Told in the Hills: A Novel

by Marah Ellis Ryan

"And we will all put on our thinking-caps and study up a title while you tell the story, and when it is ended, see which has the best one to offer. It will be a new sort of game with which to test our imaginations. Go on. What is the quotation, to begin with?"

To the surprise of the listeners, he read that old command from Deuteronomy, written of brother to brother:

"Thou shalt not see thy brother's ox or his sheep go astray; thou shalt in any case bring them again unto thy brother.

"And with all lost things of thy brother's, which he hath lost and thou hast found, shalt thou do likewise.

"In any case thou shalt deliver him the pledge again when the sun goeth down."

Stuart ceased after those lines, and looked for comment. He saw enough in the man's face opposite him.

"Oh, go on," said Rachel. "Never mind about the suggestions in that heading—it is full of them; give us the story."

"It is only the prologue to a story," he reminded her; and with no further comment began the manuscript.

Its opening was that saddest of all things to the living—a death-bed—and that most binding of all vows—a promise given to the dying.

There was drawn the picture of a fragile, fair little lady, holding in her chilling fingers the destiny of the lives she was about to leave behind—young lives—one a sobbing, wondering girl of ten, and two boys; the older perhaps eighteen, an uncouth, strong-faced youth, who clasped hands with another boy several years younger, but so fair that few would think them brothers, and only the more youthful would ever have been credited as the child of the little woman who looked so like a white lily.

The other was the elder son—an Esau, however, who was favorite with neither father nor mother; with no one, in fact, who had ever known the sunny face and nature of the more youthful—an impulsive, loving disposition that only shone the brighter by contrast with the darker-faced, undemonstrative one whom even his mother never understood.

And the shadow of that misunderstanding was with them even at the death-bed, where the Jacob sobbed out his grief in passionate protests against the power that would rob him, and the Esau stood like a statue to receive her commands. Back of them was the father, smothering his own grief and consoling his favorite, when he could, and the one witness to the seal that was set on the three young lives.