CHAPTER XII

MA SAYS NO

Ma McBirney, sitting sad-eyed at the edge of the mountain plateau on which her cottage stood, was absently watching the road. She had no reason to suppose that anybody would be winding up that five-mile wagonway to see her, yet for some reason she could not fix her mind on her work that morning. Sitting there at the “Outlook,” she could see over the bright valley and catch the gleam of the sun on the river and on the distant dome of the county courthouse.

About her the bees hummed, intent on their day’s work; and not far distant stood the buzzing village of hives which Thomas McBirney had placed where the Pride of India tree, the mimosas and catalpas, the trumpet flower and wild honeysuckle could feed them. Mary McBirney loved the song of the bees; she loved the bright valley; she loved her home and most of all she loved those within it.

Yet to-day the heart in her was heavy. A sorrow less black yet somehow more disheartening than that which had engulfed her at the time of her Molly’s death, rested upon her heart. When Molly had died, it was as if the tragic blackness of night had come upon her. Yet amid this murk there came shining the morning star of hope. And afterward there came the full and beautiful dawn of perfect trust. She believed that in the Time to Come she and Molly would stand together, spirit to spirit, and that there would be no more separation.

Then Azalea had come to fill the lonely hours with her bright ways, and every night Mary McBirney had thanked God for her daughterly society. And now she was gone! Nor could the woman who had grown to love her, rest in the comfort that she was, like Molly, safe from harm. When Molly died, her mother’s grief had been selfish. She did not mourn for Molly, but for herself. But now she mourned most for the lost girl, who might be going through terrible experiences, and who was, no doubt, eating out her heart in terror and homesickness.

There were not wanting those who said—and believed—that the “circus girl” had run away of her own accord and gone back to the wandering folk with whom she had spent the greater part of her life. But never for one fleeting second did Ma McBirney think this. She had looked too often into the clear and loving eyes of the girl, to believe that there could be anything about her which was not straightforward and loyal. She only prayed that in some way her love might reach out, as starlight reaches from stars, to shine on the poor wandering child and comfort her.

She could see her Thomas working on his terraced, steep fields, and now and then she waved a hand to him. She didn’t want him to know how heavily her heart lay in her. She had caused him enough anxiety during the past year, and she knew his own heart was sore with the loss of his Molly, and that he also was greatly distressed over Azalea. So, not to add to his troubles, she tried to wear a cheerful face. But this morning her knees seemed to give way under her, and her pulse fluttered sickeningly.

Then, as she sat there reproaching herself for not having more faith that her eager prayers would be answered, she saw three riders coming up the long road. They showed in the midst of a little clearing and then were lost among the trees, and only now and then, at some bald, out-jutting point, could she catch a glimpse of them. After a time she made out that they were a man, a woman and a girl; and when they were still far beneath her, she recognized them for Mr. and Mrs. Carson and Carin.

She threw a thought to the cabin and the way it looked, and decided that nothing was out of place. All was as orderly and clean as hands could make it, and up in Azalea’s empty room, there were fresh flowers in the vase, and the canary bird was singing on the little high-swung gallery. As for Ma McBirney herself, she always was neat. Her hair rippled away from her broad, low brow, and her plain gingham frock, with its crocheted collar and its branched coral brooch, was as clean and smooth as it could be made. So, unflurried as ever—though she had never before received people so important—Mrs. McBirney awaited her guests.

The three of them, having achieved the last climb on their way, urged their horses to a fine gallop, and they came bearing down tumultuously on Mary McBirney, crying out something joyously. Then, suddenly she forgot all her dignity and ran to meet them, and as they reined up sharply by her side the tears were streaming over her face.

“What say? What say?” she shrilled at them. “Is she found!”

“Found! Whoop la!” shouted Mr. Carson like a boy. “Found by Haystack Thompson. She’s all safe and right—safe and right as Carin here. And they’re coming home on the afternoon train.”

“Oh,” gasped Mrs. McBirney, and sank down on a convenient stump and stared in the distance, the unheeded tears still running down her cheeks. And then rousing herself she cried: “But the boys must know! Pa must know!”

“Where are they all?”

“Pa’s cultivating the cotton patch yon; and Hi’s fishing—it don’t take but one arm to fish, you know. And Jim’s off at school.”

“Count Jim out, then, Mrs. McBirney. Shall I go call the others?”

“Wait. I’ve a way,” cried Mrs. McBirney, and sped toward the house. There she kept an old horn hanging. It had come down in the family from Revolutionary times; it had been used to call the men in from the fields, when the hostile Indians showed their feathered heads above the pass, and now it blew its good tidings over the fields.

“That will bring them,” said Mrs. McBirney. “They’ll come running.”

