The Call of the Cumberlands Part 31

His eyes showed surprise.

"Perhaps," he apologized, "I am dense, and you may have to tell me bluntly what I am to do. But you know that you have only to tell me."

For a moment, she said nothing, then she shook her head again.

"Issue your orders," he insisted. "I am waiting to obey."

She hesitated again, then said, slowly:

"Have your hair cut. It's the one uncivilized thing about you."

For an instant, Samson's face hardened.

"No," he said; "I don't care to do that."

"Oh, very well!" she laughed, lightly. "In that event, of course, you shouldn't do it." But her smile faded, and after a moment he explained:

"You see, it wouldn't do."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I've got to keep something as it was to remind me of a prior claim on my life."

For an instant the girl's face clouded, and grew deeply troubled.

"You don't mean," she asked, with an outburst of interest more vehement than she had meant to show, or realized that she was showing--"you don't mean that you still adhere to ideas of the vendetta?" Then she broke off with a laugh, a rather nervous laugh. "Of course not," she answered herself. "That would be too absurd!"

"Would it?" asked Samson, simply. He glanced at his watch. "Two minutes up," he announced. "The model will please resume the pose. By the way, may I drive with you to-morrow afternoon?"

The next afternoon, Samson ran up the street steps of the Lescott house, and rang the bell, and a few moments later Adrienne appeared.

The car was waiting outside, and, as the girl came down the stairs in motor coat and veil, she paused and her fingers on the bannisters tightened in surprise as she looked at the man who stood below holding his hat in his hand, with his face upturned. The well-shaped head was no longer marred by the mane which it had formerly worn, but was close cropped, and under the transforming influence of the change the forehead seemed bolder and higher, and to her thinking the strength of the purposeful features was enhanced, and yet, had she known it, the man felt that he had for the first time surrendered a point which meant an abandonment of something akin to principle.

She said nothing, but as she took his hand in greeting, her fingers pressed his own in handclasp more lingering than usual.

Late that evening, when Samson returned to the studio, he found a missive in his letter-box, and, as he took it out, his eyes fell on the postmark. It was dated from Hixon, Kentucky, and, as the man slowly climbed the stairs, he turned the envelope over in his hand with a strange sense of misgiving and premonition.

CHAPTER XXIII

The letter was written in the cramped hand of Brother Spencer. Through its faulty diction ran a plainly discernible undernote of disapproval for Samson, though there was no word of reproof or criticism. It was plain that it was sent as a matter of courtesy to one who, having proven an apostate, scarcely merited such consideration. It informed him that old Spicer South had been "mighty porely," but was now better, barring the breaking of age. Every one was "tolerable." Then came the announcement which the letter had been written to convey.

The term of the South-Hollman truce had ended, and it had been renewed for an indefinite period.

"Some of your folks thought they ought to let you know because they promised to give you a say," wrote the informant. "But they decided that it couldn't hardly make no difference to you, since you have left the mountains, and if you cared anything about it, you knew the time, and could of been here. Hoping this finds you well."

Samson's face clouded. He threw the soiled and scribbled missive down on the table and sat with unseeing eyes fixed on the studio wall. So, they had cast him out of their councils! They already thought of him as one who had been.

In that pa.s.sionate rush of feeling, everything that had happened since he had left Misery seemed artificial and dream-like. He longed for the realities that were forfeited. He wanted to press himself close to the great, gray shoulders of rock that broke through the greenery like giants tearing off soft raiment. Those were his people back there. He should be running with the wolf-pack, not coursing with beagles.

He had been telling himself that he was loyal, and now he realized that he was drifting like the lotus-eaters. Things that had gripped his soul were becoming myths. Nothing in his life was honest--he had become as they had prophesied, a derelict. In that thorn-choked graveyard lay the crude man whose knotted hand had rested on his head just before death stiffened it bestowing a mission.

"I hain't fergot ye, Pap." The words rang in his ears with the agony of a repudiated vow.

He rose and paced the floor, with teeth and hands clenched, and the sweat standing out on his forehead. His advisers had of late been urging him to go to Paris He had refused, and his unconfessed reason had been that in Paris he could not answer a sudden call. He would go back to them now, and compel them to admit his leadership.

Then, his eyes fell on the unfinished portrait of Adrienne. The face gazed at him with its grave sweetness; its fragrant subtlety and its fine-grained delicacy. Her pictured lips were silently arguing for the life he had found among strangers, and her victory would have been an easy one, but for the fact that just now his conscience seemed to be on the other side. Samson's civilization was two years old--a thin veneer over a century of feudalism--and now the century was thundering its call of blood bondage. But, as the man struggled over the dilemma, the pendulum swung back. The hundred years had left, also, a heritage of quickness and bitterness to resent injury and injustice. His own people had cast him out. They had branded him as the deserter; they felt no need of him or his counsel. Very well, let them have it so. His problem had been settled for him. His Gordian knot was cut.

Sally and his uncle alone had his address. This letter, casting him out, must have been authorized by them, Brother Spencer acting merely as amanuensis. They, too, had repudiated him--and, if that were true, except for the graves of his parents the hills had no tie to hold him.

"Sally, Sally!" he groaned, dropping his face on his crossed arms, while his shoulders heaved in an agony of heart-break, and his words came in the old crude syllables: "I 'lowed you'd believe in me ef h.e.l.l froze!" He rose after that, and made a fierce gesture with his clenched fists. "All right," he said, bitterly, "I'm shet of the lot of ye. I'm done!"

