Chapter 25

With the Farley stock in his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled skein of Chiawassee affairs. Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement were vanquished, one by one.

When it was all over, Tom began to draw checks on the small fortune realized from the sale of the patents. One was to Major Dabney, redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawassee Limited at par. Another was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a valuation based on the prosperous period before the crash of '93. With this check in his pocket he went home--for the first time in two weeks.

It was well beyond the Woodlawn dinner-hour before he could muster up the courage to cross the lawns to Deer Trace. No word had passed between him and Ardea since the September afternoon when he had overtaken her at the church door,--counting as nothing the effort she had made to speak to him on the night of vengeance.

How would she receive him? Not too coldly, he hoped. It was known that Vincent's assailant in the furnace yard was a stranger; a man who had taken service as a guard: also that Mr. Gordon--they gave him his courtesy title now--had saved Vincent from a terrible death. Tom thought the rescue should count for something with Ardea.

It did. She was sitting at the piano in the otherwise deserted music-room when he entered; and she broke a chord in the middle to give him both of her hands, and to say, with eyes shining, as if the rescue were a thing of yesterday:

"O Tom! I _knew_ you had it in you! It was fine!"

"Hold on," he said, a bit unsteadily. "There must be no more misunderstandings. What happened that night three weeks ago, had to happen; and five minutes before it happened I was wondering if I could aim straight enough in the light from the slag-pot to hit him. And I fully meant to do it."

She shuddered.

"I--I was afraid," she faltered. "I knew, you know--Japheth had told me, in--in justice to you. That was why I ran across the lawn and called to you."

The sweet beauty of her laid hold on him and he felt his grip going. Another word and he would be trespassing again. To keep from saying it he crossed to the recessed window and sat down in the sleepy-hollow chair which was the Major's peculiar possession in the music-room.

After a little he said: "Play something, won't you?--something that will make me a little less sorry that I didn't kill him."

"The idea!" she said. But when he settled himself in the big easy-chair as a listener, lying back with his eyes closed and his hands locked over one knee, she turned to the piano and humored him. When the final chord of the _Wanderlied_ had sung itself asleep, he sat up and nodded approvingly.

"I wonder if you appreciate your gift as you should?--to be able to make a man over in the moral part of him with the tips of your fingers? The devil is exorcised, for the moment, and I can tell you all about it now, if you care to know."

"Of course I care," she assented.

"Well, to begin with, I'm no better than I have been; a little less despicable than you've been thinking me, perhaps, but more wicked. I've hated these two men ever since I was old enough to know how; and to get square with them, I haven't scrupled to sink to their level. The smash at Gordonia is my smash, I'm responsible for everything that has happened."

"I know it," she said. "Mr. Norman has told me."

"Looking it all over, I don't see that there is much to choose between me and the men I've been hunting down. They went after the things they needed, without much compunction for other people; and so did I. On the night of the--on the night when you called to me and I wouldn't answer, I was going down to rub it in; to tell them they were in the hole and that I had put them there. I met a man at the gate who told me what Japheth told you. It made a devil of me, Ardea. I took the man's gun and followed Vincent around the yard. I meant to kill him."

She nodded complete intelligence.

"The provocation was very great," she said evenly. "Why didn't you do it, Tom?"

"Now you've cornered me: I don't know why I didn't. I had only to walk away and let him alone when the time came. The slag-spilling would have settled him. But I couldn't do it."

"Of course you couldn't," she agreed convincingly. "God wouldn't let you."

"He lets other men commit murder; one a day, or such a matter."

"Not one of those who have named His name, Tom--as you have."

He shook his head slowly. "I wish that appealed to me, as it ought. But it doesn't. Where is the proof?"

She rose from the piano seat and went to stand before him.

"Can you ask that, soberly and in earnest, after the wonderful experience you have had?"

"I have asked it," he insisted stubbornly. "You mustn't take anything for granted. Just at that moment I couldn't kill a man; but that is all the difference. I've done what I meant to do, or most of it."

