Chapter 17

She had moved aside out of the square of window light, and he followed her.

"Tell me," he said thickly; "you heard this: you have believed it. Have I been misjudging you?"

"Not more than I misjudged you, perhaps. But that is all over, now: I am trusting you again, Tom. Only, as I said before, you mustn't try me too hard."

"Let me understand," he went on, still in the same strained tone. "Knowing this, or believing it, you could still find a place in your heart for me--you could still forgive me, Ardea?"

"I could still be your friend; yes," she replied. "I believed--others believed--that your punishment would be great enough; there are all the coming years for you to be sorry in, Tom. But in the fullness of time I meant to remind you of your duty. The time has come; you must play the man's part now. What have you done with her?"

"Wait a moment. I must know one other thing," he insisted. "You heard this before you went to Europe?"

"Long before."

"And it didn't make any difference in the way you felt toward me?"

"It did; it made the vastest difference." They were pacing slowly up and down the portico, and she waited until they had made the turn at the Woodlawn end before she went on. "I thought I knew you when we were boy and girl together, and, girl-like, I suppose I had idealized you in some ways. I thought I knew your wickednesses, and that they were not weaknesses; so--so it was a miserable shock. But it was not for me to judge you--only as you might rise or sink from that desperate starting point. When I came home I was sure that you had risen; I have been sure of it ever since until--until these few wretched hours to-night. They are past, and now I'm going to be sure of it some more, Tom."

It was his turn to be silent, and they had measured twice the length of the pillared floor when at last he said:

"What if I should tell you that you are mistaken--that all of them are mistaken?"

"Don't," she said softly. "That would only be smashing what is left of the ideal. I think I couldn't bear that."

"God in Heaven!" he said, under his breath. "And you've been calling this friendship! Ardea, girl, it's _love_!"

She shook her head slowly.

"No," she rejoined gravely. "At one time I thought--I was afraid--that it might be. But now I know it isn't."

"How do you know it?"

"Because love, as I think of it, is stronger than the traditions, stronger than anything else in the world. And the traditions are still with me. I admit the existence of the social pale, and as long as I live within it I have a right to demand certain things of the man who marries me."

"And love doesn't demand anything," he said, putting the remainder of the thought into words for her. "You are right. If I could clear myself with a word, I should not say it."

"Why?"

"Because your--loyalty, let us call it, is too precious to be exchanged for anything else you could give me in place of it--esteem, respect, and all the other well-behaved and virtuous bestowals."

"But the loyalty is based on the belief that you are trying to earn the well-behaved approvals," she continued.

"No, it isn't. It exists 'in spite of' everything, and not 'because of' anything. The traditions may try to make you stand it on the other leg, it's a way they have; but the fact remains."

She shook her head in deprecation.

"The 'traditions,' are about to send me into the house, and the principal problem is yet untouched. What have you done with Nancy?"

He told her briefly and exactly, adding nothing and omitting nothing; and her word for it was "impossible."

"Don't you understand?" she objected. "I may choose to believe that this home making for poor Nan and her waif is merely a bit of tardy justice on your part and honor you for it. But nobody else will take that view of it. If you keep her in that little cabin of yours, Mountain View Avenue will have a fit--and very properly."

"I don't see why it should," he protested densely.

"Don't you? That's because you are still so hopelessly primeval. People won't give you credit for the good motive; they will quote that Scripture about the dog and the sow. You must think of some other way."

"Supposing I say I don't care a hang?"

"Oh, but you do. You have your father and mother and--and me to consider, however reckless you may be for yourself and Nancy. You mustn't leave her where she is for a single day."

"I can leave her there if I like. I've told her she may stay as long as she wants to."

They had paused in front of the great door, and Ardea's hand was on the knob.

"No," she said decisively, "you will have a perfect hornets' nest about your ears. Every move you make will be watched and commented on. Don't you see that you are playing the part of the headstrong, obstinate boy again?"

"Yet you think I ought to provide for Nan, in some way; how am I going to do it unless I ignore the hornets?"