But it was easier to say the words of repudiation than to cut the ties that were knotted about his heart. Again, he saw Sally standing by the old stile in the starlight with sweet, loyal eyes lifted to his own, and again he heard her vow that, if he came back, she would be waiting.

Now, that picture lay beyond a sea which he could not recross. Sally and his uncle had authorized his excommunication. There was, after all, in the entire world no faith which could stand unalterable, and in all the world no reward that could be a better thing than Dead-Sea fruit, without the love of that barefooted girl back there in the log cabin, whose sweet tongue could not fashion phrases except in illiteracy. He would have gambled his soul on her steadfastness without fear--and he bitterly told himself he would have lost. And yet--some voice sounded to him as he stood there alone in the studio with the arteries knotted on his temples and the blood running cold and bitter in his veins--and yet what right had he, the deserter, to demand faith? One hand went up and clasped his forehead--and the hand fell on the head that had been shorn because a foreign woman had asked it. What tradition had he kept inviolate? And, in his mood, that small matter of shortened hair meant as great and bitter surrender as it had meant to the Samson before him, whose mighty strength had gone out under the snipping of shears. What course was open to him now, except that of following the precedent of the other Samson, of pulling down the whole temple of his past? He was disowned, and could not return. He would go ahead with the other life, though at the moment he hated it.

With a rankling soul, the mountaineer left New York. He wrote Sally a brief note, telling her that he was going to cross the ocean, but his hurt pride forbade his pleading for her confidence, or adding, "I love you." He plunged into the art life of the "other side of the Seine,"

and worked voraciously. He was trying to learn much--and to forget much.

One sunny afternoon, when Samson had been in the _Quartier Latin_ for eight or nine months, the _concierge_ of his lodgings handed him, as he pa.s.sed through the cour, an envelope addressed in the hand of Adrienne Lescott. He thrust it into his pocket for a later reading and hurried on to the _atelier_ where he was to have a criticism that day. When the day's work was over, he was leaning on the embankment wall at the _Quai de Grand St. Augustin_, gazing idly at the fruit and flower stands that patched the pavement with color and at the gray walls of the Louvre across the Seine, His hand went into his pocket, and came out with the note. As he read it, he felt a glow of pleasurable surprise, and, wheeling, he retraced his steps briskly to his lodgings, where he began to pack. Adrienne had written that she and her mother and Wilfred Horton were sailing for Naples, and commanded him, unless he were too busy, to meet their steamer. Within two hours, he was bound for Lucerne to cross the Italian frontier by the slate-blue waters of Lake Maggiore.

A few weeks later Samson and Adrienne were standing together by moonlight in the ruins of the Coliseum. The junketing about Italy had been charming, and now, in that circle of sepia softness and broken columns, he looked at her, and suddenly asked himself:

"Just what does she mean to you?"

If he had never asked himself that question before, he knew now that it must some day be answered. Friendship had been a good and seemingly a sufficient definition. Now, he was not so sure that it could remain so.

Then, his thoughts went back to a cabin in the hills and a girl in calico. He heard a voice like the voice of a song-bird saying through tears:

"I couldn't live without ye, Samson.... I jest couldn't do hit!"

For a moment, he was sick of his life. It seemed that there stood before him, in that place of historic wraiths and memories, a girl, her eyes sad, but loyal and without reproof. For an instant, he could see a scene of centuries ago. A barbarian and captive girl stood in the arena, looking up with ignorant, but unflinching, eyes; and a man sat in the marble tiers looking down. The benches were draped with embroidered rugs and gold and scarlet hangings; the air was heavy with incense--and blood. About him sat men and women of Rome's culture, freshly perfumed from the baths. The slender figure in the dust of the circus alone was a creature without artifice. And, as she looked up, she recognized the man in the box, the man who had once been a barbarian, too, and she turned her eyes to the iron gates of the cages whence came the roar of the beasts, and waited the ordeal. And the face was the face of Sally.

"You look," said Adrienne, studying his countenance in the pallor of the moonlight, "as though you were seeing ghosts."

"I am," said Samson. "Let's go."

Adrienne had not yet seen her portrait. Samson had needed a few hours of finishing when he left New York, though it was work which could be done away from the model. So, it was natural that, when the party reached Paris, Adrienne should soon insist on crossing the _Pont d'

Alexandre III_. to his studio near the "_Boule Mich'_" for an inspection of her commissioned canvas. For a while, she wandered about the business-like place, littered with the gear of the painter's craft.

It was, in a way, a form of mind-reading, for Samson's brush was the tongue of his soul.

The girl's eyes grew thoughtful, as she saw that he still drew the leering, saturnine face of Jim Asberry. He had not outgrown hate, then?

But she said nothing, until he brought out and set on an easel her own portrait. For a moment, she gasped with sheer delight for the colorful mastery of the technique, and she would have been hard to please had she not been delighted with the conception of herself mirrored in the canvas. It was a face through which the soul showed, and the soul was strong and flawless. The girl's personality radiated from the canvas --and yet--A disappointed little look crossed and clouded her eyes. She was conscious of an indefinable catch of pain at her heart.

Samson stepped forward, and his waiting eyes, too, were disappointed.