She was holding him steadily with her eyes. "Are you glad, or sorry, Tom?"

He frowned up at her.

"I don't know. Now that it's all over, the taste of it is like sawdust in the mouth; I'll admit that much. I'm free; 'free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,' as David put it when he had sounded all the depths. Is that being sorry?"

"No--I don't know," she confessed.

He was smiling now.

"You think I ought to go back to first principles: get down on my knees and agonize over it? Sometimes I wish I could be a boy long enough to do just that thing, Ardea. But I can't. The mill won't grind with the water that has passed."

"But the stream isn't dry," she asserted, taking up his figure. "What will you do now? That is the question: the only one that is ever worth asking."

He was frowning thoughtfully again, and the words came as an unconscious voicing of vague under-depths.

"They took to the woods, the waste places, the deserts--those men of old who didn't understand. Some of them went blind and crazy and died there; and some of them had their eyes opened and came back to make the world a little better for their having lived in it. I'm minded to try it."

She caught her breath in a little gasp which she was careful not to let him see.

"You are going away?" she asked.

"Yes; out to the 'beyond' in northern Arizona. There is a new iron field out there to be prospected, and Mr. Clarkson wants me to go and report on it. And that brings us back to business. May I talk business--cold money business--to you for a minute or two?"

"If you like," she permitted. "Only I think the other kind of talk is more profitable."

"Wait till you hear what I have to say in dollars and cents. That ought to interest you."

"Why should it--particularly?"

"Because you are going to marry a poor man, and--"

She turned away from him quickly and stood facing the window. But he went on with what he had to say.

"That's all right; I can say it to your back, just as well. You know, I suppose, that your--that the Farleys have lost out completely?"

"Yes,"--to the window-pane.

"Well, a curious thing has come to pass--quite a miraculous thing, in fact. Chiawassee will pay the better part of its debts and--and redeem its stock; or some of it, at least." He rose and stood beside her. "Isn't it a thousand pities that Colonel Duxbury couldn't have held on to his shares just a little longer?"

"Yes; he is an old man and a broken one, now." There was a sob in her voice, or he thought there was. But it was only the great heart of compassion that missed no object of pity.

"True; but the next best thing is to have the young woman who marries into the family bring it back with her, don't you think? Here is a check for what Mr. Farley's stock would have sold for before the troubles began. It's made payable to you because--well, for obvious reasons; as I have said, he lost out."

She turned on him, and the blue eyes read him to his innermost depths.

"You are still the headlong, impulsive boy, aren't you?" she said, not altogether approvingly. "You are paying this out of your own money."

"Well, what if I am?"

"If you are, it is either a just restitution, or it is not. In either case, I can not be your go-between."

"Now look here," he argued; "you've got to be sensible about this. There'll be four of you, and at least two incompetents; and you've got to have money to live on. I made Colonel Duxbury lose it, and--"

She stopped him with the imperious little gesture he knew so well.

"Not another word, if you please. I can't do your errand in this, and I wouldn't if I could."

"You think I ought to be generous and give it to him, anyway, do you?"

"I don't presume to say," was the cool rejoinder. "When you have come fully to your right mind, you will know what to do, and how to go about it."

He crumpled the check, thrusting it into his pocket, and made two turns about the room before he said:

"I'll see them both hanged first!"

"Very well; that is your own affair."

He fell to walking again, and for a full minute the silence was broken only by the murmur of men's voices in the library adjoining. The Major had company, it seemed.

"This is 'good-by,' Ardea; I'm going to-morrow. Can't we part friends?" he said, when the silence had begun to rankle unbearably.

"You've hurt me," she declared, turning again to the window.

"You've hurt me, more than once," he retorted, raising his voice more than he meant to; and she faced about quickly, holding up a warning finger.

"Mr. Henniker and Mr. Young-Dickson are in the library with grandpa. They will hear you."

