The ReCreation of Brian Kent

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THE RE-CREATION OF BRIAN KENT


By Harold Bell Wright



DEAR AUNTIE SUE:

I have wondered many times, while writing this simple story of life and
love, if you would ever forgive me for putting you in a book. I hope you
will, because if you do not, I shall be heartbroken, and you wouldn't
want me that way, would you, Auntie Sue?

I fancy I can hear you say: "But, Harold, how COULD you! You know I
never did the things you have made me do in your story. You know I never
lived in a little log house by the river in the Ozark Mountains! What in
the world will people think!"

Well, to tell the truth, dear, I don't care so very much what people
think if only they will love you; and that they are sure to do,
because,--well, just because--You must remember, too, that you will
be eighty-seven years old the eighteenth of next November, and it is
therefore quite time that someone put you in a book.

And, after all, Auntie Sue, are you very sure that you have never lived
in a little log house by the river,--are you very sure, Auntie Sue?

Forgive my impertinence, as you have always forgiven me everything;
and love me just the same, because I have written only in love of the
dearest Auntie Sue in the world!

Signature [Harold]

The Glenwood Mission Inn, Riverside, California, April 30, 1919.



"And see the rivers, how they run
Through woods and meads, in shade and sun,
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,--
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep
Like human life to endless sleep!"

John Dyer--"Grongar Hill."



CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I. A REMARKABLE WOMAN

II. THE MAN IN THE DARK

III. A MISSING LETTER

IV. THE WILL OF THE RIVER

V. AUNTIE SUE RECOGNIZES A GENTLEMAN

VI. IN THE LOG HOUSE BY THE RIVER

VII. OFFICERS OF THE LAW

VIII. THAT WHICH IS GREATER THAN THE LAW

IX. AUNTIE SUE'S PROPOSITION

X. BRIAN KENT DECIDES

XI. RE-CREATION

XII. AUNTIE SUE TAKES A CHANCE

XIII. JUDY TO THE RESCUE

XIV. BETTY JO CONSIDERS

XV. A MATTER OF BUSINESS

XVI. THE SECRET OF AUNTIE SUE'S LIFE

XVII. AN AWKWARD SITUATION

XVIII. BETTY JO FACES HERSELF

XIX. JUDY'S CONFESSION

XX. BRIAN AND BETTY JO KEEP HOUSE

XXI. THE WOMAN AT THE WINDOW

XXII. AT THE EMPIRE CONSOLIDATED SAVINGS BANK

XXIII. IN THE ELBOW ROCK RAPIDS

XXIV. JUDY'S RETURN

XXV. THE RIVER



ILLUSTRATIONS


BETTY JO

"LOOK, JUDY! LOOK!"

AUNTIE SUE SAID, SOFTLY, "SHE DID NOT UNDERSTAND, BRIAN."

...SHE MADE THE LITTLE BOOK OF PAINFUL MEMORIES A BOOK OF JOYOUS
PROMISE.




THE RE-CREATION OF BRIAN KENT



CHAPTER I.

A REMARKABLE WOMAN.


I remember as well as though it were yesterday the first time I met
Auntie Sue.

It happened during my first roaming visit to the Ozarks, when I had
wandered by chance, one day, into the Elbow Rock neighborhood. Twenty
years it was, at least, before the time of this story. She was standing
in the door of her little schoolhouse, the ruins of which you may still
see, halfway up the long hill from the log house by the river, where the
most of this story was lived.

It was that season of the year when the gold and brown of our Ozark
Hills is overlaid with a filmy veil of delicate blue haze and the world
is hushed with the solemn sweetness of the passing of the summer. And as
the old gentlewoman stood there in the open door of that rustic temple
of learning, with the deep-shadowed, wooded hillside in the background,
and, in front, the rude clearing with its crooked rail fence along which
the scarlet sumac flamed, I thought,--as I still think, after all these
years,--that I had never before seen such a woman.

Fifty years had gone into the making of that sterling character which
was builded upon a foundation of many generations of noble ancestors.
Without home or children of her own, the life strength of her splendid
womanhood had been given to the teaching of boys and girls. An old-maid
schoolteacher? Yes,--if you will. But, as I saw her standing there that
day,--tall and slender, dressed in a simple gown that was fitting to her
work,--there was a queenly dignity, a stately sweetness, in her bearing
that made me feel, somehow, as if I had come unexpectedly into the
presence of royalty. Not the royalty of caste and court and station with
their glittering pretenses of superiority and their superficial claims
to distinction,--I do not mean that; I mean that true royalty which
needs no caste or court or station but makes itself felt because it IS.

