Chapter 11

He was rising from his seat on the church step when he heard sounds like muffled groans. Recovering quickly from the first boyish startle of fear oozing like a cool breeze blowing up the back of his neck, he saw that the church door was ajar. By cautiously adding another inch to the aperture he could see the interior of the building, its outlines taking shape when his eyes had become accustomed to darkness relieved only by the small fan-light over the door. Some one was in the church: a man, kneeling, with clasped hands uplifted, in the open space fronting the rude pulpit. Tom recognized the voice and withdrew quickly. It was his Uncle Silas, praying fervently for a lost sheep of the house of Israel.

In former times, with grim rebellion gripping him as it gripped him now, Tom would have run away. But there was a prompting stronger than rebellion: a sudden melting of the heart that made him remember the loving-kindnesses, and not any of the austerities, of the man who was praying for him, and he sat down on the lowest step to wait.

The twilight was glooming to dusk when Silas Crafts came out of the church and locked the door behind him. If he were surprised to find Tom waiting for him, he made no sign. Neither was there any word of greeting passed between them when he gathered his coat tails and sat down on the higher step, self-restraint being a heritage which had come down undiminished from the Covenanter ancestors of both. A little grayer, a little thinner, but with the deep-set eyes still glowing with the fires of utter convincement and the marvelous voice still unimpaired, Silas Crafts would have refused to believe that the passing years had changed him; yet now there was kinsman love to temper solemn austerity when he spoke to the lost sheep--as there might not have been in the sterner years.

"The way of the transgressor is hard, grievously hard, Thomas. I think you are already finding it so, are you not?"

Tom shook his head slowly.

"That doesn't mean what it used to, to me, Uncle Silas; nothing means the same any more. It's just as if somebody had hit that part of me with a club; it's all numb and dead. I'm sure of only one thing now: that is, that I'm not going to be a hypocrite after this, if I can help it."

The man put his hand on the boy's knee.

"Have you been that all along, Thomas?"

"I reckon so,"--monotonously. "At first it was partly scare, and partly because I knew what mother wanted. But ever since I've been big enough to think, I've been asking why, and, as you would say, doubting."

Silas Crafts was silent for a moment. Then he said:

"You have come to the years of discretion, Thomas, and you have chosen death rather than life. If you go on as you have begun, you will bring the gray hairs of your father and mother in sorrow to the grave. Leaving your own soul's salvation out of the question, can you go on and drag an upright, honorable name in the dust and mire of degradation?"

"No," said Tom definitely. "And what's more, I don't mean to. I don't know what Doctor Tollivar wrote you about me, and it doesn't make any difference now. That's over and done with. You haven't been seeing me every day for these three weeks without knowing that I'm ashamed of it."

"Ashamed of the consequences, you mean, Thomas. You are not repentant."

"Yes, I am, Uncle Silas; though maybe not in your way. I don't allow to make a fool of myself again."

The preacher's comment was a groan.

"Tom, my boy, if any one had told me a year ago that a short twelvemonth would make you, not only an apostate to the faith, but a shameless liar as well--"

Tom started as if he had been struck with a whip.

"Hold on, Uncle Silas," he broke in hardily. "That's mighty near a fighting word, even between blood kin. When have you ever caught me in a lie?"

"Now!" thundered the accusing voice; "this moment! You have been giving me to understand that your sinful rebellion at Beersheba was the worst that could be charged against you. Answer me: isn't that what you want me to believe?"

"I don't care whether you believe it or not. It's so."

"It is not so. Here, at your own home, when your mother had just been spared to you by the mercies of the God whose commandments you set at naught, you have been wallowing in sin--in crime!"

Tom locked his clasped fingers fast around his knees and would not open the flood-gates of passion.

"If I can sit here and take that from you, it's because it isn't so," he replied soberly.

Silas Crafts rose, stern and pitiless.

"Wretched boy! Out of your own mouth you shall be convicted. Where were you on Wednesday morning?"

Tom had to think back before he could place the Wednesday morning, and his momentary hesitation was immediately set down to the score of conscious guilt.

