It was the old story that always seems so big and important to the young, and that brings reminiscent smiles to their elders. Love was the theme, as may be supposed. There was a young man in Atlanta, full of all goodness and the graces, who had discovered that Miss Chester also possessed these qualities above all other people in Atlanta or anywhere else from Greenland to Patagonia. She showed Father Abram the letter over which she had been weeping. It was a manly, tender letter, a little superlative and urgent, after the style of love letters written by young men full of goodness and the graces. He proposed for Miss Chester"s hand in marriage at once. Life, he said, since her departure for a three-weeks" visit, was not to be endured. He begged for an immediate answer; and if it were favourable he promised to fly, ignoring the narrow-gauge railroad, at once to Lakelands.
"And now where does the trouble come in?" asked the miller when he had read the letter.
"I cannot marry him," said Miss Chester.
"Do you want to marry him?" asked Father Abram.
"Oh, I love him," she answered, "but--" Down went her head and she sobbed again.
"Come, Miss Rose," said the miller; "you can give me your confidence.
I do not question you, but I think you can trust me."
"I do trust you," said the girl. "I will tell you why I must refuse Ralph. I am n.o.body; I haven"t even a name; the name I call myself is a lie. Ralph is a n.o.ble man. I love him with all my heart, but I can never be his."
"What talk is this?" said Father Abram. "You said that you remember your parents. Why do you say you have no name? I do not understand."
"I do remember them," said Miss Chester. "I remember them too well.
My first recollections are of our life somewhere in the far South. We moved many times to different towns and states. I have picked cotton, and worked in factories, and have often gone without enough food and clothes. My mother was sometimes good to me; my father was always cruel, and beat me. I think they were both idle and unsettled.
"One night when we were living in a little town on a river near Atlanta they had a great quarrel. It was while they were abusing and taunting each other that I learned--oh, Father Abram, I learned that I didn"t even have the right to be--don"t you understand? I had no right even to a name; I was n.o.body.
"I ran away that night. I walked to Atlanta and found work. I gave myself the name of Rose Chester, and have earned my own living ever since. Now you know why I cannot marry Ralph--and, oh, I can never tell him why."
Better than any sympathy, more helpful than pity, was Father Abram"s depreciation of her woes.
"Why, dear, dear! is that all?" he said. "Fie, fie! I thought something was in the way. If this perfect young man is a man at all he will not care a pinch of bran for your family tree. Dear Miss Rose, take my word for it, it is yourself he cares for. Tell him frankly, just as you have told me, and I"ll warrant that he will laugh at your story, and think all the more of you for it."
"I shall never tell him," said Miss Chester, sadly. "And I shall never marry him nor any one else. I have not the right."
But they saw a long shadow come bobbing up the sunlit road. And then came a shorter one bobbing by its side; and presently two strange figures approached the church. The long shadow was made by Miss Phoebe Summers, the organist, come to practise. Tommy Teague, aged twelve, was responsible for the shorter shadow. It was Tommy"s day to pump the organ for Miss Phoebe, and his bare toes proudly spurned the dust of the road.
Miss Phoebe, in her lilac-spray chintz dress, with her accurate little curls hanging over each ear, courtesied low to Father Abram, and shook her curls ceremoniously at Miss Chester. Then she and her a.s.sistant climbed the steep stairway to the organ loft.
In the gathering shadows below, Father Abram and Miss Chester lingered. They were silent; and it is likely that they were busy with their memories. Miss Chester sat, leaning her head on her hand, with her eyes fixed far away. Father Abram stood in the next pew, looking thoughtfully out of the door at the road and the ruined cottage.
Suddenly the scene was transformed for him back almost a score of years into the past. For, as Tommy pumped away, Miss Phoebe struck a low ba.s.s note on the organ and held it to test the volume of air that it contained. The church ceased to exist, so far as Father Abram was concerned. The deep, booming vibration that shook the little frame building was no note from an organ, but the humming of the mill machinery. He felt sure that the old overshot-wheel was turning; that he was back again, a dusty, merry miller in the old mountain mill. And now evening was come, and soon would come Aglaia with flying colours, toddling across the road to take him home to supper. Father Abram"s eyes were fixed upon the broken door of the cottage.
And then came another wonder. In the gallery overhead the sacks of flour were stacked in long rows. Perhaps a mouse had been at one of them; anyway the jar of the deep organ note shook down between the cracks of the gallery floor a stream of flour, covering Father Abram from head to foot with the white dust. And then the old miller stepped into the aisle, and waved his arms and began to sing the miller"s song:
"The wheel goes round, The grist is ground, The dusty miller"s merry."
--and then the rest of the miracle happened. Miss Chester was leaning forward from her pew, as pale as the flour itself, her wide-open eyes staring at Father Abram like one in a waking dream. When he began the song she stretched out her arms to him; her lips moved; she called to him in dreamy tones: "Da-da, come take Dums home!"
