“I don’t believe a word of—of that!” Peter cried passionately. “Yes—ef I was your brother Lominack, I’d see to you! I sure would!”
“Ffttt! He don’t know nothin’ about me—and you won’t tell,” she replied, but the blue eyes widened uneasily.
“Have you ever said anything about—this here—to anybody but me?” the boy asked.
“No; and I ain’t liable to name it to you again, nuther,” she retorted.
“I’m tellin’ ye for your own good. Where do you expect to go to, holdin’ with such?” His voice was harsh. “I wisht you hadn’t been born with a veil like they say you was. Ha’nts don’t do nobody no good. The Bible names them, and says not to have nothin’ to do with ’em. They’ll wither your time. But it don’t name no Sylvaines, nor them fairies nuther. I don’t believe in no such—a-tall!” His voice rose almost to a shout.
Half ashamed and half angry, she turned away to cross the fence and regain the road. Awkwardly, Peter reached a helping hand; yet when she touched him he snatched it suddenly away.
The boy was half afraid of the girl.
She gave no sign, but caught up her basket and walked steadily on. He stood grasping plow and lines, watching until the warm-hued figure was far away in the shortened shadows and quivering air of noon.
It was always this way with Peter. She had forgiven him many a rudeness in the past; but this she resented smoulderingly. For days thereafter, until the spring plowing and planting were finished, she went and came silently on her lonely road between the fields. And though, later, she made friends with him, she would never discuss the sylvan mystery of which she had once spoken so boldly, putting aside his tentative questions.
“It brings bad luck to name them things, just like you said. It made us quarrel that time.”
Singularly, he felt no triumph in this admission. “I named Sylvaines to my mother,” he said sheeplishly. “She ’lows they’re gypsies. I’ve heared they live in the open and cooks outdoors. Pappy traded horses with ’em oncet.”
Isodene maintained obstinate silence.
They were standing on the spot where the end of Peter’s furrows brought him near to Isodene’s path, and she swung the pail with the daily luncheon for the husband and father of a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.
“Pappy says,” continues Peter, “there’s a bunch of ’em camped now down the river a piece. Folks that’s been missin’ their chickens lays it onto them.”
Isodene’s lips parted; but before she was ready to speak a stormwind drew across the knob in enormous, shivering sighs. The woods, the blades of sprouting corn, moved, fluttered, and whispered together. Eerie shadows leaped forth as from hidden lairs, and flung their formless duskiness across the fields. Thunder rolled, deep and ominous, in the clouded west. In their flight for shelter, neither Peter nor the more observant Isodene saw that a brilliant scarlet flower had opened at their feet.
Again next day they failed to see it. Isodene had trudged faithfully in draggling weeds to carry her father’s dinner. Both countrymen were afield in spite of threatening weather, for the summer was wet, and they utilized every moment of sunshine.
There had been a quilting in the settlement, and Isodene was accusing Peter:
“You walked right through the room without speakin’ to me. You never even looked at me.”
“I looked,” said Peter meaningly, and turned red. “I seed your pink dress. It—it was powerful pretty.”
His unaccustomed tone and manner made her eyes droop. She twisted the corner of her apron, dropped it, reached vaguely for its support, and looked about for a new subject of conversation.
“Oh!” she cried, perceiving the blossom and coming closer to it. “How pretty—like something alive!” The flower on its tall, slender stem, wafted by some vagrant breeze—or impulse, was it?—leaned toward her. Peter reached for her hand as it slipped below the scarlet cup. Both, startled, stepped back and half turned away. The dank mist, rolling up from the creek, enveloped them closely. Conscious, embarrassed, they stood perfectly still for its passing.
When the wind lifted the fog, the sun shone clear on a group of three where but two had been.
In place of the blooming plant an elfin shape clothed in tints of browns and grays swayed slenderly; dark hair curled over slim shoulders and around a dark-eyed, pointed, wonderful little face; all brown and gray save red, red lips and the scarlet flower clasped tight—a flower whose petals shivered with vitality, of a color rich as blood of youth and bright as flame of desire.
“It’s the Sylvaine! It’s the Sylvaine! Let’s run away quick before we-uns is bewitched.”