She did not notice me at first, for the noise of the children at play in
the yard covered the sound of my approach, and she was looking far, far
away, over the river which lay below at the foot of the hill; over the
forest-clad mountains in the glory of their brown and gold; over the
vast sweep of the tree-crowned Ozark ridges that receded wave after wave
into the blue haze until, in the vastness of the distant sky, they were
lost. And something made me know that, in the moment's respite from her
task, the woman was looking even beyond the sky itself.

Her profile, clean-chiselled, but daintily formed, was beautiful in its
gentle strength. Her hair was soft and silvery like the gray mist of the
river in the morning. Then she turned to greet me, and I saw her eyes.
Boy that I was then, and not given overmuch to serious thought, I knew
that the high, unwavering purpose, the loving sympathy, and tender
understanding that shone in the calm depth of those eyes could belong
only to one who habitually looks unafraid beyond all earthly scenes.
Only those who have learned thus to look beyond the material horizon of
our little day have that beautiful inner light which shone in the eyes
of Auntie Sue--the teacher of a backwoods school.

Auntie Sue had come to the Elbow Rock neighborhood the summer preceding
that fall when I first met her. She had grown too old, she said, with
her delightful little laugh, to be of much use in the larger schools of
the more thickly populated sections of the country. But she was still
far too young, she stoutly maintained, to be altogether useless.

Tom Warden, who lived just over the ridge from the schoolhouse, and
who was blessed with the largest wife, the largest family, and the most
pretentious farm in the county, had kinsfolk somewhere in Illinois.
Through these relatives of the Ozark farmer Miss Susan Wakefield had
learned of the needs of the Elbow Rock school, and so, finally, had
come into the hills. It was the influential Tom who secured for her the
modest position. It was the motherly Mrs. Tom who made her at home in
the Warden household. It was the Warden boys and girls who first called
her "Auntie Sue." But it was Auntie Sue herself who won so large a place
in the hearts of the simple mountain folk of the district that she
held her position year after year, until she finally gave up teaching
altogether.

Not one of her Ozark friends ever came to know in detail the history of
this remarkable woman's life. It was known in a general way that she
was born in Connecticut; that she had a brother somewhere in some
South-American country; that two other brothers had been killed in the
Civil War; that she had taught in the lower and intermediate grades of
public schools in various places all the years of her womanhood. Also,
it was known that she had never married.

"And that," said Uncle Lige Potter, voicing the unanimous opinion,
of the countryside, "is a doggone funny thing and plumb unnatural,
considerin' the kind of woman she is."

To which Lem Jordan,--who was then living with his fourth wife, and
might therefore be held to speak with a degree of authority,--added:
"Hit sure is a dad burned shame, an' a plumb disgrace to the men of this
here country, when you come to look at the sort of wimmen most of 'em
are a marryin' most of the time."

Another matter of universal and never-failing interest to the mountain
folk was the unprecedented number of letters that Auntie Sue received
and wrote. That some of these letters written by their backwoods teacher
were addressed to men and women of such prominence in the world that
their names were known even to that remote Ozark district was a source
of no little pride to Auntie Sue's immediate neighbors, and served to
mark her in their eyes with no small distinction.

It was during the fourth year of her life amid the scenes of this
story,--as I recall time,--that Auntie Sue invested the small savings
of her working years in the little log house by the river and the eighty
acres of land known as the "Old Bill Wilson place."

The house was a substantial building of three rooms, a lean-to kitchen,
and a porch overlooking the river. The log barn, with "Prince," a gentle
old horse, and "Bess," a mild-mannered, brindle cow, completed the
modest establishment. About thirty acres of the land were cleared and
under cultivation of a sort. The remaining acreage was in timber.
The price, under the kindly and expert supervision of Tom Warden, was
fifteen dollars an acre. But Auntie Sue always laughingly insisted that
she really paid fifty cents an acre for the land and fourteen dollars
and a half an acre for the sunsets.

