"Oh, please go quickly!""Oh, please go quickly!"
He was waiting only for her to finish.
"Is it quite safe for you here?" he asked.
"Quite; but I shall die of impatience if you don't hurry!" Then her good blood made its protest heard. "Oh, please forgive me! I don't forget that you are my guest, but—"
"Not a word, Miss Dabney. Shall I come back here with the woman or the doctor?"
"No; I'll send for you if—if there is no hope. Otherwise you could do nothing."
He lifted his hat and was gone, and she turned and reëntered the house of trouble, bravely facing that which had to be faced.
An hour later, when Doctor Williams, with Mammy Juliet's Pete chopping the way for him up the hazardous path, reached the end of his journey of mercy, there was a bright fire crackling on the hearth, and Miss Dabney was sitting before it, holding little Tom, who was still sleeping. Aunt Eliza, a deft middle-aged negress who had succeeded Mammy Juliet as housekeeper at Deer Trace, was bending over the bed, and the physician went quickly to stand beside her, shaking his head dubiously. A moment afterward he turned short on Ardea.
"You must go home, my dear—at once—and take the child with you. Pete is outside to help you, and my buggy is just at the foot of the path. I can't have you here."
"Can't I be of some use if I stay?" she pleaded.
"No; you'd only hinder. You are much too sympathetic. Don't delay; the minutes may count for lives," and the physician began to unbuckle the straps of the canvas-covered case he had brought with him.
Ardea wrapped the child hastily and gave him to Pete to carry, following as quickly as she could down the path made possible by the coachman's choppings. Happily, the doctor's horse was freshly shod, and the quarter-mile to the manor-house was measured in safety. Ardea left little Tom with Mammy Juliet at her cabin in the old quarters, and went up to the great house to wait anxiously for news. It was drawing on to the early dusk of the cloudy evening when she saw from the window of the music-room the muffled figure of Pete opening the pasture gate for the doctor to drive through. Instantly she flew to the door and out on the steps.
"Go in, child; go in," was the fatherly command. "I've got to stop to take Morelock in. I promised to carry him to the station."
"But Nancy?" she questioned anxiously.
"She will live," said the doctor briefly. And then he added with a frown: "But the child may not—which would doubtless be the best thing possible for all concerned. I'm afraid the woman is incorrigible." Then the professional part of him came to its own again: "You'll have to send somebody up there to relieve Eliza. Care is all that is needed now, but it mustn't be stinted."
There were tears standing in the slate-blue eyes of the listener, but Doctor Williams did not see them. If he had, he would not have understood; neither would he have plumbed the depths of misery in that whispered saying of Ardea's as she turned and fled to her room: "O Tom! how could you! how could you!"
Thomas Jefferson Gordon, Bachelor of Science, and one of the six prize-men in his class, was expected home on the first day of July; and it was remarked as a coincidence by the curious that Deer Trace manor-house was closed for the summer no more than a week before the return of the Gordon black sheep.
That Tom was a black sheep, a hopeless and incorrigible social iconoclast, was no longer a matter of doubt in the minds of any. Something may be forgiven a promising young man who has been unhappy enough, or imprudent enough, to begin to make history for himself in the irresponsible 'teens; but also the act of oblivion may be repealed. When it became noised about that there were two children instead of one in the old dog-keeper's cabin in the glen, Mountain View Avenue was justly indignant, and even the lenient Gordonians scowled and shook their heads at the mention of the young boss's name. All the world loves a lover, as in just measure it despises a libertine; and there were fathers of daughters among the miner and foundry folk of the town.
On the lips of the transplanted urbanites of the hill houses comment was less elemental, but no less condemnatory. It was no wonder the Dabneys had closed their house and had gone to Crestcliffe Inn to save Ardea the humiliation of having to meet Tom before she was safely married to Vincent Farley. It was what any self-respecting young woman would wish under like trying conditions. The country colony approved; likewise, it commended Miss Dabney's foresight and prudence in causing the Bryerson woman and her two children to disappear from the cabin in the glen; though Mrs. Vancourt Henniker, in secret session over the tea-cups with the elder Miss Harrison, voiced her surprise that Ardea could continue to be charitable in that quarter.
"It is quite beyond me," was the matron's thin-lipped phrasing of it. "When one remembers that this wretched mountain girl has been Ardea's understudy from the very beginning—faugh! it is simply disgusting! I should think Ardea would never want to see or hear of her again."
To such an atmosphere of potential social ostracism Tom returned after the final scholastic triumph in Boston; and for the first few days he escaped asphyxiation chiefly because the affairs of Gordon and Gordon and the Chiawassee Consolidated gave him no time to test its quality.
But after the first week he began to breathe it unmistakably. One evening he called on the Farnsworths; the ladies were not at home to him. The next night he saddled Saladin and rode over to Fairmont; the Misses Harrison were also unable to see him, and the butler conveyed a deftly-worded intimation pointing to future invisibilities on the part of his mistresses. The eveningbeing still young, Tom tried Rockwood and the Dell, suspicion settling into conviction when the trim maidservant at the Stanley villa went near to shutting the door in his face. At the Dell he fared a little better. The Young-Dicksons were going out for an after-dinner call on one of the neighbors, and Tom met them at the gate as he was dismounting. There were regrets apparently hearty; but in recasting the incident later, Tom remembered that it was the husband who did the talking, and that Mrs. Young-Dickson stood in the shadow of the gate tree, frigidly silent and with her face averted.
"Once more, old boy, and then we'll quit," he said to Saladin at the remounting, and the final rein-drawing was at the stone-pillared gates of Rook Hill. Again the ladies were not at home, but Mr. Vancourt Henniker came out and smoked a cigar with his customer on the piazza. The talk was pointedly of business, and the banker was urbanely gracious—and mildly inquisitive. Would there be a consolidation of the allied iron industries of Gordonia when the Farleys should return? Mr. Henniker thought it would be undeniably profitable to all concerned, and offered his services as financiering promoter and intermediary. Would Mr. Gordon come and talk it over with him—at the bank?