Miss Phoebe released the low key of the organ. But her work had been well done. The note that she struck had beaten down the doors of a closed memory; and Father Abram held his lost Aglaia close in his arms.
When you visit Lakelands they will tell you more of this story. They will tell you how the lines of it were afterward traced, and the history of the miller"s daughter revealed after the gipsy wanderers had stolen her on that September day, attracted by her childish beauty. But you should wait until you sit comfortably on the shaded porch of the Eagle House, and then you can have the story at your ease. It seems best that our part of it should close while Miss Phoebe"s deep ba.s.s note was yet reverberating softly.
And yet, to my mind, the finest thing of it all happened while Father Abram and his daughter were walking back to the Eagle House in the long twilight, almost too glad to speak.
"Father," she said, somewhat timidly and doubtfully, "have you a great deal of money?"
"A great deal?" said the miller. "Well, that depends. There is plenty unless you want to buy the moon or something equally expensive."
"Would it cost very, very much," asked Aglaia, who had always counted her dimes so carefully, "to send a telegram to Atlanta?"
"Ah," said Father Abram, with a little sigh, "I see. You want to ask Ralph to come."
Aglaia looked up at him with a tender smile.
"I want to ask him to wait," she said. "I have just found my father, and I want it to be just we two for a while. I want to tell him he will have to wait."
XVII
NEW YORK BY CAMP FIRE LIGHT
Away out in the Creek Nation we learned things about New York.
We were on a hunting trip, and were camped one night on the bank of a little stream. Bud Kingsbury was our skilled hunter and guide, and it was from his lips that we had explanations of Manhattan and the queer folks that inhabit it. Bud had once spent a month in the metropolis, and a week or two at other times, and he was pleased to discourse to us of what he had seen.
Fifty yards away from our camp was pitched the teepee of a wandering family of Indians that had come up and settled there for the night. An old, old Indian woman was trying to build a fire under an iron pot hung upon three sticks.
Bud went over to her a.s.sistance, and soon had her fire going. When he came back we complimented him playfully upon his gallantry.
"Oh," said Bud, "don"t mention it. It"s a way I have. Whenever I see a lady trying to cook things in a pot and having trouble I always go to the rescue. I done the same thing once in a high-toned house in. New York City. Heap big society teepee on Fifth Avenue. That Injun lady kind of recalled it to my mind. Yes, I endeavours to be polite and help the ladies out."
The camp demanded the particulars.
"I was manager of the Triangle B Ranch in the Panhandle," said Bud.
"It was owned at that time by old man Sterling, of New York. He wanted to sell out, and he wrote for me to come on to New York and explain the ranch to the syndicate that wanted to buy. So I sends to Fort Worth and has a forty dollar suit of clothes made, and hits the trail for the big village.
"Well, when I got there, old man Sterling and his outfit certainly laid themselves out to be agreeable. We had business and pleasure so mixed up that you couldn"t tell whether it was a treat or a trade half the time. We had trolley rides, and cigars, and theatre round-ups, and rubber parties."
"Rubber parties?" said a listener, inquiringly.
"Sure," said Bud. "Didn"t you never attend "em? You walk around and try to look at the tops of the skysc.r.a.pers. Well, we sold the ranch, and old man Sterling asks me "round to his house to take grub on the night before I started back. It wasn"t any high-collared affair--just me and the old man and his wife and daughter. But they was a fine-haired outfit all right, and the lilies of the field wasn"t in it. They made my Fort Worth clothes carpenter look like a dealer in horse blankets and gee strings. And then the table was all pompous with flowers, and there was a whole kit of tools laid out beside everybody"s plate. You"d have thought you was fixed out to burglarize a restaurant before you could get your grub. But I"d been in New York over a week then, and I was getting on to stylish ways. I kind of trailed behind and watched the others use the hardware supplies, and then I tackled the chuck with the same weapons. It ain"t much trouble to travel with the high-flyers after you find out their gait. I got along fine. I was feeling cool and agreeable, and pretty soon I was talking away fluent as you please, all about the ranch and the West, and telling "em how the Indians eat gra.s.shopper stew and snakes, and you never saw people so interested.
"But the real joy of that feast was that Miss Sterling. Just a little trick she was, not bigger than two bits" worth of chewing plug; but she had a way about her that seemed to say she was the people, and you believed it. And yet, she never put on any airs, and she smiled at me the same as if I was a millionaire while I was telling about a Creek dog feast and listened like it was news from home.
"By and by, after we had eat oysters and some watery soup and truck that never was in my repertory, a Methodist preacher brings in a kind of camp stove arrangement, all silver, on long legs, with a lamp under it.
"Miss Sterling lights up and begins to do some cooking right on the supper table. I wondered why old man Sterling didn"t hire a cook, with all the money he had. Pretty soon she dished out some cheesy tasting truck that she said was rabbit, but I swear there had never been a Molly cotton tail in a mile of it.