"I don't care. I came here to-night with a heart full of what few good things there are left in me, and you--you are so wrapped up in that beggar that I didn't kill--"

"Hush!" she commanded imperatively. "Grandfather has not heard: he knows nothing, and he must nev--"

The murmur of voices in the adjoining room had suddenly become a storm, with the smooth tones of Mr. Henniker trying vainly to allay it. In the thick of it the door of communication flew open and a white-haired, fierce-mustached figure of wrath appeared on the threshold. For a moment Tom's boyish awe of the old autocrat of Deer Trace came uppermost and he was tempted to run away. But the wrath was not directed at him. Indeed, the Major seemed not to see him.

"What's all this I'm hearing now for the ve'y first time about these heah low-down, schemin' scoundrels that want to mix thei-uh white-niggeh blood with ouhs?" he roared at Ardea, quite beside himself with passion. "Wasn't it enough that they should use my name and rob my good friend Caleb? No, by heavens! That snivelin' young houn'-dog must pay his cou't to you while he was keepin' his--"

The Major's face had been growing redder, and he choked in sheer poverty of speech. Moreover, Tom had come between; had taken Ardea in his arms protectingly and was fronting the firebrand Dabney like a man.

"That's enough, Major," he said definitely. "You mustn't say things you'll be sorry for after you cool down a bit. Miss Ardea is like the king: she can do no wrong."

There was a gasping pause, the sound of a big man breathing hard, followed by the slamming of the door, and they were alone together again, Ardea crying softly, with her face hidden on the shoulder of shielding.

"Oh, isn't it terrible?" she sobbed; and Tom held her the closer.

"Never mind," he comforted. "He was crazy-mad, as he had a good right to be. You know he will be heart-broken when he comes to himself. You are his one ewe lamb, Ardea."

"I know," she faltered; "but O Tom! it was so unnecessary; so wretchedly unnecessary! It's--it's more than two whole months since--since Vincent Farley broke the engagement, and--"

He held her at arm's length to look at her, but she hid her face in her hands.

"Broke the engagement!" he exclaimed, almost roughly. "Why did he do that?"

She stood before him with her hands clasped and the clear-welled eyes meeting his bravely.

"Because I told him I could not marry him without first telling him that I loved you, Tom; that I had been loving you always and in spite of everything," she said.

And what more she said I do not know.

XXXVII

WHOSE YESTERDAYS LOOK BACKWARD

"Tom, isn't this the same foot-log you made me walk that day when you were trying to convince me that you were the meanest boy that ever breathed?" asked Ardea, gathering her skirts preparatory to the stream crossing.

"It is. But you didn't walk it, as you may remember: you fell off. Wait a second and give me those azaleas. I'll go first and take your hand."

Tom Gordon, lately home from a full half-year spent in the unfettered solitudes of the Carriso iron fields, to be married first, and afterward to start up--with Caleb for superintendent--the idle Chiawassee plant as a test and experimental shop for American Aqueduct, was indemnifying himself for the long exile.

On this Saturday evening in the lovers' month of June he had walked Ardea around and about through the fragrant summer wood of the upper creek valley, retracing, in part, the footsteps of the boy whose fishing had been spoiled and the little girl who was to be bullied into submission; and so rambling they had come at length to the old moss-grown foot-log which had been a newly-felled tree in the former time. Tom went first across the rustic bridge, holding the hand of ecstatic thrillings, and pausing in mid-passage that he might have excuse for holding it the longer. Ah me! we were all young once; and some of us are still young,--God grant,--in heart if not in years.

It was during the mid-passage pause, and while she was looking down on the swirling waters sometime of terrifying, that Miss Dabney said:

"How deep is it, Tom? Would I really have drowned if you and Hector had not pulled me out?"

He laughed.

"It's a thankless thing to spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You could have waded out."

She made the adorable little grimace which was one of the survivals of the yesterdays, and suffered him to lead her across.

"And I have always believed that I owed my life to you--and Hector!" she said reproachfully.

