The Call of the Cumberlands by Charles Neville Buck

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One day, Adrienne looked up from a sheaf of his very creditable
landscape studies to inquire suddenly:

"Samson, are you a rich man, or a poor one?"

He laughed. "So rich," he told her, "that unless I can turn some of
this stuff into money within a year or two, I shall have to go back to
hoeing corn."

She nodded gravely.

"Hasn't it occurred to you," she demanded, "that in a way you are
wasting your gifts? They were talking about you the other evening
--several painters. They all said that you should be doing portraits."

The Kentuckian smiled. His masters had been telling him the same
thing. He had fallen in love with art through the appeal of the skies
and hills. He had followed its call at the proselyting of George
Lescott, who painted only landscape. Portraiture seemed a less-artistic
form of expression. He said so.

"That may all be very true," she conceded, "but you can go on with
your landscapes, and let your portraits pay the way. With your entrée,
you could soon have a very enviable _clientèle_."

"'So she showed me the way, to promotion and pay,
And I learned about women from her,'"

quoted Samson with a laugh.

"And," she added, "since I am very vain and moderately rich, I hereby
commission you to paint me, just as soon as you learn how."

Farbish had simply dropped out. Bit by bit, the truth of the
conspiracy had leaked, and he knew that his usefulness was ended, and
that well-lined pocketbooks would no longer open to his profligate
demands. The bravo and plotter whose measure has been taken is a broken
reed. Farbish made no farewells. He had come from nowhere and his going
was like his coming.

* * * * *

Sally had started to school. She had not announced that she meant to
do so, but each day the people of Misery saw her old sorrel mare making
its way to and from the general direction of Stagbone College, and they
smiled. No one knew how Sally's cheeks flamed as she sat alone on
Saturdays and Sundays on the rock at the backbone's rift. She was
taking her place, morbidly sensitive and a woman of eighteen, among
little spindle-shanked girls in short skirts, and the little girls were
more advanced than she. But she, too, meant to have "l'arnin'"--as much
of it as was necessary to satisfy the lover who might never come. It
must be admitted that learning for its own sake did not make a clarion-
tongued appeal to the girl's soul. Had Samson been satisfied with her
untutored, she would have been content to remain untutored. He had said
that these things were of no importance in her, but that was before he
had gone forth into the world. If, she naïvely told herself, he should
come back of that same opinion, she would never "let on" that she had
learned things. She would toss overboard her acquirements as ruthlessly
as useless ballast from an over-encumbered boat. But, if Samson came
demanding these attainments, he must find her possessed of them. So
far, her idea of "l'arnin'" embraced the three R's only. And, yet, the
"fotched-on" teachers at the "college" thought her the most voraciously
ambitious pupil they had ever had, so unflaggingly did she toil, and
the most remarkably acquisitive, so fast did she learn. But her studies
had again been interrupted, and Miss Grover, her teacher, riding over
one day to find out why her prize scholar had deserted, met in the road
an empty "jolt-wagon," followed by a ragged cortège of mounted men and
women, whose faces were still lugubrious with the effort of recent
mourning. Her questions elicited the information that they were
returning from the "buryin'" of the Widow Miller.

Sally was not in the procession, and the teacher, riding on, found her
lying face down among the briars of the desolate meeting-house yard,
her small body convulsively heaving with her weeping, and her slim
fingers grasping the thorny briar shoots as though she would still hold
to the earth that lay in freshly broken clods over her mother's grave.

Miss Grover lifted her gently, and at first the girl only stared at
her out of wide, unseeing eyes.

"You've nothing to keep you here now," said the older woman, gently.
"You can come to us, and live at the college." She had learned from
Sally's lips that she lived alone with her mother and younger brother.
"You can't go on living there now."

But the girl drew away, and shook her head with a wild torrent of
childish dissent.

"No, I kain't, neither!" she declared, violently. "I kain't!"

"Why, dear?" The teacher took the palpitating little figure in her
arms and kissed the wet face. She had learned something of this sweet
wood-thrush girl, and had seen both sides of life's coin enough to be
able to close her eyes and ears, and visualize the woman that this
might be.

"'Cause I kain't!" was the obstinate reply.

Being wise, Miss Grover desisted from urging, and went with Sally to
the desolated cabin, which she straightway began to overhaul and put to
rights. The widow had been dying for a week. It was when she lifted
Samson's gun with the purpose of sweeping the corner that the girl
swooped down on her, and rescued the weapon from her grasp.

"Nobody but me mustn't tech thet rifle-gun," she exclaimed, and then,
little by little, it came out that the reason Sally could not leave
this cabin, was because some time there might be a whippoorwill call
out by the stile, and, when it came, she must be there to answer. And,
when at the next vacation Miss Grover rode over, and announced that she
meant to visit Sally for a month or two, and when under her deft hands
the cabin began to transform itself, and the girl to transform herself,
she discovered that Sally found in the graveyard another magnet. There,
she seemed to share something with Samson where their dead lay buried.
While the "fotched-on" lady taught the girl, the girl taught the
"fotched-on" lady, for the birds were her brothers, and the flowers her
cousins, and in the poetry that existed before forms of meter came into
being she was deeply versed.

