XVIIIEvolutionary
INTENT upon the swift purchase of another power-plant, Tregarvon caught an afternoon freight on the branch railroad, made a late train on the main line, and was obliged to spend the Sunday in Chattanooga, with little to console him save the thought that he would be on hand to transact business with the machinery merchants bright and early Monday morning.
It was a sad Sunday, weatherwise, with a chill autumn rain sweeping the streets of the battle-field city, and the crest of Lookout Mountain veiled in cloud. Tregarvon had made a few business acquaintances in town on previous purchasing expeditions, but there were no familiar faces in the hotel; nothing to lighten the monotony of a dreary day of enforced idleness.
In such circumstances impatience becomes a rat to gnaw the vitals. The suspense, the tormenting uncertainty which he had left behind him in the unfinished test-hole on the summit of Mount Pisgah, would have been hard to endure even in a whirlwind of work; and upon a daywhen he could neither work nor play he was in despair.
After the noon meal, which figured as “Luncheon” on the hotel bill of fare, and was, in point of fact, a heavy and dispiriting midday dinner, he braved the elements and went in a closed sight-seeing car to the Chickamauga battle-field. The drive proved to be a damp test of endurance, and he brought nothing back from it better than a memory of rain-sodden fields and forest; of endless colonnades of gray, ghostly monuments, a majority of them assuring the beholder in letters of granite that here the Ohio troops fought nobly; of parkings of ancient cannon, the guns pointing in so many different directions that no human being could guess which way the battle had run; of the droning singsong of the chauffeur pouring his explanation patter into the reversed megaphone for the benefit of his few fares.
The return to the hotel was merely a change from outdoor dreariness to indoor. The lobby was a gathering-ground for a scattering of disgruntled tourists, who had used their battle-field stop-over privilege only to find themselves marooned by the weather. Tregarvon smoked in solitary misery for what remained of the afternoon, and past the evening meal, begged some ofthe hotel stationery, and wrote a letter to Elizabeth Wardwell.
“It is a sin and a shame to write you after such a day as I’ve been wearing out here,” he began, “but you know my weakness for afflicting other people—for unloading my woes upon the nearest pair of sympathetic shoulders. Your shoulders have always been that; and sometimes I wonder that you can still stand up straight and queenly, as you do, after having carried so many of my burdens.” Here followed an account of the events of the exciting Saturday forenoon, and he tried, as well as the written words would serve, to transmit some picture of the boiler explosion, tagged with an attempt to portray the tenterhooks of suspense upon which the disaster had impaled him.
“You see where it leaves me,” he went on; “still in the air as to whether the Ocoee is something or nothing. For a few little minutes, after the drill had passed the eighteen-inch dead-line, I saw rose-colored, saw my chance to provide for the home-folks, and to ignore forever and a day, the Uncle Byrd legacy. But now I am no better assured than I was before we began drilling; and, to make it more interesting, Hartridge happened along after the explosion—the whole collegeturned out and came tramping over through the wood to see what had broken loose—and he says the sandstone dike is still under us. We shan’t know positively, of course, until we can get a new engine, and haul it by inches up the mountain, and drag it into place and set it going; and by that time I shall be a raving maniac.
“In all this new trouble, Poictiers has been all that you’d expect him to be; a friend to tie to. He doesn’t lend me money; he simply tosses me his purse. I have his last dividend check in my pocket at this present moment, and I’m to cash it to-morrow morning to pay for the new engine. I suppose I needn’t say that I should have been out of the fight down here long ago if he hadn’t joined me and given me a checking account. He is pure gold, Elizabeth; and yet——
“The gap represents a good half-hour, my dear cousin, in which I have been sitting here at this dinky little table in the hotel writing-room, trying to screw my courage to the sticking-place. What I have to tell you concerns four people, and you are one of the four. I’ve written you a lot about Richardia Birrell—she’s another one of the four—in the past few weeks, and I havebeen assuring myself all along that I have been telling you all there was to tell.
