The thing was done, though not without some misgivings on Caleb's part. Honesty and fair dealing, even with a known enemy, had been the rule of his life; and while he could not put his finger on the equivocal thing in Tom's plan, he was vaguely troubled. Analyzed after the fact, the trouble was vicarious, and for Tom. It defined itself more clearly when they went together to South Tredegar to have an attorney draw upthe agreement under which Tom's pipe venture was to be conducted. Tom, as the owner of the patents, was fair with the Chiawassee Consolidated, but he was not liberal; indeed, he would have been quite illiberal if the attorney had not warned him that an agreement, to be defensible, must be equitable as well as legal.
At this stage in the journey Tom could not have accounted for himself in the ethical field. Something, a thing intangible, had gone out of him. He could not tell what it was; but he missed it. The kindly Gordon nature was intact, or he hoped it was, but the neighbor-love, which was his father's rule of life, seemed not to have come down to him in its largeness. Ruth for the Farleys was not to be expected of him, he argued; but behind this was a vaster ruthlessness, arming him to win the industrial battle, making him a hard man as he had suddenly become a strong one.
And the experiences of the summer were all hardening. He plunged headlong into the world of business, into a panic-time competition which was in grim reality a fight for life, and there seemed to be little to choose between trampling or being trampled. By early autumn the iron industries of the country were gasping, and the stacks of pig in the Chiawassee yards, kept down a little during the summer by a few meager orders, grew and spread until they covered acres. As long as money could be had, the iron was bonded as fast as it was made, and the proceeds were turned into wages to make more. But when money was no longer obtainable from this source, the pipe venture was the only hope.
With the entire foundry force at the Chiawassee making pipe, Tom had gone early into the market withhis low-priced product. But the commercial side of the struggle was fire-new to him, and he found himself matched against men who knew buying and selling as he knew smelting and casting. They routed him, easily at first, with increasing difficulty as he learned the new trade, but always with certainty. It was Norman, the correspondence man, transformed now into a sales agent, who gave him his first hint of the inwardnesses.
"We're too straight, Mr. Gordon; that's at the bottom of it," he said to Tom, over a grill-room luncheon at the Marlboro one day. "It takes money to make money."
Tom's eyebrows went up and his ears were open. The battle had grown desperate.
"Our prices are right," he said. "Isn't that enough?"
"No," said Norman, looking down. Like all the others, he stood a little in awe of the young boss.
"Why?"
"Four times out of five we have to sell to a municipal committee, and the other time we have to monkey with the purchasing agent of a corporation. In either case it takes money—other money besides the difference in price."
Tom wagged his head in a slow affirmative. "It's rotten!" he said.
Norman smiled.
"It's our privilege to cuss it out; but it's a condition."
Tom was in town that day for the purpose of taking a train to Louisville, where he was to meet the officials of an Indiana city forced, despite the hard times, to relay many miles of worn-out water-mains. He madea pencil computation on the back of an envelope. The contract was a large one, and his bid, which he was confident was lower than any competitor could make, would still stand a cut and leave a margin of profit. Before he took the train he went to the bank, and, when he reached the Kentucky metropolis, his first care was to assure the "wheel-horse" member of the municipal purchasing board that he was ready to talk business on a modern business basis.
Notwithstanding, he lost the contract. Other people were growing desperate, too, it appeared, and his bribe was not great enough. One member of the committee stood by him and gave him the facts. A check had been passed, and it was a bigger check than Tom could draw without trenching on the balance left in the Iron City National to meet the month's pay-roll at Gordonia.
"You sent a boy to mill," said the loyal one. "And now it's all over, I don't mind telling you that you sent him to the wrong mill, at that. Bullinger's a hog."
"I'd like to do him up," said Tom vindictively.
"Well, that might be done, too. But it would cost you something."
Tom did not take the hint; he was not buying vengeance. But on the way home he grew bitterer with every subtracted mile. He could meet one more pay-day, and possibly another; and then the end would come. This one contract would have saved the day, and it was lost.
The homing train, rushing around the boundary hills of Paradise, set him down at Gordonia late in the afternoon. There was no one at the station to meet him, but there was bad news in the air which neededno herald to proclaim it. Though it still wanted half an hour of quitting time, the big plant was silent and deserted.
Tom walked out the pike and found his father smoking gloomily on the Woodlawn porch.
"You needn't say it, son," was his low greeting, when Tom had flung himself into a chair. "It was in the South Tredegar papers this morning."
"What was in the papers?"
"About our losin' the Indiany contract. I reckon it was what did the business for us, though there were a-plenty of black looks and a storm brewin' when we missed the pay-day yesterday."
Tom started as if he had been stung.
"Missed the pay-day? Why, I left money in bank for it when I went to Louisville!"
"Yes, I know you did. When Dyckman didn't come out with the pay-rolls yesterday evening I telephoned him. He said Vint Farley, as treasurer of the company, had made a draft on him and taken it all."
Tom sprang out of his chair and the bitter oaths upbubbled and choked him. But he stifled them long enough to say: "And the men?"
"The miners went out at ten o'clock this morning. The blacks would have stood by us, but Ludlow's men drove 'em out—made 'em quit. We're done, Buddy."
Tom dashed his hat on the floor, and the Gordon rage, slow to fire and fierce to scorch and burn when once it was aflame, made for the moment a yelling, cursing maniac of him. In the midst of it he turned, and the tempest of imprecation spent itself in a gasp of dismay. His mother was standing in the doorway,thin, frail, with the sorrow in her eyes that had been there since the long night of chastenings three years agone.
As he looked he saw the growing pallor in her face, the growing speechless horror in her gaze. Then she put out her hands as one groping in darkness and fell before he could reach her.