"You owe me much more than that," he affirmed broadly, when they had sat down to rest--they had often to do this, lest the way should prove shorter than the happy afternoon--on the end of the bridge log.

"Money?"--flippantly.

"No; love. If it hadn't been for me, you might never have known what love is."

His saying it was only an upbubbling of love's audacity, but she chose to take it seriously. She was gazing afar into the depths of the fresh-green forest darkening softly to the sunset, with her hands clasped around the tangle of late-blooming white azaleas in her lap.

"It is a high gift," she said soberly; "the highest of all for a woman. Once I thought I should live and die without knowing it, as many women do. I wish I might give you something as great."

"I am already overpaid," he asserted. "For a man there is nothing so great, no influence so nearly omnipotent, as the love of a good woman. It is the lever that moves the world--what little it does move--up the hill to the high planes."

"A lever?" she mused; "yes, perhaps. But levers are only links in the chain binding cause to effect."

His smile was lovingly tolerant.

"Is that what your religion has brought you to, Ardea--a full-grown belief in a Providence that takes cognizance of our little ant-wanderings up and down the human runways?"

"Yes, I think so," she said; but she said it without hesitancy or a shadow of doubt.

"I'm glad; glad you have attained," he rejoined quite unaffectedly.

"It was hardly attainment, in my case," she qualified; and, after a momentary pause, she added: "any more than it was in yours."

"You think I, too, have attained?" he smiled. "I am not so sure of that. Sometimes I think I am like my father, who is like Mahomet's coffin; hanging somewhere between Heaven and earth, unable to climb to one or to fall to the other. But I'm not as brash as I was a year or so ago; at least, I'm not so cock-sure that I know it all. That evening in the music-room at Deer Trace changed me--changed my point of view. You haven't heard me rail once at the world, or at the hypocrites in it, since I came home, have you?"

"No."

"Well, I don't feel like railing. I reckon the old world is good enough to live in--to work in; and certainly there are men in it who are better than I'm ever likely to be. I met one of them last winter out in the Carriso cow country; a 'Protestant' priest, he called himself, of your persuasion. He was the most hopeless bigot I've ever known, and by long odds the nearest masculine approach to true, gritty saintliness. There was nothing he wouldn't do, no hardship he wouldn't cheerfully undergo, to brother a man who was down, and the wickedest devil in all that God-forsaken country swore by him. Yet he would argue with me by the hour, splitting hairs over Apostolic Succession, or something of that sort."

She smiled in her turn. "Did he regard you as a heretic?" she asked.

"Oh, sure! though he admitted that I might escape at the last by virtue of my 'invincible ignorance.' Then I would laugh at him, telling him he was a lot better than his bigotry. But he got the best of me in other ways. I owned the one buckboard in the northern half of Apache County, and my broncos were harness-broken and fast. So, when there was a shoot-up at the Arroyo dance-hall, or any other job of swift brothering to be done, I had to drive Father Philip."

She was musing again. "You used to write me that you were on the edge of things out there: it was a mistake, Tom; you were in the very heart of them."

He shook his head.

"No; the heart of them was back yonder in the music-room. There were chaos and thick darkness to go before that day of days; and it was your woman's love that changed the world for me."

"No," she denied; "that was only an incident. When chaos and darkness fled away, it was God who said, 'Let there be light.' The dawn had come for you before our day of days, Tom."

He stretched himself luxuriously on the sward at her feet.

"You may put it that way if you please. But I shall go on revering you as my torch-bearer," he asserted.

"Tell me," she said quickly; "was it for my sake that you spared Vincent Farley when all you had to do was to turn your back and go away?"

He took time to consider, and his answer put love under the foot of truth.

"No, it wasn't. If you make me confess the bald fact, I was not thinking of you at all, just at that one moment."

"I know it," she rejoined. "And I am big enough to be glad. Neither was it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil by redeeming the Farleys' stock just before they left for Colorado, or that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for their losses during the strike."

But again he was shaking his head dubiously.

