The Dulcimore

Abstract

FEATURED AUTHOR—FICTION The Dulcimore Emma Bell Miles THE MOUNTING SUMMER had at last escaped the grasp of the April chill, and the season's growth came on with a headlong rush. The forest was one rustling loom of life-stuff, everywhere thrilling to million-tinted glories of summer beauty and abundance. Between twin hills that lay against the sky, dark and softly rounded as the breasts of a slave-mother, the old smithy nestled. It was a log structure, low and windowless, and lighted like a grotto withblue and greenish reflections from the hot sunshine outside. The young giant in the leather apron was clanking steadily on with his task, albeit he had a visitor. Straight from trysting with the wind among the blossoming laurel on the hill, she came into this place of grime and toil, with perfume yet on her garments, and her dreams in her eyes. Georgia Carden, daughter of old Jared Carden and his wife Selina, who lived on a good farm under which coal had been found in fairly profitable quantities, was a noted figure in her environment. "She shan't go with the young folks around here," her mother said, half fiercely. "Let her roam as she will; the woods'll be all lumber and tan-bark soon enough; let her enjoy them while she can." In the twenty years of her wifehood, which began with galling poverty, Selina Carden's pride had never faltered, yet she had notbeen so foolish as to prefer utter failure to makeshift. She adapted herself in order not to die, and she had so managed that all her children were actually rich. For each babe that came were the clean changes, constantly forthcoming on demand, that she could not afford for herself. For the new babe's sake she forbore cruel toil a while. Later, she furbished her early knowledge to set them in the way of 42 permanent riches, by teaching them what she knew of their immediate world, supplementing the crude schooling which was all they could have, to fit them to enjoy a life which had never been hers. But the Carden lads, as they grew, would have none of such impalpable possessions. Georgia alone, on the opening of the coal veins beneath the farm, asked the reason for the dainty fern-prints in the shale. Her brothers echoed only chance-caught information about freight rates and comparative values. Was it strange that the girl, her youngest, seemed of all Selina's children peculiarly her own—that the usual mother-dream of a relation to endure indefinitely was here intensified? "Howdy, Return," the girl spoke from the doorway, her light lawn dress blowing about her, the sun at her back, facing the shadows. Her mother's indulgence had given her years of faerie wanderings and dreaming to remember; and now any day that dawned might hold ere sunset the hour of the Prince's coming, the morning of love, with music and white light. The consciousness of the imminence was aglow in her face as she flitted across the earthen floor and perched moth-like on the work-bench, where scraps and broken tools were piled in rusty confusion. By way of welcome the young smith fetched her a drink of cool spring water in a dripping gourd. There was something about him that seemed near akin to the silent, incomprehensible, tireless earth itself. Toward her freshness and sweetness all his being drew with a yearning like that of the tides heaving moonward from unsounded depths; through one looking on would never have guessed it. "I'll fix you a better place to sit," he said, and his voice had the sweetness of bees droning in honey-drunken meadows. It was an odd, murmuring speech, coming and lapsing like natural sounds, but very pleasant to hear. "I can see better from here," Georgia argued, tucking one foot under her. "What's that you're making? I want to watch you work." "Jist a cow-bell," replied Return Ritchie. "Man up the valley's got two heifers might' near alike, and it's his notion to bell 'em as near the same as he can...