Tom found his father smoking a bedtime pipe on the picturesque veranda at Woodlawn when he reached home. Whistling for William Henry Harrison to come and take his horse, he drew up one of the porch chairs and filled and lighted his own pipe. For a time there was such silence as stands for communion between men of one blood, and it was the father who first broke it.
"Been out callin', son?" he asked, marking the Tuxedo and the white expanse of shirt front.
"No, I reckon not," was the reply, punctuated by a short laugh. "The Avenue seems to be depopulated."
"So? I hadn't heard of anybody goin' away," said Caleb the literal.
"Nor I," said Tom curtly; and the conversation paused until the iron-master had deliberately refilled and lighted his corn-cob.
"It's a-plenty onprofitable, Buddy, don't you reckon?" he ventured, referring to the social diversion.
There was a picric quality in Tom's tone when he replied: "The calling act?—I have certainly found it so to-night." Then, more humanely: "But as a means of relaxation it beats sitting here in the dark and stewing over to-morrow's furnace run—which is what you've been doing."
Caleb chuckled. "That's one time you missed the whole side o' the barn, Buddy. I was settin' here wonderin' if a man ever did get over bein' surprised at the way his children turn out."
"Meaning me?" said Tom, knocking the ash from his pipe and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.
"Yes, meanin' you, son. You've somehow got away from me again in these last six months 'r so."
"I'm older, pappy; and I hope I'm bigger and broader. I was a good bit of a kid a year ago; tough in some spots and fearfully and wonderfully raw in others. Do you recollect how I climbed up on the fence the first dash out of the box and read off the law to you about religion and such things?"
"I reckon so," said the iron-master. "And that's oneo' the things—I ain't heard you cuss out the hypocrites once since you got back. Have you gone back on the Dutchman and his argyment?"
"Bauer, you mean?—no; only on the nullifying part of it. Bauer's no-religion doctrine is a doctrine of denial, and it's pure theory. What we have to deal with in this world is the practical human fact, and a good half of that is tangled up with some sort of religious belief or sentiment. At least, that's the way I'm finding it."
"It's the way itis," said Caleb sententiously. And after a pause: "I allow it helps some, too; greases the wheels some if it don't do anything more."
"It does much more," was the quick reply. "When you find it in a woman like Ardea Dabney, it raises her to the seventh power angelic. It is only when you find it, or some ghastly imitation of it, in such people as the Farleys...." He changed the subject abruptly. "You said the Dabneys had gone up on the mountain for the summer, didn't you?"
"Yes. I believe they're allowin' to come back in August, in time for the weddin'."
The younger man's wince was purely involuntary. He had been trying latterly to train up to the degree of mental fitness which would enable him to think calmly of Ardea as another man's wife. The effort commended itself as a part of the new broadening process, but it was not entirely successful.
"You wrote me the Farleys would be back this month, didn't you?" he asked.
"The fifteenth," said Caleb; smoking reflectively through another long pause before he added. "Andthen come the business fireworks. Have you made up your mind what-all you're goin' to do, Buddy?"
"Oh, yes," said Tom, as if this were merely a matter in passing. "We'll consolidate the two plants and the coal-mine, if it's agreeable all around."
The iron-master took a fresh hitch in his chair. Truly, this was a retransformed Tom; a creature totally and radically different from the college junior who had sweltered through the industrial battle of the previous summer, breathing out curses and threatenings.
"Was you allowin' to let Colonel Duxbury climb into all three o' the saddles?" he inquired, keeping his emotions out of his voice as he could.
"That will be for you and Major Dabney to decide," was the even-toned response. "I would suggest a three-cornered alliance: a third to you, another to Farley, and the remaining third to the Major. The pipe foundry can't run without the furnace and, under present conditions, the furnace is pretty largely dependent on the pipe foundry for its market; and neither could run without the Major's coal."
"Yes, that scheme might carry far enough to hit three of us. But whereabouts do you figure out the fourth third for yourself, son?"
"Oh, I'm not in it; or I'm not going to be after the Farleys come back. I made up my mind to that six months ago," said Tom coolly.
"Great Peter!" ejaculated Caleb, stirred for once out of his slow-speaking, reticent habit. But he made amends by remaining silent for five full minutes before he hazarded the query: "Got something else on the string, Buddy?"
"Yes, two or three things," was Tom's immediate and frank rejoinder. "I can have a place as chemist with the steel people at Bethlehem; and Mr. Clarkson is anxious to have me to go to the New Arizona iron country for him."
It was the brightest of midsummer nights, and a late moon was swinging clear of the Lebanon sky-line, but the prospect of close-clipped lawn and stately trees suddenly went dim before the eyes of the old ex-artillery-man.
"You're all I got in this world, son, and I reckon it makes me sort o' narrow. I know in reason it must seem mighty little and pindlin' down here to you, after what you've seen out in the big road, and I ain't goin' to say a word. But if you can sort it round somehow in the mix-up so I can get a few thousand dollars quittin' money out of it—jest enough to keep your mammy and me from gettin' hongry what few years we've got to eat, I'd be mighty proud."
"Oh," said Tom, still unmoved, as it seemed, "we can do better than that, if you want to pull out. But I made sure you'd rather stay in and hold your job. I've a notion you'd find 'retiring' pretty hard work after so many years spent in the furnace yard."
"You're right about that, son; I sure would," agreed Caleb. Then he went back to the main proposition. "What-all makes you restless, Buddy? Is it because Chiawassee and the pipe-makin' ain't big enough for you?"
Tom answered promptly and without apparent reserve.
"The job's big enough, but I don't want to stay hereand yoke up with the Farleys; they'd ruin me in a year."
"Get the better of you in the business—is that what you're aimin' to say?"
"Not exactly. I'm still brash enough to believe I could hold my own on that score. But—oh, well; you know what we found out last summer about their business methods. I can do business that way, too; as a matter of fact, I did do a good bit more of it last year than you knew anything about. But I'm out of it now, and I mean to stay out."
A longer interval of silence followed, and at the end of it another query.