It was her stalwart son who carried Martha Gordon to her room and laid her gently on the bed, with the husband to follow helplessly behind. Also, it was Tom, tender and loving now as a woman, who sat upon the edge of the bed, chafing the bloodless hands and striving as he could to revive her.
"I'm afeard you've killed her for sure, this time, son!" groaned the man.
But Tom saw the pale lips move and bent low to catch their whisperings. What he heard was only the echo of the despairing cry of the broken heart: "Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son!"
In these days of slowing wheels and silenced anvils South Tredegar had its own troubles, and when some one telephoned the editor of theMorning Tribunethat Chiawassee Consolidated had succumbed at last, he did not deem it worth while to inquire whether the strike at Gordonia was the cause or the consequence of the sudden shut-down.
But a day or two later, when rumors of threatened violence began to trickle in over the telephone wires, aTribuneman called, in passing, at the general offices in the Coosa Building, and was promptly put to sleep by the astute Dyckman, who, for reasons of his own, was quite willing to conceal the true state of affairs. Yes, there was a suspension of active operations at Gordonia, and he believed there had been some hot-headed talk among the miners. But there would be no trouble. Mr. Farley was at present in London negotiating for English capital. When he should return, the capital stock of the company would be increased, and the plant would probably be removed to South Tredegar and enlarged.
All of which was duly jotted down to be passed into theTribune'sarchives; and the following morning Tom,doing guard duty with his father, the two Helgersons and a squad of the yard men at the threatened plant, read a pointless editorial in which misstatement of fact and sympathy for the absent and struggling Farleys were equally and impartially blended.
"Look at that!" he growled wrathfully, handing the paper across the office desk to Caleb. "One of these fine days I'm going to land that fellow Dyckman in the penitentiary."
The iron-master put on his spectacles and plodded slowly and conscientiously through the editorial, turning the paper, at length, to glance over the headings on the telegraphic page. In the middle of it he looked up suddenly to say:
"Son, what was the name o' that Indiany town with the big water-pipe contract?"
Tom gave it in a word, and Caleb passed the paper back, with his thumb on one of the press despatches.
"Read that," he said.
Tom read, and the wrathful scowl evoked by the foolish editorial gave place to a flitting smile of triumph. There was trouble in the Indiana city over the awarding of the pipe contract. In some way unknown to the press reporter, it had leaked out that a much lower bid than the one accepted had been ignored by the purchasing committee. A municipal election was pending, and the people were up in arms. Rumors of a wholesale indictment of the suspected officials were rife, and the city offices were in a state of siege.
Tom put the paper down and smote on the desk.
"Damn them!" he said; "I thought perhaps I could give them a run for their money."
"You?" said Caleb, removing his glasses. "How's that?"
The new recruit in the army of business chicane nodded his head.
"It was a shot in the dark, and I didn't want to brag beforehand," he explained. "I wrestled it out Saturday night when I was tramping the hills after Doc Williams had brought mother around. One member of the purchasing committee was ready to dodge; he gave me a pointer before I left Louisville. I didn't see anything in it then but revenge; but afterward I saw how we might spend some money to a possible advantage."
Caleb's eyes had grown narrow.
"I reckon I'm sort o' dull, Buddy; what-all did you do?"
"Wired the disgruntled one that there was a letter and a check in the mail for him, to be followed by another and a bigger if his pole proved long enough to reach the persimmons."
The old iron-master left his chair and began to walk the floor, six steps and a turn. After a little he said:
"Tom, is that business?"
"It is the modern definition of it."
"What's goin' to happen up yonder in Indiany?"
"If I knew, I'd be a good bit easier in my mind. What I'm hoping is that the rumpus will be big enough to make 'em turn the contract our way."
Caleb stopped short.
"My God!" he ejaculated. "Where's your heart, Buddy? Would you take the chance of sendin' these fellows to jail for the sake of gettin' that contract?"
"Cheerfully," said Tom. "They're rascals; I couldhave bought them if I'd had money enough; and the other fellow did buy them."
The old man resumed his monotonous tramp up and down the room. The hardness in Tom's voice unnerved him. After another interval of silence he spoke again.
"I wish you hadn't done it, son. It's a dirty job, any way you look at it."
Tom shrugged.
"Norman says it's a condition, not a theory; and he is right. We are living under a new order of things, and if we want to stay alive, we've got to conform to it. It gagged me at first: I reckon there are some traces of the Christian tradition left. But, pappy, I'm going to win. That is what I'm here for."
Caleb Gordon shook his head as one who deprecates helplessly, but he sat down again and asked Tom what the programme was to be.
"There is nothing for us to do but to sit tight and wait. If we get a telegram from Indiana before these idiots of ours lose their heads and go to rioting and burning, we shall still have a fighting chance. If not, we're smashed."
"You mustn't be too hard on the men, Buddy. They've been mighty patient."
The scowl deepened between the level gray eyes.
"If I could do what I'd like to, I'd fire the last man of them. It makes me savage to have them turn up and knock us on the head after we've been sweating blood to pull through. Have you seen Ludlow?"
"Yes; I saw him last night. He's right ugly; swore he wouldn't raise a hand even if the boys took kerosene and dynamite to us."
"Well, if they do, he'll be the first man to pay for it," said Tom; and he left the office and the house to make the round of the guarded gates.
Ludlow was as good as his word. On the night following the day of suspense an attempt was made to wreck the inclined railway running from the mines on Lebanon to the coke yard. It was happily frustrated; but when Tom and his handful of guards got back to the foot of the hill they found a fire started in a pile of wooden flasks heaped against the end of the foundry building.