"Now you are more reasonable," she said approvingly. "I shall ride to-morrow morning, and if you should happen to overtake me, we might think up something."

The door was opening gently under the pressure of her hand, but he was loath to go.

"I wouldn't take five added years of life for what I've learned to-night, Ardea;" he said passionately. And then: "Have you fully made up your mind to marry Vincent Farley?"

In the twinkling of an eye she was another woman--cold, unapproachable, with pride kindling as if she had received a mortal affront.

"Sometimes--and they are bad times for you, Mr. Gordon--I am tempted to forget the boy-and-girl anchorings in the past. Have you no sense of the fitness of things--no shame?"

"Not very much of either, I guess," he said quite calmly. "Love hasn't any shame; and it doesn't concern itself much about the fitness of anything but its object."

And then he bade her good night and went his way with a lilting song of triumph in his heart which not even the chilling rebuff of the leave-taking was sufficient to silence.

"She loves me! She would still love me if she were ten times Vincent Farley's wife!" he said, over and over to himself; the words were on his lips when he fell asleep, and they were still ringing in his ears the next morning at dawn-break when he rose and made ready to go to ride with her.

XXV

THE PLOW IN THE FURROW

One of Miss Ardea Dabney's illuminating graces was the ability to return easily and amicably to the _status quo ante bellum_; to "kiss and be friends," in the unfettered phrase of Margaret Catherwood, her chum and room-mate at Carroll College.

Wherefore, when Tom, mounted on Saladin, overtook her on the morning next after the night of offenses, she greeted him quite as if nothing had happened, challenging him gaily to a gallop with the valley head for its goal, and refusing to be drawn into anything more serious than joyous persiflage until they were returning at a walk down a boulder-strewn wood road at the back of the Dabney horse pasture. Then, and not till then, was the question of Nancy Bryerson's future suffered to present itself.

For Miss Dabney the question was settled before it came up for discussion. In the Major's young manhood Deer Trace had maintained a pack of foxhounds, and it was the Major's bride, a city-bred Charleston belle, who first objected to the dooryard kennels and the clamor of the dogs. Back of the horse pasture, and a hundred yards vertical above the road Ardea and Tom were traversing, a pocket-like glen indented the mountain side, and in this glen the kennels had been established, with a substantial log cabin for the convenience of the dog-keeper.

Dogs and dog-keeper had long since gone the way of most of the old-time Southern manorial largenesses; but the cabin still stood solidly planted in the midst of its overgrown garden patch, with a dense thicket of mountain laurel backgrounding it, and a giant tulip-tree standing sentinel over a gate hanging by one rusted hinge.

This was what Tom saw when he had followed Ardea's lead up the steep bit of path climbing from the road and the pasture wall, and it evoked memories. Often in the boyhood days, when the Nazarite fit was on, he had climbed to the deserted solitude of the glen to sit on the broad door-stone of the dog-keeper's cabin as a hermit at large,--monarch for the monastic moment of a kingdom as remote as that of John the Baptist in the Wilderness of Sin.

"I thought of it last night," said Ardea, nodding toward the cabin. "It is just the place for Nancy, if she can not, or will not, go back to her father. After breakfast, I shall send Dinah and a man up to set things in order, and she can come as soon as she likes. She won't mind the loneliness?"

Tom shook his head. "I should think not; she has never been used to anything else. I'll bring her and the youngster over in the buggy any time you telephone." He had quite forgotten his lesson of the previous evening.

"Indeed, you will do nothing of the kind," was the quick reply. "Japheth will go after her when we are ready; and if you are prudently wise you will have business in South Tredegar for the next few days."

The blue-grass, seeded once in the dog-keeper's dooryard, had spread to the farthest limits of the glen, and the autumn rains had given it a spring-like start. Tom let Saladin crop a dozen mouthfuls unchecked before he said:

"That looks like dodging; and I don't like to dodge."