"Is that all that's the matter, Buddy?"
"No—it isn't," hesitantly. "I'm seventeen other kinds of a fool, too, pappy."
"Reckon ye couldn't make out to onload the whole of it on to a pair o' right old shoulders, could ye, son Tom?" was the gentle invitation.
"I don't know why I shouldn't tell you. I'm foolish about Ardea; been that way ever since she used to wear frocks and I used to run barefoot. I don't believe I could stand it to stay here and be her husband's business partner."
Caleb was shrouding himself in tobacco smoke and nodding complete intelligence.
"How did you ever come to let her get away from you, son?" he asked.
"That's a large question—too big for me to answer, I'm afraid. I always knew we were meant for each other, and I guess I took too much for granted. Then Vint Farley came along, and I helped his case by pitching into him every time she gave me a chance. Naturally, she leaned the other way; and the European business settled it."
Caleb drew a long breath. "Reckon it's everlastin'ly too late now, do ye, Tom?"
The young man's smile was wintry.
"You said the wedding-day was set, didn't you?"
"Why, yes;toebe sure. Leastwise, your mammy talked like it was. But, lawzee, son! the Gordon stock don't lie down in the harness. Ardee thinks a heap o' you, and if you could jest've made out to keep from gettin' so everlastin'ly tangled with that gal o' Tike—" he stopped abruptly, but not quite soon enough, and the word was as the flick of a whip on a wound already made raw by the abrasion of the closed doors.
"So that miserable story has got around to you at last, has it?" said Tom, in fine scorn. "I did hope they'd spare you and mother."
"She's spared yet, so far as I know," said the father, with a backward nod to indicate the antecedent of the pronoun. Following which, he said what lay uppermost in his mind. "I been allowin' maybe you'd come back this time with your head sot on lettin' that gal alone, son."
Thomas Jefferson was on his feet and a hot anger wave was sweeping him back over the years to other times when things used to turn red under the rage blast. But he got some sort of grip on himself before the words came.
"You've believed all you've heard, have you?—condemned me before I could say a word in my own defense? That's what they've all done."
"I don't say that, son." Then, with a note of fatherly yearning in his voice: "I'm waitin' to hear that word right now, Buddy—or as much of it as ye can say honestly."
"You'll never hear it from me—never in this world or another. Now tell me who told you!"
"Why, it's in mighty near ever'body's mouth, son!" said Caleb, in mild surprise. "You certain'y didn't take any pains to cover it up."
"Didn't take any pains? Why, in the name of God, should I?" Tom burst out. After which he tramped heavily to the farther end of the veranda, refilled and lighted his pipe, and smoked furiously for a time, glooming over at the darkened windows of Deer Trace and letting bitter anger and disappointment work their will on him. And when he finally turned and tramped back it was only to say an abrupt "Good night," and to pass into the house and up to his room.
He thought he was alone in the moon-lighted dusk of the upper chamber when he closed the door and began to pace a rageful sentry-beat back and forth between the windows. But all unknown to him one of the three fell sisters, she of the implacable front and deep-set, burning eyes, had entered with him to pace evenly as he paced, and to lay a maddening finger on his soul.
Without vowing a vow and confirming it with an oath, he had partly turned a new life-leaf on the night of heavenly comfort when Ardea had sent him forth to tramp the pike with her kiss of sisterly love still caressing him. Beyond the needs of the moment, the recall of Norman and the determination to turn his back on the world struggle for the time being, he had not gone in that first fervor of the uplifting impulse. But later on there had been other steps: a growing hunger for success with self-respect kept whole; a dulling of the sharp edge of his hatred for the Farleys; a meliorating of his fierce contempt for all the hypocrites, conscious and subconscious.
With the changing point of view had come a corresponding change in the life. The men of his class had marked it, and there were helping hands held out, as there always are when one struggles toward the forward margin of any Slough of Despond. He had even gone to church at long intervals, having there the good hap to fall under the influence of a man whose faults were neither of ignorance nor of insincerity.
In these surface-scratchings of the heart soil there had sprung up a mixed growth in which the tares of self-righteousness began presently to overtop the good grain of humility. One must not be too exacting. If the world were not all good, neither was it all bad; at all events, it was the part of wisdom to make the magnanimous best of it, and to be thankful that the day-star of reason had at last arisen for one's self. At the close of his college course he would go home prepared to deal firmly but justly with the Farleys, prepared to show Ardea and the small world of Paradise a pattern of business rectitude, of filial devotion, of upright, honorable manhood. As Ardea had said, the example was needed; it should be forthcoming. And perhaps, in the dim and distant future, Ardea herself would look back to the night when her word and her kiss had fashioned a man after her own heart, and be—not sorry (true love was still stronger than prideful Phariseeism here), but a little regretful, it might be, that her love could not have gone where it was sent.
And now.... With Alecto's maddening finger pressed on the soul-hurt, no man is responsible. After the furious storm of upbubbling curses had spent itself there was a little calm, not of surcease but of vacuity, since even the cursing vocabulary has its limitations. Then a grouping of words long forgotten arrayed itself before him, like the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzer's banqueting hall.
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.
He put his hands before his face to shut out the sight of the words. Farther on, he felt his way across the room to stand at the window where he could look across to the gray, shadowy bulk of the manor-house, to the house and to the window of the upper room which was Ardea's.
"They've got me down," he whispered, as if the words might reach her ear. "The devils have come back, Ardea, my love; but you can cast them out again, if you will. Ah, girl, girl! Vincent Farley will never need you as I need you this night!"
During the first half of the year 1894, with Norman too busy at the pipe foundry to worry him, and the iron-master president too deeply engrossed in matters mechanical, Mr. Henry Dyckman, still bookkeeper and cashier for Chiawassee Consolidated, had fewer nightmares; and by the time he had been a month in undisputed command at the general office he had given over searching for a certain packet of papers which had mysteriously disappeared from a secret compartment in his desk.