The fire was easily extinguishable by a willing hand or two, but Tom tried an experiment. Steam had been kept up in a single battery of boilers against emergencies, and he directed Helgerson to throw open the great gates while he ran to the boiler room and sent the fire call of the huge siren whistle shrieking out on the night.
The experiment was only meagerly successful. Less than a score of the strikers answered the call, but these worked with a will, and the fire was quickly put out.
Tom was under the arc-light at the gates when the volunteers straggled out. He had a word for each man,—a word of appreciation and a plea for suspended judgment. Most of the men shook their heads despondently, but a few of them promised to stand on the side of law and order. Tom took the names of the few, and went back to his guard duty with the burden a little lightened. But the succeeding night there were more attempts at violence, three of them so determined as to leave no doubt that the crisis was at hand. This was Tom's discouraged admission when his father came to relieve him in the morning.
"We're about at the end of the rope," he said wearily, when Caleb had closed the door of the log-house yard office behind him. "The two Helgersons are played out, and neither of us can stand this strain for another twenty-four hours. I'm just about dead on my feet for sleep, and I know you are."
The old ex-artilleryman stifled a yawn, and admitted the fact.
"I'm gettin' right old and no-account, son; there's no denyin' that. And you can't make out to shoulder it all, stout as you are. But what-all can we do different?"
"I know what I'm going to do. I had a 'phone wire from Bradley, the sheriff, last night after you went home. He funked like a boy; said he couldn't raise a posse in South Tredegar that would serve against striking workmen. Then I wired the governor, and his answer came an hour ago. We can have the soldiers if we make a formal demand for them."
"But, Tom, son; you wouldn't do that!" protested Caleb tremulously. Then, getting up to walk the floor as was his wont under sharp stress: "Let's try to hold out a little spell longer, Buddy. It'll be like fire to tow; there'll be men killed—men that I've known ever since they were boys: men killed, and women made widders. Tom, I've seen enough of war to last me."
"I know," said Tom. None the less, he found a telegraph blank and began to write the message. There had been shots fired in the night, in a sally on the inclined railway, and one of them had scored his arm. If the rioters needed the strong hand to curb them, they should have it.
"Think of what it'll mean for this town that we've built up, son. We'll have to stay here—'er leastwise, I will, and there'll be blood on the streets for me to see as long as I walk 'em."
"I know," Tom reiterated, in the same monotonous tone. But his pen did not pause.
"Then there's your mammy," Caleb pleaded, and now the pen stopped.
"Mother must not know."
"How can we he'p her knowin', Buddy? I tell you, son, the very stones o' Paradise'll rise up to testify against us, now, and at the last great day, maybe."
The frown deepened between the young man's eyes.
"The old, old phantom!" he said, half to himself. "Will it never be laid, even for those who know it to be a myth?" And then to his father: "It's no use, pappy. I tell you we've got to take this thing by the neck. See here; that's how near they came to settling me last night," and he showed the perforated coat-sleeve.
Caleb Gordon was silenced. He resumed his restless pacing while Tom signed the call for help, read it over methodically, and placed it between dampened sheets in the letter-press. He had pushed the electric button which summoned Stub Helgerson, when the door opened silently and Jeff Ludlow's boy thrust face and hand through the aperture.
"Well; what is it?" demanded Tom, more sharply than he meant to. The strain was beginning to tell on his nerves.
"Hit's a letter for you-all from Mr. Stamford at the dee-po," said the boy. "He allowed maybe you-all'd gimme a nickel for bringin' hit."
The coin was found and passed, and the small boy was whooping and yelling for Helgerson to come and let him through the gates when Tom tore the envelope across and read the telegram. It was from the Indiana city, and it was signed by the chairman of the Board of Public Works.
"Proposals for water-pipe have been reopened, and your bid is accepted. Wire how soon you can begin to ship eighteen-inch mains," was what it said. Tom handed it to his father and stepped quickly to the telephone. There was a little delay in getting the ear of the president of the Iron City National at South Tredegar, and the bounding, pulsing blood of impatience made it seem interminable.
"Is that you, Mr. Henniker? This is Gordon at the Chiawassee plant, Gordonia. We have secured that Indiana contract I was telling you about, and I'll be in to see you on the ten o'clock train. Will you save five minutes for me? Thank you. Good-by."
Tom hung the ear-piece on its hook and turned to face his father.
"Have you surrounded it?" he laughed, with a little quaver of excitement in his voice, which he had been careful to master in the announcement to the bank president. "We live, pappy; we live and win! Get word to the men to come up here at three o'clock for their pay. Tell them we blow in again to-morrow, and they can all come back to work and no questions asked. Can you stay on your feet long enough to do all that?"
Caleb was nodding gravely; yet bewilderment was still in the saddle.
"But the money for the pay-rolls, son—this is onlyan order to go to work," he said, fingering the telegram doubtfully.
Tom laughed joyously.
"If I can't make Mr. Henniker believe that he can afford to carry us a while longer on the strength of that bit of yellow paper, I'll rob his bank. You get the men together by three o'clock, and I'll be here with the money. If I'm not, it will be because somebody has sandbagged me between the bank and the train."
Caleb was still wrestling with the incredible thing, but light was breaking in on him slowly.
"Hold on, son," he said, and the old-time smile was wrinkling at the corners of his eyes; "how much did you allow to make out o' this job? I disremember what you said when you talked about it before."
Tom checked off the items on his fingers.
"Enough to put us through the winter; enough to stand us on our feet independent of Duxbury Farley and his son; enough to let us pay Major Dabney the back royalties on the coal. More than this, it's going to use up iron—hundreds of tons of it. We'll buy out of our own yards, and the men shall have the back-pay dividends."
