Lakelands is not to be found in the catalogues of fashionable
summer resorts. It lies on a low spur of the Cumberland range of mountains on a
little tributary of the Clinch River. Lakelands proper is a contented village
of two dozen houses situated on a forlorn, narrow-gauge railroad line. You
wonder whether the railroad lost itself in the pine woods and ran into
Lakelands from fright and loneliness, or whether Lakelands got lost and huddled
itself along the railroad to wait for the ears to carry it home.
You wonder again why it was named Lakelands. There are no lakes,
and the lands about are too poor to be worth mentioning.
Half a mile from the village stands the Eagle House, a big,
roomy old mansion run by Josiah Rankin for the accommodation of visitors who
desire the mountain air at inexpensive rates. The Eagle House is delightfully
mismanaged. It is full of ancient instead of modern improvements, and it is
altogether as comfortably neglected and pleasingly disarranged as your own
home. But you are furnished with clean rooms and good and abundant fare:
yourself and the piny woods must do the rest. Nature has provided a mineral
spring, grape-vine swings, and croquet -- even the wickets are wooden. You have
Art to thank only for the fiddle-and-guitar music twice a week at the hop in
the rustic pavilion.
The patrons of the Eagle House are those who seek recreation as
a necessity, as well as a pleasure. They are busy people, who may be likened to
clocks that need a fortnight's winding to insure a year's running of their
wheels. You will find students there from the lower towns, now and then an
artist, or a geologist absorbed in construing the ancient strata of the hills.
A few quiet families spend the summers there; and often one or two tired
members of that patient sisterhood known to Lakelands as
"schoolmarms."
A quarter of a mile from the Eagle House was what would have
been described to its guests as "an object of interest" in the
catalogue, had the Eagle House issued a catalogue. This was an old, old mill
that was no longer a mill. In the words of Josiah Rankin, it was "the only
church in the United States, sah, with an overshot-wheel; and the only mill in
the world, sah, with pews and a pipe organ." The guests of the Eagle House
attended the old mill church each Sabbath, and heard the preacher liken the
purified Christian to bolted flour ground to usefulness between the millstones
of experience and suffering.
Every year about the beginning of autumn there came to the Eagle
House one Abram Strong, who remained for a time an honoured and beloved guest.
In Lakelands he was called "Father Abram," because his hair was so
white, his face so strong and kind and florid, his laugh so merry, and his
black clothes and broad hat so priestly in appearance. Even new guests after
three or four days' acquaintance gave him this familiar title.
Father Abram came a long way to Lakelands. He lived in a big,
roaring town in the Northwest where he owned mills, not little mills with pews
and an organ in them, but great, ugly, mountain-like mills that the freight
trains crawled around all day like ants around an ant-heap. And now you must be
told about Father Abram and the mill that was a church, for their stories run
together.
In the days when the church was a mill, Mr. Strong was the
miller. There was no jollier, dustier, busier, happier miller in all the land
than he. He lived in a little cottage across the road from the mill. His hand
was heavy, but his toll was light, and the mountaineers brought their grain to
him across many weary miles of rocky roads.
The delight of the miller's life was his little daughter,
Aglaia. That was a brave name, truly, for a flaxen-haired toddler; but the
mountaineers love sonorous and stately names. The mother had encountered it
somewhere in a book, and the deed was done. In her babyhood Aglaia herself
repudiated the name, as far as common use went, and persisted in calling
herself "Dums." The miller and his wife often tried to coax from
Aglaia the source of this mysterious name, but without results. At last they
arrived at a theory. In the little garden behind the cottage was a bed of
rhododendrons in which the child took a peculiar delight and interest. It may
have been that she perceived in "Dums" a kinship to the formidable
name of her favourite flowers.
When Aglaia was four years old she and her father used to go
through a little performance in the mill every afternoon, that never failed to
come off, the weather permitting. When supper was ready her mother would brush
her hair and put on a clean apron and send her across to the mill to bring her
father home. When the miller saw her coming in the mill door he would come
forward, all white with the flour dust, and wave his hand and sing an old
miller's song that was familiar in those parts and ran something like this:
"The wheel goes round, The grist is ground, The dusty
miller's merry. He sings all day, His work is play, While thinking of his
dearie."