"You will have to do many things you don't like before you say your _ave atque vale_," she remarked. "But you shall be permitted to carry your full share of the burden. I mean to let you give me some money, if you can afford it, and I'll spend it for you."

"Charity itself couldn't be kinder," he asseverated. "And, luckily, I can afford it. But--"

He was looking at her wistfully, and the old longing for sympathy, for the sympathy which has been quite to the bottom of the well where truth lies, was about to cry out against this riveting of the fetters of misunderstanding and false accusation.

"But you would rather spend it yourself?" she broke in, fancying she had divined his thought. "That cannot be. The one condition on which I shall consent to help is the completest isolation for Nan. You must promise me you will not try to see her. I am hoping against hope that none of the Mountain View Avenue people will find out what you did last night."

"Oh, confound their gossiping tongues!" he railed; adding hastily: "Not that I care so very much what they say, either."

Ardea let her horse pick his way down to the wood road, and when they were approaching the Deer Trace gate: "You haven't promised yet, Tom; and you must, you know."

"Not to see Nan? That's easy. I'll keep out of her way, if you can keep her out of mine. All I care is to know that she is comfortably provided for."

This he said, thinking only of the boy-time obligation voluntarily assumed; but it was quite inevitable that Ardea should mistake the motive.

"It is right and proper that you should care about that," she said judicially. And a little farther along she added: "But I don't like your attitude."

"I don't like it myself," he rejoined heartily. "I never wanted so badly to say things in all my life! But you've nailed the lid on and I can't."

"They are better unsaid," she returned quickly. "Will you take that for your cue in the future?"

"Certainly; it is for you to command," he said lightly, swinging from his saddle to open the pasture gate for her; and so the morning ride came to its end.

Since provincialism is by no means the exclusive distinction of the landward bred, there was an immediate restirring of the gossip pool when the story of Tom's befriending of Nancy Bryerson and her child got abroad in Gordonia and among the country colonists.

In the comment of the simpler-minded Gordonia folk, the iron-master's son had finally "made it up" with Nancy, and here the note of approval was not wholly lacking. There were good-hearted souls to say that boys will be boys, and to express the hope that Tom would go on from this beginning and make an honest woman of Nancy by marrying her.

Quite naturally, the point of view of the country-house people was different; more critical, if not less charitable. Though the social acceptance of the Gordons, as an ancient family, as friends of the Dabneys, and as land-holding neighbors was fairly complete, it still lacked somewhat of the class kinship which breeds leniency and the closed eye to the sins of its own household. But for Tom, personally, as a distinct social improvement on honest Caleb, the welcome into the charmed circle of Mountain View Avenue had been warm enough to make his sudden apparent relapse into the primitive figure as an affront to the colony. Hence, there were rods laid in pickle for the sinner, as when Mrs. Vancourt Henniker gave the footman at Rook Hill a hint that for the present the Misses Henniker were not at home to Mr. Thomas Gordon; and if Tom had known it, there were other and similar chastenings lying in wait for him behind more of the colonial doors.

But Tom did not know it. He was in the crucial month of the panic year, striving desperately to maintain the foothold given to him by the pipe-casting invention, and he had little time for the amenities. So it came about that he escaped for the moment; or, which was quite the same, he did not know he was pursued. Another Northern city, with its full complement of grafting officials, was in the market for some train-loads of water-mains, and again Thomas Jefferson was fighting the old battle of conscience against expediency, this time in the evil-smelling ditches where the dead and wounded lie.

"You are sure you went into it thoroughly, Norman?" he demanded of his lieutenant, when the latter returned from a personal reconnaissance of the field. "The break they are making at us seems almost too rank to be taken at its face value."

"Oh, yes; I dug it up from the bottom," said the henchman. "It's rotten and riotous. The political machine runs the town, and the bosses own the machine. So much to this one, so much to that, so much to half a dozen others, and we get the contract. Otherwise, most emphatically _nit_."

"That comes straight, does it?"

