"SMILES'" GIFT: AND THE "WRITING"
"Now, my boy, let us hear an account of your trip. Did you enjoy it, and find anything of especial interest in the mountains of the feud country?"
The doctor's father lighted his after-dinner cigar, and leaned back with the indolent satisfaction which a man ripe in useful years may feel when surrounded by his family. Since the death of his wife, he and his children had been more inseparably attached one to another than ever, and each drew a full measure of happiness from these all-too-infrequent reunions, when Donald could be with them. Even little Muriel was not left out of the group, for she had been granted the exceptional privilege of sitting up an extra hour, and listening to the wonderful hunting tales told by her beloved Uncle Don, upon whose lap she was now contentedly curled. Her mother and father sat near by.
"Yes, to both questions," responded Donald.
"Did you shoot any bears?" queried his little niece, expectantly.
"No bears this trip, although I almost scalded to death a bare-legged little girl," was the reply. And with Rose thus made the central figure of his recital at the very outset, Donald proceeded to tell of his experiences and new friendships; but consciously refrained from mentioning the unpleasant incident with which his trip ended, and Smiles' parting embrace.
His faithful reproduction of the soft mountain dialect brought frequent smiles from his listeners, and filled the child with delighted amusement.
"I just love Smiles," she cried, as he finished his story.
"Indeed, so does every one who knows her. You do, don't you, Mike?" added Donald, and the dog beat a tattoo on the rug with his stumpy tail.
"Witchery," laughed his father. "Even your clumsy description has strangely stirred my youthful blood, and 'I longs fer ter see this hyar wonderful child dryad of ther primeval forest.' If you ever go back there, you had better wear magic armor as protection against that illusive smile which seems to have cast a spell of enchantment over your civilized senses."
"Pshaw, you needn't be concerned about my feelings for her. She's no siren, but a very real little person. I'll admit that she's amazingly attractive; but she's merely a child."
"Children grow up," teased his sister.
"I'm aware of that natural phenomenon," answered Donald, somewhat curtly. "But ... Great Scott, can't I describe a fifteen—no, sixteen-year-old little savage, without all you people imagining that I'm going to be such a fool as to fall in love with her?"
"Sometimes it isn't what one says, but the way he says it, that incriminates," put in his brother-in-law, adding his voice to the general baiting which had apparently disclosed a tender spot.
"Hang it all, I believe that I'll go back and ask Smiles to marry me, if only to put an end to your teasing," cried Don with a laugh not entirely natural. "At least I might perhaps succeed in frustrating your obvious designs, Ethel. Oh, I'm not blind!"
"I've almost concluded that you are—or hopeless," answered his sister. "However, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I would like to see you married to Marion Treville—she's my closest friend, and would certainly make you a perfect wife."
"Too perfect, by far. Can you imagine me hitched with that proud and classic beauty? I should go mad."
"But I want my pretty basket that little Smiles made for me," broke in Muriel, to whom the present remarks held no interest, and who emphasized her demand by seizing his cheeks.
"To be sure you do, and I want to see my present, too. I'll bring them right down."
Not at all ill pleased at this opportunity to escape from his family's jesting, which, for some indefinable reason, aroused his belligerency, Donald jumped up hastily and departed for the sanctuary of his bedroom, to get the bulky bundle with its mysterious enclosure. Minutes slipped by, and he failed to return to the group downstairs.
At last his absorption was broken into by the arrival of Muriel, whose entrance into the room, with the traces of tears on her cheeks, brought him back to the present with a remorseful start.
"You didn't come down, an' you didn't come down, Uncle Don, an' now mother says it's bedtime, an' I want Smiles' basket to take with me."
"Why, I'm terribly sorry that I've been so long, sweetheart-mine. I stopped to read the letter she wrote to me, and, I'm ashamed to say, forgot that you were waiting for me. But see, here's your present. Little Rose made it all herself for you. Isn't it pretty?"