The general manager had taken his burned-out corn-cob pipe from his pocket and was looking at it speculatively.
"Well, now, if that's the case, I reckon I can go down to Hargis's and buy me a new pipe, Buddy; and I—I'll be switched if I don't do it right now."
And in such gladsome easing of the strain were the wheels of Chiawassee Consolidated oiled to their new whirlings on the road to fortune. If Caleb Gordon remembered how the miracle had been wrought, he said no word to clench his disapproval; and as for Tom—ah, well; it was not the first time in the history of the race that the end has served to justify the means—to make them clean and white and spotless, if need were.
If Tom Gordon could have known how slightly the Dabney's European plans coincided with those of the Farleys, he might have had fewer heartburnings in those intervals when the harassing struggle for industrial existence gave him time to think of Ardea.
As a strict matter of fact, the voyage across, and some little guide-book touring of England, were the sum total of coincidence. On leaving London the Farleys set out on the grand tour which was to land them in Naples for the winter, while the Dabneys went directly to Paris and to a modest pension in the Rue Cambon to spend the European holiday in a manner better befitting the purse of a country gentleman.
So it befell that by the time Miss Eva Farley was rhapsodizing over the Rhine castles in twenty-page letters, boring Ardea a little, if the truth must be told, the Dabneys had settled down to their quiet life in the French capital. Ardea was anxious to do something with her music under a Parisian master—and was doing it. The Major found melancholy pleasure in reviewing at large the city of his son's long exile; and Miss Euphrasia came and went with one or the other of her cousins, as the exigencies of chaperonage or companionship constrained her.
In such moderate pleasuring the French summer began for the Major and his charges; so it continued, and so it ended; and late in September they began to talk about going home.
"We really mean it this time," wrote Ardea in a letter to Martha Gordon. "I confess we are all a little homesick for America, and Paradise, and dear old Deer Trace Manor. The Farleys are settled for the remainder of the year or longer in a fine old palazzo on the Bay of Naples, and we have a very pressing invitation to go and help them inhabit it. But thus far we have not been tempted beyond our strength. Major Grandpa is talking more and more pointedly about the Morgan mares, and is growing a habit of comparison-drawing in which America profits at the expense of Europe; so I suppose by the time you are reading this we shall have made our sailing arrangements. Nevertheless, the Naples invitation is dying hard. Eva seems to have set her heart on having us for the winter."
Ardea's figure of speech was no figure. The palazzo-sharing invitation did die hard; and when Miss Farley's letters failed, Mr. Vincent Farley made a journey to Paris for the express purpose of persuading the Dabneys to reconsider. Miss Euphrasia was neutral. The Major was homesick for a sight of his native Southland, but for Ardea's sake he generously concealed the symptoms—or thought he did. So the decision was finally left to Ardea.
She said no, and adhered to it, partly because she knew her grandfather was pining for Paradise, and partly on her own account. Ardea at twenty was a young woman who might have made King Solomonpause with suspended pen when he was writing that saying about his inability to find one woman among a thousand. She was not beautiful beyond compare, as the Southern young woman is so likely to be under the pencil of her loyal limners. She had the Dabney nose, which was not quite classical, and the Courtenay mouth, well-lined and expressive, rather than too suggestive, of feminine softness. But her eyes were beautiful, and her luxuriant masses of copper-gold hair fitted her shapely head like a glorious aureole; also, she had that indefinable adorableness called charm, and the sweet, direct, childlike frankness of speech which is its characteristic.
This was the external Ardea, known of men, and of those women who were large-minded enough not to envy her. But the inner Ardea was a being apart—high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded either by passion or the conventions. This inner Ardea knew Vincent Farley better than he knew himself: the small mind, the mask of outward correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still yields open-eyed and undeceived.
He was the most moderate of lovers, as such a man must needs be, but his anxiety to second the wishes of his father and sister was not to be misunderstood by the clear-eyed inner Ardea, whose intuition served her as a sixth sense. She knew that sometime he would ask her to marry him; and in that region where her answer should lie she found only a vast indecision. He wasnot her ideal, but the all-seeing inner self told her that she would never find the ideal. There comes to every woman, sooner or later, the conviction that if she would marry she must take men as they are, weighing the good against the evil, choosing as she may the man whose vices may be condoned or whose virtues are great enough to overshadow them. Ardea knew that Vincent Farley was not great in either field; but the little virtues were not to be despised. If he were not, in the best sense of the word, well-bred, he had at least been well nurtured, well schooled in the conventions. Ardea sighed. It was in her to be something more than the conventional wife, yet she saw no reason to believe that she would ever be called on to be anything else. By which it will be apparent that the sacred flame of love had not yet been kindled in her maiden heart.
As for Vincent Farley, the real man, Ardea's appraisal of him was not greatly at fault. He was tall, like his father, but there the resemblance paused. The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the ability always to present the same side to the same person. His attitude toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating instinct. And even lust finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them into some brief, fierceflame. At times, Farley's thought of Ardea was libertine; but oftener she figured as the woman who would grace the home of affluence, giving it charm and tone. Also, he had an affection for the Dabney manorial acres, and especially for that portion of them overlying the coal measures.
The pose-facet was at the precisely effective angle when he came to Paris as his sister's messenger and pictured, with what warmth there was in him, the delights in the prospect of a Neapolitan winter. But Ardea, shrinking from a six months' guesting with any one, said no, and told her grandfather she was ready to go home.
The start was from Havre, and Vincent, with time on his hands, was her companion on the railway journey, hercourrier du placein the embarkation, and her faithful shadow up to the instant when the warning cry for the shore-goers rang through the ship. It was scarcely a moment for sentimental passages, and under the most favoring conditions, Vincent Farley was something less than sentimental. Yet he found time to declare himself in conventional fashion, modestly asking only for the right to hope.
