Chapter 6

Why Mr. Duxbury Farley spared the iron-master in the freezing-out process was an unsolved riddle to many. But there were reasons. For one, there was the lease of the coal lands, renewable year by year--this was Caleb's own honest provision inserted in the contract for the Major's protection--and renewable only by the Major's friend. Further, a practical man at the practical end of an industry is a sheer necessity; and by contriving to have honest Caleb associated with himself in the receivership, a fine color of uprightness was imparted to the promoter's far-reaching plan of aggrandizement.

So, later, when the reorganization was effected; when the troublesome, dividend-hungry stock-holders of the original company were eliminated by due process of law, Caleb's name appeared on the Farley slate with the title of general manager of the new company--for the same good and sufficient reasons.

It was during the fervid six months of Chiawassee Coal and Iron development that Thomas Jefferson had passed from the old life to the new--from childhood to boyhood.

Simultaneously, there were the coal-mines opening under the cliffs of Mount Lebanon, the long, double row of coking-ovens building on the flat below the furnace, and the furnace itself taking on undreamed-of magnitudes under the hands of the army of workmen. Thomas Jefferson did his best to keep the pace, being driven by a new and eager thirst for knowledge mechanical, and by a gripping desire to be present at all the assemblings of all the complicated parts of the threefold machine. And when he found it impossible to be in three places at one and the same moment, it distressed him to tears.

Of the home life during that strenuous interval there was little more than the eating and sleeping for one whose time for the absorbent process was all too limited. Also, the perplexing questions reaching down into the under-soul of things were silent. Also, again--mark of a change so radical that none but a Thomas Jefferson may read and understand--an awe-inspiring Major Dabney had ceased to be the first citizen of the world, that pinnacle being now occupied by a tall, sallow, smooth-faced gentleman, persuasive of speech and superhuman in accomplishment, who was the life and soul of the activities, and whom his father and mother always addressed respectfully as "Colonel" Farley.

One day, in the very heat of the battle, this commanding personage, at whose word the entire world of Paradise was in travail, had deigned to speak directly to him--Thomas Jefferson. It was at the mine on the mountain. The workmen were bolting into place the final trestle of the inclined railway which was to convey the coal in descending carloads to the bins at the coke-ovens, and Thomas Jefferson was absorbing the details as a dry sponge soaks water.

"Making sure that they do it just right, are you, my boy?" said the great man, patting him approvingly on the shoulder. "That's good. I like to see a boy anxious to get to the bottom of things. Going to be an iron-master, like your father, are you?"

"N-no," stammered the boy. "I wisht I was!"

"Well, what's to prevent? We are going to have the completest plant in the country right here, and it will be a fine chance for your father's son; the finest in the world."

"'Tain't goin' to do me any good," said Thomas Jefferson dejectedly. "I got to be a preacher."

Mr. Duxbury Farley looked down at him curiously. He was a religious person himself, coming to be known as a pillar in St. Michael's Church at South Tredegar, a liberal contributor, and a prime mover in a plan to tear down the old building and to erect a new one more in keeping with the times and South Tredegar's prosperity. Yet he was careful to draw the line between religion as a means of grace and business as a means of making money.

"That is your mother's wish, I suppose: and it's a worthy one; very worthy. Yet, unless you have a special vocation--but there; your mother doubtless knows best. I am only anxious to see your father's son succeed in whatever he undertakes."

After that, Thomas Jefferson secretly made Success his god, and was alertly ready to fetch and carry for the high priest in its temple, only the opportunities were infrequent.

For, wide as the Paradise field seemed to be growing from Thomas Jefferson's point of view, it was altogether too narrow for Duxbury Farley. The principal offices of Chiawassee Coal and Iron were in South Tredegar, and there the first vice-president was building a hewn-stone mansion, and had become a charter member of the city's first club; was domiciled in due form, and was already beginning to soften his final "r's," and to speak of himself as a Southerner--by adoption.

