This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler.
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: Being thrown by Paprika]
AZALEA’S
SILVER WEB
BY
ELIA W. PEATTIE
Author of Azalea; Annie Laurie and Azalea;
Azalea at Sunset Gap, etc.
_Illustrations by_
_E. R. Kirkbride_
* * * * *
[Picture: Publisher logo]
* * * * *
The Reilly & Britton Co.
Chicago
* * * * *
Copyright, 1915
by
The Reilly & Britton Co.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I GROWN GIRLS 9
II NEW RELATIONS 27
III OWN FOLK 46
IV MADAM GRANDMOTHER 64
V MALLOWBANKS 82
VI MY BALL 101
VII GETTING SETTLED 120
VIII THE PORTRAIT 139
IX GRANDMOTHER’S STORY 158
X “THE WATERS OF QUIET” 177
XI A FRIEND 195
XII A TRAVEL LOG 212
XIII CROSSROADS 231
XIV “WHERE THERE IS A WILL” 250
XV “RING, HAPPY BELLS” 267
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
So, in a moment more I felt myself—I who had never _Frontispiece_
been thrown in my life—going over Paprika’s head
We stepped back in the shrubbery and kept very 84
still while they passed. Grandmother was weeping
like a hurt child
Azalea’s Coming Out Party 114
It was Keefe O’Connor who stood there holding out 276
his hands to me
CHAPTER I
GROWN GIRLS
Tennyson Mountain, N. C.,
October 6.
_Carin_, _dear and far_:
So you are back at your beloved Vassar! Does it seem as wonderful as it
did last year? Or more so? More so, I expect. You were a little lonely
and strange last year, you know. But now it will be different. The
girls will seem like old friends to you now that you are coming back to
them. But, Carin, girl, they cannot _possibly_ be such old friends as I
am, or as Annie Laurie is. Don’t dare to like one of them better than
you like us. I can imagine, and really spend too much time imagining,
just how lovely and cultivated and surprising some of them are. But,
please, aren’t some of them quite stupid, too? I hope so. Annie Laurie
hopes so. We want still to be the brightest stars in your sky.
Lest you should think we are not, we keep polishing ourselves. Annie
Laurie, when she is not attending to her dairy, will take university
extension work. And I, your own ever adoring, ever grateful Azalea, will
keep hammering away at the books that dear Barbara Summers lends, and
Keefe O’Connor sends down from New York, and those that your own library
at the Shoals furnishes.
I have the heart to read, Carin, but not the time. That’s the truth.
Or, come to think of it, perhaps it is a matter of eyelids. I have a
queer, self-closing pair. If they would stay up after nine o’clock at
night I could learn something. But, no, they appear to be attached to a
wheel or a ratchet in the clock, and when nine strikes, down they go and
down they stay.
What can I do?
Nothing, except kiss dearest Mother McBirney good night, trying not to
yawn in her face as I do it, and after paying my respects to Father
McBirney and “brother” Jim, slip away up to my darling loft.
Now, there, Carin! You see I’m nicer than your other friends, more
unusual and surprising. (You told me the last time I saw you that you
liked your friends to be unusual and surprising.) Well, have you any
other friend who goes up to her bedroom by means of an outside pair of
stairs and who sleeps in a loft, with a tame bat for company? You have
not, Carin Carson, and you know it. And, Oh, how I love it! Shall I
ever have another room I love so well? The soft noises of the night come
purling down into it like a stream. The stars of the northern sky shine
into it. The mountain-side is like a green curtain hanging before it.
When I get up in that little room, my doors and windows wide to old Mount
Tennyson’s whispering side, I seem to find my real self. Everything
slips away from me except the night and myself and—and God.
Dearest Carin, I am feeling rather serious. It is because of something
that I have just come to realize. Do you remember how, at the end of our
school-teaching up at Sunset Gap three years ago, your father and mother
offered to send me away to school, and I—thanking them more than I could
possibly make them understand—refused? I said I wanted it to be Azalea
for herself. That I meant to spin my own little web, and that I hoped it
would be a silver one.
Since then, as you know, I have tried my best. I decided that I would
become a teacher of the mountain handicrafts; I hoped that some day when
good Mrs. Kitchell resigned her position as head of the Mountain
Industries which your father and mother established, that I could take
her place. What is more, I wanted to develop the Industries so that they
would become much, much more useful and inspiring and important than they
are now. I wanted, too, to fit myself to meet all the people who come to
Lee—all the charming, gracious people. You know how I have worked for
all this. Haystack Thompson, the best basket-maker in the country, has
taught me to make baskets. Mrs. Kitchell, the cleverest little weaver of
all the weavers, has instructed me in the weaving of woolen and linen and
cotton cloth, and in the making of counterpanes, as well as the knotting
of fringe and the looping of fancy edges. Mother McBirney has taught me
knitting and lace making and crocheting. I can do a little wood carving.