The Carsons said they would sit out in the sunshine—that there was no need for them to go into the house. They had come up unexpectedly, and they gave Mary McBirney a chance to keep her house to herself if she wished. But a kind of humble pride swelled in the good woman’s heart. She had not many vanities, but her pride in her home was one of them.

“We will sit in the sun,” she said, “for it’s the place to be days like this. But first you must see my home. I’ve seen yours, you know.”

So they were shown the homely rooms—the rooms where each and every member of the family had his comfortable place. They saw the cat sunning on the doorstep, and the hounds stretched out in the yard. They saw the braided rugs, the woven counterpanes, the homemade cotton at the windows, the shapely baskets, all the products of Mary McBirney’s busy hands.

And then they were taken to that clean little chamber, looking straight up the leafy mountain side, which the McBirneys had lovingly made for Azalea.

“Oh!” cried Carin, “Isn’t it a dear place, mamma? Quaint and dear like Azalea! My room has too many things in it, hasn’t it mamma? I like this better. And it’s almost like living in the tree tops. The next time Azalea leaves you, Mrs. McBirney, it will be because she thinks she’s a bird and flies away. Or else she’ll be a flying squirrel.”

And just then they heard Thomas McBirney calling them from below. Then they all went down to have a part in telling their good news, and while they were in the very midst of their story—not that they had much to tell, for they knew no more than Haystack’s message had brought them—Hi’s odd little figure, with its long arms and bullet head, came crawling up the rocks from the lower waterfall. His dark face was strangely old and tired, and as he moved forward, with one of his thin arms in a splint, he certainly looked like a neglected boy, and this in spite of all that Ma McBirney could do to keep him as she thought a boy should be kept.

“She’s found, Hi,” Mr. Carson shouted in his hearty way. “Azalea is found!”

“Honest, sir?” cried Hi, stumbling forward. “Honest?”

“Honest Injun, hope to die!” roared back Mr. Carson.

Hi began kicking viciously at the dirt and twisting his body this way and that. He was in agony for fear he would “boo hoo,” as he put it to himself.

“Sap head!” he snarled under his breath, “Mammy’s baby boy!” He was calling himself names, and to some effect, for the invisible hand that had clutched his throat seemed to relax.

“Well,” said Mr. Carson, “let’s go sit out there on the headland and talk. We rode up here to-day not only to tell you this perfectly gorgeous piece of news, but also to talk over certain matters with you.”

“I’m sure we’re pleased to listen to anything you have to say, sir,” replied Thomas McBirney quaintly. So they seated themselves on the benches at “Outlook Point.”

“We are so,” murmured Ma McBirney in her soft voice.

“Won’t you begin at the beginning, Lucy?” said Mr. Carson to his wife. “Tell them how we came to leave the city and our friends and all, and settle here. Or shall I tell them, dear?”

Mrs. Carson leaned back against the trunk of a tulip tree and looked off across the valley.

“It was a great sorrow,” she said in her weary, beautiful way. “It was a sorrow so great that we never could quite believe it.” She spoke slowly, with a little pause between each word. “In one day our three sons were taken from us. It was at a theatre—there was a fire—I never talk of it. I cannot. We have traveled; we have lived here and there, and we have been unable to get back our strength and interest. My Charles—” she laid her white hand on her husband’s knee—“tries to make out that he has. But I know better. But he’s more unselfish than I, that’s all. Sometimes I’ve shut myself up for weeks at a time, and seen no one except my nurse. It was the only way that I could control myself. Well, not to talk of that, we have come, naturally enough, to look at life in a very different way from what we used to look at it. We see that we’ve got to stop living for ourselves alone. If we’re to be happy again, we must enlarge our family. We must take in everyone we can reach who needs us, or who will care for us. So we have come down here where every one seems simple and friendly, and where we can offer our neighborly offices, to spend the next few years. We heard of the fine old Atherton place, and finding that it was for sale, we bought it and have made a home there which we really are coming to love, though we had thought we never could really care for a home again. And now we want to be doing something—something really interesting.”

“We want to play a new game,” broke in Mr. Carson, “and to get as many as we can to come and play with us.”

“We want,” went on Mrs. Carson, “to go into these mountain industries. We want the old handicrafts to be revived; the weaving, the basket making and the pottery. And we want your help and advice.”

“Oh, yes’m,” cried Mary McBirney enthusiastically. “Thomas and I have talked many and many’s the time, of the good that might come from such a thing. Why, there’s chair makers in these parts that can make a chair that’ll go down to their great-great-grandchildren.”

“Just the thing, just the thing, madam!” answered Mr. Carson. “They’ve got the knowledge, and they’ve the talent, but they don’t use their knowledge sufficiently, and they don’t understand how to market their wares.”

“It’s true,” Mr. McBirney admitted. “They’re poorer than Job’s turkey. They just set around and mourn their fate. They stir up a little patch of ground, and think they’ve done everything there is to be done.”

