Meg o' the Mountains

Summary

A pocket-myth carved into the mist-hemmed Blue Ridge: Meg, once a sloe-eyed dryad whose hair drank moonlight, now drifts through Carolina hollers as the village’s scapegoated madwoman, her mind fractured by a sin she cannot name. Her boy—elfin, fatherless—skitters like a fox among hostile cabins until Hugh Gregory, taciturn merchant-prince of the cove, restores the child to her arms and unwittingly re-ignites the town’s smoldering gossip. Simon Grant, spurned suitor to the widowed Darthea Westerly, nurses a viper’s resentment; Jake, Meg’s half-feral brother, nurses a blood-oath. One barn-muzzle flash later, a bullet meant for Gregory ricochets through communal conscience, setting vigilante hounds on Jake’s trail. Gregory, inexplicably mute before calumny, becomes the tarred effigy of every unspoken crime until Meg, sanity flickering like a struck match on wet leaves, confronts Simon and remembers the true face above her in the dark. Her deathbed exhalation—part confession, part absolution—unties the noose around two almost-lovers and leaves the settlement to reckon with the brittle cost of its own cruelty.

Synopsis

Meg lived down in Carolina in the shadow of the great Blue Ridge. When she had been a little younger she had been winsomely and strangely beautiful, a gypsy-like elf of the woods and forests. Now, she is mad. The neighbors said cruel things about Meg and turned their faces aside when she passed. And from her little son, they shrank, and turned away as from a thing accursed. When Hugh Gregory opened a store in the little mountain town and fell in love with the widowed Darthea Westerly, he incurred the bitter hatred of Simon Grant, who had long courted Darthea. When Meg's little son ran away, and Gregory found him, and gave him back to his mother, the crazed woman thought she recognized in him the father of her boy. When she returned home she told her brother that she had found her child's father. The brother, infuriated, confronted Gregory, and demanded that he marry his sister. Gregory, naturally, refused indignantly. Simon Grant met Jake, Meg's brother, while he was still half insane with rage over Gregory's refusal, and found him in a willing mood to listen to Simon's scheme. The next day, as Gregory and the colonel were riding together, Jake, egged on by Simon, fired at them from a barn. Gregory proved himself a good Samaritan by saving Jake from the infuriated mob which thirsted for his life. Meanwhile. Darthea, who had fallen in love with Gregory, learned of Meg's terrible accusation against him. The story naturally changed her feelings toward the man, particularly when Gregory, realizing the futility of argument, refused to say a word in his own defense. Then suddenly Meg came upon Simon Grant, and with a miraculous flash of understanding, remembered that he, not Gregory, was the man. But with the passing of her madness, Meg's life fluttered and went out like a candle in the wind, but not before she had told Gregory and Darthea the truth.