Later, when the time for the return of the younger Gordon drew near, there was encouraging news from Europe. Dyckman had not failed to keep the mails warm with reports of the Gordon and Gordon success; with urgings for the return of the exiled dynasty; and late in May he had news of the home-coming intention. From that on there were alternating chills and fever. If Colonel Duxbury should arrive and resume the reins of management before Tom Gordon should reappear, all might yet be well. If not,—the alternative impaired the bookkeeper's appetite, and there were hot nights in June when he slept badly.
When Tom's advent preceded the earliest date namedby Mr. Farley by a broad fortnight or more, the bookkeeper missed other of his meals, and one night fear and a sharp premonition of close-pressing disaster laid cold hands on him; and nine o'clock found him skulking in the great train shed at the railway station, a ticket to Canada in his pocket, a goodly sum of the company's money tightly buckled in a safety-belt next to his skin—all things ready for flight save one, the courage requisite to the final step-taking.
The following morning the premonition became a certainty. In the Gordonia mail there was a note from the younger Gordon, directing him to come to the office of the pipe foundry, bringing the cash-book and ledger for a year whose number was written out in letters of fire in the bookkeeper's brain. He went, again lacking the courage either to refuse or to disappear, and found Gordon waiting for him. There were no preliminaries.
"Good morning, Dyckman," said the tyrant, pushing aside the papers on his desk. "You have brought the books? Sit down at that table and open the ledger at the company's expense account for the year. I wish to make a few comparisons," and he took a thick packet of papers from a pigeonhole of the small iron safe behind his chair.
Dyckman was unbuckling the shawl-strap in which he had carried the two heavy books, but at the significant command he desisted, went swiftly to the door opening into the stenographer's room, satisfied himself that there were no listeners, and resumed his chair.
"You have cut out some of the preface, Mr. Gordon; I'll cut out the remainder," he said, moistening his dry lips. "You have the true record of the expense accountin that package. I'm down and out; what is it you want?"
The inexorable one at the desk did not keep him in suspense.
"I want a written confession of just what you did, and what you did it for," was the direct reply. "You'll find Miss Ackerman's type-writer in the other room; I'll wait while you put it in type."
The bookkeeper's lips were dryer than before, and his tongue was like a stick in his mouth when he said:
"You're not giving me a show, Mr. Gordon; the poor show a common murderer would have in any court of law. You are asking me to convict myself."
Gordon held up the packet of papers.
"Here is your conviction, Mr. Dyckman—the original leaves taken from those books when you had them re-bound. I need your statement of the facts for quite another purpose."
"And if I refuse to make it? A cornered rat will fight for his life, Mr. Gordon."
"If you refuse I shall be reluctantly compelled to hand these papers over to our attorneys—reluctantly, I say, because you can serve me better just now out of jail than in it."
Dyckman made a final attempt to gain fighting space.
"It's an unfair advantage you're taking; at the worst, I am only an accessory. My principals will be here in a few days, and—"
"Precisely," was the cold rejoinder. "It is because your principals are coming home, and because they are not yet here, that I want your statement. Oblige me, if you please; my time is limited this morning."
There was no help for it, or none apparent to the fear-stricken; and for the twenty succeeding minutes the type-writer clicked monotonously in the small ante-room. Dyckman could hear his persecutor pacing the floor of the private office, and once he found himself looking about him for a weapon. But at the end of the writing interval he was handing the freshly-typed sheet to a man who was yet alive and unhurt.
Gordon sat down at his desk to read it, and again the roving eyes of the bookkeeper swept the interior of the larger room for the means to an end; sought and found not.
The eye-search was not fully concluded when Gordon pressed the electric button which summoned the young man who kept the local books of the Chiawassee plant across the way. While he waited he saw the conclusion of the eye-search and smiled rather grimly.
"You'll not find it, Dyckman," he said, divining the desperate purpose of the other; adding, as an afterthought: "and if you should, you wouldn't have the courage to use it. That is the fatal lack in your makeup. It is what kept you from taking the train last night with the money belt which you emptied this morning. You'll never make a successful criminal; it takes a good deal more nerve than it does to be an honest man."
The bookkeeper was sliding lower in his chair.
"I—I believe you are the devil in human shape," he muttered; and then he made an addendum which was an unconscious slipping of the under-thought into words: "It's no crime to kill a devil."
Gordon smiled again. "None in the least,—only youwant to make sure you have a silver bullet in the gun when you try it."
Hereupon the young man from the office across the pike came in, and Gordon handed a pen to Dyckman.
"I want you to witness Mr. Dyckman's signature to this paper, Dillard," he said, folding the confession so that it could not be read by the witness; and when the thing was done, the young man appended his notarial attestation and went back to his duties.
"Well?" said Dyckman, when they were once more alone together.
"That's all," said Gordon curtly. "As long as you are discreet, you needn't lose any sleep over this. If you don't mind hurrying a little, you can make the ten-forty back to town."
Dyckman restrapped his books and made a show of hastening. But before he closed the office door behind him he had seen Gordon place the type-written sheet, neatly folded, on top of the thick packet, snapping an elastic band over the whole and returning it to its pigeonhole in the small safe.
Later in the day, Tom crossed the pike to the oak-shingled office of the Chiawassee Consolidated. His father was deep in the new wage scale submitted by the miners' union, but he sat up and pushed the papers away when his son entered.
"Have you seen this morning'sTribune?" asked Tom, taking the paper from his pocket.
"No; I don't make out to find much time for it before I get home o' nights," said Caleb. "Anything doin'?"
"Yes; they are having a hot time in Chicago andPullman. The strike is spreading all over the country on sympathy lines."
"Reckon it'll get down to us in any way?" queried the iron-master.
"You can't tell. I'd be a little easy with Ludlow and his outfit on that wage scale, if I were you."
"I don't like to be scared into doin' a thing."
"No; but we don't want a row on our hands just now. Farley might make capital out of it."
Caleb nodded. Then he said: "Didn't I see Dyckman comin' out of your shanty 'long about eleven o'clock?"
"Yes; he came out to do me a little favor, and it went mighty near to making him sweat blood. Shall you need me any more to-day?"