Ardea was not ready to give an answer, even to the tentative question; yet she did it—was, in a manner, surprised into doing it. For the young woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities. At the very crucial moment the clear-sighted inner self was assuring her that this cold-eyed young man, who walked in the paths of righteousness because he found them easier and pleasanter than the way ofthe transgressor, was at best only a mildly exciting apotheosis of the negative virtues. But the negative virtues, failing to score brilliantly, nevertheless have the advantage of continuous innings. Ardea was turned twenty in the year of the European holiday, and she had—or believed she had—her heritage of the Dabney impetuosity well in hand. Vincent's self-restraint was admirable, and his gentle deference, conventional as it was, rose almost to the height of sentiment. So she gave him his answer; gave him her hand at parting, and stood dutifully fluttering her handkerchief for him while the liner drew out of its slip and pointed its prow toward the headlands.
With rough weather on the homeward passage, she had space and opportunity to consider the consequences. Being the only good sailor in the trio, she had her own self-communings for company during the greater part of the six days, and the incident sentimental took on an aspect of finality which was rather dismaying. It was quite in vain that she sought comfort in the reflection that she was committed to nothing conclusive. Vincent Farley had not taken that view of it. True, he had asked for nothing more than a favorable attitude on her part; but she thought he would be less than a man if he had not seen his final answer foreshadowed in her acquiescence.
The finality admitted, a query arose. Was Vincent Farley the man who, giving her his best, could call out the best there was in her? It annoyed her to admit the query, or rather the doubt which fathered it; it distressed her when the doubt appeared to grow with the lengthening leagues of distance.
Now vacillation was not a Dabney failing; and the aftermath of these storm-tossed musings made for Vincent Farley's cause. Romance also, in the eternal feminine, is a constant quantity, and if it be denied the Romeo-and-Juliet form of expression, will find another. Vincent Farley, as man or as lover, presented obstacles to any idealizing process, but Ardea set herself resolutely to overcome them. Distance and time have other potentialities besides the obliterative: they may breed halos. When the French liner reached its New York slip, Ardea was remembering only the studied kindnesses, the conventional refinements, the correctnesses which, if they did seem artificial at times, were so many guarantees of self-respect: when the Great Southwestern train had roared around the cliffs of Lebanon with the returning exiles, and the locomotive whistle was sounding for Gordonia, some other of the negative virtues had become definitely positive, and the halo was beginning to be distinctly visible.
How Tom Gordon had informed himself of the precise day and train of their home-coming, Ardea did not think to inquire. But he was on the platform when the train drew in, and was the first to welcome them.
She was quick to see and appreciate the changes wrought in him, by time, by the Boston sojourn, by the summer's struggle with adverse men and things—though of this last she knew nothing as yet. It seemed scarcely credible that the big, handsome young fellow who was shaking hands with her grandfather, helping Miss Euphrasia with her multifarious belongings, and making himself generally useful and hospitable, could be alater reincarnation of the abashed school-boy who had sweated through the trying luncheon at Crestcliffe Inn.
"Not a word for me, Tom?" she said, when the last of Cousin Euphrasia's treasures had been rescued from the impatient train porter and added to the heap on the platform.
"All the words are for you—or they shall be presently," he laughed. "Just let me get your luggage out of pawn and started Deer-Traceward, and I'll talk you to a finish."
She stood by and looked on while he did it. Surely, he had grown and matured in the three broadening years! There was conscious manhood, effectiveness, in every movement; in the very bigness of him. She had a little attack of patriotism, saying to herself that they did not fashion such young men in the Old World—could not, perhaps.
Mammy Juliet's grandson, Pete, was down with the family carriage, and he took his orders from Tom touching the bestowal of the luggage as he would have taken them from Major Dabney. Ardea marked this, too, and being Southern bred, wrote the Gordon name still a little higher on the scroll of esteem. Pete's respectful obedience was, in its way, a patent of nobility. The negro house-servant, to the manner born, draws the line sharply between gentle and simple and is swift to resent interlopings.
When Pete had done his office with the European gatherings of the party the ancient carriage looked like a van, and there was scant room inside for three passengers.
"That means us for old Longfellow and the buggy,"said Tom to Ardea. "Do you mind? Longfellow is fearfully and wonderfully slow, same as ever, but he's reasonably sure."
"Any way," said Ardea; so he put her into the buggy and they drew in behind the carriage. Before they were half-way to the iron-works they had the pike to themselves, and Tom was not urging the leisurely horse.
"My land! but it's good for tired eyes to have another sight of you!" he declared, applying the remedy till she laughed and blushed a little. Then: "It has been a full month of Sundays. Do you realize that?"
"Since we saw each other? It has been much longer than that, hasn't it?"
"Not so very much. I saw you in New York the day you sailed."
"You did! Where was I?"
"You had just come down in the elevator at the hotel with your grandfather and Miss Euphrasia."
"And you wouldn't stop to speak to us? I think that was simply barbarous!"
"Wasn't it?" he laughed. "But the time was horribly unpropitious."
"Why?"
He looked at her quizzically.
"I'm wondering whether I'd better lie out of it; say I knew you were on your way to breakfast, and that I hoped to have a later opportunity, and all that. Shall I do it?"
She did not reply at once. The undeceived inner self was telling her that here lay the parting of the ways; that on her answer would be built the structure, formal or confidential, of their future intercourse. Loyalty tothe halo demanded self-restraint; but every other fiber of her was reaching out for a reëstablishment of the old boy-and-girl openness of heart and mind. Her hesitation was only momentary.
