Books: The Heart Of The Hills

J >> John Fox, Jr. >> The Heart Of The Hills

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"Ain't it purty?" she said, and her voice and her eyes spoke all
her thanks with such sincerity and pathos that Marjorie was
touched. Then they sat down in front of the fire--a pair of slim
brown feet that had been bruised by many a stone and pierced by
many a thorn stretched out to a warm blaze side by side with a
pair of white slim ones that had been tenderly guarded against
both since the first day they had touched the earth, and a golden
head that had never been without the caress of a tender hand and a
tousled dark one that had been bared to sun and wind and storm--
close together for a long time. Unconsciously Marjorie had Mavis
tell her much about Jason, just as Mavis without knowing it had
Marjorie tell her much about Gray. Mavis got the first good-night
kiss of her life that night, and she went to bed thinking of the
Blue-grass boy's watchful eyes, little courtesies, and his
sympathetic smile, just as Gray, riding home, was thinking of the
dark, shy little mountain girl with a warm glow of protection
about his heart, and Marjorie fell asleep dreaming of the mountain
boy who, under her promise, had gone back homeless to his hills.
In them perhaps it was the call of the woods and wilds that had
led their pioneer forefathers long, long ago into woods and wilds,
or perhaps, after all, it was only the little blind god shooting
arrows at them in the dark.

At least with little Jason one arrow had gone home. At the forks
of the road beyond the county-seat he turned not toward his
grandfather's, but up the spur and over the mountain. And St.
Hilda, sitting on her porch, saw him coming again. His face looked
beaten but determined, and he strode toward her as straight and
sturdy as ever.

"I've come back to stay with ye," he said.

Again she started to make denial, but he shook his head. "'Tain't
no use--I'm a-goin' to stay this time," he said, and he walked up
the steps, pulling two or three dirty bills from his pocket with
one hand and unbuckling his pistol belt with the other.

"Me an' my nag'll work fer ye an' I'll wear gal's stockin's an' a
poke-bonnet an' do a gal's work, if you'll jus' l'arn me whut I
want to know."

XV

The funeral of old Hiram Sudduth, Marjorie's grandfather on her
mother's side, was over. The old man had been laid to rest, by the
side of his father and his pioneer grandfather, in the cedar-
filled burying-ground on the broad farm that had belonged in turn
to the three in an adjoining county that was the last stronghold
of conservatism in the Blue-grass world, and John Burnham, the
school-master, who had spent the night with an old friend after
the funeral, was driving home. Not that there had not been many
changes in that stronghold, too, but they were fewer than
elsewhere and unmodern, and whatever profit was possible through
these changes was reaped by men of the land like old Hiram and not
by strangers. For the war there, as elsewhere, had done its deadly
work. With the negro quarters empty, the elders were too old to
change their ways, the young would not accept the new and hard
conditions, and as mortgages slowly ate up farm after farm, quiet,
thrifty, hard-working old Hiram would gradually take them in,
depleting the old Stonewall neighborhood of its families one by
one, and sending them West, never to come back. The old man, John
Burnham knew, had bitterly opposed the marriage of his daughter
with a "spendthrift Pendleton," and he wondered if now the old
man's will would show that he had carried that opposition to the
grave. It was more than likely, for Marjorie's father had gone his
careless, generous, magnificent way in spite of the curb that the
inherited thrift and inherited passion for land in his Sudduth
wife had put upon him. Old Hiram knew, moreover, the parental
purpose where Gray and Marjorie were concerned, and it was not
likely that he would thwart one generation and tempt the
succeeding one to go on in its reckless way. Right now Burnham
knew that trouble was imminent for Gray's father, and he began to
wonder what for him and his kind the end would be, for no change
that came or was coming to his beloved land ever escaped his
watchful eye. From the crest of the Cumberland to the yellow flood
of the Ohio he knew that land, and he loved every acre of it,
whether blue-grass, bear-grass, peavine, or pennyroyal, and he
knew its history from Daniel Boone to the little Boones who still
trapped skunk, mink, and muskrat, and shot squirrels in the hills
with the same old-fashioned rifle, and he loved its people--his
people--whether they wore silk and slippers, homespun and brogans,
patent leathers and broadcloth, or cowhide boots and jeans. And
now serious troubles were threatening them. A new man with a new
political method had entered the arena and had boldly offered an
election bill which, if passed and enforced, would create a State-
wide revolution, for it would rob the people of local self-
government and centralize power in the hands of a triumvirate that
would be the creature of his government and, under the control of
no court or jury, the supreme master of the State and absolute
master of the people. And Burnham knew that, in such a crisis,
ties of blood, kinship, friendship, religion, business, would
count no more in the Blue-grass than they did during the Civil
War, and that now, as then, father and son, brother and brother,
neighbor and neighbor, would each think and act for himself,
though the house divided against itself should fall to rise no
more. Nor was that all. In the farmer's fight against the
staggering crop of mortgages that had slowly sprung up from the
long-ago sowing of the dragon's teeth Burnham saw with a heavy
heart the telling signs of the land's slow descent from the
strength of hemp to the weakness of tobacco--the ravage of the
woodlands, the incoming of the tenant from the river-valley
counties, the scars on the beautiful face of the land, the scars
on the body social of the region--and now he knew another deadlier
crisis, both social and economic, must some day come.