I can make mats. I can weave carpets. Even, if put to it, I can turn a
jug. Then I have read and studied and thought. And in doing all that I
have grown vain and foolish.
I’ll tell you how I found out.
Dear Father McBirney isn’t well. I think I spoke about this to you the
other day. But he’s been getting rapidly worse, and now he can hardly
move from his chair. It is rheumatism; and it’s likely to stay with him
for a long, long time. He cannot help about the farm at all, and so all
of the farm work falls on Jim. He can’t even go about the country to
collect the chairs the mountaineers make for the Mountain Industries, as
he promised your father he would.
Oh, Carin, do you remember the day you and your father and mother came up
to our cabin to ask my foster-parents to go down and take charge of the
Industries? And do you remember how Pa and Ma looked about at the
darling cabin with its wistaria and trumpet vine, and its Pride of India
tree with the graves of their little Molly and my own dear mama beneath
it, and how they would not go? And then do you recall how Father
McBirney promised to “beat up trade” for the Industries, and so we all
stayed in the cabin with its nice open room in between the closed ones,
and its own queer little smithy, and its beehives on the south slope, and
its martin houses by the door? Oh, the dear, dear little house!
Well, there has been such a demand for the mountain chairs from the
visitors to Lee, that the chair-makers have been making a good profit and
Father McBirney has been enjoying a nice commission. This winter he
quite depended on it, because, owing to his bad health, he hadn’t been
able to do as much with the farm as usual. But now he isn’t well enough
to go over the mountains arranging about the chairs, or getting them
together, so even that little profit is denied us.
What are we to do? Jim may be able to do some hauling for people;
there’s wood to be carted, and some work to do for the miller, but it’s
very irregular.
And this is where I come in. This is where I am shown up as a person
with much vanity and little common sense. For, of course, it should be
my part to make ready money for the family. And I can’t. I don’t know
how. I have been thinking I was so capable, and now I see I’m just as
useless as—as most girls!
Of course I could go away somewhere else and perhaps find some other
place where the mountain industries are being developed. But ought I to
leave home now? I seem to be very much needed. As you know, sometimes
our sweet, unselfish Mother McBirney gets melancholy. She has lived so
long away up here on the mountain that her thoughts get to turning
inward, and she remembers about Molly’s death, and then for days she is
silent and brooding, and we all tremble for her. She looks far, far away
and pays almost no attention to what we say to her. This is a very real
danger, and if I were not here to shake her out of these moods, who knows
what might happen?
So there I am, I who wanted to do such wonderful independent things, I
who thought I had learned so much, about as useless as anyone could be.
At least, as a money-earner. Of course I am not sitting about, beating
my breast and throwing dust on my head. I hope you don’t think that.
No, I have Mother McBirney’s loom in good working order, and have set it
up not too far away from the fireplace, and I am throwing that shuttle
like mad, weaving some perfectly fascinating counterpanes. You ought to
see the one in red and black in the Tudor rose pattern. Truly, it’s a
beauty. I know I can sell it easily enough, and I’m going to charge a
good price for it, too. I’m a greedy pig.
But you see, I _must_ have money.
By rights, Father McBirney ought to have a change. He should go down to
Bethal Springs. The waters there are said to cure some terrible cases of
rheumatism. But he couldn’t go without Mother; and Mother wouldn’t go
without Jim. So there you are. Such a puzzle!
Jim is dreadfully on my mind, too. What do you think has happened to
him? He has “got religion.” Yes, I know you are laughing. Jim, the
tease of the world, Jim with freckles and warts and funny words, and the
very _dickens_ in him. But it is true. Mr. Summers did it—talked to him
in the woods, and Jim “saw the light.” And now he wants to be a preacher
like Mr. Summers. You ought to hear him preaching to the horses when he
combs them down. I listen. Perhaps I ought not to. I don’t do it to
make fun, you may be sure. I do it because the poor boy is so earnest
and surprising. You can’t think what beautiful things he says. Nights
he studies the Bible and some books Mr. Summers gives him. He drives
away to town once every week to help with the Epworth League meeting, and
he has got up some sort of a society among the boys, and has induced the
members to pledge themselves not to drink whiskey or chew tobacco, or use
profane words, or do any other horrid thing.
Our Jim!
Carin, we’re all growing up, aren’t we?