“That isn’t strictly true, Elizabeth. There was a thing that I wouldn’t admit, even to myself; but I had to admit it three days ago when Poictiers told me that he had asked Richardia to be his wife. I knew then what Richardia had done to me, and for a bad half-hour I—well, I’m not going into details; it is enough to say that I’m not fit to be your door-mat, Betha, dear—nor Poictiers Carfax’s, for that matter.
“What can I say for myself more than I have said a hundred times in the past? Nothing, I imagine; I’m simply hopeless where the eternal feminine is concerned. You’ve known it ever since we went to school together, and you’ve promised to marry me in spite of the knowledge. I shall not be a faithless husband, my dear—I know I shan’t be that; and this last and most humiliating lapse could never have amounted to anything, anyway, even if Poictiers had not slammed the door in my face. But it is your right to know about it; to know that for some few days or hours or minutes, as the case may be, I was daffy, foolish, a simpleton from the idiotic wards, with a slant toward depravity.
“You see now what an incredible friend Poictiersis. I’ve never thought of him as a marrying man, and I could swear, even now, that he isn’t in love with Richardia—though I don’t quite see how any free man with live blood in him could help being. Let that go: Poictiers has killed my temptation for me. He has asked Richardia to marry him, and he and she are good enough for each other—which is the highest praise I can offer to either. Poictiers will get a wife who could make any man happy; and Richardia will be able to restore the Birrell fortunes, which, as you have doubtless gathered from my earlier letters, are pretty sadly in need of a rich marriage.
“This leaves us two to face things as they are as best we can, Elizabeth. After what I have written down in this letter, can you still care enough for me, and for the conventions and the wishes of the families on both sides, to—not to forgive me; I’m not going to ask that—but to take me just as I am, and let things go on as before? I shan’t blame you in the least if you can’t, you know; but if it must come to a break between us, you must let me be the one to make the break. By all right and reason the Uncle Byrd legacy is yours; and whatever happens, I promise you I shall never touch a penny of it.
“Good night, my dear. My love for you is precisely the same as it has always been. The madness which Richardia Birrell was stirring up in me was something entirely different, and no doubt everybody would say it was worlds less worthy.”
Tregarvon had a bad habit of not reading his letters after they were written and signed, and he did not break the habit now. Folding, sealing, and addressing his confession, he went to the lobby to mail it. Thanks to the rainy Sunday, the hotel mail-box was stuffed to repletion with week-end missives, and Tregarvon, after trying in vain to wedge his own through the slit, exemplified his careless habit by leaving it on top of the box with the newspapers.
Later in the evening there were other additions made to the overflow newspaper mail, and some one, still more careless than the Philadelphian, displaced the letter, which fell, unnoted, to the floor. Here, during the small hours, one of the sweepers found it; and since some muddy boot heel had defaced the postage-stamp, and all but obliterated the address, the sweeper passed his find on to the night clerk. At this point another phase of Tregarvon’s heedlessness came to the fore. He had neglected to put his own name andaddress in the corner of the envelope, hence the clerk had no means of identifying the sender. Being a young man of resource, he enclosed the letter, just as it was, in a larger envelope, copying, or trying to copy, the address. But the marring boot heel had done its work too thoroughly. The Philadelphia street number was entirely effaced; and “Miss Elizabeth Wardwell” became, in the night clerk’s transcription, “Miss Eliza Bell Woodwell.”
Tregarvon was astir early on the Monday morning, was fortunate enough to be able to purchase the new power-plant without waiting to have it shipped in from some Northern supply house, hustled busily until he had seen his purchase entrained for Coalville, and took the afternoon local for his return. As often happened, the local was late, and he found Carfax waiting dinner for him when he dropped off on the office-building side of the train at the home station.
Over Uncle William’s chicken gumbo the talk ran easily upon the business affair. Tregarvon had driven a rather good bargain on the new engine, and was inclined to expatiate upon it. In reality, however, he was trying to postpone the moment when Carfax should begin to talk of the more intimate things. That moment camewith the pipe-filling before the cheerful wood-fire, after Uncle William had cleared the table and disappeared.
“After you left, Saturday, I took Hartridge’s hint and went into the explosion details a little deeper,” said Carfax. “Rucker stayed with me and lent me his mechanical wit.”
“What is the verdict?”