In the toll-gate war, long over, the law had been merely a little
too awkward and slow. County sentiment had been a little lazy, but
it had got active in a hurry, and several gentlemen, among them
Gray's father, had ridden into town and deposited bits of gilt-
scrolled paper to be appraised and taken over by the county, and
the whole problem had been quickly solved, but the school-master,
looking back, could not help wondering what lawless seeds the
firebrand had then sowed in the hearts of the people and what
weeds might not spring from those seeds even now; for the trust
element of the toll-gate troubles had been accidental,
unintentional, even unconscious, unrecognized; and now the real
spirit of a real trust from the outside world was making itself
felt. Courteous emissaries were smilingly fixing their own price
on the Kentuckian's own tobacco and assuring him that he not only
could not get a higher price elsewhere, but that if he declined he
would be offered less next time, which he would have to accept or
he could not sell at all. And the incredulous, fiery, independent
Kentuckian found his crop mysteriously shadowed on its way to the
big town markets, marked with an invisible "noli me tangere"
except at the price that he was offered at home. And so he had to
sell it in a rage at just that price, and he went home puzzled and
fighting-mad. If, then, the Blue-grass people had handled with the
firebrand corporate aggrandizement of toll-gate owners who were
neighbors and friends, how would they treat meddlesome
interference from strangers? Already one courteous emissary in one
county had fled the people's wrath on a swift thoroughbred, and
Burnham smiled sadly to himself and shook his head.

Rounding a hill a few minutes later, the school-master saw far
ahead the ancestral home of the Pendletons, where the stern old
head of the house, but lately passed in his ninetieth year, had
wielded patriarchal power. The old general had entered the Mexican
War a lieutenant and come out a colonel, and from the Civil War he
had emerged a major-general. He had two sons--twins--and for the
twin brothers he had built twin houses on either side of the
turnpike and had given each five hundred acres of land. And these
houses had literally grown from the soil, for the soil had given
every stick of timber in them and every brick and stone. The twin
brothers had married sisters, and thus as the results of those
unions Gray's father and Marjorie's father were double cousins,
and like twin brothers had been reared, and the school-master
marvelled afresh when he thought of the cleavage made in that one
family by the terrible Civil War. For the old general carried but
one of his twin sons into the Confederacy with him--the other went
with the Union--and his grandsons, the double cousins, who were
just entering college, went not only against each other, but each
against his own father, and there was the extraordinary fact of
three generations serving in the same war, cousin against cousin,
brother against brother, and father against son. The twin brothers
each gave up his life for his cause. After the war the cousins
lived on like brothers, married late, and, naturally, each was
called uncle by the other's only child. In time the two took their
fathers' places in the heart of the old general, and in the twin
houses on the hills. Gray's father had married an aristocrat, who
survived the birth of Gray only a few years, and Marjorie's father
died of an old wound but a year or two after she was born. And so
the balked affection of the old man dropped down through three
generations to centre on Marjorie, and his passionate family pride
to concentrate on Gray.