Then Aglaia would run to him laughing, and call:
"Da-da, come take Dums home;" and the miller would
swing her to his shoulder and march over to supper, singing the miller's song.
Every evening this would take place.
One day, only a week after her fourth birthday, Aglaia
disappeared. When last seen she was plucking wild flowers by the side of the
road in front of the cottage. A little while later her mother went out to see
that she did not stray too faraway, and she was already gone.
Of course every effort was made to find her. The neighbours
gathered and searched the woods and the mountains for miles around. They
dragged every foot of the mill race and the creek for a long distance below the
dam. Never a trace of her did they find. A night or two before there had been a
family of wanderers camped in a grove near by. It was conjectured that they
might have stolen the child; but when their wagon was overtaken and searched
she could not be found.
The miller remained at the mill for nearly two years; and then
his hope of finding her died out. He and his wife moved to the Northwest. In a
few years he was the owner of a modern mill in one of the important milling
cities in that region. Mrs. Strong never recovered from the shock caused by the
loss of Aglaia, and two years after they moved away the miller was left to bear
his sorrow alone.
When Abram Strong became prosperous he paid a visit to Lakelands
and the old mill. The scene was a sad one for him, but he was a strong man, and
always appeared cheery and kindly. It was then that he was inspired to convert
the old mill into a church. Lakelands was too poor to build one; and the still
poorer mountaineers could not assist. There was no place of worship nearer than
twenty miles.
The miller altered the appearance of the mill as little as
possible. The big overshot-wheel was left in its place. The young people who
came to the church used to cut their initials in its soft and slowly decaying
wood. The dam was partly destroyed, and the clear mountain stream rippled
unchecked down its rocky bed. Inside the mill the changes were greater. The
shafts and millstones and belts and pulleys were, of course, all removed. There
were two rows of benches with aisles between, and a little raised platform and
pulpit at one end. On three sides overhead was a gallery containing seats, and
reached by a stairway inside. There was also an organ -- a real pipe organ --
in the gallery, that was the pride of the congregation of the Old Mill Church.
Miss Phoebe Summers was the organist. The Lakelands boys proudly took turns at
pumping it for her at each Sunday's service. The Rev. Mr. Banbridge was the
preacher, and rode down from Squirrel Gap on his old white horse without ever
missing a service. And Abram Strong paid for everything. He paid the preacher
five hundred dollars a year; and Miss Phoebe two hundred dollars.
Thus, in memory of Aglaia, the old mill was converted into a
blessing for the community in which she had once lived. It seemed that the
brief life of the child had brought about more good than the three score years
and ten of many. But Abram Strong set up yet another monument to her memory.
Out from his mills in the Northwest came the "Aglaia"
flour, made from the hardest and finest wheat that could be raised. The country
soon found out that the "Aglaia" flour had two prices. One was the
highest market price, and the other was -- nothing.
Wherever there happened a calamity that left people destitute --
a fire, a flood, a tornado, a strike, or a famine, there would go hurrying a
generous consignment of the "Aglaia" at its "nothing"
price. It was given away cautiously and judiciously, but it was freely given,
and not a penny could the hungry ones pay for it. There got to be a saying that
whenever there was a disastrous fire in the poor districts of a city the fire
chief's buggy reached the scene first, next the "Aglaia" flour wagon,
and then the fire engines.
So this was Abram Strong's other monument to Aglaia. Perhaps to
a poet the theme may seem too utilitarian for beauty; but to some the fancy
will seem sweet and fine that the pure, white, virgin flour, flying on its
mission of love and charity, might be likened to the spirit of the lost child
whose memory it signalized.
There came a year that brought hard times to the Cumberlands.
Grain crops everywhere were light, and there were no local crops at all.
Mountain floods had done much damage to property. Even game in the woods was so
scarce that the hunters brought hardly enough home to keep their folk alive.
Especially about Lakelands was the rigour felt.
As soon as Abram Strong heard of this his messages flew; and the
little narrow-gauge cars began to unload "Aglaia" flour there. The
miller's orders were to store the flour in the gallery of the Old Mill Church;
and that every one who attended the church was to carry home a sack of it.
Two weeks after that Abram Strong came for his yearly visit to
the Eagle House, and became "Father Abram" again.
