bob a philanthropist. He had taken Dale into his room
and there prosecuted a stragetic system; voluntarily submitting to Uncle
Zack's shears on his hair which required no cutting. Nor was this all.
He made the old servant shave him, a thing he despised from any hand but
his own. Then he tubbed, and continued this game of follow-the-leader
throughout the entire toilette, affably talking all the while, until
Dale emerged a different looking, and a much more gratified, man.
"Lawd, Marse Dale," Uncle Zack had exclaimed, "you suah does look
handsome! I'se gwine to shave you ever' mawnin' now, till you ketches on
for yohse'f!"
The Colonel's smile was immeasurably pleasing to his new guest, and when
the old gentleman playfully spoke of fine clothes Dale responded like a
happy boy.
"Ain't they fine!" he looked admiringly down at himself. "I reckon I
hain't never had on decent clothes before in all my life! D'ye reckon
I'll get used ter this collar? Bob said so!"
Under his arm were two books--a speller and a simple reader. These Jane
had given him as he left, after an afternoon spent in lessons on the
lawn. It was the first lesson, of course; a lesson, perhaps, which both
would remember all their lives; vivid to Dale because the tentacles of
his mind were beginning to stir and stretch in their new awakening;
vivid to her for many reasons. As the day had progressed she became more
and more astounded by his ability to learn, for in an incredibly short
time he had mastered the first four columns of her spelling book with an
ease which made her wonder if he had not before been over it.
Enthusiastically now he related this to the Colonel, who saw that he
was trembling--tingling, like a thoroughbred ready for the start in a
big race.
"You must use the library for your studies, sir," the old gentleman
declared with warmth. "In there you will find a dictionary--if you know
how to use one."
"Show me how!" the new student eagerly turned to him.
Laying aside his own volume, a treatise on the calorific power of
fuels--a brain-rasping subject which had been absorbing him since the
coal fields were in prospect--he led the way into that spacious, mellow
room, walled from floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves of books.
Dale stood transfixed. His head was thrown back and his hands were
clenched, as though in very truth the secrets of this silent store-house
were already creeping out to enter his attentive brain. Colonel May
opened the clumsy dictionary, explaining it with a word the mountaineer
had already learned to spell, and left him in this paradise of fancies.
Some time later Uncle Zack opened the library door, announced dinner,
and left unheard. A few minutes after this he returned, but again left
unheard, and only when a hand pressed Dale's arm did the young man look
up. The Colonel was smiling down at him.
"Come, Sam Johnson. Dr. Jared Sparks, Ben Franklin, Davy Crockett, Abe
Lincoln, and more such indomitable shades rolled into one! Man must eat;
it is time for dinner!"
"What does that mean?" he asked, leaning back in his chair.
"Oh, Lord," the Colonel groaned. "I'll tell you another time. Come! You
understand 'dinner,' I hope?"
Entering the dining room Dale's mind was like a country pup walking
stiff-legged into a crowd of city dogs, its hair belligerently on end
and the tip of its tail wagging a friendly compromise. Not that he was
at all defiant, and of course not afraid, but his whole mental attitude
had become one of alert watchfulness, ready to spring this way or that,
to follow this new custom or that new custom, and not intending to lag
if the others made a move. So it was that when the Colonel held a chair
back for Miss Liz, and Bob was seating Jane, Dale, who never in his life
had seen anything of this sort, made a pretense of imitating them for
the convenience of Ann;--and even though she were rudely jolted by the
violence with which he shoved her into the table, her appreciative smile
made him determine to do this thing forever.
"How will you have your coffee, Mr. Dawson?" Miss Liz presently
asked--for dinner at the Colonel's was of the farm variety which scorned
the demitasse.
"A mite of long sweetenin', please Ma'm," he answered to that lady's
utter consternation. She laid down the tongs and stared at him.
"He'll take it as you fix Bob's, Miss Liz," Jane interposed readily
enough to save the situation, and at the next opportunity she turned in
a confidential undertone: "We don't use 'long sweetening' down here,
Dale. People in the valleys use sugar exclusively--'short sweetening,'
as you call it. They don't have to grind and stew up corn-stalks to get
sorghum for their coffee, as we used to do. But I remember how good
that molasses--that 'long sweetening'--was," she added, lying for the
benefit of charity. "Don't forget, they use 'short sweetening' all the
time here in coffee, but they never call it anything but sugar. While on
the subject of customs I want to correct you about something else.
Today, over home, you stood in the drive and halloed for Bob till he
came out for you. That isn't done in the settlements. Here you can walk
right up to anybody's front door and knock, or ring the bell, without
the slightest fear of having a rifle poked through a chink because
people may take you for an enemy. Of course, your way is the proper and
polite thing to do where we come from, but in the valley it isn't good
etiquette."
"What's etiquette?" he asked.
She explained it and continued:
"The etiquette of knives and forks and spoons also materially differs
between our people and these."
"I never seed one of these little fellers before," he picked up a
teaspoon and turned it curiously over.
"I didn't either," she laughed, "until I went to the convent. But now,
since I'm to be your teacher, you must let me teach you these things,
too."
"I want ye to teach me everything in the world," he whispered.
"Then watch how I use them," she replied, flushing at the way he said
this, "and which ones I use. Down here, people who eat with their knives
are murdered--I mean socially murdered. Break--" she was about to say:
break all the commandments before doing this! but thought better of it
and added: "yourself of that habit the very first--the very first thing
you do. And I want to hear more of that good English you say you know,"
she laughed at him. "You've been talking atrociously all day!"
"What's atrociously?" he asked.
"I don't see Brent," Miss Liz raised her lorgnette. "Is he ill?"