Peter did not hear. He had forgotten Isodene. He saw only the beautiful, bewildered stranger, who, meeting his admiring eyes, smiled timidly and moved towards him.
The boy held out both hands. His shyness even was overborne by the rush of new emotions, whirled away and lost like a dry leaf in the flame of the hearth as the boy, under the influence of beauty and mystery, became a man.
“Don’t be afeard,” he said in tones new to Peter’s tongue. “Come home with me—to Mammy’s house.”
The other murmured words in a strange language, looking at him with her great eyes. She seemed not to see the shrinking Isodene. Peter pointed to the smoke rising from his father’s house, and she let him take her hand and guide her toward the gray roof.
Isodene, alone and forgotten, ran after them a little way, but they did not glance back and would not heed her appeal. Pride came to her aid. She would not follow, though she could not force herself to go home. The bitterest drop in her cup was that she herself had evoked this apparition!
From afar now, she saw Peter with the exquisite stranger, pointing to various objects, already trying to find some method of communication, to teach the new-comer his rough, earth language.
Doubts as to Peter’s safety mingled with Isodene’s anger at his desertion. That night she stole by his window, where the red firelight streamed forth, a square shaft, into the thick mist and flying rain. She was spared the sight of Peter’s rapt, adoring eyes; the narrow pane showed the stranger only, framed the lovely form and spirituelle face, like some painting. She was dancing. Without music, without other rhythm than the swift, resonant patting of Peter’s hands, she was dancing as Isodene and Peter had never seen any one dance before—dancing all over, alive with poetic grace to the tips of her fingers, to the swift, soft pressure of feet no larger than might set firm on a man’s heart. Not the loose-jointed swinging, tossing, bounding, of the mountaineers, but a bending, melting, swaying movement that went weaving to and fro on the homely braided rug, her dark eyes flashing, the flower of her mouth parting to disclose heart of pearl.
Isodene, out in the rain that was falling again, shivered and turned away with a sob. The loneliness of unshared gayety struck into her heart. Peter’s voice held her:
“I don’t want nothin’ better than to pet you and wait on you!”
The Sylvaine laughed aloud. Peter dragged forward a chair, and she threw herself down, panting, quivering, a-glow, in a pretty abandon.
“You shall always be waited upon,” said the young mountaineer, with unexpected eloquence. “I’ll spend my life bein’ your slave. And when Pappy and Mammy come back from town there won’t be nothin’ too much for you to ask. They’ll be proud to do hit!”
Isodene pressed closer to the window under the streaming eaves. She must watch lest the Sylvaine do him occult injury. And now she saw him bring fresh milk, newly baked oval pones, services and wild berries drowned in cream.
As she ate, the Sylvaine’s eyes blessed his ministry. Always her left hand clung to the flower.
“Oh, but you’re fine!” jubilated the boy. “There never was anything like you in this world till to-day. Smile, you pretty child! I never will make you cry. I won’t have no aim but to make you happy. It don’t make no differ now whether it rains or shines. Ef you smile, I’m jist plumb content!”
That his word
s were not comprehensible by her appeared not to trouble him. Only once was his mood shadowed. Bringing a vase for the flower, he met with a shaken head and frown of refusal. But he had so completely forgotten Isodene that even her story of the Sylvaines and the magic red bloom was obliterated from his mind. He felt only that he had erred in one effort to please, and tried another, bringing a drinking-cup.
Isodene, outside, in misery, thought that the girl, unaccustomed to light and love, drinking from the cup he held to her lips, letting her hand rest in this big, fine lover’s, must feel like a spirit newly received in heaven. Surely one so happy could work no harm to the mortal that loved her.
“I ain’t needed, not even to take keer of him,” Isodene told her heavy heart.
The two rapt beings in the firelit room heard soft, swift sounds, a pattering as of heavier drops—it was Isodene’s feet fleeing from the window, out into the wet fields, the drenched night, the lonely road. Her eyes, aching with unfallen tears, saw at last into the little cabin where her mother held hard-bitten lips to deny the “visions” that came to her wild, Celtic blood in midsummer nights like this.
The next day Isodene, hidden in a fence corner behind a tangle of undergrowth, saw him come, leading his horse, whereon perched a small brown and gray figure holding against its breast a brilliant flower.