"I'm not so sure about that. It's in any man to play high when the good opinion of the one woman is the stake. I'm a _poseur_, like all the others."

She smiled down on him and the slate-blue eyes were reading him to the latest-indited heart-line.

"You are posing now," she asseverated. "Don't I know?--don't I always and always know?" And, after a reflective moment: "It is a great comfort to be able to love the poses, and a still greater to be permitted to discern the true man under them."

"I am glad to believe that you don't see quite to the bottom of that well, Ardea, girl," he said with sudden gravity. "I get only occasional glimpses, myself, and they make me seasick. I don't believe any man alive could endure it to look long into the inner abysses of himself."

"'The heart knoweth his own bitterness,'" she quoted, speaking softly; and then--O rarest of women!--she did not enlarge on it. Instead--

Silence while she was gathering the sweet-smelling tangle in her lap into some more portable arrangement. And afterward, when they were drifting slowly homeward in the lengthening shadows, a small asking.

"Mr. Morelock is coming out to-morrow to hold service in St. John's, and I shall go to play for him. Will you go with me, Tom?"

He smiled out of the gold and sapphire depths of a lover's reverie.

"One week from the day after the day after to-morrow--and it will be the longest week-and-two-days of my life, dearest--your grandfather will take you to church, and I shall bring you away. Won't that be enough?"

She took him quite seriously.

"I shall never be a Felicita Young-Dickson, and drag you," she promised. "But, O Tom! I wish--"

"I know," he said gently. "You are thinking of the days to come; when the paths may diverge--yours and mine--ever so little; when there may be children to choose between their mother's faith and their father's indifference. But I am not indifferent. So far from it, I am only anxious now to prove what I was once so bent on disproving."

"You yourself are the strongest proof," she interposed. "You will see it, some day."

"Shall I? I hope so; and that is an honest hope. And really and truly, I think I have come up a bit--out of the wilderness, you know. I am willing to admit that this is the best of all possible worlds; and I want to do my part in making it a little better because I have lived in it. Also, I'd like to believe in something bigger and better than protoplasm."

Her smile was of the kind which stands half-way in the path to tears, but she spoke bravely to the doubt in his reply.

"You do believe, Tom, dear; you have never seen the moment when you did not. It was the doubt that was unreal. When the supreme test came, it was God's hand that restrained you; you know it now--you knew it at the time. And afterward it was His grace that enabled you to do what was just and right. Haven't you admitted all this to yourself?"

They had crossed the white pike to the manor-house gates and were turning aside from the driveway into the winding lawn path when he said:

"To myself, and to one other." Then, very softly: "I sat at my mother's knee last night, Ardea, and told her all there was to tell."

Ardea's eyes were shining. "What did she say, Tom, dear--or is it more than I should ask?"

"There is nothing you may not ask. She said--it wasn't altogether true, I'm afraid--but she put her arms around my neck and cried and said: _For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found._"

She slipped her arm in his, and there was a little sob of pure joy at the catching of her breath. The moon was just rising above the Lebanon cliff-line, and the beauty of the glorious night-dawn possessed her utterly. Ah, it was a good world and a generous, bringing rich gifts to the steadfast! Instinctively she felt that Tom's little confession did not require an answer; that he was battling his way to the heights which must be taken alone.

So they came in the sacred hush of the young night to a great tulip-tree on the lawn, and where a curiously water-worn limestone boulder served as a rustic seat wide enough for two whose hearts are one they sat down together, still in the companionship that needs no speech. It was Tom who first broke the silence.

"I have been trying ever since that night last winter to feel my way out," he said slowly. "But what is to come of it? I can't go back to the boyhood yesterdays; in a way I have hopelessly outgrown them. Let us admit that religion has become real again; but Ardea, girl, it isn't Uncle Silas's religion, or--or my mother's, or even yours. And I don't know any other."

She laid a hand on one of his.

"It is all right, dear; there is only the one religion in all Christendom--perhaps in all the world, or in God's part of it. The difference is in people."