Now the old Roman was gone, and John Burnham looked with sad eyes
at the last stronghold of him and his kind--the rambling old house
stuccoed with aged brown and covered with ancient vines, knotted
and gnarled like an old man's hand; the walls three feet thick and
built as for a fort, as was doubtless the intent in pioneer days;
the big yard of unmown blue-grass and filled with cedars and
forest trees; the numerous servants' quarters, the spacious hen-
house, the stables with gables and long sloping roofs and the
arched gateway to them for the thoroughbreds, under which no
hybrid mule or lowly work-horse was ever allowed to pass; the
spring-house with its dripping green walls, the long-silent
blacksmith-shop; the still windmill; and over all the atmosphere
of careless, magnificent luxury and slow decay; the stucco peeled
off in great patches, the stable roofs sagging, the windmill
wheelless, the fences following the line of a drunken man's walk,
the trees storm-torn, and the mournful cedars harping with every
passing wind a requiem for the glory that was gone. As he looked,
the memory of the old man's funeral came to Burnham: the white old
face in the coffin--haughty, noble, proud, and the spirit of it
unconquered even by death; the long procession of carriages, the
slow way to the cemetery, the stops on that way, the creaking of
wheels and harness, and the awe of it all to the boy, Gray, who
rode with him. Then the hospitable doors of the princely old house
were closed and the princely life that had made merry for so long
within its walls came sharply to an end, and it stood now,
desolate, gloomy, haunted, the last link between the life that was
gone and the life that was now breaking just ahead. A mile on, the
twin-pillared houses of brick jutted from a long swelling knoll on
each side of the road. In each the same spirit had lived and was
yet alive.

In Gray's home it had gone on unchecked toward the same tragedy,
but in Marjorie's the thrifty, quiet force of her mother's hand
had been in power, and in the little girl the same force was
plain. Her father was a Pendleton of the Pendletons, too, but the
same gentle force had, without curb or check-rein, so guided him
that while he lived he led proudly with never a suspicion that he
was being led. And since the death of Gray's mother and Marjorie's
father each that was left had been faithful to the partner gone,
and in spite of prediction and gossip, the common neighborhood
prophecy had remained unfulfilled.

A mile farther onward, the face of the land on each side changed
suddenly and sharply and became park-like. Not a ploughed acre was
visible, no tree-top was shattered, no broken boughs hung down.
The worm fence disappeared and neat white lines flashed divisions
of pastures, it seemed, for miles. A great amphitheatrical red
barn sat on every little hill or a great red rectangular tobacco
barn. A huge dairy was building of brick. Paddocks and stables
were everywhere, macadamized roads ran from the main highway
through the fields, and on the highest hill visible stood a great
villa--a colossal architectural stranger in the land--and Burnham
was driving by a row of neat red cottages, strangers, too, in the
land. In the old Stonewall neighborhood that Burnham had left the
gradual depopulation around old Hiram left him almost as alone as
his pioneer grandfather had been, and the home of the small
farmers about him had been filled by the tobacco tenant. From the
big villa emanated a similar force with a similar tendency, but
old Hiram, compared with old Morton Sanders, was as a slow fire to
a lightning-bolt. Sanders was from the East, had unlimited wealth,
and loved race-horses. Purchasing a farm for them, the Saxon virus
in his Kentucky blood for land had gotten hold of him, and he,
too, had started depopulating the country; only where old Hiram
bought roods, he bought acres; and where Hiram bagged the small
farmer for game, Sanders gunned for the aristocrat as well. It was
for Sanders that Colonel Pendleton had gone to the mountains long
ago to gobble coal lands. It was to him that the roof over little
Jason's head and the earth under his feet had been sold, and the
school-master smiled a little bitterly when he turned at last into
a gate and drove toward a stately old home in the midst of ancient
cedars, for he was thinking of the little mountaineer and of the
letter St. Hilda had sent him years ago.

"Jason has come back," she wrote, "to learn some way o' gittin'
his land back.'"

For the school-master's reflections during his long drive had not
been wholly impersonal. With his own family there had been the
same change, the same passing, the workings of the same force in
the same remorseless way, and to him, too, the same doom had come.
The home to which he was driving had been his, but it was Morton
Sanders's now. His brother lived there as manager of Sanders's
flocks, herds, and acres, and in the house of his fathers the
school-master now paid his own brother for his board.

