223

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 the moment of their 225 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 inspected from all the 226 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.

"Well, I—reckon I was aimin' to sorter talk, too, Callisty," he 227 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 theirselves. Now they've built 228 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 he opened his 229 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 230 mountaineers. Even the play of the children was hushed. 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 ennuyÉ, 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 rain—tepid, perpendicular—231 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 whilst they're a fightin' it 232 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. She 233 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 234 use 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 235 her own use—presented with sweet 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."

And still Callista had nothing to offer. 236

"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.