Alexander's face, as she met Brent at the door, was pale with the waxen softness of a magnolia petal and though the vividness of her lips and eyes were emphasized by contrast, suffering seemed to have endowed her remarkable beauty with a sort of n.o.bility--an exquisite delicacy that was a paradox for one so tall and strong.

The appeal of her wistfully sad eyes struck at his heart as she greeted him in a still voice.

"I heard--and I wanted to come over," he said and her reply was simple.

"I'm obleeged ter ye. I wants ye ter look at him. He war a G.o.dly man an' a right n.o.ble one. Somehow his face----" she spoke slowly and with an effort, "looks like he'd done already talked with G.o.d--an' war at rest."

At once she led him into the room where, upon the four-poster bed lay the sheeted figure, and with a deeply reverent hand, lifted the covering.

To Brent it seemed that he was looking into features exemplifying all the wholesome virtues of those men who built the Republic. It was a face of rugged strength and una.s.suming simplicity. Its lines bespoke perils faced without fear and privations endured without complaint.

Here in a pocket of wilderness which the nation had forgotten survived many others of those unaltered pioneers. But in the expression that death had made fixed, as well as in facial pattern, Brent recognized that simple kindliness to which courtesy had been a matter of instinct and not of ceremony and the rude n.o.bility of the man to whom others had brought their tangled disputes, in all confidence, for adjustment.

"I understand what you mean," he declared as his eyes traveled from the father to the daughter, "and I'm glad you let me see him."

Moving un.o.btrusively about, engaged in many small matters of consideration, Brent recognized Bud Sellers and Jerry O'Keefe. He himself remained until the burial had taken place, and was one of those who lowered the coffin into the grave. But when those rites had been concluded and another day had come Brent sought for Alexander to make his adieus.

She was nowhere about the house and he went in search of her. He could not bear to remain longer where he must endure the pain of her stricken face. Of all the women he had ever known she stood forth as the most unique--and in some ways the most impressive. She was undoubtedly the most beautiful. He realized now that, though they were of different and irreconcilable planes of life, there had never been a moment since he had first seen her when he would not, save for his dragging on the steady curb of reason, have fallen into a headlong infatuation. Now he wished only to prove himself a serviceable friend.

When he had vainly sought her about the farm, it occurred to him to go to the ragged "buryin' ground" and though he found her there he did not obtrude upon her solitary vigil.

For Alexander was abandoning herself to one of those wild and nerve-wracking tempests of weeping that come occasionally in a lifetime to those who weep little. She had thrown herself face-down on the ground beneath which Aaron McGivins slept, with arms outflung as though seeking to reach into the grave and embrace him. As she had been both son and daughter to him, he had been, to her, both father and mother.

Spasmodically her hands clenched and unclenched, and her fingers dug wildly into the earth.

Brent turned away and left her there and it was a full two hours later before he met her and led her, pa.s.sive enough now, to a place from which they overlooked that river that, not long ago, they had ridden together. Under his gently diplomatic prompting she found relief in unbosoming herself.

"He war all I hed----" she rebelliously declared. "An' whilst he lived thet war enough--but now I hain't got nothin' left."

After a little she broke out again. "I hain't a woman--an' hain't a man. I hain't nuthin'."

"Alexander," said Brent gently, "when I looked at your father's face in there, I was thinking of what Parson Acup once told me. He said that if your father had been a wishful man,"--he used the hill phrase for ambition quite unconsciously, "he could have gone to the Legislature.

Perhaps to Congress."

"I reckon he mout ef hed any honors he craved," she replied. "Folks was always pesterin' him ter run fer office."

The man looked off across the valley which was so desolate now and which would soon be so tenderly green; so tuneful with leaf and blossom.

His eyes were seeing a vision and some of it he tried to voice.

"Suppose, Alexander, he _had_ gone. Suppose he had taken his seat in Congress, instead of staying here. He would have become a figure trusted there, too--but how different your life would have been. There would have been schools and--well, many things that you have never known."

"I hain't hankerin' fer none of them things," she said. Then with a sudden paroxysm of sobs that shook her afresh, she added, "All I wants is ter hev him back ergin!"

But Brent was thinking of things that could mean little to her because she lacked the background of contrast and comparison. He was seeing that beauty and that personality in the social life of official Washington; seeing the triumph that would have been hers--and wondering what it would have meant to her in the balance of contentment or unhappiness.

Of course had Aaron McGivins begun his political career young enough, every trace of mountain illiteracy would long ago have been shed away by the growing girl. As for her blood, there is in all America no other so purely Anglo-Saxon.