With a cry of delight the child gathered the simple basket into her chubby arms and bent her head over it. "Oh, don't it smell sweet, Uncle Don. Does Smiles smell like that?"
"Perhaps not exactly," he replied, chuckling.
"Now please show me what she sent to you. Was it a basket, too?"
"No, not a basket. It's a very great secret; but, if you'll promise not to tell a soul, no matter how they tease, I'll show it to you."
"Cross my heart, an' hope to die," said the child earnestly, making across her pinafore the mystic sign, so potent to the childish mind.
Donald opened a drawer in the chiffonier and took out a small and obviously cheap glazed blue-and-white vase. The child took it wonderingly and, removing the cover, sniffed audibly and deeply.
"My. This smells like Rose," she said with conviction.
"You're right, it does, indeed, because it is roses—dried wild rose petals which she gathered and preserved herself. I saw it in her little cabin, and know that it was her most precious possession, yet she gave it to 'Uncle Don' as a keepsake, so that he might remember her whenever he smells of it."
"Wasn't she just too sweet to do that. My, how I would like to see her, Uncle Don."
"Well, perhaps you may, some day."
The sentence echoed out of the past, carrying his recollection back to the night when he had heedlessly spoken the identical words to Smiles, and there entered his mind the sudden realization of what amazing potentialities for good or evil often lie hidden in the simplest utterances.
The sound of his sister's light tread in the hallway caused Donald to return his homely gift to its hiding place hurriedly, and little Muriel, with roguishly twinkling eyes, imitated his action as he laid his finger on his lips as a seal of secrecy.
"Well, you two kids," laughed Ethel, as she caught sight of the picture framed by the doorway.
"I'm glad that I haven't wholly forgotten how to be one," answered her brother, as he kissed first his little niece, and then the basket which she held up with the demand that it be paid similar homage, and bade them good-night.
Rejoining the diminished group in the living-room, Donald was preoccupiedly silent, until his father asked,
"Well, have you read your little friend's 'writing'? I confess to a mild curiosity as to what sort of a letter a girl like her would write, and what sort of a request she would be likely to make of you."
Don drew from his pocket the letter, painfully scrawled on cheap, and not overclean paper, and handed it over. Adjusting his eye-glasses the older man read aloud:—
"'Dear Dr. Mac,
Truly I want to be a nurse like you told me about some day.'
"Well," commented the reader, "at least she starts right off with the business in hand, without any palavering.
"'And I reckon that even a little mountain girl like me can be one if she wishes hard enough and works hard, too.'
"Why," he interpolated again, "there doesn't seem to be any evidence of your weirdly wonderful spelling and grammar here."
"Go on," answered Donald, smiling slightly.
"'I reckon it will take me a long, long time to get education and earn all that money, but I can do it, Dr. Mac. I am sure I can do it. I told my grandfather all that I mean to do, and he won't try to stop me none. Of course he does not want for me to go away from him, but I explained that I had to, and of course that made it all right.
When you was telling us what those nurses done, something seemed like it went jump inside my heart, and straightways I know that the dear Lord meant for me to do it, too. I read a story once about a girl in france named Jone of Ark and I reckon I felt like she done when she see the angel.
I know I can do it, Dr. Mac, if you will help me a little bit like you promised. Most of all I figures I need a heap of book learning, and it is books I wants for you to get me. You know the books I need to have, Dr. Mac, and in this letter I am going to put $10.
It is an awful lot of money; but I reckon books cost a good deal, and you can bring me the change next summer, for I have not got no use for money here. Don't be afeared. It is my own money. It was in my father's pocket among the camp things granddaddy found, and there was some more. Grandfather, he kept it for me until I was a big girl and now I am keeping it for a rainy day, like the copy book says, although I don't think money would be much use to keep off the rain.
Their is a preacher man who lives on our mountain winters, when he can not travel about none, and I know I can get him to help me learn if I help his wife with her work, and I can read pretty well now and write pretty well when I have a spelling book to study the words out of, although I have to go sorter slow, for they do not allus spell words like they sound, and sometimes I cannot find them at all. I guess my book is not a very good one.