"No, I reckon not. Goin' away?"
"I'm going to town on the five-ten, and I may not be back till late."
Tom's business in South Tredegar was unimportant. There was a word or two to be said personally in the ear of Hanchett, the senior member of the firm of attorneys intrusted with the legal concernments of Gordon and Gordon, and afterward a solitary dinner at the Marlboro. But the real object of the town trip disclosed itself when he took an electric car for the foot of Lebanon on the line connecting with the inclined railway running up the mountain to Crestcliffe Inn. He had not seen Ardea since the midwinter night of soul-awakenings; and Alecto's finger was still pressing on the wound inflicted by the closed doors of Mountain View Avenue and his father's misdirected sympathy.
He found Major Dabney smoking on the hotel veranda, and his welcome was not scanted here, at least. There was a vacant chair beside the Major's and the Major's pocket case of long cheroots was instantly forthcoming. Would not the returned Bachelor of Science sit and smoke and tell an old man what was going on in the young and lusty world beyond the mountain-girt horizons?
Tom did all three. His boyish awe for the old autocrat of Paradise had mellowed into an affection that was almost filial, and there was plenty to talk about: the final dash in the technical school; the outlook in the broader world; the great strike which was filling all mouths; the business prospects for Chiawassee Consolidated.
The moment being auspicious, Tom sounded the master of the Deer Trace coal lands on the reorganization scheme, and found nothing but complaisance. Whatever rearrangement commended itself to Tom and his father, and to Colonel Duxbury Farley, would be acceptable to the Major.
"I reckon I can trust you, Tom, and my ve'y good friend, youh fatheh, to watch out for Ardea's little fo'tune," was the way he put it. "I haven't so ve'y much longeh to stay in Paradise," he went on, with a silent little chuckle for the grim pun, "and what I've got goes to her, as a matteh of cou'se." Then he added a word that set Tom to thinking hard. "I had planned to give her a little suhprise on her wedding-day: suppose you have the lawyehs make out that block of new stock to Mistress Vincent Farley instead of to me?"
Tom's hard thinking crystallized into a guarded query.
"Of course, Major Dabney, if you say so. Butwouldn't it be more prudent to make it over in trust for her and her children before she becomes Mrs. Farley?"
The piercing Dabney eyes were on him, and the fierce white mustaches took the militant angle.
"Tell me, Tom, have you hadyouhsuspicions in that qua'teh, too? I'm speaking in confidence to a family friend, suh."
"It is just as well to be on the safe side," said Tom evasively. There was enough of the uplift left to make him reluctant to strike his enemy in the dark.
"No, suh, that isn't what I mean. You've had youh suspicions aroused. Tell me, suh, what they are."
"Suppose you tell me yours, Major," smiled the younger man.
Major Dabney became reflectively reminiscent. "I don't know, Tom, and that's the plain fact. Looking back oveh ouh acquaintance, thah's nothing in that young man for me to put a fingeh on; but, Tom, I tell you in confidence, suh, I'd give five yeahs of my old life, if the good Lord has that many mo' in His book for me, if the blood of the Dabneys didn't have to be—uh—mingled with that of these heah damned Yankees. I would, for a fact, suh!"
Tom rose and flung away the stub of his third cheroot.
"Then you'll let me place your third of the new stock in trust for her and her children?" he said. "That will be best, on all accounts. By the way, where shall I find Miss Ardea?"
"She's about the place, somewhahs," was the reply; and Tom passed on to the electric-lighted lobby to send his card in search of her.
Chance saved him the trouble. Some one was playing in the music-room and he recognized her touch and turned aside to stand under the looped portières. She was alone, and again, as many times before, it came on him with the sense of discovery that she was radiantly beautiful—that for him she had no peer among women.
It was the score of a Bach fugue that stood on the music-rack, and she was oblivious to everything else until her fingers had found and struck the final chords. Then she looked up and saw him.
There was no greeting, no welcoming light in the slate-blue eyes; and she did not seem to see when he came nearer and offered to shake hands.
"I've been talking to your grandfather for an hour or more," he began, "and I was just going to send my card after you. Haven't you a word of welcome for me, Ardea?"
Her eyes were holding him at arm's length.
"Do you think you deserve a welcome from any self-respecting woman?" she asked in low tones.
His smile became a scowl—the anger scowl of the Gordons.
"Why shouldn't I?" he demanded. "What have I done to make every woman I meet look at me as if I were a leper?"
She rose from the piano-stool and confronted him bravely. It was now or never, if their future attitude each to the other was to be succinctly defined.
"You know very well what you have done," she said evenly. "If you had a spark of manhood left in you, you would know what a dastardly thing you are doing now in coming here to see me."
"Well, I don't," he returned doggedly. "And another thing: I'm not to be put off with hard words. I ask you again what has happened? Who has been lying about me this time?"
Three other guests of the hotel were entering the music-room and the quarrel had to pause. Ardea had a nerve-shaking conviction that it would never do to leave it in the air. He must be made to understand, once for all, that he had sinned beyond forgiveness. She caught up the light wrap she had been wearing earlier in the evening and turned to one of the windows opening on the rear veranda. "Come with me," she whispered; and he followed obediently.
But there was no privacy to be had out of doors. There was a goodly scattering of people in the veranda chairs enjoying the perfect night and the white moonlight. Ardea stopped suddenly.
"You were intending to walk down to the valley?" she asked.
He nodded.
"I will walk with you to the cliff edge."
It was a short hundred yards, and there were many abroad in the graveled walks: lovers in pairs, and groups of young people pensive or chattering. So it was not until they stood on the very battlements of the western cliff that they were measurably alone.
"Has no one told you what happened last March—on the day of the ice storm?" she asked coldly.
"No."
"Don't you know it without being told?"
"Of course, I don't; why should I?"
His angry impassiveness shook her resolution. Itseemed incredible that the most accomplished dissembler could rise to such supreme heights of seeming.
"I used to think I knew you," she said, faltering, "but I don't. Why don't you despise hypocrisy and double-dealing as you used to?"