"I rather think it's a pity he didn't go," Brent mused aloud. Then he added, "Now that he's--not with you any more--Alexander, there is something you must let me say. You've never thought about it much, but you have such a beauty as would make you famous in any city of the world. Men will come--and they won't be turned back."

For the first time since Aaron's death the old militant fire leaped into her eyes and her chin came up as she flared into vehemence.

"Like h.e.l.l they won't be turned back!"

But Brent smiled. "You think that now, but Alexander, nature is nature and there must be something in your life. You've played at being a man and done it better than many men--but men can marry women, and you can't. Along that road lies a heart-breaking loneliness. Sometime you'll see that, since you can't be a man, you'll want to be a man's mate."

She shook her head with unconvinced obduracy.

"I knows ye aims ter give me kindly counsel, Mr. Brent, but ye're plum wastin' yore breath."

The man rose. "After all, I only came to say good-bye," he told her.

"You aren't going to keep men from loving you. I know because I've tried to keep myself from doing it--and I've failed. But this is really my message. If you do change your ideas, for G.o.d's sake choose your man carefully--and if you ever reach a point where you need counsel, send for me."

Along Fifth Avenue from Washington Arch to the Plaza, Spring was in the air. Trees were putting out that first green which, in its tenderness of beauty, is all hope and confidence. With the tide of humanity drifted Will Brent, whom business had brought from Kentucky to New York, but his thoughts were back there in the hills where the almost illiterate Diana, who knew nothing of life's nuances of refinement and who yet had all of life's allurements, was facing her new loneliness.

He reached a bookstore and turned in, idly looking through volumes of verse, while he killed the hour before his appointment. His hand fell upon a small volume bearing the name of G. K. Chesterton, and opening it at random he read those lines descriptive of the illuminated breviary from which Alfred the Great, as a boy, learned his spiritual primer at his mother's knee:

"It was wrought in the monk's slow manner of silver and sanguine sh.e.l.l, And its pictures were little and terrible keyholes of Heaven and h.e.l.l."

Brent closed the covers with a snap. "That's what my memories of it all come to," he mused, "'--little and terrible keyholes of Heaven and h.e.l.l.'"

But that evening he went to dine with Jack Halloway at his club which looked out across the Avenue and the Park. He had written to Halloway in advance of his coming and by wire had received an invitation couched in terms of urgency not to be denied.

This was not Appalachia but Manhattan yet, when Halloway met him, Brent could but smile at life's contrasts. The huge fellow rose from his chair to greet him, as splendid a physical thing as human eyes could look upon. There was no stubble now on the face that seemed cast in smooth bronze. In lieu of that calculatedly slovenly disguise which he had affected in the hinter-land, he was immaculate in the fineness of his linen and the tailoring of his evening clothes. But as he held out his hand, he drawled, "Wa'al, stranger, how fares matters back thar on Shoulder-blade?"

Brent sketched briefly the occurrences that had taken place there; the death of Old Aaron and the fact that Jerry O'Keefe had been trying to sell his farm near Coal City in order, he surmised, that he might take up his abode nearer the McGivins' place.

Talk ran idly for a time, then Halloway rose and stood towering in the Fifth Avenue window. Across Park and Plaza the sky was still rosy with the last of the afterglow. Under the loftily broken roof-lines of the great hotel mult.i.tudinous window panes were gleaming. Over it all was the warm breath of spring.

The big man's hands, idly clasped behind his back, began to twitch and finally settled into a hard grip. His shoulders heaved and when he spoke there was a queer note in his voice.

"See the rhododendron over there in the park? Soon now it will be in flower--not only _that_ rhododendron but----" He ended it abruptly, and then broke out, low-voiced but tense. "This atmosphere is stifling me--G.o.d! It's horrible--

"Send your path be straight before you, When the old spring fret comes o'er you, And the Red G.o.ds call to you.'"

Into Brent's tone came something almost savage.

"I know what you're thinking. Quit it. It won't do!"

Slowly Halloway turned. For a moment his fine face was drawn with actual suffering. Then he added:

"You're quite right, Will, it won't do. But it's hard to forget--when one has seen a comet. Touch that b.u.t.ton if you don't mind. It's time for the c.o.c.ktails."

CHAPTER XIV

Have you seen Spring come to the mountains? Have you felt the subtle power on the human heart, of trance-drugged impulses awakening in plant, in animal, in humanity; in the deep hard arteries of the ancient hills themselves? Winter there is grim and bleak beyond the telling.