"As straight as a shot out of a gun. They got together on it, eight of the big bosses, called me in and told me flat-footed what we had to do," said the salesman. "Oh, I tell you, those fellows are on to their job."

"No chance to go behind the returns and stir up popular indignation, as we did in Indiana?" suggested Tom.

"No show on top of earth. The ring owns or controls two of the dailies, and has the other two scared. Besides, they've just had their municipal election."

The Gordon-and-Gordon manager was absently jabbing holes in the desk blotter with the paper-knife.

"Well, we can do what we have to, I suppose," he said, after a hesitant pause. "Say nothing to my father, but make your arrangements to take the train for the North again to-night. I'll meet you in town at the Marlboro at four o'clock."

To prepare for the new exigency, Tom took the afternoon local for South Tredegar. The lump sum required for the bribery was considerably in excess of his balance in bank. Notwithstanding the stringency of the times, he made sure he could borrow; but it was in some vague hope that the moral chasm might be widened to impassibility, or decently bridged for him, that he was moved to state the case in detail to President Henniker of the Iron City National. Mr. Vancourt Henniker could dig ditches, on occasion, making them too vast for the boldest borrower to cross; but Tom's credit was gilt-edged, and in the present instance the president chose rather to build bridges.

"We have to shut our eyes to a good many disagreeable things in business, Mr. Gordon," he said, genially didactic. "Our problem in this day and generation is so to draw the line of distinction that these necessary concessions to human frailty will not debauch us; may be made without prejudice to that high sense of personal honor and integrity which must be the corner-stone of any successful business career. This state of affairs which you describe is deplorable--most deplorable; but--well, we may think of such obstacles as we do of toll-gates on the highway. The road is a public utility, and it should be free; but we pay the toll, under protest, and pass on."

Mr. Henniker was a large man, benign and full-favored, not to say unctuous; and his manner in delivering an opinion was blandly impressive, and convincing to many. Yet Tom was not convinced.

"Of course, I came to ask for the loan, and not specially to justify it," he said, in mild irony which was quite lost on the philosopher in the president's chair. "I wasn't sure just how you would regard it if you should know the object for which we are borrowing, and this high sense of personal honor you speak of impelled me to be altogether frank with you."

"Quite right; you were quite right, Mr. Gordon," said the banker urbanely. "You are young in business, but you have learned the first lesson in the book of success--to be perfectly open and outspoken with your banker. As I have said, the venality of these men with whom you are dealing is most deplorable, but...."

There was some further glozing over of the putrid fact, a good bit of it, and Tom sat back in his chair and listened, outwardly respectful, inwardly hot-hearted and contemptuous. Was this smooth-spoken, oracular prince of the market-place a predetermined hypocrite, shaping his words to fit the money-gathering end without regard to their demoralizing effect? Or was he only a subconscious Pharisee, self-deceived and complacent? Tom's thought ran lightning-like over the long list of the Vancourt Hennikers: men of the business world successful to the Croesus mark, large and liberal benefactors, founders of colleges, libraries and hospitals, gift-givers to their fellow men, irreproachable in private life, and yet apparently stone blind on the side of the larger equities. Could it be possible that such men deliberately admitted and accepted the double standard in morals? It seemed fairly incredible, and yet their lives appeared to proclaim it.

When the president had finished his apology for those who bow the head in the house of Rimmon, Tom rose to take his bit of approved paper around to the cashier's window. The bridge was built, and he meant to cross it; but he was honest enough, or blunt enough, to give his own point of view in a crisp sentence or two.

"I wish I could look at it in some such way as you do, Mr. Henniker, but I can't," he objected. "To me it is just plain bribery; the corrupting of officials who have sworn, among other things, to administer their offices honestly. I'm immoral, or unmoral, enough to yield to the apparent necessity, but it is quite without prejudice to a firm conviction that I am no better than the men I am going to purchase."