You with your long dresses and touch-me-not air, and Annie Laurie, one of
our leading business persons! And Sam Disbrow buying stock in Annie
Laurie’s dairy, and Hi Kitchell doing draying, and Dick Heller going in
the bank, and Keefe O’Connor sending me the catalogue of his “Autumn
Exhibit.” You can fancy how Keefe played up Sunset Gap in his pictures!
I could tell from the names where he had painted about half of them.
I’ll send you the catalogue. But return it, won’t you? It seems like a
memento of that queer, wild, happy summer at the Gap.
That was the last summer we really spent together. To be sure I have had
glimpses of you, but usually you have been away on your wonderful
journeys with your father and mother, and I have had to go about the
mountain roads alone. But I haven’t minded, Carin, and you mustn’t think
that I have. I tried to picture the beautiful places you were in, and
the parties you were going to, and the pictures and palaces you were
seeing, and I knew that if I was thinking of you, that you were thinking
of me, too. It kept my heart warm; it peopled the lonely mountain roads.
I’ll tell you this, my Carin: Next to a well-loved human face, a
well-loved road is the best thing. The sight of a familiar clump of
grass can be as dear as a threshold. Twists of tree trunks, odd
embankments, colors of the road, above all, the turns of a road, get to
be like a part of one’s life. The little smells that come up from earth
and grass and flower, rising over and over again from the same place,
affect one almost like the voices of “home folk.” Even the wind on the
face, though the wind is so wild and strange a thing, makes one feel at
ease in one’s world; and the burst of the sun over a hill, or the going
down of it at the close of a busy day—busy both for you and the sun—can
make you realize as few things can, that you are the child of God—of the
great Father, so silent, so unknowable, who has made suns and birds,
mountains and little friendly crickets.
Oh, beautiful, beautiful life! In spite of trouble and sickness,
perplexity and poverty, beautiful, beautiful life!
Dear Carin, don’t laugh at me if my letter has been a bit too ecstatic.
You are surrounded all the time with fine teachers and brilliant friends,
and moving, shifting life. I am just here by myself, so to speak. Yes,
yes, dear, I know my own McBirneys are beside me. I have no desire
deeper than the desire to help them. Yet, Carin, are they my kind of
people? You know they are not; they know it. We try to be alike, but we
cannot be, really.
I am the granddaughter of Colonel Atherton on one side; the granddaughter
of some other proud old gentleman on the other side. For it was pride
that made my grandfather Knox turn his son, my father, adrift. True, the
McBirneys took me, a little ragged wanderer, orphaned and desolate, from
a traveling show; but that was an accident in my life. It cannot change
the fact that I have the tastes of the Athertons and the Knoxes, who have
loved beauty and hospitality and other gracious things.
Oh, me, am I insinuating that Mother McBirney is not hospitable or that
she does not love beauty? If so, shame on me. Her door stands open to
every wanderer. It stood open to me. The flowers about her walls, and
the purple valley below her hill, delight her. Yes, she is a true lover
of beauty. May we never lose sight of each other, and to the last may I
feel her hand waiting to grasp mine in whatever darkness she or I may
have to walk through. I only say I wish I might, sometimes, have someone
like you, my Carin, to talk with. Of course, there is Barbara Summers.
But she is in the valley and I on the mountain.
Equally of course, there are Keefe O’Connor’s letters. And there are
yours. Be sure you send me one soon.
Do not mind my changing moods. I am, after all, always the same old
_Azalea_.
P. S. This is the evening of the same day.
Who do you think called?
Mrs. Kitchell, Hi’s little brown mother, all in new clothes, with white
cotton gloves on her hands—the hands that used to be so hard and
scratched and battered with work. She had a red rose on her new fall
hat, and her shoes were blacked. And you know what shoes are at Lee!
The standard is low, owing to red mud and lack of elbow activity. But
Mrs. Kitchell was grand. There is no other word for it.
This, however, is not the most exciting part of what I have to tell.
Haystack Thompson was with her, and he actually wore a hat. Yes, he did
too, Carin Carson. What is more, his hair had been cut—a little. But
you could get seven crops a year of his hair, just as you can of alfalfa.
He, too, was wonderful. He wore a collar. It was of celluloid, and it
shone like Mother McBirney’s best milk pan. He did not bring his fiddle,
and that made me feel sad. If he wants to court Hi’s “ma,” why let him,
but is that any reason why he should turn his back on his faithful Betsy,
his fiddle?
I felt like saying to him: “Haystack, Haystack, can any woman understand
you, answer you, listen to you, rejoice with you, as your fiddle did?