Very tenderly and carefully Peter lifted the little Sylvaine off at the field’s edge.
The music of bird and insect thrilled all the opal summer air. A gurgle of clear water sang in the dell. Peter bent his head above the stranger’s happy, eager face.
“I love you,” he murmured, “I love you!” and leaned yet nearer to illustrate his meaning with a caress. The soft dark eyes widened, then suddenly changed to a look of alarm.
There was a sharp cry of jealous pain; Isodene flung herself across the low rail fence and snatched the “red flower of life.”
The lips that Peter would have kissed vanished! The slim young form in its dull grays and browns, the little pointed face with the big eyes, disappeared like a wraith of the mist out of which she had come. Where her bright young life and loveliness had delighted the earth, there drifted now but a passing cloud of golden motes that were slowly drawn up in the long afternoon sunshine.
Peter and Isodene faced each other, alone. Dazed and perplexed, they waited each for the other to speak. At first there was a space between them—where the Sylvaine had stood. The breeze blew Isodene’s full skirt forward and bridged it.
On Peter’s yokel countenance a great wonder erased his first expression of horror and grief.
“I—I t-told you it was bad luck to name the Sylvaines!” panted Isodene, her apron to her eyes.
His mind adjusted itself. He had been in love—beauty had set his thick pulses to fluid ecstasy. That beauty he suddenly suspected of being insubstantial, not natural. But another woman was here in place of her whose lips he had been about to press! Strange! Still, there was the mitigating fact that the other woman was Isodene, whom he would have liked to kiss long ago, had he not been afraid. Since her eyes were hid in her apron, he lost the old timidity. His big arm went naturally around her sob-racked form.
“We-uns has been bewitched, Isodene Deever,” he said in tones not free from fright.
By accident his broad sole trod on the flower Isodene had let fall.
The vision had faded—the red, sweet flower was perished—the man’s foot was set on its perfumed ruin!
From a fence-row clump of bushes that shook, a face, pale with the sudden fright of Isodene’s onslaught—a pointed little face with pathetic eyes—peered forth on the reunited pair. A moment it glimmered there—a moment long enough to stamp and fix upon it the cruelty of love’s lesson—and then was withdrawn. A low sob came to their ears; in the drone of June meadows soft, pattering footfalls mingled with the hedgerow voices and whir of filmy wings.
“What was that?” cried Isodene, leaping to Peter’s arms in terror. “I heared somethin’—somethin’ run!”
“’T ain’t nothin’,” he assured, his manhood conquering superstition as he felt the weaker woman-girl clinging to his brawny neck.
“We ain’t agoin’ to be bewitched no more from nothin’ from the underworld. As long as we live together, Isodene, don’t never say no more the word that done hit!”
As long as we live together! And but an hour ago she had been forgotten! But Isodene saw in a confused way that such is the love of man—and, such as it was, her nature cried out for its possession. Perhaps it was never to be hers in its entirety—perhaps she could never utter the same appeal to his fancy as the vision lost. Perhaps all women would hereafter seem to him large or dull or heavy. But she clung to Peter, murmuring over and over the sweet assurances of her faithfulness and her love.
“Them gypsies is gone,” said Pappy Bell, returning with his spouse from an excursion into civilization. “They ’lowed in the valley that one of the youngest gals—she peddled ‘pressed flowers’ they called ’em—was lost up yere on the mountain and come back nigh about dead. They air queer folk, a-wanderin’ an’ a-wanderin’ to and fro. ’Pears like they jist simply ain’t human. An’ the jargon these talked! Some of ’em didn’t know a word o’ real langwidge like we-uns speaks. ’Pears like they ain’t scasely human!”
“Don’t you listen to no such, Isodene,” warned Peter, catching the last words only, and dragging his promised wife out of ear-shot, “I don’t want you to have no dealin’s with any such truck as Pappy’s speakin’ of.”
