Chapter 21

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It was as if the curtain of the civilizing, the humanizing, ages had been withdrawn a hand's-breadth to give him a clear outlook on primordial chaos.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 and efface 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 were twinkling 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! _how_ we pore sinners do tempt the good Lord at every crook and elbow in the big road, _toe_ be 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!"

XXX

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

On the night of the fire, Ardea had remained on the cliff's edge until the blaze died down and disappeared, which was some little time, she decided, before Tom could possibly have reached the foot of the mountain.

When there was nothing more to be seen she went back to the hotel and called up the Young-Dicksons, whose cottage commanded a short-range view of the Gordon plant. It was Mrs. Young-Dickson who answered the telephone. Yes; the fire was one of the foundry buildings--the office, she believed. Mr. Young-Dickson had gone over, and she would have him call up when he should return, if Miss Dabney wished.

Ardea said it did not matter, and having exhausted this small vein of distraction she returned to the music-room and the Bach fugue, as one, who has had a fall, rises and tries to go on as before, ignoring the shock and the bruisings. But the shock had been too severe. Tom Gordon had proved himself a wretch, beyond the power of speech to portray, and--she loved him! Not all the majestic harmonies of the inspired _Kapellmeister_ could drown that terrible discord.

The next day it was worse. There was a goodly number of South Tredegar people summering at the Inn, and hence no lack of companionship. But the social distractions were powerless in the field where Bach and the piano had failed, and after luncheon Ardea shut herself in her room, desperately determined to try what solitude would do.

That failed, too, more pathetically than the other expedients. It was to no purpose that she went bravely into the torture chamber of opprobrium and did penance for the sudden lapse into the elemental. It was the passion of the base-born, she cried bitterly. He was unworthy, unworthy! Why had he come? Why had she not refused to see him--to speak to him?

Such agonizing questions flung themselves madly on the spear points of fact and were slain. He had come; she had spoken. Never would she forget the look in his eyes when he had said, "Good night, and--good-by;" nor could she pass over the half-threat in the words that had gone before the leave-taking. To what deeper depth despicable could he plunge, having already sounded the deepest of them all--that of unfaith, of infidelity alike to the woman he had wronged and to the woman he professed to love?

At dinner-time she sent word to her grandfather and her cousin that she was not feeling well, which was a mild paraphrasing of the truth, and had a piece of toast and a cup of tea sent to her room. The bare thought of going down to the great dining-room and sitting through the hour-long dinner was insupportable. She made sure every eye would see the shame in her face.

With the toast and tea the servant brought the evening paper, sent up by a doting Major Caspar, thoughtful always for her comfort. A marked item in the social gossip transfixed her as if it had been an arrow. The Farleys had sailed from Southampton, and the house renovators were already busy at Warwick Lodge.

After that the toast proved too dry to be eaten and the tea took on the taste of bitter herbs. Vincent Farley was returning, coming to claim the fulfilment of her promise. She had never loved him; she knew it as she had not known it before; and that was dreadful enough. But now there were a thousand added pangs to go with the conviction. For in the interval love had been found--found and lost in the same moment--and the solid earth was still reeling at the shock.

Ardea of the strong heart and the calm inner vision had always had a feeling bordering on contempt for women of the hysterical type; yet now she felt herself trembling and slipping on the brink of the pit she had derided.

The third day brought surcease of a certain sort. In the Gallic blood there is ever a trace of fatalism; the shrug is its expression. It was generations back to the D'Aubignés, yet now and then some remote ancestor would reach up out of the shadowy past to lay a compelling finger on the latest daughter of his race. Her word was passed, beyond honorable recall. Somewhere and in some way she would find the courage to tell Vincent that she did not love him as the wife should love the husband; and if he should still exact the price, she would pay it. After all, it would be a refuge, of a kind.

Now it is human nature to assume finalities and to base conduct on the assumption. Conversely, it is not in human nature to tighten one knot without loosening another. Having firmly resolved to be unflinchingly just to a Vincent Farley, one could afford to be humanely interested in the struggles shoreward or seaward of a poor swimmer in the welter of the tideway. She did not put it thus baldly, even in her secret thought. But the thing did itself.