Toward the end of that year, Samson undertook his portrait of Adrienne
Lescott. The work was nearing completion, but it had been agreed that
the girl herself was not to have a peep at the canvas until the painter
was ready to unveil it in a finished condition. Often as she posed,
Wilfred Horton idled in the studio with them, and often George Lescott
came to criticize, and left without criticizing. The girl was impatient
for the day when she, too, was to see the picture, concerning which the
three men maintained so profound a secrecy. She knew that Samson was a
painter who analyzed with his brush, and that his picture would show
her not only features and expression, but the man's estimate of herself.

"Do you know," he said one day, coming out from behind his easel and
studying her, through half-closed eyes, "I never really began to know
you until now? Analyzing you--studying you in this fashion, not by your
words, but by your expression, your pose, the very unconscious essence
of your personality--these things are illuminating."

"Can I smile," she queried obediently, "or do I have to keep my face
straight?"

"You may smile for two minutes," he generously conceded, "and I'm
going to come over and sit on the floor at your feet, and watch you do
it."

"And under the X-ray scrutiny of this profound analysis," she laughed,
"do you like me?"

"Wait and see," was his non-committal rejoinder.

For a few moments, neither of them spoke. He sat there gazing up, and
she gazing down. Though neither of them said it, both were thinking of
the changes that had taken place since, in this same room, they had
first met. The man knew that many of the changes in himself were due to
her, and she began to wonder vaguely if he had not also been
responsible for certain differences in her.

He felt for her, besides a deep friendship--such a deep friendship
that it might perhaps be even more--a measureless gratitude. She had
been loyal, and had turned and shaped with her deft hand and brain the
rough clay of his crude personality into something that was beginning
to show finish and design. Perhaps, she liked him the better because of
certain obstinate qualities which, even to her persuasive influence,
remained unaltered. But, if she liked him the better for these things,
she yet felt that her dominion over him was not complete.

Now, as they sat there alone in the studio, a shaft of sunlight from
the skylight fell on his squarely blocked chin, and he tossed his head,
throwing back the long lock from his forehead. It was as though he was
emphasizing with that characteristic gesture one of the things in which
he had not yielded to her modeling. The long hair still fell low around
his head. Just now, he was roughly dressed and paint-stained, but
usually he presented the inconspicuous appearance of the well-groomed
man--except for that long hair. It was not so much as a matter of
personal appearance but as a reminder of the old roughness that she
resented this. She had often suggested a visit to the barber, but to no
avail.

"Although I am not painting you," she said with a smile, "I have been
studying you, too. As you stand there before your canvas, your own
personality is revealed--and I have not been entirely unobservant
myself."

"'And under the X-ray scrutiny of this profound analysis,'" he quoted
with a laugh, "do you like me?"

"Wait and see," she retorted.

"At all events"--he spoke gravely--"you must try to like me a little,
because I am not what I was. The person that I am is largely the
creature of your own fashioning. Of course, you had very raw material
to work with, and you can't make a silk purse of"--he broke off and
smiled--"well, of me, but in time you may at least get me mercerized a
little."

For no visible reason, she flushed, and her next question came a
trifle eagerly:

"Do you mean that I have influenced you?"

"Influenced me, Drennie?" he repeated. "You have done more than that.
You have painted me out, and painted me over."

She shook her head, and in her eyes danced a light of subtle coquetry.

"There are things I have tried to do, and failed," she told him.

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 passionate 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 hell
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 _concièrge_ of his lodgings handed
him, as he passed 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.

"You don't like it, Drennie?" he anxiously questioned. But she smiled
in answer, and declared:

"I love it."

He went out a few minutes later to telephone for her to Mrs. Lescott,
and gave Adrienne _carte blanche_ to browse among his portfolios
and stacked canvases until his return. In a few minutes, she discovered
one of those efforts which she called his "rebellious pictures."

These were such things as he painted, using no model except memory
perhaps, not for the making of finished pictures, but merely to give
outlet to his feelings; an outlet which some men might have found in
talk.

This particular canvas was roughly blocked in, and it was elementally
simple, but each brush stroke had been thrown against the surface with
the concentrated fire and energy of a blow, except the strokes that had
painted the face, and there the brush had seemed to kiss the canvas.
The picture showed a barefooted girl, standing, in barbaric simplicity
of dress, in the glare of the arena, while a gaunt lion crouched eying
her. Her head was lifted as though she were listening to faraway music.
In the eyes was indomitable courage. That canvas was at once a
declaration of love, and a _miserere_. Adrienne set it up beside
her own portrait, and, as she studied the two with her chin resting on
her gloved hand, her eyes cleared of questioning. Now, she knew what
she missed in her own more beautiful likeness. It had been painted with
all the admiration of the mind. This other had been dashed off straight
from the heart--and this other was Sally! She replaced the sketch where
she had found it, and Samson, returning, found her busy with little
sketches of the Seine.

* * * * *

"Drennie," pleaded Wilfred Horton, as the two leaned on the deck rail
of the _Mauretania_, returning from Europe, "are you going to hold
me off indefinitely? I've served my seven years for Rachel, and thrown
in some extra time. Am I no nearer the goal?"

The girl looked at the oily heave of the leaden and cheerless
Atlantic, and its somber tones found reflection in her eyes. She shook
her head.

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