XVI

The boy was curled up on the rear seat of the smoking-car. His
face was upturned to the glare of light above him, the train
bumped, jerked, and swayed; smoke and dust rolled in at the open
window and cinders stung his face, but he slept as peacefully as
though he were in one of the huge feather-beds at his
grandfather's house--slept until the conductor shook him by the
shoulder, when he opened his eyes, grunted, and closed them again.
The train stopped, a brakeman yanked him roughly to his feet, put
a cheap suit-case into his hand, and pushed him, still dazed, into
the chill morning air. The train rumbled on and left him blinking
into a lantern held up to his face, but he did not look promising
as a hotel guest and the darky porter turned abruptly; and the boy
yawned long and deeply, with his arms stretched above his head,
dropped on the frosty bars of a baggage-truck and rose again
shivering. Cocks were crowing, light was showing in the east, the
sea of mist that he well knew was about him, but no mountains
loomed above it, and St. Hilda's prize pupil, Jason Hawn, woke
sharply at last with a tingling that went from head to foot. Once
more he was in the land of the Blue-grass, his journey was almost
over, and in a few hours he would put his confident feet on a new
level and march on upward. Gradually, as the lad paced the
platform, the mist thinned and the outlines of things came out. A
mysterious dark bulk high in the air showed as a water-tank, roofs
new to mountain eyes jutted upward, trees softly emerged, a
desolate dusty street opened before him, and the cocks crowed on
lustily all around him and from farm-houses far away. The crowing
made him hungry, and he went to the light of a little eating-house
and asked the price of the things he saw on the counter there, but
the price was too high. He shook his head and went out, but his
pangs were so keen that he went back for a cup of coffee and a
hard-boiled egg, and then he heard the coming thunder of his
train. The sun was rising as he sped on through the breaking mist
toward the Blue-grass town that in pioneer days was known as the
Athens of the West. In a few minutes the train slackened in mid-
air and on a cloud of mist between jutting cliffs, it seemed, and
the startled lad, looking far down through it, saw a winding
yellow light, and he was rushing through autumn fields again
before he realized that the yellow light was the Kentucky River
surging down from the hills. Back up the stream surged his
memories, making him faint with homesickness, for it was the last
link that bound him to the mountains. But both home and hills were
behind him now, and he shook himself sharply and lost him-self
again in the fields of grass and grain, the grazing stock and the
fences, houses, and barns that reeled past his window. Steve Hawn
met him at the station with a rattle-trap buggy and, stared at him
long and hard.

"I'd hardly knowed ye--you've growed like a weed."

"How's the folks?" asked Jason.

"Stirrin'."

Silently they rattled down the street, each side of which was
lined with big wagons loaded with tobacco and covered with cotton
cloth--there seemed to be hundreds of them.

"Hell's a-comin' about that terbaccer up here," said Steve.

"Hell's a-comin' in the mountains if that robber up here at the
capital steals the next election for governor," said Jason, and
Steve looked up quickly and with some uneasiness. He himself had
heard vaguely that somebody, somewhere, and in some way, had
robbed his own party of their rights and would go on robbing at
the polls, but this new Jason seemed to know all about it, so
Steve nodded wisely.

"Yes, my feller."

Through town they drove, and when they started out into the
country they met more wagons of tobacco coming in.

"How's the folks in the mountains?"

"About the same as usual," said the boy, "Grandpap's poorly. The
war's over just now--folks 'r' busy makin' money. Uncle Arch's
still takin' up options. The railroad's comin' up the river"--the
lad's face darkened--"an' land's sellin' fer three times as much
as you sold me out fer."

Steve's face darkened too, but he was silent.

"Found out yit who killed yo' daddy?"

Jason's answer was short.

"If I had I wouldn't tell you."

"Must be purty good shot now?"

"I hain't shot a pistol off fer four year," said the lad again
shortly, and Steve stared.

"Whut devilmint are you in up here now?" asked Jason calmly and
with no apparent notice of the start Steve gave.

"Who's been a-tellin' you lies about me?" asked Steve with angry
suspicion.

"I hain't heerd a word," said Jason coolly. "I bet you burned
that toll-gate the morning I left here. Thar's devilmint goin' on
everywhar, an' if there's any around you I know you can't keep out
o' it."

Steve laughed with relief.

"You can't git away with devilmint here like you can in the
mountains, an' I'm 'tendin' to my own business."

Jason made no comment and Steve went on:

"I've paid fer this hoss an' buggy an' I got things hung up at
home an' a leetle money in the bank, an' yo' ma says she wouldn't
go back to the mountains fer nothin'."

"How's Mavis?" asked Jason abruptly.

"Reckon you wouldn't know her. She's al'ays runnin' aroun' with
that Pendleton boy an' gal, an' she's chuck-full o' new-fangled
notions. She's the purtiest gal I ever seed, an'," he added slyly,
"looks like that Pendleton boy's plumb crazy 'bout her."

Jason made no answer and showed no sign of interest, much less
jealousy, and yet, though he was thinking of the Pendleton girl
and wanted to ask some question about her, a little inconsistent
rankling started deep within him at the news of Mavis's disloyalty
to him. They were approaching the lane that led to Steve's house
now, and beyond the big twin houses were visible.