"I do; more heartily than ever."
"Yet, in spite of that, you have—oh, it is perfectly unspeakable!"
"I am taking your word for it," he rejoined gloomily. "You are denying me what the most wretched criminal is taught to believe is his right—to know what he is accused of."
"Have you forgotten that night last winter when you—when I saw you at the gate with Nancy Bryerson?"
"I'm not likely to forget it."
She seized her courage and held it fast, putting maidenly shame to the wall.
"Tom, it is a terrible thing to say—and your punishment will be terrible.But you must marry Nancy!"
"And father another man's child?—not much!" he answered brutally.
"And father your own children—two of them," she said, with bitter emphasis.
"Oh, that's it, is it?" he said, with a deeper scowl. "So there are two of them, are there? That's why no woman in Mr. Farley's country colony is at home to me any more, I suppose." And then, still more bitterly: "Of course, you are all sure of this?—Nan has at last confessed that I am the guilty man?"
"You know she has not, Tom. Her loyalty is still as strong and true at it is mistaken. But your duty remains."
He was standing on the brink of the cliff, looking down on Paradise Valley, spread like a silver-etched map far below in the moonlight. The flare and sough of the furnace at the iron-works came and went with regular intermittency; and just beyond the group of Chiawassee stacks a tiny orange spot appeared and disappeared like a will-o'-the-wisp. He was staring down at the curious spot when he said:
"If I say that I have no duty toward Nan, you will believe it is a lie—as you did once before. Have you ever reflected that it is possible to trample on love until it dies—even such love as I bear you?"
"It is a shame for you to speak of such things to me, Tom. Consider what I have endured—what you have made me endure. People said I was standing by you, condoning a sin that no right-minded young woman should condone. I bore it because I thought, I believed, you were sorry. And at that very time you were deceiving me—deceiving every one. You have dragged me in the very dust of shame!"
"There is no shame save what we make for ourselves," he retorted. "One day, according to your creed, we shall stand naked before your God, and before each other. In that day you will know what you have done to me to-night. No, don't speak, please; let me finish. The last time we were together you gave me a strong word, and—and you kissed me. For the sake of that word and that kiss I went out into the world a different man. For the little fragment of your love that you gave me then, I have lived a different man from that day to this. Now you shall see what I shall be without it."
Before he had finished she had turned from him gasping, choking, strangling in the grip of a mighty passion, new-born and yet not new. With the suddenness of a revealing flash of lightning she understood; knew that she loved him, that she had been loving him from childhood, not because, but in spite of everything, as he had once defined love. It was terrible, heartbreaking, soul-destroying. She called on shame for help, but shame had fled. She was cold with a horrible fear lest he should find out and she should be for ever lost in the bottomless pit of humiliation.
It was the sight of the little orange-colored spot glowing and growing beyond the Chiawassee chimneys that saved her.
"Look!" she cried. "Isn't that a fire down in the valley just across the pike from the furnace? Itisa fire!"
He made a field-glass of his hands and looked long and steadily.
"You are quite right," he said coolly. "It's my foundry. Can you get back to the hotel alone? If you can, I'll take the short cut down through the woods. Good night, and—good-by." And before she could reply, he had lowered himself over the cliff's edge and was crashing through the underbrush on the slopes below.
It was the office building of the pipe foundry that burned on the night of July fifteenth, and the fire was incendiary. Suspicion, put on the scent by the night-watchman's story, pointed to Tike Bryerson as the criminal. The old moonshiner, in the bickering stage of intoxication, had been seen hanging about the new plant during the day, and had made vague threats in the hearing of various ears in Gordonia.
Wherefore the small world of Paradise and its environs looked to see a warrant sworn out for the mountaineer's arrest; and when nothing was done, gossip reawakened to say that Tom Gordon did not dare to prosecute; that Bryerson's crime was a bit of wild justice, so recognized by the man whose duty it was to invoke the law.
It was remarked, also, that neither of the Gordons had anything to say, and that an air of mystery enveloped the little that they did. The small wooden office building was a total loss, but the night shift at the Chiawassee had saved most of the contents; everything of value except the small iron safe which had stood behind the manager's desk in the private office. The safe, as the onlookers observed, was taken from the debrisand conveyed, unopened, across the road to the Chiawassee laboratory and yard office. Whether or not its keepings were destroyed by the fire, was known only to the younger Gordon, who, as the foreman of the Chiawassee night shift informed aTribunereporter, had broken it open himself, deep in the small hours of the night following the fire, and behind the locked door of the furnace laboratory.
At another moment South Tredegar newspaperdom might have made something of the little mystery. But there were more exciting topics to the fore. The great strike, with Chicago and Pullman as its storm-centers, was gripping the land in its frenzied fist, and the press despatches were greedy of space. Hence, young Gordon was suffered to open his safe in mysterious secrecy; to rebuild his burned office; and to let the incendiary, sufficiently identified by the watchman, it was believed, go scot-free.
With the greater land-wide interest to divert it, even Paradise failed to note the curious change that had come over the younger of the Gordons, dating from the night of burnings. But the few who came in contact with him in the business day saw and felt it. Miss Ackerman, the pipe-works stenographer, quit when her week was up. It was nothing that the young manager had said or done; but, as she confided to her sister, more fortunately situated in town, it was like being caged with a living threat. Even Norman, the trusted lieutenant, was cut out of his employer's confidence; and for hours on end in the business day the card "Not in" would be displayed on the glass-paneled door of the private room in the rebuilt office.
Not to make a mystery of it for ourselves, Tom had passed another milestone in the descent to the valley of lost souls. Or rather, let us say, he had taken a longer step backward toward the primitive. Daggeredamour-propreis rarely a benign wound. Oftener than not it gangrenes, and there is loss of sound tissue and the setting-up of strange and malevolent growth. With the passing of the first healthful shock of honest resentment, Tom became a man of one idea. Somewhere in the land of the living dwelt a man who had robbed him, intentionally or otherwise, indirectly, but none the less effectually, of the ennobling love of the one woman; to find that man and to deal with him as Joab dealt with Amasa became the one thing worth living for.