"I was at home most of the time; between ten o'clock and noon I was on the mountain."

"Alone?"

"No; not all of the time."

"You say well. There were three of you: a hardened, degraded boy, a woman no less wicked and abandoned, and the devil who tempted you."

The flood-gates of passion would hold no longer.

"It's a lie!" he denied hotly. "I just happened to meet Nan Bryerson at the spring under the big rock, and--"

"Well, go on," said the inexorable voice.

Tom choked in a sudden fit of rage and helplessness. He saw how incredible the simple truth would sound; how like a clumsy equivocation it must appear to one who already believed the worst of him. So he took refuge in the last resort alike of badgered innocence and hardened guilt.

"I don't have to defend myself!" he burst out. "If you can believe I'm that low-down, you're welcome to!" Then, abruptly: "I reckon we'd better be going on home; they'll be waiting dinner for us at the house."

He got on his feet with that, but the accuser was still confronting him, with the dark eyes glowing and a monitory finger pointed to detain him.

"Not yet, Thomas Gordon; there is a duty laid on me. I had hoped and prayed that I might find you repentant; you are not repentant."

"No," said Tom, and he confirmed it with an oath in sheer bravado.

"Peace, miserable boy! God is not mocked. Your father has a letter from Doctor Tollivar; the doors of Beersheba are open to you again. I had hoped--" The pause was not for effect. It was merely that the man and the kinsman in Silas Crafts had throttled the righteous judge. "It breaks my heart, Thomas, but I must say it. You have put it out of your power to say with the Psalmist, 'I will wash mine hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar, O Lord.' You must give up all thoughts of going back to Beersheba."

"Don't trouble yourself," said Tom, with more bravado. "I wouldn't go back there if it was the only place on earth." Then suddenly: "Who was it that told on me, Uncle Silas?"

"Never mind about that. It was one who could have no object in misstating the fact--which you have not denied. Let us go home."

The mile walk down the pike, lying white and ghostly under the starlight, was paced in silence, man and boy striding side by side and each busy with his own thoughts. As they were passing the Deer Trace gates a loose-jointed figure loomed black against the palings, and the voice of Japheth Pettigrass said:

"Why, howdy, Brother Silas! Thought ye'd gone back to South Tredegar. When are ye comin' out to Little Zoar ag'in to give us another o' them old-fashioned, spiritual times o' refreshin' from the presence of the Lord?"

Silas Crafts turned short on the scoffer.

"Why do you ask that, Japheth Pettigrass? The Lord will deal with you, one day."

"Yes, I reckon so; that's what makes me say what I does. There's a heap o' sinners left round here, yit, Brother Silas. There's the Major, for one, and I know you're always countin' me in for another. I dunno but you might snatch me as a brand from the burnin', if you could make out to try it one more lap around the you'se. I been thinkin' right p'intedly about--"

But the preacher had cut in with a curt "Good night," and was gone, with his broad-shouldered nephew at his heels; and the horse-trader went on, with the stars for his audience.

"Look at that, now, will ye? Old Brother Silas is gettin' right smart tetchy with the passin' of the years; he is, so. But he's a powerful preacher. If anybody ever gits me for a star in their crown, it's Brother Silas ag'inst the field, even money up."

Pettigrass turned and was groping for the gate latch when a hand fell on his shoulder, and a clutch that was more than half a blow twirled him about to face the roadway. He was doubling his fists for defense when he saw who his assailant was.

"Why, Tom-Jeff! what's ailin' ye?" he began; but Tom broke in with gaspings of rage.

"Japhe Pettigrass, what did you think you saw last Wednesday forenoon up yonder at Big Rock Spring on the mountain? Tell it straight, this time, or by the God you don't believe in, I'll dig the truth out of you with my bare hands!"

"Sho, now, Tom-Jeff; don't you git so servigrous over nothin'. I didn't see nothin' but a couple o' young fly-aways playin' 'possum in a hole in the big rock. And I'll leave it to you if I didn't call Cæsar off and go my ways, jes' like I'd like to be done by."