That season the Eagle House had fewer guests than usual. Among
them was Rose Chester. Miss Chester came to Lakelands from Atlanta, where she
worked in a department store. This was the first vacation outing of her life.
The wife of the store manager had once spent a summer at the Eagle House. She
had taken a fancy to Rose, and had persuaded her to go there for her three
weeks' holiday. The manager's wife gave her a letter to Mrs. Rankin, who gladly
received her in her own charge and care.
Miss Chester was not very strong. She was about twenty, and pale
and delicate from an indoor life. But one week of Lakelands gave her a
brightness and spirit that changed her wonderfully. The time was early
September when the Cumberlands are at their greatest beauty. The mountain
foliage was growing brilliant with autumnal colours; one breathed aerial
champagne, the nights were deliciously cool, causing one to snuggle cosily
under the warm blankets of the Eagle House.
Father Abram and Miss Chester became great friends. The old
miller learned her story from Mrs. Rankin, and his interest went out quickly to
the slender lonely girl who was making her own way in the world.
The mountain country was new to Miss Chester. She had lived many
years in the warm, flat town of Atlanta; and the grandeur and variety of the
Cumberlands delighted her. She was determined to enjoy every moment of her
stay. Her little hoard of savings had been estimated so carefully in connection
with her expenses that she knew almost to a penny what her very small surplus
would be when she returned to work.
Miss Chester was fortunate in gaining Father Abram for a friend
and companion. He knew every road and peak and slope of the mountains near
Lakelands. Through him she became acquainted with the solemn delight of the
shadowy, tilted aisles of the pine forests, the dignity of the bare crags, the
crystal, tonic mornings, the dreamy, golden afternoons full of mysterious
sadness. So her health improved, and her spirits grew light. She had a laugh as
genial and hearty in its feminine way as the famous laugh of Father Abram. Both
of them were natural optimists; and both knew how to present a serene and
cheerful face to the world.
One day Miss Chester learned from one of the guests the history
of Father Abram's lost child. Quickly she hurried away and found the miller
seated on his favourite rustic bench near the chalybeate spring. He was
surprised when his little friend slipped her hand into his, and looked at him
with tears in her eyes.
"Oh, Father Abram," she said, "I'm so sorry! I
didn't know until to-day about your little daughter. You will find her yet some
day -- Oh, I hope you will."
The miller looked down at her with his strong, ready smile.
"Thank you, Miss Rose," he said, in his usual cheery
tones. "But I do not expect to find Aglaia. For a few years I hoped that
she had been stolen by vagrants, and that she still lived; but I have lost that
hope. I believe that she was drowned."
"I can understand," said Miss Chester, "how the
doubt must have made it so hard to bear. And yet you are so cheerful and so
ready to make other people's burdens light. Good Father Abram!"
"Good Miss Rose!" mimicked the miller, smiling.
"Who thinks of others more than you do?"
A whimsical mood seemed to strike Miss Chester.
"Oh, Father Abram," she cried, "wouldn't it be
grand if I should prove to be your daughter? Wouldn't it be romantic? And
wouldn't you like to have me for a daughter?"
"Indeed, I would," said the miller, heartily. "If
Aglaia had lived I could wish for nothing better than for her to have grown up
to be just such a little woman as you are. Maybe you are Aglaia," he
continued, falling in with her playful mood; "can't you remember when we
lived at the mill?"
Miss Chester fell swiftly into serious meditation. Her large
eyes were fixed vaguely upon something in the distance. Father Abram was amused
at her quick return to seriousness. She sat thus for a long time before she
spoke.
"No," she said at length, with a long sigh, "I
can't remember anything at all about a mill. I don't think that I ever saw a
flour mill in my life until I saw your funny little church. And if I were your
little girl I would remember it, wouldn't I? I'm so sorry, Father Abram."
"So am I," said Father Abram, humouring her. "But
if you cannot remember that you are my little girl, Miss Rose, surely you can
recollect being some one else's. You remember your own parents, of
course."
"Oh, yes; I remember them very well -- especially my
father. He wasn't a bit like you, Father Abram. Oh, I was only making believe:
Come, now, you've rested long enough. You promised to show me the pool where
you can see the trout playing, this afternoon. I never saw a trout."
