XXIIOut of a Clear Sky
THE event of the day for Coalville—the arrival of the afternoon passenger-train from Chattanooga—was in the near prospect when the yellow car rolled down the last of the grades and swept a wide circle around the coke-ovens and past the unloading platforms.
The train-time signs were always unmistakable. A little while before the hour, and always as if warned by some signal inaudible to alien ears, the loungers under Tait’s porch rose, shook their legs to settle wrinkled trousers, and filed slowly over to the railroad station. Tregarvon’s motor-car, no longer a nine days’ wonder to the army of leisure, was slowing to cross the rails of the Ocoee siding when the station agent ran out of his office to wave the motorists down with a telegram. The message was for Carfax, and the agent explained that it had been delayed in transmission by some trouble with the wire on the branch line.
While Carfax was opening the envelope, Tregarvongot out and went around to see if the brakes had been running cool in the swift drop from the summit of Pisgah. For this cause he did not hear Carfax’s, “Ye gods and little fishes!” basing itself upon a glance at the delayed telegram.
“Vance!” he called, turning in his place to see what had become of Tregarvon. But Tregarvon did not hear. A canopy-topped surrey, venerable with age and drawn by a great-boned horse of dapple gray, was turning out of the Hesterville road to cross the tracks to the station. Miss Richardia Birrell was holding the reins over the dapple gray, and in the seat beside her was an old man, erect, white-haired, handsome as an ancestral portrait.
“Jehu!” said Tregarvon under his breath. “So that is her father. If looks count for anything, he is worthy of her; which is more than I would say for any other Tennesseean I’ve met.” Then Carfax’s anxious call was repeated, and this time Tregarvon answered.
“Not lost—only mislaid,” he returned. Then he saw Carfax’s face: “Why, Poictiers!—who is dead?”
Carfax was standing up in his place, clinging to the steering-wheel with one hand and waving the telegram like a flag of distress in the other.
“Read that!” he commanded tragically, when the inspector of brakes came within passing reach.
Tregarvon glanced at the message and became, in his turn, a man stricken down without warning. The bolt was dated at Chattanooga, and it had been filed for sending at nine in the forenoon. It was addressed to Carfax, and it read:
“Here with papa and mamma, and the Pennsylvania battle-monument dedicators. If I should run over to Coalville with Clotilde this afternoon, will you and Vance put me up at the hotel and show me your mine? But, of course, you will.“Elizabeth.”
“Here with papa and mamma, and the Pennsylvania battle-monument dedicators. If I should run over to Coalville with Clotilde this afternoon, will you and Vance put me up at the hotel and show me your mine? But, of course, you will.
“Elizabeth.”
“Oh, good heavens!” groaned Tregarvon, when the paralyzing effect of the announcement gave place to the panic of dismay; “E-Elizabeth and her maid?—coming here?”
Carfax laughed rather wildly. “Yes; coming here to stop at—at the hotel!”
Tregarvon read the message again. “She says ‘this afternoon.’ That means to-day—now—this minute; she’s on this train! Poictiers, if you are any friend of mine, you’ll climb down here and find a club and put me out of my misery!”
Carfax stopped laughing suddenly and sprang out of the car. “It’s no joke!” he snapped. “It’s up to us, you wild ass of the desert—do you hear? Stop your braying and listen to me: we’ve got to meet her over there on that platform just as if we had been watching every train for a week! There is the whistle: come along and invent your fairy-tale on the run!”
They did not crowd too eagerly to the front when the three-car train drew up to the platform. There were terms to be agreed upon; things which might be said, and things which must not be said. Thus it happened that an exceedingly handsome young woman, in a modish travelling hat and a brown coat, and followed by a French maid bearing impedimenta, was helped from the car-step by the brakeman.
“Charge!” Carfax commanded, in a hoarse whisper; but before they could do it, Miss Richardia slipped through the ranks of the platform loungers, put her arms quickly about the handsome young woman and kissed her, with an “Oh, you dear thing!” to go with the affectionate welcome.
Tregarvon saw, gasped, swallowed hard, and the smile of greeting which he had called up for the emergency turned into a shocked grin.
“Get out in the road there and chunk me!” he whispered to Carfax. And then: “Poictiers, I’m a ruined man! They were together in the Boston music factory. Elizabeth has told me a hundred times how she chummed with a charming little Southerner—without naming any names! And I’ve been writing her—oh, I tell you, I’m a dead man. All you have to do now is to get a wreath to lay on my coffin!”
“You’ll be needing the coffin if you don’t buck up and catch the step!” hissed Carfax. Wherewith he dragged his companion masterfully into the circle of welcomings.
The golden youth neither gave nor received the kiss of greeting; and he pointedly looked another way when Miss Wardwell offered her cheek for Tregarvon’s cousinly salute. Then he found himself shaking hands with Richardia’s father; realized vaguely that the judge was taxing him reproachfully for not having consented to occupy one of the many bed-rooms at Westwood House the night before, instead of returning to Highmount; realized also that Miss Wardwell was rallying Tregarvon gayly upon his discomfiture accomplished by means of the jesting telegram.
“Surely, it didn’t mislead you, too, did it, Poictiers?” she questioned, turning to Tregarvon’saccomplice. “Vance is trying to tell me that you took it harder than he did.” Then she explained to Judge Birrell: “I sent a wire to these two from Chattanooga, you know, asking them if they could put me and Clotilde up at the Coalville hotel—by the way, Cousin Vance, whereisthe hotel?” Then again to the judge: “You see, I guessed, from what Richardia said in her last letter, that they didn’t know I was invited to Westwood House. Fancy it! they got the telegram only a few minutes ago!”
