Told in the Hills: A Novel

by Marah Ellis Ryan

She slipped her hand about his neck with a child's caressing sympathy, and then a wild scream brought the people hurrying into the room.

"He is dead!" she cried, as she dropped beside him; "sitting there cold as stone, and we thought he didn't care! And he is dead—dead!"

But he was not dead—the physician soon assured them of that. It was only a cataleptic fit. The emotion that had melted the one brother to tears had frozen the other into the closest semblance to stone that life can reach, and still be life.

The silence was thrilling as Stuart's voice ceased, and he stooped for the other pages laid by his chair.

A feeling that the story on paper could never convey was brought to every listener by the something in his voice that was not tears, but suggested the emotion back of tears. They had always acknowledged the magnetism of the man, but felt that he was excelling himself in this instance. Tillie and Fred were silently crying. Rachel was staring very steadily ahead of her, too steadily to notice that the hand laid on Genesee's revolver at the commencement of the story had gradually relaxed and dropped listless beside him. All the strength in his body seemed to creep into his eyes as he watched Stuart, trusting as much to his eyes as his ears for the complete comprehension of the object in or back of that story. In the short pause the author, with one sweeping glance, read his advantage—that he was holding in the bonds of sympathy this man whom he could never conquer through an impersonal influence. The knowledge was a ten-fold inspiration—the point to be gained was so great to him; and with his voice thrilling them all with its intensity, he read on and on.

The story? Its finish was the beginning of this one; but it was told with a spirit that can not be transmitted by ink and paper, for the teller depended little on his written copy. He knew it by heart—knew all the tenderness of a love-story in it that was careless of the future as the butterflies that coquette on a summer's day, passing and repassing with a mere touch of wings, a challenge to a kiss, and then darting hither and yon in the chase that grows laughing and eager, until each flash of white wings in the sun bears them high above the heads of their comrades, as the divine passion raises all its votaries above the commonplace. Close and closer they are drawn by the spirit that lifts them into a new life; high and higher, until against the blue sky there is a final flash of white wings. It is the wedding by a kiss, and the coquettings are over—the sky closes in. They are a world of their own.

Such a love story of summer was told by him in the allegory of the butterflies; but the young heart throbbing through it was that of the woman-child who had wept while the two brothers had clasped hands and accepted her as the trust of the dying; and her joyous teacher of love had been the fair-haired, fine-faced boy whose grief had been so great and whose promises so fervent. It is a very old story, but an ever-pathetic one—that tragedy of life; and likewise this one, without thought of sin, with only a fatal fondness on her part, a fatal desire for being loved on his, and a season's farewell to be uttered, of which they could speak no word—the emotions that have led to more than one tragedy of soul. And one of the butterflies in this one flitted for many days through the flowers of her garden, shy, yet happy, whispering over and over, "His wife, his wife!" while traveling southward, the other felt a passion of remorse in his heart, and resolved on multitudinous plans for the following of a perfection of life in the future.

All this he told—too delicately to give offense, yet too unsparingly not to show that the evil wrought in a moment of idle pastime, of joyous carelessness, is as fatal in its results as the most deliberate act of preconceived wickedness.

And back of the lives and loves of those two, with their emotional impulses and joyous union of untutored hearts, there arose, unloved and seemingly unloving, the quiet, watchful figure of the Esau.

Looking at his life from a distance, and perhaps through eyes of remorse, the writer had idealized that one character, while he had only photographed the others; had studied out the deeds back of every decided action, and discovered, or thought he had, that it was the lack of sympathy in his home-life had made a sort of human porcupine of him, and none had guessed that, back of the keen darts, there beat a pulse hungry for words such as he begged from his mother at the last—and receiving, was ready to sacrifice every hope of his, present or future, that he might prove himself worthy of the trust she had granted him, though so late.