Charles Neville Buck - Destiny

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DESTINY

by

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

Author of
The Call of the Cumberlands, Etc.

New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers
Copyright, 1916, by
W.J. Watt & Company

OTHER BOOKS BY
CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

THE KEY TO YESTERDAY
THE LIGHTED MATCH
THE PORTAL OF DREAMS
THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS
THE BATTLE CRY
THE CODE OF THE MOUNTAINS

DESTINY

Part I

THE LAND OF PROMISE

CHAPTER I

Outside the subtle clarion of autumn's dying glory flamed in the torches
of the maples and smoldered in the burgundy of the oaks. It trailed a
veil of rose-ash and mystery along the slopes of the White Mountains,
and inside the crumbling school-house the children droned sleepily over
their books like prisoners in a lethargic mutiny.

Frost had brought the chestnuts rattling down in the open woods, and
foraging squirrels were scampering among the fallen leaves.

Brooding at one of the front desks, sat a boy, slender and undersized
for his thirteen years. The ill-fitting crudity of his neatly patched
clothes gave him a certain uniformity with his fellows, yet left him as
unlike them as all things else could conspire to make him. The long hair
that hung untrimmed over his face seemed a black emphasis for the cameo
delicacy of his features, lending them a wan note of pathos. On his
thin temples, bluish veins traced the hall-mark of an over-sensitive
nature, and eyes that were deep pools of somberness gazed out with the
dreamer's unrest.

Occasionally, he shot a furtively terrified glance across the aisle
where another boy with a mop of red hair, a freckled face and a mouth
that seemed overcrowded with teeth, made faces at him and conveyed in
eloquent gestures threats of future violence. At these menacing
pantomimes, the slighter lad trembled under his bulging coat, and he sat
as one under sentence.

Had any means of escape offered itself, Paul Burton would have embraced
it without thought of the honors of war. He had no wish to stand upon
the order of his going. He earnestly desired to go at once. But under
what semblance of excuse could he cover his retreat? Suddenly his
necessity fathered a crafty subterfuge. The bucket of drinking water
stood near his desk--and it was well-nigh empty. Becoming violently
thirsty, he sought permission to carry it to the spring for refilling,
and his heart leaped hopefully when the tired-eyed teacher indifferently
nodded her assent. He meant to carry the pail to the spring. He even
meant to fill it for the sake of technical obedience. Later, some one
else could go out and fetch it back.

Paul's object would be served when once he was safe from the stored-up
wrath of the Marquess kid. As he carried the empty bucket down the
aisle, he felt upon him the derisive gaze of a pair of blue eyes
entirely surrounded by freckles, and his own eyes drooped before their
challenge and contempt. They drooped also as he met the questioning gaze
of his elder brother, Ham, whose seat was just at the door. Ham had a
disquieting capacity for reading Paul's thoughts, and an equally
disquieting scorn of cowardice. But Paul closed the door behind him,
and, in the freedom of the outer air, set his lips to whistling a casual
tune. He could never be for a moment alone without breaking into some
form of music. It was his nature's language and his soul's soliloquy.

Of course tomorrow would bring a reckoning for truancy and a probable
renewal of his danger, but tomorrow is after all another day and for
this afternoon at least he felt safe.

But Ham Burton's uncanny powers of divination were at work, and out of
his seat he slipped unobserved. Through the door he flitted shadow-like
and strolled along in the wake of his younger brother.

Down where the spring crooned softly over its mossy rocks and where
young brook trout darted in phantom flashes, Ham Burton found Paul with
his face tight-clasped in his nervous hands. Back there in the
school-house had been only terror, but out here was something else. A
specter of self-contempt had risen to contend with physical trepidation.
The song of the water and the rustle of the leaves where the breeze
harped among the platinum shafts of the birches were pleading with this
child-dreamer, and in his mind a conflict swept backward and forward.
Paul did not at once see his brother, and the older boy stood over him
in silence, watching the mental fight; watching until he knew that it
was lost and that timidity had overpowered shame. His own eyes at first
held only scorn for such a poltroon attitude, but suddenly there leaped
into them a fierce glow of tenderness, which he as quickly masked. At
the end of his silent contemplation he brusquely demanded, "Well, Paul,
how long is it going to take you to fill that bucket with water?"

The younger lad started violently and stammered. Chagrined tears welled
into his deep eyes, and a flush spread over his thin cheeks.