Will any woman cost you so little? Ask so few questions? Be such a
companion on rainy and sunshiny days?”
But of course I didn’t say anything of the kind. Little Mrs. Kitchell is
a brave creature, and Haystack is a lonely one. So if they decide to
marry, I and everyone else ought to be glad. The only thing that really
troubles me is how they are going to live. Dear Haystack never earns any
money, except in little driblets, making baskets or playing at dances.
Do you suppose that after that little beaver, Mrs. Kitchell, has reared a
family of four, alone and unaided, that she’ll turn in and support
Haystack in his old age? Wouldn’t that be odd of her? Still, perhaps
she might like it. Hi, as I say, is “draying.” He has a pair of
claybank mules and he is a proud man, I can tell you. He works quite as
hard as anybody in Lee—harder than most. But he doesn’t like to be
“driv.” You know he wouldn’t.
“When will that trunk be up to the house, expressman?” the Northerners
say, not so much as looking at him.
Then you ought to hear Hi drawl. You know his drawl! But it’s grown
worse.
“Sometime along in the forenoon, I reckon, ma’am.”
“Aren’t you sure of it? Because if you aren’t, I shall get another man
to bring it up.”
“Yessum. Only I’m the only one in town jest now that does trunk haulin’.
But don’t you worry, ma’am. I feel tollable sure that there trunk will
git up to you-all’s house some time before evenin’.”
You can just hear the Northerners pant when he says that.
I know you and your people are Northerners, Carin, dear, but you’re not
the snap-turtle variety.
I do wish you’d been down here this summer. I had so much to tell you.
The Shoals looked very lonely with none of you in it. Was it so lovely
up there in Maine that you forgot our purple mountains? I know it must
be beautiful up there. I look at the map, and follow all the queer
little inlets and outlets, and think how bright the water must be as it
breaks on the rocks.
Well, we have had wonderful things to look at ourselves. Why, only
to-day the mountains looked like gigantic plums, with rich purple bloom
all over them; and the sky went to the trouble to try to match them. But
I’d have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been so poor. Not that I’m any
poorer than usual, but I feel poorer because I see that at last it is “up
to me” to be the money-maker. And I don’t know how to begin.
I have explained to you distinctly a number of times, my dear Carin, that
when I write this way I do it to ease my feelings. I want your advice.
But that is all I do want of you, except, of course, your love and
sympathy. I know you ache to play fairy godmother. You’ve tried to do
that many times. But I think you understand pretty well by now that that
wouldn’t really help me out. I want my own fight, my own life, my own
victories. Just at present I’m terribly puzzled, because I want to help
Father and Mother McBirney and Jim.
I can’t write it all to Keefe, because—well because he might be able to
think of a way to help me out, but not of a way to help the others.
Keefe is terribly impulsive, and he will not realize how young he is. He
is disgracefully young. So am I. That extreme youthfulness of ours gets
in the way of some of his plans. No, I can’t write him. He isn’t
sensible. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he paints so well. Did I
tell you he was making rather a specialty of portraits? He sent me one
of a young Jewish girl who is in his color class at the Academy of
Design. He says her name is Miriam. She fits the name.
Keefe wants to come down here this winter, but I’m not going to let him.
There is no reason why he should come to this one place out of all the
places in the world. Let him go up to Sunset Gap to his own wonderful
little sister, Mary Cecily Rowantree. He says he needs inspiration, but
if anyone can give it to him, she can. You see, if he came here, he
would be terribly interrupting, and I cannot and will not be interrupted.
I’m going to earn the living for the family, though, as I said at the
beginning, I don’t know how.
Carin, I go out and sit down beside my dear little mama’s grave and think
and think. I tell her how good these people were to her, how good they
have been to me ever since that terrible day when I was left alone, and I
beg her if she is indeed a spirit now, who can see and understand the
things that are hidden from us earth-bound ones, that she will put
something into my heart to tell me what to do.
I am ready, Carin, to prove myself. Here I am with my strong body, with
my heart full to bursting with gratitude and love, with my waiting hands
and brain. But I need direction. You couldn’t give me that, could you,
dear yellow-headed one?
Yes, I wish you might have come home this summer. It would have helped.
Barbara Summers was away, too. She went home to see her people for the
first time since she was married. You remember her people didn’t approve
of her marriage. She had a very happy time, and all is well between her
and them at last. Of Annie Laurie I see little. She is too busy. But
we signal each other, she from her roof, I from the “Outlook.”
Good-bye, dear. If I write you too much, forgive me. I need to write.
It comforts me. You understand all I say—all I do not say, too.
_Lovingly_, _always_,
_Azalea_.