The opportunities for marking the struggles of the poor swimmer were limited; but where is the woman who can not find the way when desire drives? Ardea had something more than a speaking acquaintance with Mr. Frederic Norman who, as acting-manager of the foundry plant in Tom's absence, had generously thrown one of the buildings open for a series of Sunday services for the workmen, promoted by Miss Dabney and the Reverend Francis Morelock. Since the warm nights had come, Norman had taken a room at the Inn, climbing the mountain from the Paradise side in time for dinner, and going down in the cool of the morning after an early breakfast.

Being first and last a man of business, he knew, or seemed to know, nothing of the valley gossip, or of the social sentence passed on his chief by the Mountain View Avenue court. When Ardea had assured herself of this, she utilized Norman freely as a source of information.

"You've known the boss a long time, haven't you, Miss Dabney?" asked the manager, one evening when Ardea had made room for him in a quiet corner of the veranda between the Major's chair and her own.

"Mr. Gordon? Oh, yes; a very long time, indeed. We were children together, you know."

"Well, I'd like to ask you one thing," said Frederic, the unfettered. "Did you ever get to know him well enough to guess what he'd do next? I thought I'd been pretty close to him, but once in a while he runs me up a tree so far that I get dizzy."

"As for example?" prompted Miss Ardea, leaving the personal question in the air.

"I mean his way of breaking out in a new spot every now and then. Last winter was one of the times, when he made up his mind between two minutes to chuck the pipe-making and go back to college. And now he's got another streak."

Miss Dabney made the necessary show of interest.

"What is it this time--too much business, or not enough?"

Norman rose and went to the edge of the veranda to flick his cigar ash into the flower border. When he came back he took a chair on that side of Miss Dabney farthest from the Major, who was dozing peacefully in a great flat-armed rocker.

"I declare I don't know, Miss Dabney; he's got me guessing harder than ever," he said, lowering his voice. "Since the night when the office burned he's been miles beyond me. While the carpenters were knocking together the shack we're in now, he put in the time wandering around the plant and looking as if he had lost something and forgotten what it was. Now that we've got into the new office, he shuts himself up for hours on end; won't see anybody--won't talk--scamps his meals half the time, and has actually got old Captain Caleb scared stiff."

"How singular!" said Ardea; but in her heart there was a great pity. "Do you suppose it was his loss in the fire?" she asked.

The manager shook his head.

"No; that was next to nothing, and we're doing a good business. It was something else; something that happened about the same time. If I can't find out what it is, I'll have to quit. He's freezing me out."

Ardea was inconsistent enough to oppose the alternative.

"No," she objected. "You mustn't do that, Mr. Norman. It is a friend's part to stand by at such times, don't you think?"

"Oh, I'm willing," was the generous reply. "Only I'm a little lonesome; that's all."

At another time Norman told her of the mysterious walking delegate, who was admitted to the private office when an anxious and zealous business manager was excluded. Later still, he made a half-confidence. Caleb, in despair at the latest transformation in his son, had finally unfolded his doubts and fears, business-wise, to the manager. The Farleys were returning; a legal notice of a called meeting of the Chiawassee Consolidated had been published; and it was evident that Colonel Duxbury meant to take hold with his hands. And Tom seemed to have forgotten that there was a battle to be fought.

Norman's recounting of this to Miss Dabney was the merest unburdening of an overloaded soul, and he was careful to garble it so that the prospective daughter-in-law of Colonel Duxbury might not be hurt. But Ardea read between the lines. Could it be possible that Tom's lifelong enmity for the Farleys, father and son, had even a little justification in fact? She put the thought away, resolutely setting herself the task of disbelieving. Yet, in the conversation which followed, Mr. Frederic Norman was very thoroughly cross-questioned without his suspecting it. Ardea meant to cultivate the open mind, and she did not dream that it was the newly-discovered love which was prompting her to master the intricacies of the business affair.

Two days later the Farleys came home, and since Vincent went promptly into residence at Crestcliffe, the evenings with Norman were interrupted. But they had served their purpose; and when Vincent began to press for the naming of an early day in September for the wedding, Ardea found it quite feasible to be calmly indefinite. You see, she had still to tell him that it had become purely a matter of promise-keeping with her--a task easy only for the heartless.

It was in the third week in August, a full month, earlier than their original plans contemplated, that the Dabneys returned to Paradise and Deer Trace. Miss Euphrasia was led to believe that the Major had tired of the hotel and the mountain; and the Major thought the suggestion came first from Miss Euphrasia.