I reckon it will take me a long while to earn more than $300; but I am going to work awful hard, making baskets and other things, and I am going to get Judd Amos, our naybor, to sell them for me at the village store, for he goes down their trading every week, and he will do anything I ask him, like I told you.
This is a pretty long letter and it has taken me all the evening to right. I hope that you can read it. Well, I guess that is all now from your loveing little friend.
I most forgot to say please give my love to Mike.
Rose Webb.'
"Well, I've got to admit that I have seen many a letter, written by a grown-up, that fell a long ways short of that one in clarity of thought and in accomplishment of a definite object," said Mr. MacDonald, as he handed it back. "Do you suppose that her eagerness to become a nurse is just a passing childish whim, or has she really got sand enough to put her almost impossible plan through?"
"Clairvoyancy was not included either in the Harvard or Medical School curriculum," responded Donald, with a shrug.
"Meaning that the things of the future are in the laps of the gods. Of course, but I was merely asking for your personal opinion. I'm not jesting now; that letter really aroused my interest in the child."
"Well, then, I believe that Smiles really possesses the strength of purpose to go through with even so difficult a task as she has set for herself. Remember, she comes of city stock, and hasn't the blood of those unprogressive mountaineers in her veins."
"And you? Are you going to help her as she asks? What about your promise to Big Jerry?"
"I lived up to both the spirit and letter of that, when I tried to explain to the child the almost unsurmountable difficulties which lay between her and the accomplishment of her dream. Besides, I know that she has told the truth in her letter, and has somehow managed actually to win over the old man. I can't help feeling mighty sorry for him, if the foster birdling is really going to fly away from his nest after he has reared and loved her so tenderly, but, after all, it is only the history of the human race. Still, I can't blame him if he looks on me as a serpent who stole into his simple Eden, carrying the apple of discontent."
"There have been, of course, plenty of cases similar to this, where the adventurer's spirit was really big enough and the vision strong enough to carry him or her through to victory," mused Donald's father. "Such a one was the immortal Abe Lincoln, who came from just such surroundings. But the task is doubly hard for a young girl, and the experiment of thus breaking away from the ties and traditions of many years, and seeking a place in a wholly new, wholly dissimilar life, cannot but be fraught with dangers. There, in that simple environment she naturally appealed to you as not only an attractive child, but as a somewhat unusual personality. Tell me, lad, how will, or would, she measure up, if transplanted a few years hence into city life, where the standards of comparison are so utterly different; so much more exacting?"
"Frankly, I don't know," responded Donald. "Since I read her letter I have been asking myself that question, and the answer worries me, since I feel in a way responsible for having opened the gates before her untrained feet. Somehow I cannot disassociate little Rose from her present environment, and, although she certainly has an unusual charm for such a child, I must admit that, in part, at least, it was the result of—no, not that, but made more obvious by—her surroundings."
"Well, she has apparently decided to take the moulding of her life into her own hands and, without knowing the quotation, determined to be 'the master of her fate and captain of her soul.' However, a little more education can scarcely hurt her, and, if she succeeds in saving up some money, it will come in handy enough as a 'dot,' in case she marries your friend, Judd Amos, and raises a family of mountain brats."
Donald's reply was unnecessarily positive.
"I'll wager that she'll never do that." And with that the conversation, as far as it concerned Smiles, ended.
During purloined hours in the next few days the eminently successful young physician might have been seen engaged in strange errands, which took him into such places as a dressmaker's establishment, and several stores which sold textbooks. It was also a noteworthy fact that the decidedly soiled and crumpled ten-dollar bill, with which he had been commissioned to purchase the means through which education might be acquired, was never taken from the special compartment in his bill folder.
Then the flood of fall practice engulfed him, and gradually the memory of little Smiles faded from his busy mind, although it never quite vanished, and from time to time fresh breezes from the distant Cumberlands fanned it to life like a glowing ember.