"You are just as rude and Gothic as you used to be, aren't you, Tom? Don't you know, I'm childishly glad of it; I was afraid you might be changed in that way, too,—and I don't want to find anything changed. You needn't be polite at the expense of truth—not with me."
He looked at her with love in his eyes.
"This time, you mean—or all the time."
"All the time, if you like."
"I do like; there has got to be some one person in this world to whom I can talk straight, Ardea."
She laughed a little laugh of half-constraint.
"You speak as if there had been a vacancy."
"There has been—for just about three years. I remember you told me once that I'd find two kinds of friends: those who would refuse to believe anything bad of me, and those who would size me up and still stick to me. You are the only one of that second lot I have discovered thus far."
"We are getting miles away from the Fifth Avenue Hotel," she reminded him.
"No; we are just now approaching it from the proper direction. I had my war paint on that morning, and I wasn't fit to talk to you."
"Business?" she queried.
"Yes. Didn't the Major tell you about it?"
"Not a word. I hope you didn't quarrel with him, too?"
He marked the adverb of addition and wondered ifVincent Farley had been less reticent than Major Dabney.
"No; I didn't quarrel with your grandfather."
"But you did quarrel with Mr. Farley?—or was it with Vincent?"
He smiled and shook his head.
"We can't do it, Ardea—go back to the old way, you know. You see there's a stump in the road, the very first thing."
"I shan't admit it," she said half-defiantly. "I am going to make you like the Farleys."
He shook his head again. "You'll have to make a Christian of me first, and teach me how to love my enemies."
"Don't you do that now?"
"No; not unless you are my enemy; I love you."
She looked up at him appealingly.
"Don't make fun of such things, Tom. Love is sacred."
"I was never further from making fun of things in my life. I mean it with every drop of blood in me. You said you didn't want to find me changed; I'm not changed in that, at least."
"You ridiculous boy!" she said; but that was only a stop-gap, and Longfellow added another by coming to a stand opposite a vast obstruction of building material half damming the white road. "What are you doing here—building more additions?" she asked.
"No," said Tom. "It is a new plant—a pipe foundry."
"Don't tell me we are going to have more neighbors in Paradise," she said in mock concern.
"I'll tell you something that may shock you worse than that: the owner of this new plant has camped down right next door to Deer Trace."
"How dreadful! You don't mean that!"
"Oh, but I do. He's a young man, of poor but honest parentage, with a large eye for the main chance. I shouldn't be surprised if he took every opportunity to make love to you."
"How absurd you can be, Tom! Who is he?"
"He is Mr. Caleb Gordon's son. I think you think you know him, but you don't; nobody does."
"Really, Tom? Have you gone into business for yourself? I thought you had another year at Boston."
"I have another year coming to me, but I don't know when I shall get it. And I am in business for myself; though perhaps I should be modest and call it a firm—Gordon and Gordon."
"What does the firm do?"
"A number of things; among others, it buys the entire iron output of the Chiawassee Consolidated, just at present."
"Dear me!" she said; "how fine and large that sounds! If I should say anything like that you would tell me that Brag was a good dog, but—"
He grinned ecstatically. It was so like old times—the good old times—to be bandying good-tempered abuse with her.
"I do brag a lot, don't I? But have you ever noticed that I 'most always have something to brag about? This time, for instance. I built this new firm, and it is all that has kept Chiawassee from going into the sheriff's hands any time during the past six months."
Longfellow had picked his way judiciously around the obstructions and through the gap in the boundary hills, and was jogging in a vertical trot up the valley pike made clean and hard and stony-white by the sweeping and hammering of the autumn rains. The mingled clamor of the industries was left behind, but the throbbing pulsations of the big blowing-engines hung in the air like the sighings of an imprisoned giant. They were passing the miniature copy of Morwenstow Church when Ardea spoke again.
"You have been home all summer?" she asked.
"At home and on the road, trying to hypnotize somebody into buying something—anything—made out of cast-iron. Ah, girl! it's been a bitter fight!"
She was instantly sympathetic; more, there was a little thrill of vicarious triumph to go with the sympathy. She was sure he had won, or was winning, the battle.
"We read something about the hard times in the American papers," she said. "You don't know how far away anything like that seems when there is an ocean between. And I was hoping all the time that our homeland down here was escaping."
"Escaping? You came through South Tredegar a little while ago; it is dead—too dead to bury. You hear the sob of those blowing-engines?—you will travel two hundred miles in the iron belt before you will hear it again. When I came home in June we were smashed, like all the other furnaces in the South—only worse."
"How worse, Tom?"
He forgot the tacit truce for the moment.
"Duxbury Farley and his son had deliberately wrecked the company."
She laid a restraining hand on his arm.
"Let us understand each other," she said gently. "You must not say such things of Mr. Farley and—and his son to me. If you do, I can't listen."
"You don't believe what I say?"
"I believe you have convinced yourself. But you are vindictive; you know you are. And I mean to be fair and just."
He let the plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and looked at her with anger and despair glooming in his eyes.
"Tell me one thing, Ardea, and maybe it will shut my mouth. What is Vincent Parley to you—anything more than Eva's brother?"
Another young woman might have claimed her undoubted right to evade such a pointed question. But Ardea saw safety only in instant frankness.
"He has asked me to be his wife, Tom."
"And you have consented?"
"I wonder if I have," she said half-musingly.
"Don't youknow?" he demanded. And then, "Ardea, I'd rather see you dead and in your coffin!"
"Just why—apart from your prejudice?"
"It's Beauty and the Beast over again. You don't know Vint Farley."
"Don't I? My opportunities have been very much better than yours," she retorted.