Having obtained the sinews of war, he kept the appointment with Norman, and their joint discussion of the business situation made him too late for the early dinner at Woodlawn. To complete the delay, the evening train lost half an hour with a hot box at a point a mile short of Gordonia. Two things came of these combined time-killings: a man in a slouched hat and the brown jeans of the mountaineers, who had been watching the Woodlawn gates since dusk from his hiding-place behind the field wall across the pike, got up stiffly and went away; and Tom reached home just in time to intercept Ardea on the steps of the picturesque veranda.

"Been visiting the little mother?" he asked, when she paused on the step above him.

"Yes--no; I ran over to tell you that we moved Nancy to-day."

"Oh! Well, that's comfortable. She was willing?"

"Y-es: almost, at first; and altogether willing when I told her that I--that she--" There was an embarrassed moment and then the truth came out. "Perhaps I should have asked you first: but she was quite satisfied when I told her that she owed her changed condition to the person whose duty it was to provide for her. You don't mind, do you?"

The question was almost a beseechment; but Tom was thinking of something else.

"No, I don't mind," he said absently, and the under-thought dealt savagely with Nan--with a woman who, for the sake of the loaves and the fishes, and the shielding of the real offender, would suffer an innocent man to go to the social gallows for lack of the word which would have cleared him. He laughed rather bitterly and added, out of the heart of the under-thought: "I'm glad I'm not naturally inclined to be pessimistic."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because, after hearing"--he changed his mind suddenly, and transferred the hard word from Nan to Mr. Vancourt Henniker--"after what I've been hearing this afternoon I find myself more in the notion of weeping with the angels than of laughing with the devils."

"What has happened?" she asked, sympathetically alive to his need in one breath, and keenly apprehensive for her own peace of mind in the next.

"An exceedingly small thing, as the world's measurements go. I was in town, and made a business call on Mr. Henniker. He's a member of your church, isn't he?"

"Of St. Michael's in the city," she corrected. "You know I claim membership here at home in St. John's."

"Well, it's all the same. He is what you would call a Christian man, I take it?"

"Why not?" she demanded. "What has he done to make you doubt it?"

"Oh, nothing worth mentioning, perhaps. I needed some money to bribe a lot of political grafters in a Pennsylvania city where I'm trying to sell a bill of water-pipe. I went to Mr. Henniker to borrow it."

"And, of course, he wouldn't let you have it for any such wretched purpose!" she flamed out.

"No, you are mistaken; it's just the other way around. I told him what it was for, hoping rather vaguely, I think, that he'd sit on me and make the crime impossible. But he didn't."

"You don't mean that he lent you the money after you had told him what you purposed doing with it?" It was too dark for him to see her face, but there was something like a breath-catching of horror in her voice.

"I'm sorry it shocks you, but he did. More than that, he took the trouble to try to explain away my scruples; made it seem quite a virtuous thing before he got through. You wouldn't believe it now, would you?"

"But, Tom! you didn't take the money?"

"How could I refuse so good a man? Norman is on his way to Pennsylvania at this present moment, with a letter of credit in his pocket big enough to make the mouth of even a professional grafter water. At least, I hope it is big enough."

She was hurt, shocked, horrified, and he knew it and found pleasure of a certain sort in the knowledge. When a man has done violence to his own best impulses, the thing that comes nearest to the holy joy of penitence is the unholy joy of making somebody else sorry for him. There were unmistakable tears in her voice when she said:

"Tom, why have you told me this--this unspeakable thing?"

"Why--I guess it was because I wanted to ask you how you supposed the Mr. Henniker kind of men square such things with their conscience; or don't they have any conscience?"

"That is _not_ the reason," she faltered.

"You are right," he rejoined quickly. "It was diabolism pure and unstrained. I had hurt myself, and I wanted to pass it along--to hurt some one else. But it is too cold to keep you standing here. Won't you come in again?"

"No; I must go home." And she went down the broad steps.

He drew her arm through his and walked with her, down one grassy slope and up the other. At the manor-house steps he found at last sufficient grace to say: "It was a currish thing to do; will you forgive me, Ardea?"