The tillable land, except for the garden, she "let out on shares,"
always under the friendly guardianship of neighbor Tom; while Tom's boys
cared for the little garden in season, and saw to it that the woodpile
was always ample and ready for the stove. And, in addition to these
fixed and regular homely services, there were many offerings of helpful
hands whenever other needs arose; for, as time passed, there came to be
in all the Elbow Rock district scarce a man, young or old, who did not
now and then honor himself by doing some little job for Auntie Sue;
while the women and girls, in the same neighborly spirit, brought from
their own humble households many tokens of their loving thoughtfulness.
And never did one visit that little log house by the river without
the consciousness of something received from the silvery-haired old
teacher--a something intangible, perhaps, which they could not have
expressed in words, but which, nevertheless, enriched the lives of
those simple mountain people with a very real joy and a very tangible
happiness.

For six years, Auntie Sue continued teaching the Elbow Rock
school;--climbing the hill in the morning from her log house by the
river to the cabin schoolhouse in the clearing on the mountain-side
above; returning in the late afternoon, when her day's work was over,
down the winding road to her little home, there to watch, from the porch
that overlooked the river, the sunset in the evening. And every year the
daily climb grew a little harder; the days of work grew a little longer;
she went down the hill in the afternoon a little slower. And every year
the sunsets were to her eyes more beautiful; the evening skies to her
understanding glowed with richer meaning; the twilight hours filled her
heart with a deeper peace.

And so, at last, her teaching days were over; that is, she taught no
more in the log schoolhouse in the clearing on the mountain-side. But
in her little home beside the river she continued her work; not from
text-books, indeed, but as all such souls must continue to teach, until
the sun sets for the last time upon their mortal days.

Work-worn, toil-hardened mountaineer mothers, whose narrow world denied
them so many of the finer thoughts and things, came to counsel with
this childless woman, and to learn from her a little of the art of
contentment and happiness. Strong men, of rude dress and speech, whose
lives were as rough as the hills in which they were reared, and whose
thoughts were often as crude as their half-savage and sometimes lawless
customs, came to sit at the feet of this gentle one, who received them
all with such kindly interest and instinctive understanding. And young
men and girls came, drawn by the magic that was hers, to confide in
this woman who listened with such rare tact and loving sympathy to their
troubles and their dreams, and who, in the deepest things of their young
lives, was mother to them all.

Nor were the mountain folk her only disciples. Always there were the
letters she continued to write, addressed to almost every corner of
the land. And every year there would come, for a week or a month, at
different times during the summer, men and women from the great world of
larger affairs who had need of the strength and courage and patience and
hope they never failed to find in that little log house by the river.
And so, in time, it came to be known that those letters written by
Auntie Sue went to men and women who, in their childhood school days,
had received from her their first lessons in writing; and that her
visitors, many of them distinguished in the world of railroads and
cities, were of that large circle of busy souls who had never ceased to
be her pupils.

Thus it came that the garden was made a little larger, and two rooms
were added to the house, with other modest improvements, to accommodate
Auntie Sue's grown-up boys and girls when they came to visit her. But
never was there a hired servant, so that her guests must do their own
household tasks, because, Auntie Sue said, that was good for them and
mostly what they needed.

It should also be said here that among her many pupils who lived beyond
the sky-line of the far, blue hills, not one knew more of the
real secret of Auntie Sue's life and character than did the Ozark
mountaineers of the Elbow Rock district, among whom she had chosen to
pass the evening of her day.

Then came one who learned the secret. He learned--but that is my story.
I must not tell the secret here.



CHAPTER II.

THE MAN IN THE DARK.


A man stood at a window, looking out into the night. There was no light
in the room. The stars were hidden behind a thick curtain of sullen
clouds.

The house was a wretchedly constructed, long-neglected building of
a type common to those old river towns that in their many years of
uselessness have lost all civic pride, and in their own resultant
squalor and filth have buried their self-respect. A dingy, scarcely
legible sign over the treacherous board walk, in front, by the sickly
light of a smoke-grimed kerosene lantern, announced that the place was a
hotel.

Dark as it was, the man at the window could see the river. The trees
that lined the bank opposite the town were mere ghostly shadows against
the gloomy masses of the low hills that rose from the water's edge,
indistinct, mysterious, and unreal, into the threatening sky. The higher
mountains that reared their crests beyond the hills were invisible. The
stream itself swept sullenly through the night,--a resistless flood of
dismal power, as if, turbid with wrecked souls, with the lost hopes and
ruined dreams of men, it was fit only to bear vessels freighted with
sorrow, misfortune, and despair.

