Annie Laurie and Azalea

by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

He helped with the preparations for the mountain, saying nothing of his shamed and tortured thought that his friends might come upon his skulking family. Mr. Carson was to drive his own team, and Benjamin, his man, was to drive Annie Laurie’s horses. So, on a perfumed spring morning the little caravan set off, with Mrs. Carson and the two Misses Pace in the Carson wagon, and Carin and Azalea in Annie Laurie’s.

Azalea was strangely excited by the idea of the journey, though she tried to conceal the fact. She could not forget how often she had gone upon such long journeys in those wild, curious days when she was a “show girl.” Those days now seemed like a fantastic dream. She felt as if she always had been Azalea McBirney, wrapped about with love and consideration; and even the memory of her poor dead little mother was like a gray shadow. True, it was a shadow which arose often before her mental vision, but the outlines of it grew fainter and fainter. Yet Azalea loved it. She could not think of that brave, yet broken woman, so out of place with that sorry crew of show people, without a throb of love. Death had, at last, seemed the only happiness for her, and Azalea loved to think of her as safe and at rest in that much-cared-for lowly bed of hers beneath the Pride of India tree beside Ma McBirney’s door.

And, oh, the long red road! How it wound up the hills and over them. What valleys it glimpsed, what rivers, amber brown beneath the trees, what spots of quietude and peace beneath the pines, what sunny openings, where succulent odors of grass, freshly sprung, came to the travelers! And, oh, the delight of sleeping in the hastily spread tents—which were really no more than squares of canvas stretched on pointed sticks—and the appetites that developed for the meals cooked over the coals on the convenient tripod!

Now one and now another of the ladies cooked the meals, and they vied with each other in the mixing of stews. They grew bold and tried things they never had heard of, but which seasoned with mountain air and tested with mountain appetites, seemed the finest of discoveries. And the day and the night were sweet; the wind was their playful companion; the showers were their friends; the sun their great protector; the moon their comforter and all the stars were their intimates.

So the three girls grew browner and brighter-eyed each day, and the heart in each of them—even Annie Laurie’s—was light as down.

But not a hint did they have of the Disbrows. Though they plunged deeper and deeper into the mountains, getting far beyond the towns, they saw nothing of them. They went so far that they came at last upon the lonely, sad-eyed people whom Miss Borrow had described. In their miserable cabins, which were far from weatherproof, they lived their curious, solitary lives. Their faces were vacant and mournful; their voices like the soughing of wind in the trees. They walked languidly, and there was a strange and repellent pallor in their faces. Sometimes they sang a little, sitting before their doors in the moonlight, and their voices rose and fell with a curious cadence. The monotony of their lives rested upon them like a deadly spell, permitting them to nurse senseless hates and animosities, and to keep up foolish family feuds.

Now and then they came upon a desolate schoolhouse, approached by little winding paths, over which bare-footed children had run for weary miles. For they prized their schooling beyond all words to express.

“Whar is her who tells us how?” one little, sallow-faced child had asked when she had run eleven miles to the schoolhouse to find the teacher absent. They heard such stories of starved minds and all but starved bodies, and a deep pity awoke in their hearts for these people of their own blood and of an inheritance much like their own.

“When we are a little older,” said Azalea, her eyes shining with a deep purpose, “we will come back and teach them.”

“Yes,” said Annie Laurie. “We will teach them to read and to sing.”