Tregarvon backed out of the group and fanned himself with his hat. There were still traces of the shocked grin to temper the mask of feverish anxiety which was slowly displacing it. Everything he had ever written to Elizabeth about Richardia—everything he had ever told Richardia about Elizabeth—clamored for instant recollection and revision in the light of the unnerving fact that the two of them were here on the Coalville platform, together, as friends of long standing.
The train had moved on, the loungers were dispersing, and Miss Birrell was leading the way to the venerable surrey.
“Poictiers, I’m a ruined man!”
“Mr. Carfax has promised me that he will drive you up to Westwood House to-morrow. I think you will be very sure to come, now,” she said, after Tregarvon had flogged himself into some livelier sense of the requirements of the moment. Then she added: “You may come as early as you please.”
“I think I shall be very ill to-morrow,” he returned gravely, as he handed her into the carriage. “These sudden shocks are very bad—for the heart.” Then, while Carfax was helping Miss Wardwell to the front seat with the judge: “I didn’t believe you could be so wicked!”
“I am not the wicked one,” was the quick retort. “I tried to tell you last Wednesday; that was why I asked Mr. Carfax to drive down to where you were working. But you wouldn’t let me.”
“If I am not too ill to come, you must let me see you first, before I—” Tregarvon was beginning; but Miss Richardia was not willing to be dragged even into the vicinity of things confidential.
“Hear him!” she said to Miss Wardwell; “Mr. Tregarvon is intimating that we have made him ill, between us!” Then she spoke to her father: “Judge Birrell, you will please command these two young gentlemen to report to you to-morrow at Westwood House—do you hear?”
The judge gave the invitation in due andcourteous form, and Carfax accepted promptly for himself and for Tregarvon. After which the big dapple gray, mildly urged by his master, began to jog up and down and the age-worn surrey crept out of sight around the barrier rank of coke-ovens.
“We might have offered to take them up in the motor,” said Carfax, when the afterthought had been given time to come to the surface.
“Youmight have,” Tregarvon returned moodily. “I wouldn’t trust myself to drive a wheel-barrow in the present state of things.”
Carfax was about to swing himself behind the wheel to drive the car over to its shed and he paused with a foot on the running-board.
“When it comes to wrestling with the fateful tangles, you haven’t so much the best of me as you may think you have—thanks to your little gift of letter-writing,” he remarked darkly.
Tregarvon walked across to the office-building while Carfax was housing the car, went to his room, and was visible no more until Uncle William called him to dinner. At table he ate like an ogre—a sure sign of disturbment—and refused to rise to any of the small conversational baits flung out by Carfax. But afterward, over the tobacco-jar, there were things to be said and he said them.
“Poictiers, I believe I’ll write my will to-night and let you witness it,” he began. “The easiest thing for me to do now is to go and offer myself to the chief of the bureau of tests as a candidate for the poison squad.”
“Meaning that Elizabeth is here to answer your letter in person?” queried Carfax. “There is nothing so very deadly about that, is there?”
“That remark shows how little you know women. I was perfectly frank with Elizabeth, as I told you, but of course I didn’t write as I should have written if I had known that she and Richardia were bosom friends. Now they will proceed to exchange confidences and compare notes—if they haven’t already done both in their letters to each other. And what the comparison will leave of me won’t be fit to fling to a starved puppy.”
Carfax smoked in silence for quite some time before he said: “How they may stick pins into you, to your face or behind your back, seems a very inconsiderable factor in the case to me, Vance. The deadly part of it is that you are still in love—or you think you are—with Richardia Birrell, while you are going to marry Elizabeth Wardwell.”
“No,” Tregarvon objected, staring gloomilyinto the fire; “that isn’t the worst of it. There is a still deeper depth: I can’t help being the one or doing the other.”
Carfax began to show signs of becoming restive.
“If Elizabeth only didn’t care so much for you....” Then he took a new tack. “You didn’t tell her all you ought to have told her in that letter, Vance; if you had, you wouldn’t be dreading the actual show-down as you are now. Which means that you still have it to do.”
“That is it, exactly,” said the dejected one. “And I’d much rather be shot full of holes.”
Carfax took another dose of his own prescription of silence. Then he said: “What is going to come of it?—after you have made her understand?”
“The only thing that can come of it. While I have insisted, and still insist, that there has never been any sentiment wasted between us, the fact remains that Elizabeth is a woman, and she isn’t going to sit down meekly and say, ‘All right, Vance, dear; never mind,’ when I make her understand that I have been trying my hardest to make love to another woman. She has plenty of spirit; she can fairly set you afire with those brown eyes of hers when the occasion demands it.”
“Well?” said Carfax.
“It will be all over but the shouting, then. She will doubtless tell me what she thinks of me and break the engagement, there and then—or try to. But that is the one thing I can’t let her do, Poictiers. She needs the Uncle Byrd legacy, and I mustn’t let her lose it.”
Carfax got up and reached for the matches and his bed-room candle. “No,” he said slowly; “you mustn’t let her lose the legacy. To a man up a tree it would seem that the money is about all she is going to salvage out of the wreck.” With which unkind daggering of the sinner whose sin had found him out, he went to bed.