So sped the winter and the spring succeeding Thomas Jefferson's thirteenth birthday, and for the first time in his life he saw the opening buds of the ironwood and the tender, fresh greens of the herald poplars, and smelled the sweet, keen fragrance of awakening nature, without being moved thereby.

Ardea he saw only now and then, as old Scipio drove her back and forth between the manor-house and the railway station, morning and evening. He had heard that she was going to school in the city, and as yet there were no stirrings of adolescence in him to make him wish to know more.

As for Nan Bryerson, he saw her not at all. For one thing, he climbed no more to the spring-sheltering altar rock among the cedars; and for another, among all the wild creatures of the mountain, your moonshiner is the shyest, being an anachronism in a world of progress. One bit of news, however, floated in on the gossip at Little Zoar. It related that Nan's mother was dead, and that the body had lain two days unburied while Tike was drowning his sorrow in a sea of his own "pine-top."

In the new life, as in the old, summer followed quickly on the heels of spring, and when the hepaticas and the violets were gone, and the laurel and the rhododendron were decking the cliffs of Lebanon in their summer robes of pink and white and magenta, another door was opened for Thomas Jefferson.

Vaguely it had been understood in the Gordon household that Mr. Duxbury Parley was a widower with two children: a boy, some two years older than Thomas Jefferson, at school in New England, and a girl younger, name and place of sojourn unknown. The boy was coming South for the long vacation, and the affairs of Chiawassee Coal and Iron--already reaching out subterraneously toward the future receivership--would call the first vice-president North for the better portion of July. Would Mrs. Martha take pity on a motherless lad, whose health was none of the best, and open her home to Vincent?

Mrs. Martha would and did; not ungrudgingly on the vice-president's account, but with many misgivings on Thomas Jefferson's. She was finding the surcharged industrial atmosphere of the new era inimical at every point to the development of the spiritual passion she had striven to arouse in her son; to paving the way for the realizing of that ideal which had first taken form when she had written "Reverend Thomas Jefferson Gordon" on the margin of the letter to her brother Silas.

As it fell out, the worst happened that could happen, considering the apparent harmlessness of the exciting cause. Vincent Farley proved to be an anemic stripling, cold, reserved, with no surface indications of moral depravity, and with at least a veneer of good breeding. But in Thomas Jefferson's heart he planted the seed of discontent with his surroundings, with the homely old house on the pike, unchanged as yet by the rising tide of prosperity, and more than all, with the prospect of becoming a chosen vessel.

It was of no use to hark back to the revival and the heart-quaking experiences of a year agone. Thomas Jefferson tried, but all that seemed to belong to another world and another life. What he craved now was to be like this envied and enviable son of good fortune, who wore his Sunday suit every day, carried a beautiful gold watch, and was coolly and complacently at ease, even with Major Dabney and a foreign-born and traveled Ardea.

Later in the summer the envy died down and Thomas Jefferson developed a pronounced case of hero-worship, something to the disgust of the colder-hearted, older boy. It did not last very long, nor did it leave any permanent scars; but before Thomas Jefferson was fully convalescent the subtle flattery of his adulation warmed the subject of it into something like companionship, and there were bragging stories of boarding-school life and of the world at large to add fresh fuel to the fire of discontent.

Though Thomas Jefferson did not know it, his deliverance on that side was nigh. It had been decided in the family council of two--with a preacher-uncle for a casting-vote third--that he was to be sent away to school, Chiawassee Coal and Iron promising handsomely to warrant the expense; and the decision hung only on the choice of courses to be pursued.

Caleb had marked the growing hunger for technical knowledge in the boy, and had secretly gloried in it. Here, at least, was a strong stream of his own craftsman's blood flowing in the veins of his son.

"It'd be a thousand pities to spoil a good iron man and engineer to make a poor preacher, Martha," he objected; this for the twentieth time, and when the approach of autumn was forcing the conclusion.

"I know, Caleb; but you don't understand," was the invariable rejoinder. "You know that side of him, because it's your side. But he is my son, too; and--and Caleb, the Lord has called him!"