“They’re too far from markets and railroads,” said Mr. Carson. “In the beginning the mountains called them, they were so beautiful; and then they cast a spell over them. It’s as if the people were hypnotized, and hadn’t leave to move.”

“That’s it,” agreed Mrs. McBirney. “You see them creeping down into town as shy as deer. And you can tell by looking at them, that there ain’t enough in the pantry to go around. They’re just plumb starved, that’s what they are.”

“Starved for lack of food, and society, and excitement,” Mr. Carson added. “Their stomachs and their minds and hearts are empty.”

“Yes, sir, just plumb empty.”

“Well, let’s put something in them. What do you say, Mr. McBirney?”

“It certainly would be a fine thing to do, sir. Now, how’ll you go about it?”

“Well, we want you and Mrs. McBirney to co-operate with us. We want you to take charge of the chair factory that we mean to start, and we want Mrs. McBirney to preside over the weaving.”

“And leave the farm, sir?” cried Mary McBirney. “You’re not ever meaning that, are you?”

“Why, would that be so hard? We’d put you up just the sort of cottage you want, you know. And you’d be near the school, so that Jim could go without using up the best part of his energy racing up and down the mountain.”

“I reckon Jimmy does get rather wore out,” Mary McBirney mused. “And maybe it would be better all ’round, Mr. Carson. And yet—”

Mary McBirney’s eyes strayed off to the purple valley with its silver streams; they rested on the low-lying cottage, wreathed in its flowering vines and hemmed around with its rose bushes, its sweet althea shrubs, its hydrangeas and bridal wreaths; they rested on the Pride of India tree and the graves beneath; on the towering tulip trees under which they sat, and she shook her head.

“No, Mr. Carson,” she said gently and with the moisture gathering in her eyes, “we couldn’t never make another place so—so sweet—as this here one. We couldn’t put our hearts into another place as we have into this. Besides, though I thank you kindly, sir, I wouldn’t want to leave my home to work outside. My job is making things bright for Thomas and Jim and Azalea, and perhaps for Hi, here. If it was so that I really needed to work outside, of course I would and never say a word. But I’d rather we got along with little, and went patched and mended, than for us to have more and lose the feeling of home.”

“I can’t say the farm has paid any too well,” Thomas McBirney said, “Sometimes it certainly has been hard scratching. And yet, somehow, I wouldn’t like to cut loose from it. It’s such a likely prospect we have here.” He too was looking off at the valley. “Somehow it don’t seem as if we could move on. Perhaps the mountains _have_ cast a spell over us, as you say.”

“Well, I can’t blame you if they have,” said Mr. Carson cordially. “Yet ought you to let sentiment like that stand in the way of Jim’s schooling and your advancement?”

Thomas McBirney crossed one leg over the other, and looked down pensively at his calloused hands.

“I don’t know as I had ought to,” he said slowly. “But after all, we’re happy here. The children was born here. Our little girl—Molly, you know, that’s dead—she seems to be running over the place still. Seems like I can feel her near me, plenty of times. Don’t you feel that way, ma?”

Mary McBirney nodded, with her tender smile.

“So,” went on Thomas McBirney, “I don’t know as I ought to leave. But I tell you what I can do, Mr. Carson, and what I’d be proud to do. Times when I wasn’t busy here at the farm, I could drive back into the mountains to visit men I know, and men I don’t exactly know but that I’ve heard tell of, and I could get them to working on chairs for you. Then they’d haul them down to your place; and maybe some of them who ain’t as hard to pry loose from the rocks as I be, will move down beside your factory.”

“Thomas makes the best chairs I ever set in,” declared Mary McBirney with pride. “Talk about getting other men to make chairs! There ain’t none of them can come up to him.”

“I engage your whole output then,” declared Mr. Carson, apparently not at all vexed that his fine plan had been disarranged. “Get to work, Mr. McBirney, and get your boy to work. I’ll sell the chairs for you at better rates than you ever dreamed of.”

“And if you do that,” declared Thomas McBirney, “you’ll take your commission. This has got to be on a business basis, sir.”

“Of course, of course,” answered Mr. Carson hastily. He saw that it would be very easy to hurt the pride of this independent man. “We’ll agree on the commission, and I’ll take it. Of course I shall need money to build my cottages and to run the business.”

Hi had been wriggling like a worm on the bench where he sat beside Carin, and now, with much blinking and twisting, he managed to say, addressing himself to Mr. Carson:

“Please, sir!”

“Yes, Hi.”

“My ma, you know,” but his cogs stopped again.

“Well, I don’t exactly know her, Hi, but I’d like to.”

“She can weave, sir, better than anybody. She can weave the Tudor Rose, and the Andrew Jackson Cabin, and the Diamond and Cat Track—Oh, most anything. You ought to see her weaving. And she can make her own dyes, just beautiful. But what’s the use? Where she lives nobody cares about her weaving. If you’d just ask her to come on, sir, since Mrs. McBirney don’t want to, she’d run the place for you, fine, and teach the women all the old patterns.”