The first step was taken in secrecy. One day a stranger, purporting to be a walking delegate for the United Miners, but repudiated as such by check-weigher Ludlow, took up his residence in Gordonia and began to interest himself, quite unminer-like, in the various mechanical appliances of the Chiawassee plant, and particularly in the different sources of its water supply.
Divested of his cloakings, this sham walking delegate was a Pinkerton man, detailed grudgingly from the Chicago storm-center on Tom's requisition. His task was to scrutinize Nancy Bryerson's past, and to identify, if possible, one or more of the three men who, in January of the year 1890, had inspected and repaired the pipe-line running from the coke-yard tank up to the barrel-spring on high Lebanon.
To the detective the exclusion card on Tom's door did not apply, and the conferences between the hired and the hirer were frequent and prolonged. If we shalloverhear one of them—the final one, held on the day of the Farleys' return to Paradise and Warwick Lodge—it will suffice.
"It looks easy enough, as you say, Mr. Gordon," the human ferret is explaining; "but in point of fact there's nothing to work on—less than nothing. Three years ago you had no regular repair gang, and when a job of that kind was to be done, any Tom, Dick or Harry picked up a helper or two and did it. But I think you can bet on one thing: none of the three men who made that inspection is at present in your employ."
"In other words, you'd like to get back to your job at Pullman," snaps Tom.
"Oh, I ain't in any hurry! That job looks as if it would keep for a while longer. But I don't like to take a man's good money for nothing; and that's about what I'm doing here."
Tom swings around to his desk and writes a check.
"I suppose you have no further report to make on the woman?"
"Nothing of any importance. I told you where she is living—in a little cabin up on the mountain in a settlement called Pine Knob."
"Yes; but I found that out for myself."
"So you did. Well, she's living straight, as far as anybody knows; and if you can believe what you hear, the only follower she ever had was a young mountaineer named Kincaid. I looked him up; he's been gone from these parts for something over three years. He is ranching in Indian Territory, and only came back last week. You can check him off your list."
"He was never on, and I have no list," says the manhunter grittingly. "But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. Beckham," passing the signed check to the other, "I shall begin where you leave off, and end by finding my man."
"I hope you do, I'm sure," says the Pinkerton, moved by the liberal figure of the check. "And if there's anything more the Agency can do—"
In the afternoon of the same day, when the self-dismissed detective was speeding northward toward Chicago and the car-burners, Tom saddled the bay and rode long and hard over a bad mountain cart track to the hamlet of Pine Knob. It was a measure of his abandonment that he was breaking his promise to Ardea; and another of his reckless singleness of purpose that he rode brazenly through the little settlement to Nan's door, dismounted and entered as if he had right.
The cabin was untenanted, but he found Nan sitting on the slab step of a rude porch at the back, nursing her child. She greeted him without rising, and her eyes were downcast.
"I've come for justice, Nan," he said, without preface, seating himself on the end of the step and flicking the dust from his leggings with his riding-crop. "You know what they're saying about us—about you and me. I want to know who to thank for it: what is the man's name?"
She did not reply at once, and when she lifted the dark eyes to his they were full of suffering, like those of an animal under the lash.
"I nev' said hit was you," she averred, after a time.
"No; but you might as well. Everybody believes it, and you haven't denied it. Who is the man?"
"I cayn't tell," she said simply.
"You mean you won't tell."
"No, I cayn't; I'm livin' on his money, Tom-Jeff."
"No, you are not. What makes you say that?"
"She told me I was."
"Who? Miss Dabney?"
Her nod was affirmative, and he went on: "Tell me just what she said; word for word, if you can remember."
The answer came brokenly.
"I was ashamed—you don't believe hit, but hit's so. I allowed it washermoney. When I made out like I'd run off, she said, 'No; it's his money 'at's bein' spent for you, and you have a right to it.'"
Tom was silent for a time; then he said the other necessary word.
"She believes I am the man who wronged you, Nan. It was my money."
The woman half rose and then sat down again, rocking the child in her arms.
"You're lyin' to me, Tom-Jeff Gordon. Hit's on'y a lie to make me tell!" she panted.
"No, it's the truth. I was sorry for you and helped you because—well, because of the old times. But everybody has misunderstood, even Miss Dabney."
Silence again; the silence of the high mountain plateau and the whispering pines. Then she asked softly:
"Was you aimin' to marry her, Tom-Jeff?"
His voice was somber. "I've never had the beginning of a chance; and besides, she is promised to another man."
The woman was breathing hard again. "I heerd about that, too—jest the other day. I don't believe hit!"
"It is true, just the same. But I didn't come out here to talk about Miss Dabney. I want to know a name—the name of a man."
She shook her head again and relapsed into unresponsiveness.
"I cayn't tell; he'd shore kill me. He's always allowed he'd do hit if I let on."
"Tell me his name, and I'll kill him before he ever gets a chance at you," was the savage rejoinder.
"D'ye reckon you'd do that, Tom-Jeff—for me?"
The light of the old allurement was glowing in the dark eyes when she said it, but there was no answering thrill of passion in his blood. For one moment, indeed, the bestial demon whispered that here was vengeance of a sort, freely proffered; but the fiercer devil thrust this one aside, and Tom found himself looking consciously and deliberately into the abyss of crime. Once he might have said such a thing in the mere exuberance of anger, meaning nothing more deadly than the retaliatory buffet of passion. But now—
It was as if the curtain of the civilizing, the humanizing, ages had been withdrawn a hand's-breadth to give him a clear outlook on primordial chaos. Once across the mystic threshold, untrammeled by the hamperings of tradition, unterrified by the threat of the mythical future, the human atom becomes its own law, the arbiter of its own momentary destiny. What it wills to do, it may do—if iron-shod chance, blind and stumbling blindly, does not happen to trample on andefface it. Who first took it on him to say,Thou shalt not kill? What were any or all of the prohibitions but the frantic shrillings of some of the atoms to the others?