Gordon's smile was lenient, tolerant, as it always was in such discussions.

"Not out loud, I reckon, little woman; leastwise, Buddy don't act as if he'd heard it. As I've said, there's plenty of time. He's only a little shaver yet. Let him try the school in the city for a year 'r so, goin' and comin' on the railroads, nights and mornin's, like the Major's gran'daughter. After that, we might see."

But now Martha Gordon was fighting the last great battle in the war of spiritual repression which had been going on ever since the day when that text, _Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers_, had been turned into a whip of scorpions to chasten her, and she fought as those who will not be denied the victory. Caleb yielded finally, but with some such hand-washing as Pilate did when he gave way to the pressure from without.

"I aim to do what's for the best, Martha, but I own I hain't got your courage. You've been shovin' that boy up the steps o' the pulpit ever since he let on like he could understand what you was sayin' to him, and maybe it's all right. I've never been over on your side o' that fence, and I don't know how things look over there. But if it was my doin's, I'd be prayin' mighty hard to whatever God I believed in not to let me make a hypocrite out'n o' Buddy. I would _so_."

Thomas Jefferson was told what was in store for him only a short time before his outsetting for the sectarian home school in a neighboring state, which was the joint selection of his mother and Uncle Silas. He took it with outward calm, as he would have taken anything from a prize to a whipping. But there was dumb rebellion within when his mother read him the letter he was to carry to the principal--a letter written by Brother Crafts to one of like precious faith, commending the lamb of the flock, and definitely committing that lamb as a chosen vessel. It was unfair, he cried inwardly, in a hot upflash of antagonism. He might choose to be a preacher; he had always meant to be one, for his mother's sake. But to be pushed and driven--

He took his last afternoon for a ramble in the fields and woods beyond the manor-house, in that part of the valley as yet unfurrowed by the industrial plow. It was not the old love of the solitudes that called him; it was rather a sore-hearted desire to go apart and give place to all the hard thoughts that were bubbling and boiling within.

A long circuit over the boundary hills brought him at length to the little glade with the pool in its center where he had been fishing for perch on that day when Ardea and the great dog had come to make him back-slide. He wondered if she had ever forgiven him. Most likely she had not. She never seemed to think him greatly worth while when they happened to meet.

He was sitting on the overhanging bank, just where he had sat that other day, when suddenly history repeated itself. There was a rustling in the bushes; the Great Dane bounded out, though not as before to stand menacing; and when he turned his head she was there near him.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" she said coolly; and then she called to the dog and made as if she would go away. But Thomas Jefferson's heart was full, and full hearts are soft.

"You needn't run," he hazarded. "I reckon I ain't going to bite you. I don't feel much like biting anybody to-day."

"You did bite me once, though," she said airily.

"And you've never forgiven me for it," he asserted, in deepest self-pity.

"Oh, yes, I have; the Dabneys always forgive--but they never forget. And me, I am a Dabney."

"That's just as bad. You wouldn't be so awful mean to me if you knew. I--I'm going away."

She came a little nearer at that and sat down beside him on the yellow grass with an arm around the dog's neck.

"Does it hurt?" she asked. "Because, if it does, I'm sorry; and I'll promise to forget."

"It does hurt some," he confessed. "Because, you see, I'm going to be a preacher."

"You?" she said, with the frank and unsympathetic surprise of childhood. Then politeness came to the rescue and she added: "I'm sorry for that, too, if you are wanting me to be. Only I should think it would be fine to wear a long black robe and a pretty white surplice, and to learn to sing the prayers beautifully, and all that."

Thomas Jefferson was honestly horrified, and he looked it.

"I'd like to know what in the world you're talking about," he said.

"About your being a minister, of course. Only in France, they call them priests of the church."

The boy's lips went together in a fine straight line. Not for nothing did the blood of many generations of Protestants flow in his veins. "Priest" was a Popish word.

"The Pope of Rome is antichrist!" he declared authoritatively.

She seemed only politely interested.

"Is he? I didn't know." Then, with a tactfulness worthy of graver years, she drew away from the dangerous topic. "When are you going?"