"Yo' Uncle Arch's been here a good deal, an' he's tuk a powerful
fancy to Mavis an' he's goin' to send her to the same college
school in town whar you're goin'. Marjorie and Gray is a-goin'
thar too, I reckon."

Jason's heart beat fast at these words. Gray had the start of him,
but he would give the Blue-grass boy a race now in school and
without. As they turned into the lane, he could see the woods--
could almost see the tree around which he had circled drunk,
raging, and shooting his pistol, and his face burned with the
memory. And over in the hollow he had met Marjorie on her pony,
and he could see the tears in her eyes, hear her voice, and feel
the clasp of her hand again. Though neither knew it, a new life
had started for him there and then. He had kept his promise, and
he wondered if she would remember and be glad.

His mother was on the porch, waiting and watching for him, with
one hand shading her eyes. She rushed for the gate, and when he
stepped slowly from the buggy she gave a look of wondering
surprise and pride, burst into tears, and for the first time in
her life threw her arms around him and kissed him, to his great
confusion and shame. In the doorway stood a tall, slender girl
with a mass of black hair, and she, too, with shining eyes rushed
toward him, stopping defiantly short within a few feet of him when
she met his cool, clear gaze, and, without even speaking his name,
held out her hand. Then with intuitive suspicion she flashed a
look at Steve and knew that his tongue had been wagging. She
flushed angrily, but with feminine swiftness caught her lost poise
and, lifting her head, smiled.

"I wouldn't 'a' known ye," she said.

"An' I wouldn't 'a' known you," said Jason.

The girl said no more, and the father looked at his daughter and
the mother at her son, puzzled by the domestic tragedy so common
in this land of ours, where the gates of opportunity swing wide
for the passing on of the young. But of the two, Steve Hawn was
the more puzzled and uneasy, for Jason, like himself, was a
product of the hills and had had less chance than even he to know
the outside world.

The older mountaineer wore store clothes, but so did Jason. He had
gone to meet the boy, self-assured and with the purpose of
patronage and counsel, and he had met more assurance than his own
and a calm air of superiority that was troubling to Steve's pride.
The mother, always apologetic on account of the one great act of
injustice she had done her son, felt awe as she looked, and as her
pride grew she became abject, and the boy accepted the attitude of
each as his just due. But on Mavis the wave of his influence broke
as on a rock. She was as much changed from the Mavis he had last
seen as she was at that time from the little Mavis of the hills,
and he felt her eyes searching him from head to foot just as she
had done that long-ago time when he saw her first in the hunting-
field. He knew that now she was comparing him with even higher
standards than she was then, and that now, as then, he was falling
short, and he looked up suddenly and caught her eyes with a grim,
confident little smile that made her shift her gaze confusedly.
She moved nervously in her chair and her cheeks began to burn. And
Steve talked on--volubly for him--while the mother threw in a
timid homesick question to Jason now and then about something in
the mountains, and Mavis kept still and looked at the boy no more.
By and by the two women went to their work, and Jason followed
Steve about the little place to look at the cow and a few pigs and
at the garden and up over the hill to the tobacco-patch that Steve
was tending on shares with Colonel Pendleton. After dinner Mavis
disappeared, and the stepmother reckoned she had gone over to see
Marjorie Pendleton--"she was al'ays a-goin' over thar"--and in the
middle of the afternoon the boy wandered aimlessly forth into the
Blue-grass fields.

Spring green the fields were, and the woods, but scarcely touched
by the blight of autumn, were gray as usual from the limestone
turnpike, which, when he crossed it, was ankle-deep in dust. A
cloud of yellow butterflies fluttered crazily before him in a
sunlight that was hardly less golden, and when he climbed the
fence a rabbit leaped beneath him and darted into a patch of
ironweeds. Instinctively he leaped after it, crashing, through the
purple crowns, and as suddenly stopped at the foolishness of
pursuit, when he had left his pistol in his suit-case, and with
another sharp memory of the rabbit hunt he had encountered when he
made his first appearance in that land. Half unconsciously then
his thoughts turned him through the woods and through a pasture
toward the twin homes of the Pendletons, and on the top of the
next hill he could see them on their wooded eminences--could even
see the stile where he had had his last vision of Marjorie, and he
dropped in the thick grass, looking long and hard and wondering.

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