"I just--just got to thinkin'," he exculpated lamely, "an' I fogot to
hurry. Listen at that water singin', Ham!" His voice took on a rapt
eagerness. "An' them leaves rustlin'. It's all like some kind of music
that nobody's ever played an' nobody ever can play."

Ham's face, looking down from the commanding height of his sixteen
years, hardened.

"Do you figure that Pap sends you to school to set out here and listen
at the leaves rattlin'?" was the dry inquiry. "To hear you talk a
feller'd think there ain't anything in the world but funny noises. What
do they get you?"

"Noises!" the slight lad's voice filled and thrilled with remonstrance,
"Can't you ever understand music, Ham? There's all the world of
difference between music an' noise. Music's what the Bible says the
angels love more'n anything."

Ham's lips set themselves sternly. He was not one to be turned aside
with quibbles.

"Look here, Paul," he accused, "you didn't come out here to get water
and you didn't come to listen to the fishes singin' songs either. You
sneaked out to run away because you're scared of Jimmy Marquess an'
because you know he's goin' to punch your face after school."

The younger lad flushed crimson and he began an unconvincing denial. "I
ain't--I ain't afraid of him, neither," he protested. "That ain't the
truth, Ham."

"All right then." The elder boy filled the bucket and straightened up
with business-like alacrity. "If you ain't scared of him we might as
well go on back there an' tell him so. He thinks you are."

Instinctively Paul flinched and turned pallid. He gazed about him like
a trapped rabbit, but his brother caught him roughly by the shoulder and
wheeled him toward the school-house.

"But--Ham--but--" The younger brother's voice faltered and again tears
came to his eyes. "But I don't b'lieve in fightin'. I think it's
wicked."

"Paul," announced the other relentlessly, "you're a coward. Maybe it
ain't exactly your fault, but one thing's dead certain. There's just one
kind of feller that can't afford to run away--an' that's a coward, like
you. Everybody picks on a kid that's yeller. You've got to have one good
fight to save a lot of others an' this is the day you're goin' to have
it. After school you've got to smash Jimmy Marquess a wallop on his
front teeth an' if you don't shake 'em plumb loose I'm goin' to take you
back in the woods an' give you a revelation in lickin's that'll linger
with you for years." Ham paused and then added ominously, "Now you can
do just exactly as you like. I don't want to try to influence you, but
that Marquess kid is your softest pickin'."

Facing the dread consequences of such a dilemma, Paul went slowly and
falteringly forward with the unhappy consciousness of his brother
following warily at his heels.

"Come to think of it," suggested Ham casually, "I guess you'd better
write a note before we go in--it seems a kind of shame to treat Jimmy
like that without givin' him any warnin'." He set the bucket in the path
and fumbled in his pocket for a scrap of paper. "I'll just help you
out," he volunteered graciously. "Start with his name--like this--'James
Marquess; Sir--.'"

Paul hesitated, and Ham took a step forward with a cool glint in his
eyes before which the other quailed. "I'll write it, Ham," he hastily
whimpered.

"James Marquess; Sir--" continued the laconic voice of the
directing mind. "If you think I am afraid of you, you have erred in
judgment. I don't like you and I don't care for your personal
appearance. If you so much as squint at me after school today I
intend to change the general appearance of your face. It won't be
handsome when I get through, but I guess it will be an improvement,
at that.

"Respectfully,

"Paul Burton."

The coerced writer groaned deeply as he scrawled the signature which
pledged him so irretrievably to battle. He felt that his autograph to
such a missive was distinctly inappropriate, and invited sure calamity.
Ham, however, only nodded approval as he commanded, "When you take the
bucket up, lay that on his desk and be sure he gets it."

Yet as Paul plodded on, a piteous little shape of quaking terror, Ham
let the glance of militant tenderness flash once more into his eyes, and
his voice came in sympathetic timbre.

"Paul, I can't always do your fightin' for you. If I could I wouldn't
make _you_ do it--but you've got to learn how to stand on your own legs.
It ain't only the Marquess kid you're fightin'. You've got to lick the
yeller streak out of yourself before it ruins you." He paused, then
magnanimously added, "If you trim him down good and proper, I'll get you
a new violin string in place of the one you busted."

