The Call of the Cumberlands

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.