The manner of the man at the window was as if some woeful spirit of the
melancholy scene were calling him. With head bowed, and face turned a
little to one side, he listened intently as one listens to voices that
are muffled and indistinct. He pressed his face close to the glass, and
with straining eyes tried to see more clearly the ghostly trees, the
sombre hills, and the gloomy river. Three times he turned from the
window to pace to and fro in the darkened room, and every time his steps
brought him again to the casement, as if in obedience to some insistent
voice that summoned him. The fourth time, he turned from the window more
quickly, with a gesture of assenting decision.

The crackling snap of a match broke the dead stillness. The sudden flare
of light stabbed the darkness. As he applied the tiny, wavering flame
to the wick of a lamp that stood on the cheap, old-fashioned bureau, the
man's hand shook until the chimney rattled against the wire standards of
the burner. Turning quickly from the lighted lamp, the man sprang again
to the window to jerk down the tattered, old shade. Facing about, he
stood with his back to the wall, searching the room with wide, fearful
eyes. His fists were clenched. His chest rose and fell heavily with his
labored breathing. His face worked with emotion. With trembling limbs
and twitching muscles, he crouched like some desperate creature at bay.

But, save for the wretched man himself, there was in that shabby,
dingy-papered, dirty-carpeted, poorly furnished apartment no living
thing.

Suddenly, the man laughed;--and it was the reckless, despairing laughter
of a soul that feels itself slipping over the brink of an abyss.

With hurried step and outstretched hands, he crossed the room to snatch
a bottle of whisky from its place beside the lamp on the bureau. With
trembling eagerness, he poured a water tumbler half-full of the red
liquor. As one dying of thirst, he drank. Drawing a deep breath, and
shaking his head with a wry smile, he spoke in hoarse confidence to the
image of himself in the dingy mirror: "They nearly had me, that time."
Again, he poured, and drank.

The whisky steadied him for the moment, and with bottle and glass still
in hand, he regarded himself in the mirror with critical interest.

Had he stood erect, with the vigor that should have been his by right of
his years, the man would have measured just short of six feet; but his
shoulders--naturally well set--sagged with the weariness of excessive
physical indulgence; while the sunken chest, the emaciated limbs, and
the dejected posture of his misused body made him in appearance, at
least, a wretched weakling. His clothing--of good material and well
tailored--was disgustingly soiled and neglected;--the shoes thickly
coated with dried mud, and the once-white shirt, slovenly unfastened at
the throat, without collar or tie. The face which looked back from the
mirror to the man was, without question, the countenance of a gentleman;
but the broad forehead under the unkempt red-brown hair was furrowed
with anxiety; the unshaven cheeks were lined and sunken; the finely
shaped, sensitive mouth drooped with nervous weakness; and the blue,
well-placed eyes were bloodshot and glittering with the light of
near-insanity.

The poor creature looked at the hideous image of his ruined self as
if fascinated with the horror of that which had been somehow wrought.
Slowly, as one in a trance, he went closer, and, without moving his gaze
from the mirror, placed the bottle and tumbler upon the bureau. As if
compelled by those burning eyes that stared so fixedly at him, he leaned
forward still closer to the glass. Then, as he looked, the distorted
features twitched and worked grotesquely with uncontrollable emotions,
while the quivering lips formed words that were not even whispered. With
trembling fingers he felt the unshaven cheeks and touched the unkempt
hair questioningly. Suddenly, as if to shut out the horror of that which
he saw in the mirror, the man hid his face in his hands, and with a
sobbing, inarticulate cry sank to the floor.

Silently, with pitiless force, the river swept onward through the night,
following its ordained way to the mighty sea.

As if summoned again by some dark spirit that brooded over the sombre,
rushing flood, the man rose heavily to his feet. His face turned once
more toward the window. A moment he stood there, listening, listening;
then wheeling back to the whisky bottle and the glass on the bureau, he
quickly poured, and drank again.

Nodding his head in the manner of one reaching a conclusion, he looked
slowly about the room, while a frightful grin of hopeless, despairing
triumph twisted his features, and his lips moved as if he breathed
reckless defiance to an invisible ghostly company.