It was a very unmilitary shape that huddled in its seat, watching his
adversary read the ultimatum. As for the heir of the house of Marquess,
he allowed his freckled face for a moment to pucker in blank
astonishment, then a smile of beatitude enveloped it. It was such
beatitude as might appear on the visage of a cat who has unexpectedly
received a challenge to mortal combat from a mouse.

An hour of the afternoon session yet intervened between the present and
the awful future and upon Paul Burton it rested with its incubus of dire
suspense. It was an hour which the Marquess kid employed congenially
across the aisle. Whenever the tired eyes of the teacher were not upon
him he gave elaborate pantomimes wherein he felt the swelling biceps of
his right arm, and made as if to spit belligerently upon his doubled
fist. Sometimes his left hand seemed struggling to restrain the deadly
right, lest it leap forth untimely in its hunger for smiting. These
wordless pleasantries were in no wise lost on the shrinking Paul in
whose slight body slept the spirit of the artist unfortified with
martial iron of combat.

The world of boyhood has little understanding or sympathy for a soul
like Paul's; a soul woven of dreams and harmonies which knows no means
of attuning itself to the material. This lad walked with his head in the
clouds and his thoughts in visions. His playmates were invisible to
human eyes and he heard the crashing of vast symphonies where others
felt only the silences. Now in a little while he was to have his face
punched by a material and normal young savage whose very freckles shone
with anticipation.

Ham Burton, looking on from his desk, recognized that in the frail lad
who "wouldn't stick up for himself" burned the thin hot fire of genius
without the stamina that alone could fan it into effective blaze. For
Ham, whose face revealed as little of what went on back of his eyes as
an Indian's, was the dreamer, too, though his dreams were cut to a
different pattern. As he dealt in visions, so William the Conqueror may
have dealt when a boy in his father's bakeshop; so Napoleon may have
dreamed before the world had heard his name. The younger lad dreamed as
the hasheesh-eater, for the vague and iridescent glory of visioning, but
the elder dreamed otherwise, in preface to achievement.

The teacher rose at length to dismiss the classes, and as the children
piled out into the crisp air, the Marquess kid was first on the
hard-trodden soil of the school-yard--for there triumph awaited his
coming. Paul was less impulsive. He collected his books with the most
deliberate care, dusting them off with an unwonted solicitude. Then he
spent an indefinite period searching for a stub of slate-pencil, which
at another time would not have interested him. He hoped against hope
that Jimmy Marquess would not have time to wait for him.

At last, the laggard in war felt Ham's strong hand on his coat-collar.
Vainly protesting and sniffling, he was hustled toward the rotting
threshold and catapulted upon his enemy so abruptly and skillfully that
to the casual eye he might have seemed bursting with impatience for
battle.

And as he stumbled, willy-nilly, upon the Marquess kid, the Marquess kid
joyously gathered him in and began raining enthusiastic rights and lefts
upon the blanched and blue-veined face.

Suddenly Paul Burton woke to the fact that at his back was an extremely
solid wall; on his right an equally impassable fence; on his left his
implacable brother and at his front--nothing but the Marquess kid.

Of the four obstacles Jimmy seemed the most vulnerable, and upon him
Paul hurled himself with the exalted frenzy of a single idea: an idea of
boring his way out of an insupportable position. That Jimmy's blows hurt
him so little astonished him, and under the spur of fear he fought with
such abandon that to Ham's face came a slow grin of contentment and to
that of the Marquess kid an expression of pained amazement, followed by
one of sudden panic. Of this particular mouse, the cat had had enough
and amid jeers of derision the cat withdrew with more of haste than of
dignity in his departure.

But five minutes later as Paul trudged along the forest path toward his
home, the unaccustomed light of battle that had momentarily kindled in
his eyes began to fade. There glowed in them no such lasting triumph as
should come from a boy's first victory. Instead, they wore again the
far-away look of dreamy pensiveness. Already, his thoughts were back in
their own world, a world peopled with fancies and panoplied with
imaginings. Suddenly he halted, and threw back his head, intently
listening. High and far away came the honking cry of wild geese in
flight; travelers of the upper air-paths, winging their way southward.
Distance softened the harshness of their journeying clamor into a note
of appealing wanderlust.

Paul's lips were parted and his eyes aglow. The memory of the fight he
had dreaded was effaced; the bruises on his sensitive face were
forgotten. His heart was drinking an elixir through his ears, and at the
sounds floating down from the heights new fancies leaped within him.