"Yes," snarled Tom, dog-mad and furious in this second submergence of the wave of wrath. "Yes; and then you came straight down here and told my uncle!" The hand he had been holding behind him came to the front, clutching a stone snatched up from the metaling of the pike as he ran. "If I should break your face in with this, Japhe Pettigrass, it wouldn't be any more than you've earned!"

"By gravy! _I_ tell Brother Silas on you, Tom-Jeff? You show me the man 'at says I done any such low-down thing as that, and I'll frazzle a fifty-dollar hawsswhip out on his ornery hide--I will, so. Say, boy; you don't certain'y believe that o' me, do ye?"

"I don't want to believe it of you, Japhe," quavered Tom, as near to tears as the pride of his eighteen years would sanction. "But somebody saw and told, and made it a heap worse than it was." He leaned over the top of the wall and put his face in the crook of his elbow, being nothing better than a hurt child, for all his bigness.

"Well, now; I wouldn't let a little thing like that gravel me, if I was you, Tom-Jeff," said Pettigrass, turned comforter. "Nan's a mighty pretty gal, and you ort to be willin' to stand a little devilin' on her account--more especially as you've--"

Tom put up his arm as if to ward a blow.

"Don't you say it, Japhe, or I'll go mad again," he broke out.

"I ain't sayin' nothin'. But who do you reckon it was told on you? Was there anybody else in the big woods that mornin'?"

"Yes; there were three men testing the pipe-line. We both saw them, and Nan was scared stiff at sight of one of them; that's why I put her up in that hole."

"Who was the man?"

"I don't know. I didn't recognize any of them--they were too far off when I saw them. And afterward, Nan wouldn't tell me."

"Did any of 'em see you and Nan?"

"I thought not. Nan was sitting on the flat rock where you stood and looked into the cave, and when she began to whimper, I flung her over into the leaves and ran with her to the hole."

"H'm," said Japheth. "When you find out who that feller is that Nan's skeered of, you can lay your hand on the man that told Brother Silas on you. But I wouldn't trouble about it none, if I was you. You've got a long ways the best of him, whoever he is, and--"

But Tom had turned to go home, feeling his way by the wall because the angry tears were still blinding him, and the horse-trader fell back into his star-gazing.

"Law, law," he mused; "'the horrible pit an' the miry clay.' What a sufferin' pity it is we pore sinners cayn't dance a little now and ag'in 'thout havin' to walk right up and pay the fiddler! Tom-Jeff, there, now, he's a-thinkin' the price is toler'ble high; and I don't know but it is--I don't know but what it is."

The dinner at Woodlawn that night was a stiff and comfortless meal, as it had come to be with the taking on of four-tined forks and the other conventions for which an oak-paneled dining-room in an ornate brick mansion sets the pace. Caleb Gordon was fathoms deep in the mechanical problems of the day's work, as was his wont. Silas Crafts was abstracted and silent. Tom's food choked him, as it had need under the sharp stress of things; and the convalescent housemother remained at table only long enough to pour the coffee.

Tom excused himself a few minutes later, and followed his mother to her room, climbing the stair to her door, leaden-footed and with his heart ready to burst.

"Is that you, Thomas?" said the gentle voice within, answering his tap on the panel. "Come in, son; come in and sit by my fire. It's right chilly to-night."

Thomas Jefferson entered and placed his chair so that she could not see him without turning, and for many minutes the silence was unbroken. Then he began, as begin he must, sometime and in some way.

"Mammy," he said, feeling unconsciously for the childish phrase, "Mammy, has Uncle Silas been telling you anything about me?"

She gave a little nod of assent.

"Something, Thomas, but not a great deal. You have had some trouble with Doctor Tollivar?"

"Yes."

"I have known that for some little time. Your uncle might have told me more, but I wouldn't let him. There has never been anything between us to break confidence, Tom. I knew you would tell me yourself, when the time came."

"I have come to tell you to-night, mammy. You must hear it all, from beginning to end. It goes back a long way--back to the time when you used to let me kneel with my head in your lap to say my prayers; when you used to think I was good...."