His little black eyes seemed to hold flames in them as he turned his face, twitching with his excitement, toward Mr. Carson.

“Why, Hi, could she really? Where does she live? I can go and see her.”

“She lives away over on the far side of Steamboat Mountain, sir. Pa’s dead, you know, and there’s three children for ma to care for. She drives the horse to town and gets washing, and she farms a little. But it ain’t much. I had to leave home so’s I’d not be making her feed me. That’s why I went away with my uncle Sisson.” His face flushed scarlet through all the brown as he thought of his connection with this man whom he hated, and whom he knew all these people with him held in contempt.

“You shall go with me, Hi, and show me the way. We go by train, of course?”

“By train first. Then we drive.” Little drops of sweat broke out on Hi’s forehead and about his mouth and the tears swam into his hot eyes.

“Oh, if we could be together, here, sir! I just want to see my ma so! I’ve been wanting to see her all the time, and now since my arm got broke I can’t hardly live, I want her so.”

Mary McBirney reached out a hand and drew the boy over beside her. He might have been ashamed of her petting at another moment, but now he nestled up close to her, big boy that he was, and looked shyly up into her face.

“It was being with you, ma’am,” he murmured, “that made me so homesick, I reckon. It made me remember what ma was like.”

Mrs. Carson leaned forward to smile on him.

“We’ll have you and your mother together, Hi,” she declared, the languor gone out of her lovely voice, “one way or another. You may take my word for that. And if, as you say, she can attend to the weaving, why you may be sure she shall be given it to do. We can get some one to help her keep her house and care for the children. I agree with Mrs. McBirney, a mother has to make a happy home. That’s her first business—and her best business, too, isn’t it? But since your mother has to have the work outside in order to have a home, we’ll arrange the best we can.”

“I shall learn how to weave, too, mother,” Carin announced. “O mother, can’t I have that big room upstairs for a studio? I want to put my sketches up on the wall, and have a place to paint. Please, mother! I’d be so happy if I could have a studio of my own. If everyone else is to do something, I want to do something too. And I know I can paint. And I know I can weave. And I can make baskets. I have the dearest ideas for shapes and designs. Oh, I’d so much rather do that than study arithmetic and grammar.”

“Perhaps there’ll be time for both, my dear,” smiled her mother. “There seems to be a great deal of time down here. I’m having a friend of mine come down to act as governess for Carin,” Mrs. Carson said, turning to Mrs. McBirney. “She will teach her at home for the present, for I don’t feel as if I could let her go away to boarding school yet. Fortunately, my friend, Miss Parkhurst, paints charmingly in water colors, and so Carin will be able to take some lessons in that. Carin wants to make an artist of herself, and I’m sure I’d love to have her if she really has the talent. Well, come, Charles, we must be riding down the mountain. Will you meet Azalea this afternoon, Mr. McBirney?”

“You just believe I will, ma’am,” declared Thomas McBirney, going forward to hold Mrs. Carson’s horse for her. “And it will be as happy an errand as I ever took, ma’am.”

“We’ll be pleased to see you often, ma’am,” said Mrs. McBirney in her quaint way, as she stood beside Mrs. Carson’s beautiful white mare, looking up into the delicate, lovely face of the woman above her. “It’s a great privilege for me to know you, ma’am.”

“It’s one of the best things that has come to _me_ to know you, Mary McBirney,” responded the other, leaning down to grasp the firm hand of her new friend. “I feel warmed all over when I’m with you. And I’m so glad you’ve decided to keep inside your home. I’m even glad that your husband has made up his mind to stay up here on the mountain, though I must confess that it sets back our plans a little. But it will all come out all right. We’ll find some one who needs to come. As for you—I mean ‘you-all’—” she laughed lightly, “as you say, you’re better right here in this beautiful spot. Let me come often, will you?”

“Come as often as you can, ma’am. It certainly will make me thankful to have you.” Mary McBirney spoke from the heart. Idle compliments were not in her line. She was offering her friendship, and Mrs. Carson, who had known brilliant and charming women and had had their devotion in plenty, felt her heart swell with satisfaction. She had known lovely women, but never one in whose eyes the lights of home seemed to glow as they did in Mary McBirney’s.

Good-byes were said by all save Hi. He, it seemed, was not to be found. He had slipped away in his own fashion, and at that moment he lay on the red pine needles back of the cabin, “just bawling,” as he would have phrased it.

He was astonished at himself, and thoroughly disgusted. He remembered that during all of his troubles, when Sisson beat him, when he went hungry, when he lay out in the wet, he had not once “bawled.” It seemed perfectly disgusting that he should be doing it now when everything was coming all right.