Ham with his eyes shrewdly fixed upon his brother swung his books to his
other hand and shrugged his shoulders. He, too, was looking in fancy
beyond the misty hills, but not to the flight of geese. He saw cities
with shaft-like structures biting the sky and dark banners of smoke
floating above the clash of conflict. His heart was burning to be at the
center of that conflict.

He, too, heard a song of sirens, but it was such a song as Richard
Whittington heard when bare-footed in Pauntley the notes of the Bow
bells stole out to him:

"Sang of a city that was blazoned like a missal-book,
Black with oaken gables, carven and inscrolled;
Every street a colored page, every sign a hieroglyph,
Dusky with enchantments, a city paved with gold."

Then he gazed about the desolate country where morning wore to night in
a sequence of hard chore upon hard chore, and he groaned between his set
teeth.

Here and there along the way stood deserted houses where the wind
searched the interiors through the eyeless sockets of unglazed windows
and where the roof-trees were broken and twisted. They were blighting
symbols of this soul-breaking existence in a land of abandoned farms
where Opportunity never came. They were mutely eloquent of surrender
after struggle. They summed up the hazard of life where to abate the
fight and rest meant to lose the fight and starve.

His heart told him that no other battle-field was hard enough or
desperate enough to spell his defeat. The world was his if he could go
out into the world to claim it, but here in this meager land of
barrenness his soul would strangle without a fight. The things that had
long flamed in his heart had flamed secretly, like a smothered blaze
which gnaws the vitals out of a ship whose hatches are battened down.
He, too, had kept the hatches of silence battened. But through many
wakeful nights the voice that speaks to those whom the gods have chosen
cried to him with the certainty of a herald's bugle. "What the greatest
have been, you can be! Of the few to whom impossibility is a jest, you
are one! Nothing can halt your onward march save--want of opportunity.
You have kinship with the world's mightiest, but you must go out into
the world and claim your own." For that was how Ham Burton dreamed.

As the Burton boys came to the farm-house where they had been born, the
sun was sinking behind the ragged spears of the mountain-top, and its
last fires were mirrored in the lake whose name was like an epitome of
their lives--Forsaken.

The house seemed to huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic
despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as
grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants
lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a
beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies. This was the prison in
which Ham Burton must serve his life sentence--unless he responded to
that urgent call which he heard when the others slept. Tonight he must
share with his father the raw chores of the farm, and, when his studies
were done, he must go to his bed, exhausted in body and mind, to be
awakened at sunrise and retread the cheerless round of drudgery. Every
other tomorrow while life fettered him here held a repetition of just
that and nothing more.

The white fire of rebellion leaped mutinously up in Ham's heart. He
would go away. He would answer the loud clarion that called to him from
beyond the horizons. The first line of hills should no longer be his
remotest frontier. And if he did that--a whispering voice of loyalty and
conscience argued insistently--who would wear the heavy harness here at
home? His father would never leave, and upon his father the infirmities
of age would some day come creeping. There was Paul--but, at the thought
of Paul with his strong imagination and his weak muscles, Ham laughed.
If he went away he must go without consent or parental blessing; he must
slip away in the night with his few possessions packed in his battered
bag. Very well; if that were the only way, it must be his way. The
voices were calling--always calling--and it might as well be tonight.
Destiny is impatient of temporizing. Yes, tonight he would start out
there, somewhere, where the battles were a man's battles, and the
rewards a man's rewards.

But at the door his mother met him. There was a moisture of unshed tears
in her eyes, and she spoke in the appeal of dependence--dependence upon
her eldest son who had never failed her.

"Son, your father's in bed--he's had some sort of stroke. He's feelin'
mighty low in his mind, an' he says he's played out with the fight of
all these years. I told him that he needn't fret himself because we have
you. You've always been so strong an' manly--even when you were a little
feller. You'd better see him, Ham, an' cheer him up. Tell him you can
take right hold an' run the farm."

Ham turned away a face suddenly drawn. A lemon afterglow hung above the
hills, and where it darkened into the evening sky, a single star shone
in a feeble point of light. It was setting--not rising--and to the boy
it seemed to be his star.

"I'll go in and see him," he said curtly.