“It is the Scotch verdict: ‘Not proven,’” was the thoughtful rejoinder. “Knowing, as we do, that at least one attempt was made to dynamite the boiler, I may have been oversuspicious. In such circumstances the judicial frame of mind is hard to attain. Rucker swears he left the furnace-door open when we stopped at noon. When we found the front sheet of the boiler three or four hundred yards away in the woods, the door was shut and latched.”
“That proves nothing,” Tregarvon said.
“No; anything might happen to a door, or to anything else, in a hurry trip of that kind. On the other hand, it would have been a very easy matter for some one to have sneaked up on the farther side of the engine while we were eating. And Rucker insists that only the closed door could have accounted for the sudden rise in pressure which caused the explosion.”
“We’ll never know,” was Tregarvon’s comment. “But why Hartridge should shield our obstacle-thrower at one time, and try to set us on to him at another, is beyond me.”
Carfax smiled soberly. “Mr. William W. Hartridge appears to be a unique. I had the pleasure of meeting him again, socially, no longer ago than yesterday.”
“You spent the Sunday at Highmount?”
“No; I did better than that. Wilmerding was down from Whitlow, and I found that he knows Judge Birrell familiarly and well. I took my courage in my hand, borrowed your beast of a car, and Wilmerding and I drove to Westwood House in the rain.”
“So you have met Richardia’s father?”
“I have; and a finer old citizen doesn’t exist. That suspicion of yours that he may be inspiring the fight on us is all bosh. He isn’t at all the kind of man to knife an enemy in the dark. He is a poem on the Old South, Vance; a whole heart-breaking epic. His manners would put a Chesterfield to shame; and you can see at once where Richardia gets her keen little mind. The judge was disposed to place me in the Parker class at first—quite naturally; I could see that plainly enough—that, and his prejudice againstall things Northern. But I was there as the friend of his friend Wilmerding, and that settled it. A Bedouin chief couldn’t have been more hospitable.”
“You told him you were going to marry Richardia?”
“Oh, dear, no; you mustn’t hurry things that way!” laughed the golden one. “You simplycan’thurry them, you know, with a man like Judge Birrell. But I flatter myself that I made good in the try-out. Hartridge was there, with Miss Farron—though I can’t imagine how they got over from Highmount in the rain—so there was quite a house-party of us. At dinner-time it was raining harder than ever, and the judge wouldn’t hear to our going, though I had the top up on the car, and, of course, offered to take Hartridge and Miss Farron back to the college. So we all stayed to dinner. That dinner would have broken your heart, Vance.”
“Why?”
“Because it showed in a thousand little ways what the family has been, and what it has now come to. The china was Sèvres, but much of it was chipped and broken, and hardly any two pieces were alike. The table-cloth had once been somebody’s pride, but it had been laundered anddarned until it was like a piece of old lace. The silver was evidently an heirloom, and it was so worn with much polishing that you could scarcely make out the engraving. We had chicken—I imagine nobody in the South ever gets so poor that he can’t have chicken—but the luxuries were conspicuous by their absence. Do you know what I think, Vance? I believe that the Westwood House cash assets are measured exactly by the size of Richardia’s Highmount salary.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Tregarvon, keenly sympathetic. “Richardia has given me to understand that there is a lot of mountain land, which is practically valueless now that the tan-bark timber has all been cut off; but there is nothing to bring an income.”
“Wilmerding has told me something of the judge’s involvement with the original Ocoee promoters, and the struggle he made to keep his name good after he and his friends had been frozen out,” Carfax resumed. “He had recommended the scheme to a good many others, and when the smash came, he stripped himself bare to make good the losses of his friends, withholding nothing but a little money he had put aside for Richardia’s musical education.”
Tregarvon nodded. “That explains somethingthat Richardia said to me one time when we were talking about people marrying and settling down; she said, in that perfectly straightforward way of hers, that she would like to marry, but that she was in debt, and couldn’t marry until after she had earned enough money to pay herself out.”