Late one afternoon Father Abram set out for the old mill alone.
He often went to sit and think of the old days when he lived in the cottage
across the road. Time had smoothed away the sharpness of his grief until he no
longer found the memory of those times painful. But whenever Abram Strong sat
in the melancholy September afternoons on the spot where "Dums" used
to run in every day with her yellow curls flying, the smile that Lakelands
always saw upon his face was not there.
The miller made his way slowly up the winding, steep road. The
trees crowded so close to the edge of it that he walked in their shade, with
his hat in his hand. Squirrels ran playfully upon the old rail fence at his
right. Quails were calling to their young broods in the wheat stubble. The low
sun sent a torrent of pale gold up the ravine that opened to the west. Early
September! -- it was within a few days only of the anniversary of Aglaia's
disappearance.
The old overshot-wheel, half covered with mountain ivy, caught
patches of the warm sunlight filtering through the trees. The cottage across
the road was still standing, but it would doubtless go down before the next
winter's mountain blasts. It was overrun with morning glory and wild gourd
vines, and the door hung by one hinge.
Father Abram pushed open the mill door, and entered softly. And
then he stood still, wondering. He heard the sound of some one within, weeping
inconsolably. He looked, and saw Miss Chester sitting in a dim pew, with her
head bowed upon an open letter that her hands held.
Father Abram went to her, and laid one of his strong hands
firmly upon hers. She looked up, breathed his name, and tried to speak further.
"Not yet, Miss Rose," said the miller, kindly.
"Don't try to talk yet. There's nothing as good for you as a nice, quiet
little cry when you are feeling blue."
It seemed that the old miller, who had known so much sorrow
himself, was a magician in driving it away from others. Miss Chester's sobs
grew easier. Presently she took her little plain-bordered handkerchief and
wiped away a drop or two that had fallen from her eyes upon Father Abram's big
hand. Then she looked up and smiled through her tears. Miss Chester could
always smile before her tears had dried, just as Father Abram could smile
through his own grief. In that way the two were very much alike.
The miller asked her no questions; but by and by Miss Chester
began to tell him.
It was the old story that always seems so big and important to
the young, and that brings reminiscent smiles to their elders. Love was the
theme, as may be supposed. There was a young man in Atlanta, full of all
goodness and the graces, who had discovered that Miss Chester also possessed
these qualities above all other people in Atlanta or anywhere else from
Greenland to Patagonia. She showed Father Abram the letter over which she had
been weeping. It was a manly, tender letter, a little superlative and urgent,
after the style of love letters written by young men full of goodness and the
graces. He proposed for Miss Chester's hand in marriage at once. Life, he said,
since her departure for a three-weeks' visit, was not to be endured. He begged
for an immediate answer; and if it were favourable he promised to fly, ignoring
the narrow-gauge railroad, at once to Lakelands.
"And now where does the trouble come in?" asked the
miller when he had read the letter.
"I cannot marry him," said Miss Chester.
"Do you want to marry him?" asked Father Abram.
"Oh, I love him," she answered, "but -- "
Down went her head and she sobbed again.
"Come, Miss Rose," said the miller; "you can give
me your confidence. I do not question you, but I think you can trust me."
"I do trust you," said the girl. "I will tell you
why I must refuse Ralph. I am nobody; I haven't even a name; the name I call
myself is a lie. Ralph is a noble man. I love him with all my heart, but I can
never be his."
"What talk is this?" said Father Abram. "You said
that you remember your parents. Why do you say you have no name? I do not
understand."
"I do remember them," said Miss Chester. "I
remember them too well. My first recollections are of our life somewhere in the
far South. We moved many times to different towns and states. I have picked
cotton, and worked in factories, and have often gone without enough food and
clothes. My mother was sometimes good to me; my father was always cruel, and
beat me. I think they were both idle and unsettled.
"One night when we were living in a little town on a river
near Atlanta they had a great quarrel. It was while they were abusing and
taunting each other that I learned -- oh, Father Abram, I learned that I didn't
even have the right to be -- don't you understand? I had no right even to a
name; I was nobody.
"I ran away that night. I walked to Atlanta and found work.
I gave myself the name of Rose Chester, and have earned my own living ever
since. Now you know why I cannot marry Ralph -- and, oh, I can never tell him
why."