Isodene lifted to his, humble, wistful eyes. “I won’t, Peter,” she promised. “As long as we live together I won’t never no more talk erbout nothin’ strange or—underground”—she whispered the word—“or that ain’t like other folks. We’ll jist be content with what we can get our hands on—us women-folk has to anyhow—and not try to know nothin’ else. I’ll do jist what you tell me, Peter,” she said; and he gave her a kiss and the promise:
“I’ll make ye a good man, Isodene, an’ allus aim to see atter you the best I know how. You’re the onliest woman in the world for me!”
And the little red flower lay dying, and the summer drifted a few leaves—not having many to spare in the season’s busy heat—above its lonely bed. Its episode had been a fairy tale that is told.
sixteen
The White Marauder
From The Mother’s Magazine 13 (August 1917): 727–29, 798; illustrated by R. F. Tandler
“The White Marauder” was the last piece of fiction published in Miles’s lifetime. When the story appeared in The Mother’s Magazine in August 1917, Miles was hospitalized in Pine Breeze Sanitarium, slowly dying of tuberculosis. In her personal journal entries for August, she makes no reference to the publication, perhaps not even aware of it. Evident in the story are Miles’s discerning ear for the dialect of her mountain characters and a sense of humor even in the midst of chaos created by the white mare’s ravaging of Letty Kindred’s garden. The major conflict of the story is between the young wife Letty and the owner of the mare, old Captain Charley Bushares. Poverty and hunger surface again, as in “Three Roads and a River,” but with much less serious consequences. The relationship between the wife and her husband is a recurring theme.
. . .
Waked in the night by a sound of trampling hoofs, Letty Kindred sat up and the creak of the bedcords under her movement aroused ’Bithie, her husband’s twelve-year-old sister who slept beside her. They were not in the least afraid, although they were alone in the little cabin and only a wooden latch, rude and flimsy, held the door between them and the world. But when the trampling was followed by a swish as of ripping silk, they were aroused.
“Hit’s that ol’ rogue of Cap’n Charley’s in the corn agin. You git the broom, ’Bithie honey, and I’ll take the poker.”
Out they dashed into the early April night, and gave chase to a white mare, gaunt and ghostly under the stars. Impudently the creature flung up her heels, and trotted twice around the clearing, snortin
g defiance; then, being hard pressed, she sailed lightly over the fence and disappeared into the woods.
“Now that’s the fou’th night she’s broke in sence we planted. And last summer you ricollect she never stopped till she’d eat up mighty nigh the whole patch. Lawsy-massy, I jist wisht you’d look here how I’ve tore my skyirt!”
“Yes, and I e’en-about ruint my feet, when I took out a’ter her th’oo them briers along the fence,” complained ’Bithie.
“My feet’s a-bleedin’ too; but I don’t keer for that,” said Letty. “My feet’ll git well and mend theirselves, but my dress won’t. Nor the corn won’t neither, ef she’s tore hit up much bad. I aim to light into Cap’n Charley about this, right soon in the morning.”
“I like to busted her ol’ jaws with a rock, anyways,” crowed the younger girl. “Let’s go make a light and see what she’s et this time.”
Too anxious to wait for daybreak, they kindled a sliver of pitch-pine by some coals that were buried in ashes on the hearth, and inspected the damage. The young corn indeed was considerably torn and trampled; a whole row of beans was gone entirely; worst of all, the tender mustard was ruined.
“I wouldn’t a-hated nothin’ so bad as losin’ that there mustard,” lamented the wife, who was but a few years older than her companion. “Hit had leaves over a inch long, mighty near big enough to eat. And I’m so hongry for green I declar’ I’d go and pull me some brier leaves and weeds ef I wasn’t afeard they’d pizen me. Jist a handful o’ green and drap o’ vinegar would piece out our cornbread and pork into full rations; but we ain’t had nary mess, nor any gyarden-sass only ’taters, sence away last fall.” She was thoroughly angry as they trudged, shivering in the chill dew, back to the cabin where they warmed their feet on the hearth. “Now, ef Mansell had only fixed that fince afore he went off to work in the valley! He had plenty of time durin’ the winter. Or ef he’d a-notified Cap’n Charley to put up his critter!”
“Cap’n Charley’s had a plenty of notice from other folks to put her up,” said ’Bithie shrewdly. “She’s a ol’ rogue. He knows good an’ well she can jump ary fince in the county.”
The Common Lot and Other Stories Page 25