"That may be, but I say you don't know him. He is a whited sepulcher."
"But you can not particularize," she insisted. "And the evidence is all the other way."
Tom was silent. During the summer of strugglingshe had gone pretty deeply into the history of Chiawassee Consolidated, and there was commercial sharp practice in plenty, with some nice balancings on the edge of criminality. Once, indeed, the balance had been quite lost, but it was Dyckman who had been thrust into the breach, or who had been induced to enter it by falsifying his books. Yet these were mere business matters, without standing in the present court.
"The evidence isn't all one-sided," he asserted. "If you were a man, I could convince you in two minutes that both of the Farleys are rascals and hypocrites."
"Yet they are your father's business associates," she reminded him.
He saw the hopelessness of any argument on that side, and was silent again, this time until they had passed the Deer Trace gates and he had cut the buggy before the great Greek-pillared portico of the manor-house. When he had helped her out, she thanked him and gave him her hand quite in the old way; and he held it while he asked a single blunt question.
"Tell me one thing more, Ardea: do you love Vincent Farley?"
Her swift blush answered him, and he did not wait for her word.
"That settles it; you needn't say it in so many words. Isn't it a hell of a world, Ardea? I love you—love you as this man never will, never could. And with half his chance, I could have made you love me. I—"
"Don't, Tom! please don't," she begged, trying to free her hand.
"I must, for this once; then we'll quit and go back to the former things. You said a while ago that I wasvindictive; I'll show you that I am not. When the time comes for me to put my foot on Vint Farley's neck, I'm going to spare him for your sake. Then you'll know what it means to have a man's love. Good-by; I'm coming over for a few minutes this evening if you'll let me."
"Now jest you listen at me, Tom-Jeff; you ain't goin' to make out to find no better hawss 'n that this side o' the Blue Grass. Sound as a dollar in lungandleg, highstepper—my Land! jest look at the way he holds his head—rides like a baby's cradle; why, that hawss is a perfect gentleman, Tom-Jeff."
Since her return from Europe Miss Ardea Dabney had taken to horseback riding, a five-mile canter before breakfast in the fine brisk air of the autumn mornings; and Tom had discovered that he needed a saddle animal. Wherefore Brother Japheth was parading a handsome bay up and down before the door of the small office building of the new foundry, descanting glowingly on its merits, while Tom lounged on the step and pretended to make difficulties.
"You think he's a pretty good horse, do you, Japhe—worth the money?" he queried, with the air of one who is about to surrender, not to the fact, but to the presentation of it.
"If you cayn't stable him this winter and then get your money back on him in ary hawss market this side o' the Ohio River, I'll eat hawss for the rest o' my bawn days. Now that's fair, ain't it?"
"It's more than fair; it's generous. But let me ask you: is this protracted-meeting talk you're giving me, or just plain, every-day horse lies?"
Brother Japheth halted the parade and there was aggrieved reproachfulness in every line of his long, lantern-jawed face.
"Now lookee here; I didn't 'low to findyoua-sittin' in the seat of the scornful, Tom-Jeff; I shore didn't. Ain't the good cause precious to your soul no mo' sence you to'd loose f'om your mammy's apron-string?"
Tom's shrewd overlooking of the horse-trader spoke eloquently of the spiritual landmarks past and left behind.
"I don't know about you, Japhe. A fair half of the time you have me cornered; and the other half I'm wondering if you are just ordinary, canting hypocrite, like the majority of 'the brethren.'"
"Now see here, Tom-Jeff, you know a heap better'n that! First and fo'most, the majority ain't the majority, not by three sights and a horn-blow. Hit don't take more'n one good, perseverin' hypocrite in the chu'ch to spile the name o' chu'ch-member as fur as ye can holler it. You been on a railroad train and seen the con-duc-tor havin' a furss with the feller 'at pays for one seat and tries to hog four, and you've set back and said, 'My gosh! what a lot o' swine the human race is when hit gits away f'om home!' And right at that ve'y minute, mebbe, ther' was forty-five 'r fifty other people in that cyar goin' erlong, mindin' their own business, and not hoggin' any more 'n they paid for."
Tom smiled. "And you think that's the way it is in the church, do you?"
"I don't think nare' thing about hit; I know sufferin' well that's the how of it. Lord forgive me! didn't I let one scribe-an'-Pharisee keep me out o' the Isra'l o' God for nigh on to twenty year?"
"Who was it?" asked Tom, tranquilly curious.
"That ther' Jim Bledsoe, Brother Bill Layne's brother-in-law. He kep' Brother Bill out, too, for a right smart spell."
Tom was turning the memory pages half-absently.
"Let me see," he said. "Didn't I hear something about your whaling the everlasting daylights out of Bledsoe sometime last winter?"
Japheth hung his head after the manner of one who has spoiled a good argument by overstating it.
"That ther's jest like me," he said disgustedly. "I nev' do know enough to quit when I git thoo. Ain't it somewher's in the Bible 'at it says some folks is bawn troublesome, and some goes round huntin' for trouble, and some has trouble jammed up ag'inst 'em?"
"You can't prove it by me," Tom laughed. "I believe Shakespeare said something like that about greatness."