"No, my dear," the Colonel answered, "he is otherwise engaged and cannot
be with us."
"John," the good woman stared severely across at him, "I believe that
boy is working too hard! You must prevail upon him to take more rest."
A bomb exploding could scarcely have produced more surprise, yet one
could never know just at what point Miss Liz would "break out"--as Zack
called it. In the midst of their spellbound silence Ann giggled, and
Jane managed to say:
"That would be rather difficult, wouldn't it, Miss Liz?--I mean,
persuading him to take _more_ rest?"
"Well, your father must try," she insisted; for, when very much in
earnest, Miss Liz impartially denoted the Colonel as father to
whomsoever she might be speaking.
"He's makin' a railroad, ain't he?" Dale turned to Ann. "Do ye reckon
he'll show me how?"
"He'll turn it all over to you, no doubt!--he'll have to turn it over to
someone if it gets built! It only shows, Daddy," she laughed across to
the Colonel, "that one can't serve a corporation and a goddess both at
the same time! Isn't that a natty little epigram?"
"I don't follow the subject of your epigram," the Colonel smiled.
"Why, Brent, and the goddess, and the railroad," she replied.
"Goddess, my dear? What goddess?"
She and Jane exchanged glances.
"He's suspected of having a love somewhere; some mysterious love whom he
meets in the moonlit forest of Arden--when it's moonlight; and, maybe,
when it isn't."
"What have you to support this?" the old gentleman frowned. He, too, had
sometimes wondered what took Brent away so frequently of late. These
were uncomfortable thoughts to the Colonel, who allowed suspicions no
place in his estimate of people.
"Oh, we just support it for the sake of gossip," she laughed. "Aunt
Timmie dreamed it, I believe."
"I thought you were serious," he smiled, yet showing his distaste for
the subject, "nor will I permit any gossiping here!"
"But, Heavens, Daddy--"
"My dear," he interrupted her, "I trust you will never learn to gossip.
It is purely a trade, carried on by a breed of fawning Judases--of
self-satisfied butchers, to deal in the choicest cuts of their
unsuspecting friends' characters. The shelter of my roof must also
afford protection to the good name of my guest."
"'Good name' in the present instance is hardly a calculable statement,"
she murmured, for Ann could be biting, as well as sweet, when her
feelings were touched.
"I quite agree with John," Miss Liz arose to the occasion. "It is
strange," she added, turning the lorgnette this time carefully at Jane,
"that he does not find a nice young girl to marry."
"Such a cynosure of niceness, too," Ann added her little dig, and Jane
suggested:
"He might try advertising!"
"What's advertising?" Dale asked.
"Oh, Lord," the Colonel exploded into his napkin.
When dinner was over, Jane crossed the porch unnoticed and walked out
under the trees. The lorgnette which had said to her "it is strange he
does not find some nice girl to marry," left a disquieting effect. Ann
had only that day suggested the same idea, and Bob had laughed to her
about it the previous evening. Even Aunt Timmie, the ebony font of
wisdom, had but recently looked slyly at her, remarking: "'Foh long we's
gwine to have a weddin' in a private cyar!" (Aunt Timmie had never seen
a private car, but it typified her idea of grandeur). She now strolled
on beneath the trees, beneath giant clinging wild grape and trumpet
vines, to a circle of low spreading cedars, wherein lay a carpet of
odorous tanbark. It was a favorite spot with her.
Gliding carefully through the meeting branches which hid the path, she
dropped into a yielding hammock and gazed for several minutes up at the
network of black limbs, watching a star here and there which showed in
a few small patches of visible sky. One arm stretched down at full
length until her fingers touched the ground, and in this way she was
keeping the hammock gently in motion.
She made a wonderfully graceful shadow, reclining in this dark place,
and no judge of the human form could have passed without a quick breath
of admiration for its delicate blending of strength and frailty, its
stamp of being thoroughbred. And it was along the line of thoroughbreds
that her thoughts were wandering.
Having acquired much of the Colonel's reliance in breeding, and in the
fitness of appropriately mated things, she was wondering! Her father and
mother had been illiterate mountaineers, but did there not exist a time
prior to this when their ancestors were people of refinement? This, she
felt, must be surely so, because of her early love of refined
things--truly refined, to a degree far beyond the ken of mountain life.
Without substantiating records, she seemed to know that in early
Colonial days her family of gentle blood had floated with the migratory
tide across the Appalachian range. That was the origin of all
mountaineers! What had held some there, instead of sending them on to
the rich, unsurveyed plains? A birth enroute? That sometimes happened.
The man of the family died, or was killed, and the woman forced to build
a shelter as best she might until the boys grew big enough to help?
That, too, had happened. Whatever the reason, some of the best
Anglo-Saxon stock had been stranded in the Cumberlands, staying there
literally and figuratively while the world advanced.
Perhaps her strain was purer than the Colonel's! Few mountaineers made
alien marriages, for the very sufficient reason that they seldom
roamed--even though this had meant stagnation in their own environment.
Still, the strain was pure! If one occasionally escaped these mountain
fastnesses, why should he not--why should she not--with a free rein,
dash out to regain lost prestige? Why should she not with one stroke
blot out five or six generations of ignorance, and bring the stifled
line of her honorable ancestry to the place it had been rightfully
demanding for a century? But, in the face of uncertainties, would her
blood commingled with the blood of established lineage now be fair?
Would she ever feel a rebuke in infant eyes? Would they not burn her
soul if she wantonly summoned them to open on a world which might point
back with a superior smile? Could she ever kiss the little lips which
might some day praise the father and be silent of her?
Thus her sensitive thoughts, bringing a succession of confusions,
wandered dreamily on, while the hammock gradually ceased its swinging
and hung as a thing asleep.