The fire had died down to a few glowing masses of coke on the grate bars when he had finished the story of his wanderings in the valley of dry bones. Through it all, Martha Gordon had sat silent and rigid, her thin hands lying clasped in her lap, and her low willow rocking-chair barely moving at the touch of her foot on the fender.

But when it was over; when Tom, his voice breaking in spite of his efforts to control it, told her that he could walk in the way she had chosen for him only at the price a conscious hypocrite must pay, she reached up quickly and took him in her arms and wept over him as those who sorrow without hope, crying again and again, _"O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"_

XVIII

THE AWAKENING

Once in a lifetime for every youngling climbing the facile or difficult slope of the years there comes a day of realization, of a sudden extension of vision, of Rubicon-crossing from the hither shore of joyous and irresponsible adolescence to that further one of conscious grapplings with the adult fact.

For Thomas Jefferson, grinding tenaciously in the Boston technical school, whither he had gone late in the winter of Beersheban discontent, the stream-crossing fell in the spring of the panic year 1893, what time he was twenty-one, a quarter-back on his college eleven, fit, hardy, studious and athletic; a pace-setter for his fellows and the pride of the faculty, but still little more than an overgrown, care-free boy in his outlook on life. Glimpses there had been over into the Promised Land of manhood, but the brimming cup of college work and play quaffed in health-giving heartiness is the elixir of youth. The speculative habit of the boy slept in the college undergraduate. The days were full, each of the things of itself, and if Tom looked forward to the workaday future,--as he did by times,--the boyish impatience to be at it was gone. Chiawassee Consolidated was moderately prosperous; the home letters were mere chronicles of sleepy Paradise. The skies were clear, and the present was acutely present. Tom studied hard and played hard; ate like an ogre and slept like a log. And when he finally awoke to find himself stumbling bewildered on the bank of the epoch-marking Rubicon, he was over and across before he could realize how so narrow a stream should fill so vast a chasm.

The call of the ferryman--to keep the figure whole--was a letter from his father, a letter longer than the commonplace chronicles, and painfully written with the mechanic hand on both sides of a company letter-head. Caleb Gordon wrote chiefly of business. Mutterings of the storm of financial depression were already in the air. Iron, more sensitive than the stock-market, was the barometer, and its readings in the Southern field were growing portentous. Within the month several of the smaller furnaces had gone out of blast, and Chiawassee Consolidated, though still presenting a fair exterior, was, Caleb feared, rotten at heart. What would Tom advise?

Tom found this letter in his mail-box one evening after a strenuous day in the laboratory; and that night he sat up with the corpse of his later boyhood, though he was far enough from putting it that way. His father was in trouble, and the letter was a call for help. It seemed vastly incredible. Thomas Jefferson's ideal of steady courage, of invincible human puissance, was formed on the model of the stout-hearted old soldier who had fought under Stonewall Jackson. What a trumpet blast of alarm must have sounded to make such a man turn to a raw recruit for help!

Suddenly Tom began to realize that he was no longer a raw recruit, a boy to ride care-free while men were afoot and fighting. It astounded him that the realization had been so slow in arriving. It was as if he had been led blindfolded to the firing line, there to have the bandage plucked from his eyes by an unseen hand. Tumultuously it rushed on him that he was weaponed as the men of his father's generation could not be; that his hand could be steady and his heart fearless under threatenings that might well shake the courage of the old man who had borne only the burden and the heat of the day of smaller things.

He sat long with his elbows on the study table and his chin resting on his hands. The room was small but the walls gave before the steady gaze of the gray eyes, and Tom saw afar; down a vistaed highway wherein a strong man walked, leading a boy by the hand. Swiftly, with a click like that of the mechanism in a kinetoscope, the scene changed. The highway was the same, but now the man's steps had grown cautious and uncertain and he was groping for the shoulder of the boy, as for a leaning-staff.

Tom broke the eye-hold on the vision and sprang up to pace the narrow limits of the study.

"It's up to me," he mused, "and I'd like to know what I've been thinking of all this time. Why, pappy's old! he was forty before I was born. And I've been up here taking it easy and having all sorts of a good time, while he's been playing Sindbad to Duxbury Farley's Old Man of the Sea. Coming, pappy!" he shouted; and forthwith flung himself down at the table to write a letter that was to put new life into a weary old man who was fighting against odds in the far-away Southland.