"Well, nev' mind; whoa, Saladin, boy, we'll git round to you ag'in, bime-by. As I was sayin', this here furss with Jim Bledsoe jest natchelly couldn't be holped, nohow. Hit was thisaway: 'long late in the fall I swapped Jim a piebald that was jest erbout the no-accountest hawss 'at ever had a bit in his mouth. I done told Jim all his meanness; but Jim, he 'lowed I was lyin' and made the trade anyhow. Inside of a week he was back here, callin' me names. I turned him first one cheek and then t'other, like the Good Book says, till they was jest plum' wo' out; and then I says, says I: 'Lookee here,Jim, you've done smack' me on both sides o' the jaw, and that ther's your priv'lege—me bein' a chu'ch-member in good and reg'lar standin', and no low-down, in-fergotten, turkey-trodden hypocrite like you. But right here the torections erbout what I'm bounden to do sort o' peter out. I got as many cheeks to turn as any of 'em, but that ain't sayin' that the stock's immortil' With that he ups and allows a heap mo' things about my morils; and me havin' turned both cheeks till my neck ached, and not havin' any mo'toeturn, what-all could I do—what-all would you 'a' done, Tom-Jeff?"
"Don't ask me. I'm one of the hair-hung and breeze-shaken majority. I should most probably have punched his head."
"Well, that's jest what I did. I says, says I, 'Jim, whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and jest at this time present, I'm the instrument.' And when the dust got settled down, Jim he druv' home with that ther' piebald, allowin' he wasn't such an all-fired bad hawss after all. But lookee here, Tom-Jeff, this ain't sellin' you the finest saddle-hawss in the valley. What do ye say about Saladin?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Tom. "I don't love horses very much. You know what the Bible says:A horse is a vain thing for safety. Is this bay going to make me lose my temper and knock his pinhead brains out the first time I put a leg over him?"
"No-o-o, suh! Why, he's as kind and gentle and lovin as a woman. You jest natchellycouldn'twhup this here bay, Tom-Jeff!"
"All right, Japhe; I was only deviling you a little. Take him up to the Woodlawn stables and tell WilliamHenry Harrison to give him the box stall. I'll try him to-morrow morning, if the weather is good."
Brother Japheth's business was concluded, and the architect who was building the latest extension to the pipe-pit floor was heading across the yard to consult the young boss. Pettigrass paused with his foot in the stirrup to say, "Old Tike Bryerson's on the rampage ag'in; folks up at the valley head say he's a-lookin' for you, Tom-Jeff."
"For me?" said Tom; then he laughed easily. "I don't owe him anything, and I'm not very hard to find. What's the matter?"
He thought it a little singular at the time that Japheth gave him a curious look and mounted and rode away without answering his question. But the building activities were clamoring for time and attention, and his father was waiting to consult him about a run of iron that was not quite up to the pipe-making test requirements. So he forgot Japheth's half-accusing glance at parting, and the implied warning that had preceded it, until an incident at the day's end reminded him of both.
The incident turned on the fact of his walking home. Ordinarily he struck work when the furnace whistle blew, riding home with his father behind old Longfellow; but on this particular evening Kinderling, the architect, missed his South Tredegar train, and Tom spent an extra hour with him, discussing further and future possibilities of expansion. Kinderling got away on a later train, and Tom closed his office and took the long mile up the pike afoot in the dusk of the autumn evening, thinking pointedly of many things mechanical and industrial, and never by any chance forereaching tothe epoch-marking event that was awaiting him at the Woodlawn gate.
His hand was upon the latch of the ornamental side wicket opening on the home foot-path when a woman, crouching in the shadow of the great-gate pillar, rose suddenly and stood before him. He did not recognize her at first; it was nearly dark, and her head was snooded in a shawl. Then she spoke, and he saw that it was Nancy Bryerson—a Nan sadly and terribly changed, but with much of the wild-creature beauty of face and form still remaining.
"You done forgot me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked; and then, at his start of recognition: "I allow I have changed some."
"Surely I haven't forgotten you, Nan. But you took me by surprise; and I can't see in the dark any better than most people. What are you doing down here in the valley so late in the evening?" He tried to say it superiorly, paternally, as an older man might have said it—and was not altogether successful. The mere sight of her set his blood aswing in the old throbbing ebb and flow, though, if he had known it, it was pity now rather than passion that gave the impetus.
"You allow it ain't fittin' for me to be out alone after night?" she said, with a hard little laugh. "I reckon it ain't goin' to hurt me none; anyways, I had to come. Paw's been red-eyed for a week, and he's huntin' for you, Tom-Jeff."
Then Tom recalled Japheth's word of the morning.
"Hunting for me? Well, I'm not very hard to find," he said, unconsciously repeating the answer he had made to the horse-trader's warning.
"Couldn't you make out to go off somewheres for a little spell?" she asked half-pleadingly.
"Run away, you mean? Hardly; I'm too busy just at present. Besides, I haven't any quarrel with your father. What's he making trouble about now?"
She put her face in her hands, and though she was silent, he could see that sobs were shaking her. Being neither more nor less than a man, her tears made him foolish. He put his arm around her and was trying to find the comforting word, when the heavens fell.
How Ardea and Miss Euphrasia, going the round-about way from one house to the other to avoid the dew-wet grass of the lawns, came fairly within arm's-reach before he saw or heard them, remained a thing inexplicable. But when he looked up they were there, Miss Euphrasia straightening herself aloof in virtuous disapproval, and Ardea looking as if some one had suddenly shown her the head of Medusa.
Tom separated himself from Nan in hot-hearted confusion and stood as a culprit taken in the act. Nan hid her face again and turned away. It was Miss Dabney the younger who found words to break the smarting silence.
"Don't mind us, Mr. Gordon," she said icily. "We were going to Woodlawn to see if your father and mother could come over after dinner."
Tom smote himself alive and made haste to open the foot-path gate for them. There was nothing more said, or to be said; but when they were gone and he was once more alone with Nan, he was fighting desperately with a very manlike desire to smash something; to relieve the wrathful pressure by hurting somebody. Let it bewritten down to his credit that he did not wreak his vengeance on the defenseless. Thomas Jefferson, the boy, would not have hesitated.