"To-morrow."

"Is it far?"

"Yes; it's an awful long ways."

"Never mind; you'll be coming back after a while, and then we'll be friends--if you want to."

Surely Thomas Jefferson's heart was as wax before the fire that day.

"I'm mighty glad," he said. Then he got up. "Will you let me show you the way home again?--the short, easy way, this time?"

She hesitated a moment, and then stood up and gave him her hand.

"I'm not afraid of you now; _we_ don't hate him any more, do we, Hector?"

And so they went together through the yellowing aisles of the September wood and across the fields to the manor-house gates.

X

THE SHADOW OF THE ROCK

Tom Gordon--Thomas Jefferson now only in his mother's letters--was fifteen past, and his voice was in the transition stage which made him blushingly self-conscious when he ran up the window-shade in the Pullman to watch for the earliest morning outlining of old Lebanon on the southern horizon.

There had been no home-going for him at the close of his first year in the sectarian school. The principal had reported him somewhat backward in his studies for his age,--which was true enough,--and had intimated that a summer spent with the preceptor who had the vacation charge of the school buildings would be invaluable to a boy of such excellent natural parts. So Tom had gone into semi-solitary confinement for three months with a man who thought in the dead languages and spoke in terms of ancient history, studying with sullen resentment in his heart, and charging his imprisonment to his preacher-uncle, who was, indeed, chiefly responsible.

He had mourned that loss of liberty all through his second year, and was conscious the while that it would prove the parent of a still greater loss. It is the exile's anchorage in a shifting world to think of the home haven as unchanged and unchanging; as a place where by and by the thread of life as it was may be knotted up with that of life as it shall be. But Tom remembered that he had left Paradise in the midst of convulsive upheavals, and was correspondingly fearful.

The sickening sense of unfamiliarity seized him when the train stopped for breakfast in the city which had once been the village of the single muddy street. The genius of progress had transformed it so completely that there was nothing but the huge, backgrounding mass of Lebanon, visible from the windows of the station breakfast-room, to identify the grave of the old and the birthplace of the new.

The boy laid desperate eye-holds on the comforting solidity of the background, and would not loose them when the train sped away southward again through mile-long yards with their boundaries picked out by black-vomiting factory chimneys. The mountain, at least, was unchanged, and there might be hope for the country beyond.

But the homesickness returned with renewed qualms when the train had doubled the nose of Lebanon and threaded its way among the hills to the Paradise portal. Gordonia, of the single side-track, had grown into a small iron town, with the Chiawassee plant flanking a good half-mile of the railway; with a cindery street or two, and a scummy wave of operatives' cottages and laborers' shacks spreading up the hillsides which were stripped bare of their trees and undergrowth.

Tom's eyes filled, and he was wondering faintly if the desolating tide of progress had topped the hills to pour over into the home valley beyond, when his father accosted him. There was a little shock at the sight of the grizzled hair and beard turned so much grayer; but the welcoming was like a grateful draft of cool water in a parched wilderness.

"Well, now then! How are ye, Buddy, boy? Great land o' Canaan! but you've shot up and thickened out mightily in two years, son."

Tom was painfully conscious of his size. Also of the fact that he was clumsily in his own way, particularly as to hands and feet. The sectarian school dwelt lightly on athletics and such purely mundane trivialities as physical fitness and the harmonious education of the growing body and limbs.

"Yes; I'm so big it makes me right tired," he said gravely, and his voice cracked provokingly in the middle of it. Then he asked about his mother.

"She's tolerable--only tolerable, Buddy. She allows she don't have enough to keep her doin' in the new--" Caleb pulled himself up abruptly and changed the subject with a ponderous attempt at levity. "What-all have you done with your trunk check, son? Now I'll bet a hen worth fifty dollars ye've gone and lost it."

But Tom had not; and when the luggage was found there was another innovation to buffet him. The old buggy with its high seat had vanished, and in its room there was a modern surrey with a negro driver. Tom looked askance at the new equipage.