The lone soldier was to take heart of grace, remembering that he had a son; remembering also that the son was now a man grown, stout of arm, steady of head, and otherwise fighting-fit. If the storm should come, the watchword must be to hold on all, keeping steerage-way on the Chiawassee Consolidated craft at all hazards. The June examinations were not far off, and these disposed of, the man-son would be ready to lay hold. Meanwhile, let Caleb Gordon, in his capacity of principal minor stock-holder, insist on a full and exact statement of the company's affairs, and--here the new manhood asserted itself boldly--let that statement, or a copy of it, come to Boston by the first mail.

To this letter there was a grateful reply in which Tom read with a smile his father's half-bewildered attempt to get over to the new point of view. It began, "Dear Buddy," and ended, "Your affectionate pappy," but there was man-to-man matter between the salutation and the signature. The inquiry into the affairs of Chiawassee Consolidated had revealed little or nothing more than the general manager already knew. The president had turned the inquiring stock-holder over to Dyckman, the bookkeeper, with instructions to give Mr. Gordon the fullest possible information, and:

"Dyckman slid out of it, smooth and easy-like," Caleb's letter went on. "He allowed he was _mighty_ busy, right about then. Wouldn't I just make myself at home and examine the books for myself? I reckon that was about what Farley wanted him to do. I'm no book expert, and I couldn't make head or tail out of Dyckman's spider tracks. Looks to me like all the books are good for is to keep people from finding where the company is at. What little I found out, young Norman told me. He says we're in a hole, and the first wagon-load of dirt that comes along will bury us out of sight."

Tom, driven now with the closing work of the college year, yet took time to write another heartening letter to the hard-pressed old soldier. It had been his good fortune to win the Clarkson prize for crucible tests, and to have gained thereby a speaking acquaintance with the multimillionaire iron king who had founded it. Mr. Clarkson did not believe that the financial storm would grow to panic size. As for himself, Tom thought the hazard was less in the times than in the Farleys. Father Caleb was to keep his finger on the pulse of the main office, wiring Boston at the first sign of its weakening.

The junior metallurgical was in the thick of the June examinations when the catastrophe befell. The brief story of it came to Tom in the first dictated letter he had ever received from his father, and the tremulous shakiness of the signature pointed eloquently to the reason. Chiawassee Consolidated was out of blast--"temporarily suspended," in the pleasant euphemism of the elder Farley; the force, clerical and manual, was discharged, with only Dyckman left in the deserted South Tredegar offices to answer questions; and the three Farleys, with Major Dabney, Ardea and Miss Euphrasia, were to spend the summer in Europe.

Caleb wrote in some bitterness of spirit. Though the Gordon holdings in the company, increased from time to time as the iron-master had prospered, amounted to a little more than a third of the capital stock, everything had been done secretly. The general manager's own notice of the shut-down had come in the posted "Notice to Employees." When the Farleys should leave, he would be utterly helpless; on their return they could repudiate everything he might do in their absence. Meantime, ruin was imminent. The affairs of the company were in the utmost confusion; the treasury was empty, and there were no apparent assets apart from the idle plant. Creditors were pressing; the discharged workmen, led by the white coal-miners, were on the verge of riot; and Major Dabney's royalties on the coal lands were many months in arrears.

Tom rose promptly to the occasion, and in all the stress of things found space to wonder how it chanced that he knew instinctively what to do and how to go about it. Before his information was an hour old a rush telegram had gone to his father, asking from what port and by what steamer the Farleys would sail; asking also that certain documents be sent to a given New York address by first mail.

This done, he laid the exigencies frankly before the examiners in the technical school, praying for such lenity as might be extended under the circumstances. Since all things are possible for an honor-man, beloved of those whose mission it is to grind the human weapon to its edge, the difficulties in this field vanished. Mr. Gordon could go on with the examinations until his presence was needed elsewhere; and after the stressful moment was passed he could return and finish.