In the clear outlook Thomas Gordon saw himself as one whose foot was already across the threshold. True, he had thus far broken with the world of time-honored traditions only in part. But why should he scruple to be wholly free? If the man whose deed of brutality or passion was disturbing the chanceful equilibrium for two other human dust-grains should be identified, why should he not be effaced?
The child at Nan's breast stirred in its sleep and threw up its tiny hands in the convulsive movement which is the human embryo's first unconscious protest against the helplessness of which it is born inheritor. Tom stood up, beating the air softly with the hunting-crop.
"The man has spoiled your life, Nan; and, incidentally, he has muddied the spring for me—robbed me of the love and respect of the one woman in the world," he said, quite without heat. "If I find him, I think I shall blot him out—like that." A bumblebee was bobbing and swaying on a head of red clover, and the sudden swish of the hunting-crop left it a little disorganized mass of black and yellow down and broken wing-filaments.
The glow in the dark eyes of the woman had died down again, and her voice was hard and lifeless when she said:
"But not for me, Tom-Jeff; you ain't wantin' to kill him like my brother would, if I had one."
"No; not at all for you, Nan," he said half-absently.And then he tramped away to the gate, and put a leg over Saladin, and rode down the straggling street of the little settlement, again in the face and eyes of all who cared to see.
The bay had measured less than a mile of the homeward way when there came a clatter of hoof-beats in the rear. Tom awoke out of the absent fit, spoke to Saladin and rode the faster. Nevertheless, the pursuing horseman overtook him, and a drawling voice said:
"Hit's right smart wicked to shove the bay thataway down-hill, son."
Tom pulled his horse down to a walk. He was in no mood for companionship, but he knew Pettigrass would refuse to be shaken off.
"Where have you been?" he asked sourly.
"Me? I been over to McLemore's Valley, lookin' at some brood-mares that old man Mac is tryin' to sell the Major."
"Did you come through Pine Knob?"
"Shore, I did. I was a-settin' on Brother Bill Layne's porch whilst you was talkin' to Nan Bryerson. Seems sort o' pitiful you cayn't let that pore gal alone, Tom-Jeff."
"That's enough," said Tom hotly. "I've heard all I'm going to about that thing, from friends or enemies."
"I ain't no way shore about that," said the horse-trader easily. "I was 'lottin' to say a few things, m'self."
Tom pulled the bay up short in the cart track.
"There's the road," he said, pointing. "You can have the front half or the back half—whichever you like."
Japheth's answer was a good-natured laugh and a tacit refusal to take either.
"You cayn't rile me thataway, boy," he said. "I've knowed you a heap too long. Git in the fu'ther rut and take your medicine like a man."
Since there appeared to be no help for it, Tom set his horse in motion again, and Japheth gave him a mile of silence in which to cool down.
"Now you listen at me, son," the horse-trader began again, when he judged the cooling process was sufficiently advanced. "I ain't goin' to tell no tales out o' school this here one time. But you got to let Nan alone, d'ye hear?"
"Oh, shut up!" was the irritable rejoinder. "I'll go where I please, and do what I please. You seem to forget that I'm not a boy any longer!"
"Ya-as, I do; that's the toler'ble straight fact," drawled the other. "But I ain't so much to blame; times you ack like a boy yit, Tom-Jeff."
Tom was silent again, turning a thing over in his mind. It was a time to bend all means to the one end, the trivial as well as the potent.
"Tell me something, Japhe," he said, changing front in the twinkling of an eye. "Is Nan coming back to the dog-keeper's cabin when the family leaves the hotel?"
"'Tain't goin' to make any difference to you if she does," said Pettigrass, wondering where he was to be hit next.
"It may, if you'll do me a favor. You'll be where you can see and hear. I want to know who visits her—besides Miss Ardea."
Brother Japheth's smile was more severe than the sharpest reproach.
"Still a-harpin' on that old string, are ye? Say, Tom-Jeff, I been erbout the best friend you've had, barrin' your daddy, for a right smart spell o' years. Don't you keep on tryin' to th'ow dust in my eyes."
"Call it what you please; I don't care what you think or say. But when you find a man hanging around Nan—"
"They's one right now," said the horse-trader casually.
Tom reined up as if he would ride back to Pine Knob forthwith.
"Who is it?" he demanded.
"Young fellow named Kincaid—jest back f'om out West, somewheres. Brother Bill Layne let on to me like maybe he'd overlook what cayn't be he'ped, and marry Nan anyhow. And that's another reason you got to keep away."
"Let up on that," said Tom, stiffening again. "If you had been where you could have used your ears as you did your eyes back yonder at Pine Knob, you'd know more than you seem to know now."
There was silence between them from this on until the horses were footing it cautiously down the bridle-path connecting the cart track with the Paradise pike. Then Pettigrass said:
"Allowin' ther' might be another man, Tom-Jeff, jest for the sake of argyment, what-all was you aimin' to do if you found him?"
It was drawing on to dusk, and the electric lights of Mountain View Avenue and the colonial houses weretwinkling starlike in the blue-gray haze of the valley. They had reach the junction of the steep bridle-path with the wood road which edged the Dabney horse pasture and led directly to the Deer Trace paddocks, and when Japheth pulled his horse aside into the short cut, Tom drew rein to answer.
"It's nobody's business but mine, Japhe; but I'd just as soon tell you: it runs in my head that he needs killing mighty badly, and I've thought about it till I've come to the conclusion that I'm the appointed instrument. You turn off here? Well, so long."
Brother Japheth made the gesture of leave-taking with his riding-switch, and sent his mount at an easy amble down the wood road, apostrophizing great nature, as his habit was. "Lawzee!howwe pore sinners do tempt the good Lord at every crook and elbow in the big road,toebe shore! Now ther's Tom-Jeff, braggin' how he'll be the one to kill the pappy o' Nan's chillern: he's a-ridin' a mighty shore-footed hawss, but hit do look like he'd be skeered the Lord might take him at his word and make that hawss stumble. Hit do, for a fact!"