"Can't we make out to walk, pappy?" he asked, dropping unconsciously into the child-time phrase.

"Oh, yes; I reckon we could. You're not too young, and I'm not so terr'ble old. But--get in, Buddy, get in; there'll be trampin' enough for ye, all summer long."

The limestone pike was the same, and the creek was still rushing noisily over the stones in its bed, as Tom remarked gratefully. But the heaviest of the buffets came when the barrier hills were passed and the surrey horses made no motion to turn in at the gate of the old oak-shingled house beyond the iron-works.

"Hold on!" said Tom. "Doesn't the driver know where we live?"

The old-time, gentle smile wrinkled about the iron-master's eyes.

"That's the sup'rintendent's office and lab'ratory now, son. It was getting to be tolerable noisy down here for your mammy, so nigh to the plant. And we allowed to s'prise you. We've been buildin' us a new house up on the knoll just this side o' Major Dabney's."

It was the cruelest of the changes--the one hardest to bear; and it drove the boy back into the dumb reticence which was a part of his birthright. Had they left him nothing by which to remember the old days--days which were already beginning to take on the glamour of unutterable happiness past?

Nevertheless, he could not help looking curiously for the new home--the old being irretrievably sacked and ruined; but there were more shocks to come between. One of Mr. Duxbury Farley's side issues had been a real estate boom for Paradise Valley proper. South Tredegar being prosperous, the time had seemed propitious for the engrafting of the country-house idea. By some means, marvelous to those who knew Major Dabney's tenacious land-grip, the promoter had bought in the wooded hillsides facing the mountain, cut them into ten-acre residence plots, run a graveled drive on the western side of the creek to front them, and presto! the thing was done.

Tom saw well-kept lawns, park-like groves and pretentious country villas where he had once trailed Nance Jane through the "dark woods," and his father told him the names and circumstance of the owners as they drove up the pike. There was Rockwood, the summer home of the Stanleys, and The Dell, owned, and inhabited at intervals, by Mr. Young-Dickson, of the South Tredegar potteries. Farther along there was Fairmount, whose owner was a wealthy cotton-seed buyer; Rook Hill, which Tom remembered as the ancient roosting ground of the migratory winter crows; and Farnsworth Park, ruralizing the name of its builder. On the most commanding of the hillsides was a pile of rough-cut Tennessee marble with turrets and many gables, rejoicing in the classic name of Warwick Lodge. This, Tom was told, was the country home of Mr. Farley himself, and the house alone had cost a fortune.

At the turn in the pike where you lost sight finally of the iron-works, there was a new church, a miniature in native stone of good old Stephen Hawker's church of Morwenstow. Tom gasped at the sight of it, and scowled when he saw the gilded cross on the tower.

"Catholic!" he said. "And right here in our valley!"

"No," said the father; "it's 'Piscopalian. Colonel Farley is one o' the vestries, or whatever you call 'em, of St. Michael's yonder in town. I reckon he wanted to get his own kind o' people round him out here, so he built this church, and they run it as a sort of side-show to the big church. Your mammy always looks the other way when we come by."

Tom looked the other way, too, watching anxiously for the first sight of the new home. They reached it in good time, by a graveled driveway leading up from the white pike between rows of forest trees; and there was a second negro waiting to take the team, when they alighted at the veranda steps.

The new house was a two-storied brick, ornate and palpably assertive, with no suggestion of the homely country comfort of the old. Yet, when his mother had wept over him in the wide hall, and there was time to go about, taking it all in like a cat exploring a strange garret, it was not so bad.

Or rather, let us say, there were compensations. The love of luxury is only dormant in the heart of the hardiest barbarian; and the polished floors and soft-piled rugs, the bath-room with its great china dish, and the carpeted stair with the old grandfather clock ticking bravely on the landing, presently began to thrum the tuneful chord of pride. Perhaps Ardea Dabney would not laugh and say, "What a funny, _funny_ old place!" as she had once said when the Major had brought her to the log-walled homestead on the lower pike.