Moving, now, with a decision and purpose that suggested a native
strength of character, the man quickly packed a suit-case with various
articles of clothing from the bureau drawers and the closet. He was in
the act of closing the suit-case when he stopped suddenly, and, with
a shrug of his shoulders, turned away. Then, as if struck by another
thought, he stooped again over his baggage, and drew forth a fresh,
untouched bottle of whisky.

"I guess you are the only baggage I'll need where I am going," he said,
whimsically; and, leaving the open suit-case where it lay, he crossed
the room, and extinguished the light. Cautiously, he unlocked and opened
the door. For a moment, he stood listening. Then, with the bottle hidden
under his coat, he stole softly from the room.

A few minutes later, the man stood out there in the night, on the bank
of the river. Behind him the outlines of the scattered houses that made
the little town were lost against the dusk of the hillside. From the
ghostly tree-shadows that marked the opposite bank, the solemn hills
rose out of the deeper darkness of the lowlands that edged the stream
in sombre mystery. There was no break in the heavy clouds to permit the
gleam of a friendly star. There was no sound save the soft swish of the
water against the bank where he stood, the chirping of a bird in the
near-by willows, and the occasional splash of a leaping fish or water
animal. But to the man there was a feeling of sound. To the lonely human
wreck standing there in the darkness, the river called--called with
fearful, insistent power.

From under the black wall of the night the dreadful flood swept out of
the Somewhere of its beginning. Past the man the river poured its mighty
strength with resistless, smoothly flowing, terrible force. Into the
darkness it swept on its awful way to the Nowhere of its ending. For
uncounted ages, the river had poured itself thus between those walls of
hills. For untold ages to come, until the end of time itself, the stream
would continue to pour its strength past that spot where the man stood.

Out of the night, the voice of the river had called to the man, as he
stood at the window of his darkened room. And the man had come, now, to
answer the call. Cautiously, he went down the bank toward the edge of
the dark, swirling water. His purpose was unmistakable. Nor was there
any hint of faltering, now, in his manner. He had reached his decision.
He knew what he had come to do.

The man's feet were feeling the mud at the margin of the stream when his
legs touched something, and a low, rattling sound startled him. Then
he remembered. A skiff was moored there, and he had brushed against the
chain that led from the bow of the boat to the stump of a willow higher
up on the bank. The man had seen the skiff,--a rude, flat-bottomed
little craft, known to the Ozark natives as a John-boat,--just before
sunset that evening. But there had been no boat in his thoughts when he
had come to answer the call of the river, and in the preoccupation of
his mind, as he stood there in the night beside the stream, he had not
noticed it, as it lay so nearly invisible in the darkness. Mechanically,
he stooped to feel the chain with his free hand. A moment later, he had
placed his bottle of whisky carefully in the boat, and was loosing the
chain painter from the willow stump.

"Why not?" he said to himself. "It will be easier in midstream,--and
more certain."

Carefully, so that no sound should break the stillness, he stowed the
chain in the bow, and then worked the skiff around until it pointed out
into the stream. Then, with his hands grasping the sides of the little
craft, and the weight of his body on one knee in the stern, he pushed
vigorously with his free foot against the bank and so was carried well
out from the shore. As the boat lost its momentum, the strong current
caught it and whirled it away down the river.

Groping in the darkness, the man found his bottle of whisky, and working
the cork out with his pocketknife, drank long and deep.

Already, save for a single light, the town was lost in the night. As
the man watched that red spot on the black wall, the stream swung
his drifting boat around a bend, and the light vanished. The dreadful
mystery of the river drew close. The world of men was far, very far
away. Centuries ago, the man had faced himself in the mirror, and had
obeyed the voice that summoned him into the darkness. In fancy, now, he
saw his empty boat swept on and on. Through what varied scenes would it
drift? To what port would the mysterious will of the river carry it? To
what end would it at last come in its helplessness?

And the man himself,--the human soul-craft,--what of him? As he had
pushed his material boat out into the stream to drift, unguided and
helpless, so, presently, he would push himself out from the shore of
all that men call life. Through what scenes would he drift? To what port
would the will of an awful invisible stream carry him? To what end would
he finally come, in his helplessness?

Again the man drank--and again.

And then, with face upturned to the leaden clouds, he laughed
aloud--laughed until the ghostly shores gave back his laughter, and the
voices of the night were hushed and still.

The laughter ended with a wild, reckless, defiant yell.

Springing to his feet in the drifting boat, the man shook his clenched
fist at the darkness, and with insane fury cursed the life he had left
behind.