Thomas Burton lay on his bed with his face turned to the wall. When his
son entered, he raised it and shifted it so that the yellow light of an
oil lamp shone on it above the faded quilt.

It was a hopeless, beaten face, and for the first time in his life Ham
saw the calloused hand which crept out to his own shake feebly.

He took it, and the father said slowly:

"Ham, somehow I feel like an old hoss that just goes as long as he can
an' then lays down. Right often he don't get up no more. It's a hard
fight for a boy to take up, this fight with rocks and poor soil, but I
guess you'll have to tackle it. I didn't quit so long as I could keep
goin'."

The boy nodded. He composed his face and answered steadily: "I guess you
can depend on me."

But outside by the barn fence he set down his milk-pail a few minutes
later and in the coming night his face twitched and blackened.

"So after all," Ham told himself bitterly, "I've got to stay."

He reached out mechanically and began loosing the top bar from its
sockets, while he called in the cows to be milked. So many times had he
taken down and put up that panel of bars that his hands knew from habit
every roughness and knot in every rail.

"Mornin' an' evenin' for three hundred and sixty-five days a year;" the
boy said to himself in a low and very bitter voice. "That makes seven
hundred and thirty times a year I do this same, identical thing. I ain't
nothin' more than servant to a couple of cows." He stood and watched the
two heifers trot through the opening to the water-trough by the pump.
"By the time I'm thirty-five," he continued, "I'll do it fourteen
thousand and six hundred times more--When Napoleon was thirty-five--"
But there he broke off with an inarticulate sound in his browned young
throat that was very like a groan.

CHAPTER II

Mary Burton was eleven. Of late, thoughts which had heretofore not
disturbed her had insistently crept into the limelight of consciousness.
One morning as she stood, dish-towel in hand, over the kitchen table,
her eyes stole ever and anon to the cracked mirror that hung against the
wall, and after each glance she turned defiantly away with something
like sullenness about her lips. Elizabeth Burton, the mother, and Hannah
Burton, the spinster aunt, went about their accustomed tasks with no
thought more worldly than the duties of the moment. It never occurred to
Aunt Hannah to complain of anything that was. If her life spelled
unrelieved drudgery she accepted it as the station to which it had
pleased God to call her, and conceived that complaint would be a form of
blasphemy. Now as she wielded her broom, her angular shoulders ached
with rheumatism, and, in a voice as creaking as her joints, she sang,
"For the Master said there is work to do!" Such was Aunt Hannah's creed,
and it pleased her while she moiled over the work to announce in song
that she acted upon divine command. To Aunt Hannah's mind, this lent an
august dignity to a dust-rag.

When Mary savagely threw down her dish-towel and burst unaccountably
into tears, both women looked up, startled. Mary was normally a sunny
child and one not given to weeping.

"For the name of goodness!" exclaimed the mother in bewilderment. "What
in the world can have struck the child?" It was to Aunt Hannah that she
put the question, but it was Mary who answered, and answered with a
sudden flow of vehemence:

"Why didn't God make me pretty?" demanded the girl in an impassioned
voice. "They call me spindle-legs at school, and yesterday Jimmy
Marquess said,

'If I had a sister Mary that had eyes like that,
I'd put her out of pain with a baseball bat.'

"It ain't fair that I've got to be ugly."

Mrs. Burton, confronted with a situation she had not anticipated, found
herself unequipped with a reply, but Aunt Hannah's face became severe.

"You are as God made you, child," she announced in a tone of finality,
"and it's sinful to be dissatisfied."

But, if dissatisfaction was wicked, Mary was resolved upon sin. For the
first time in her eleven years of life she stood forth mutinous. Her
eyes blazed, and she trembled passionately through her slender
child-body, with her hands clenched into tight little fists.

"If God made me this way on purpose, He didn't treat me fair," she
rebelliously flamed out. "What good can it do God to have me skinny and
white, with eyes that don't even match?"

Aunt Hannah's face paled as though she feared that she must fall an
innocent victim to the avenging bolt which might momentarily be expected
to crash through the roof.

"Elizabeth," she gasped, "stop the child! Don't let her invite the wrath
of the Almighty like that! Tell her how wicked it is to complain an'
rebel against Infinite Wisdom."

They heard a low, rather contemptuous laugh, and saw Ham standing in the
door. His coarse lumberman's socks were pulled up over his trousers'
legs and splashed with mud of the stable lot.

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