Better than any sympathy, more helpful than pity, was Father
Abram's depreciation of her woes.
"Why, dear, dear! is that all?" he said. "Fie,
fie! I thought something was in the way. If this perfect young man is a man at
all he will not care a pinch of bran for your family tree. Dear Miss Rose, take
my word for it, it is yourself he cares for. Tell him frankly, just as you have
told me, and I'll warrant that he will laugh at your story, and think all the
more of you for it."
"I shall never tell him," said Miss Chester, sadly.
"And I shall never marry him nor any one else. I have not the right."
But they saw a long shadow come bobbing up the sunlit road. And
then came a shorter one bobbing by its side; and presently two strange figures
approached the church. The long shadow was made by Miss Phoebe Summers, the
organist, come to practise. Tommy Teague, aged twelve, was responsible for the
shorter shadow. It was Tommy's day to pump the organ for Miss Phoebe, and his
bare toes proudly spurned the dust of the road.
Miss Phoebe, in her lilac-spray chintz dress, with her accurate
little curls hanging over each ear, courtesied low to Father Abram, and shook
her curls ceremoniously at Miss Chester. Then she and her assistant climbed the
steep stairway to the organ loft.
In the gathering shadows below, Father Abram and Miss Chester
lingered. They were silent; and it is likely that they were busy with their
memories. Miss Chester sat, leaning her head on her hand, with her eyes fixed
far away. Father Abram stood in the next pew, looking thoughtfully out of the
door at the road and the ruined cottage.
Suddenly the scene was transformed for him back almost a score
of years into the past. For, as Tommy pumped away, Miss Phoebe struck a low
bass note on the organ and held it to test the volume of air that it contained.
The church ceased to exist, so far as Father Abram was concerned. The deep,
booming vibration that shook the little frame building was no note from an
organ, but the humming of the mill machinery. He felt sure that the old
overshot wheel was turning; that he was back again, a dusty, merry miller in
the old mountain mill. And now evening was come, and soon would come Aglaia
with flying colours, toddling across the road to take him home to supper.
Father Abram's eyes were fixed upon the broken door of the cottage.
And then came another wonder. In the gallery overhead the sacks
of flour were stacked in long rows. Perhaps a mouse had been at one of them;
anyway the jar of the deep organ note shook down between the cracks of the
gallery floor a stream of flour, covering Father Abram from head to foot with
the white dust. And then the old miller stepped into the aisle, and waved his
arms and began to sing the miller's song:
"The wheel goes round, The grist is ground, The dusty
miller's merry."
-- and then the rest of the miracle happened. Miss Chester was
leaning forward from her pew, as pale as the flour itself, her wide-open eyes
staring at Father Abram like one in a waking dream. When he began the song she
stretched out her arms to him; her lips moved; she called to him in dreamy
tones: "Da-da, come take Dums home!"
Miss Phoebe released the low key of the organ. But her work had
been well done. The note that she struck had beaten down the doors of a closed
memory; and Father Abram held his lost Aglaia close in his arms.
When you visit Lakelands they will tell you more of this story.
They will tell you how the lines of it were afterward traced, and the history
of the miller's daughter revealed after the gipsy wanderers had stolen her on
that September day, attracted by her childish beauty. But you should wait until
you sit comfortably on the shaded porch of the Eagle House, and then you can
have the story at your ease. It seems best that our part of it should close
while Miss Phoebe's deep bass note was yet reverberating softly.
And yet, to my mind, the finest thing of it all happened while
Father Abram and his daughter were walking back to the Eagle House in the long
twilight, almost too glad to speak.
"Father," she said, somewhat timidly and doubtfully,
"have you a great deal of money?"
"A great deal?" said the miller. "Well, that
depends. There is plenty unless you want to buy the moon or something equally
expensive."
"Would it cost very, very much," asked Aglaia, who had
always counted her dimes so carefully, "to send a telegram to
Atlanta?"
"Ah," said Father Abram, with a little sigh, "I
see. You want to ask Ralph to come."
Aglaia looked up at him with a tender smile.
"I want to ask him to wait," she said. "I have
just found my father, and I want it to be just we two for a while. I want to
tell him he will have to wait."