But the real reason for the sudden return lay in a brief note signed "Norman," and conveyed privately to Ardea's hands by a grimy-faced boy from the foundry.

"Mr. Tom was waylaid by two footpads at the Woodlawn gates Saturday night and half killed," it read. "He is delirious and asks continually for you. Could you come?"

XXXI

THE NET OF THE FOWLER

Which of the Cynic Fathers was it who defined virtue as an attitude of the mind toward externals? One may not always recall a pat quotation on the spur of the moment, but it sounds like Demonax or another of the later school, when the philosophy of cynicism had sunk to the level of a sneer at poor human nature.

To say that Mr. Duxbury Farley, returning to find Chiawassee Consolidated in some sense at the mercy of the new pipe plant, regarded himself as a benefactor whose confidence had been grossly abused, is only to take him at his word. What, pray tell us, was Caleb Gordon in the crude beginning of things?--a village blacksmith or little more, dabbling childishly in the back-wash of the great wave of industry and living poverty-stricken between four log walls. To whom did he owe the brick mansion on the Woodlawn knoll, the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, the higher education of his son?

In Mr. Farley's Index Anathema, ingratitude ranked with crime. He had trusted these Gordons, and in return they had despoiled him; crippled a great and growing industry by segregating the profitable half of it; cast doubt on the good name of its founder by reversing his business methods. Chiawassee had been making iron by the hundreds of tons: where were the profits? The query answered itself. They were in the credit account of Gordon and Gordon, every dollar of which justly belonged to the parent company. Was not the pipe-making invention perfected by a Chiawassee stock-holder, who was also a Chiawassee employee, on Chiawassee time, and with Chiawassee materials? Then why, in the name of justice, was it not to be considered a legitimate Chiawassee asset?

Mr. Duxbury Farley asked these questions pathetically and insistently; at the Cupola Club, in the Manufacturers' Association, in season and out of season, wherever there was a willing ear to hear or the smallest current of public sentiment to be diverted into the channel so patiently dug for it. Was his virtuous indignation merely the mental attitude of all the Duxbury Farleys toward things external? That bubble is too huge for this pen to prick; besides, its bursting might devastate a world.

But if we may not probe too deeply into primal causes, we may still be regardful of the effects. Mr. Farley's bid for public sympathy was not without results. True, there were those who hinted that the veteran promoter was only paving the way for a _coup de grâce_ which should obliterate the Gordons, root and branch; but when the days and weeks passed, and Mr. Farley had done nothing more revolutionary than to reëlect himself president of Chiawassee Consolidated, and to resume, with Dyckman as his lieutenant, the direction of its affairs, these prophets of evil were discredited.

It was observed also that Caleb remained general manager at Gordonia, and still received the patronizing friendship of former times; and to Tom the full width of the pike was given--a distance which he kept scrupulously. But as for the younger Gordon, he knew it was the lull before the storm, and he was watching the horizon for the signs of its coming--when he was not searching for clues or brooding behind the closed door of his private office with the devil of homicide for a closet companion.

During this reproachful period Vincent Farley gave himself unreservedly, as it would seem, to the sentimental requirements, spending much time on the mountain top and linking his days to Ardea's in a way to give her a sinking of the heart at the thought that this was an earnest of all time to come.

Mountain View Avenue had understood that the wedding was to be in September; but as late as the final week in August the cards were not out, and Miss Euphrasia, the source and fountainhead of the Avenue's information, could only say that she supposed the young people were making up for the time lost by separation and absence, and were willing to prolong the delights sentimental of an acknowledged engagement.

But at the risk of cutting sentiment to the very bone, it must be admitted that, after the first ardent attempt to commit Ardea to a certain and early day, the delay was of Vincent's own making; and the motive was basely commercial. Through Major Dabney, who was not proof against Colonel Duxbury's blandishments at short range, however much he might distrust them at a distance, Tom's plan of reorganization, with the suggestion of the trusteeship for Ardea's third, had become known to the Farleys. Thereupon ensued a conference of two held in Vincent's room in the hotel, and sentence of extinction was passed on Tom and Caleb.

"The ungrateful cub!" was Colonel Duxbury's indignant comment. "To use his influence over Major Dabney to sequestrate, absolutely sequestrate, a full third of our property!"

"Forewarned is forearmed," said the son coolly. "It's up to us to break the slate."