“She has said something of the same nature to me,” Carfax admitted. “But it seems that there were other troubles besides the property losses. The judge had a son, a year or so older than Richardia. He was a school-boy at the time of the big smash, but was old enough, Wilmerding says, to be hot-headed and a bit wild and ungovernable. Parker, the promoter, was foolish enough to show up here again, after thedébâcle; and this boy actually tried to kill him; emptied a pistol at him, winged him with one of the shots, and then ran away. He has never been heard from since.”
“That is all new to me,” Tregarvon commented. “I didn’t know Richardia had a brother. She has never spoken of him to me.”
“Wilmerding says nobody ever speaks of him,” Carfax went on. “Parker was vindictive, and pushed the assault case. A grand jury found a true bill against young Birrell, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He couldn’tbe found; has never been found. His son’s disappearance, and the struggle to keep faith with his friends, made the judge what he is now, a proud, broken-spirited old hermit who is carrying the heaviest burden a father can bear—the disgrace of a son.”
“Disgrace?” echoed Tregarvon. “It’s hardly that, is it? Haven’t we been taught that it is a part of the Southern code that a son should shoot his father’s betrayer?”
“Oh, yes; that part of it was all right. The disgrace was in showing the white feather by running away; in not staying to face the consequences. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose there would have been any consequences. Any jury that could have been impanelled in this vicinity at that particular time would have acquitted the boy. The cowardly streak is what broke the judge’s heart.”
“This story of the boy opens up a bit of new ground,” said Tregarvon musingly. “I wonder if Richardia doesn’t know where he is? She has given me the impression, more than once, that she has a deep-buried trouble of some sort—a trouble that she never shares with anybody. Haven’t you had the same notion?”
Carfax shook his head.
“She doesn’t need to go that far afield to find her troubles. The wrecked family fortunes, and a broken old man to shield and comfort and care for on a music teacher’s wages, are enough to fill all the requirements, I should imagine.”
“Surely. But as to the money hardship ... you’ll be able to change all that, Poictiers.”
Carfax rose, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and slowly refilled it.
“You have come to see things in their right light, at last, have you?” he inquired at the end of the little interval of silence.
“Partly. There is only one light in which they can be seen. I had no shadow of right to fall in love with Richardia.”
“Wait a minute,” said Carfax in his gentlest tone. “Are you sure it was real? You know, you have had so many of these—er—these little erotic explosions in the past——”
“I know,” was the humble admission. “But this was different. You may say that the difference lay in the fact that it was forbidden, and point me to the moral twist—as old as the race—that makes the forbidden thing figure as the one thing altogether desirable. Doubtless I have the twist, in common with other men: but the difference remains.”
“You have written to Elizabeth?”
“Yes; I wrote last night at the hotel in Chattanooga.”
“I hope you said all you ought to say.”
“I tried conscientiously to do just that, Poictiers. I’ll confess now that I didn’t begin to see how dastardly it would look when it was written out in black on white. But I didn’t spare myself in the least.”
“What kind of an answer do you expect?” Carfax had sat down again and his face was turned away.
“Honestly, I don’t know. Every word that I have ever told you about the lack of sentiment between us is true: and yet ... well, Elizabeth is a woman, after all, Poictiers. Even in a relationship as unsentimental as ours has been there are limitations—there must be limitations.”
Carfax was gazing now into the heart of the dying fire.
“If the case were reversed, Vance, what would your answer be?”
Tregarvon gave a short laugh. “I can’t imagine the reversal,” he parried. “Elizabeth is one of those splendid, serene,élevéwomen who go through life without ever knowing the meaning of a grand passion.”
“Still, you haven’t answered my question.”
“I am not afraid to answer it. If Elizabeth had told me, even before I met Richardia, that she had— Oh, piffle! it’s no use; I can’t imagine it!”
For a long time Carfax said nothing. But when the final whiff had been drawn from the bedtime pipes, he ventured a small request.
“I’ve been butting in on your affairs so long that it has come to be a habit, Vance,” he said, with his quaint smile. “When you hear from Elizabeth, will you tell me what she says?”
Tregarvon, who had been thinking of many things during the speechless interval, answered on the impulse of the moment.
“Of course; I’ll let you read the letter, if you care to. Why shouldn’t I? There’s your candle on the mantel, when you want it. I’m going to bed.”