Chapter 7

Still, there were incongruities--hopeless janglings of things married by increasing prosperity, but never meant to be bedfellows in the harmonious course of nature. One was the unblushing effrontery of the new brick pairing itself brazenly with the venerable gray stone manor-house on the adjoining knoll--impudence perceivable even to a hobbledehoy fresh from the school desk and the dormitory. Another was the total lack of sympathy between the housing and the housed.

This last was painfully evident in all the waking hours of the household. Tom observed that his father escaped early in the morning, and lived and moved and had his being in the industries at the lower end of the valley, as of old. But his mother's occupation was quite gone. And the summer evenings, sat out decorously on the ornate veranda, were full of constraint and awkward silences, having no part nor lot with those evenings of the older time on the slab-floored porch of the old homestead on the pike.

But there were compensations again, even for Martha Gordon, and Tom discovered one of them on the first Wednesday evening after his arrival. The new home was within easy walking distance of Little Zoar, and he went with his mother to the prayer-meeting.

The upper end of the pike was unchanged, and the little, weather-beaten church stood in its groving of pines, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Better still, the congregation, the small Wednesday-night gathering at least, held the familiar faces of the country folk. The minister was a young missionary, zealously earnest, and lacking as yet the quality of hardness and doctrinal precision which had been the boy's daily bread and meat at the sectarian school. What wonder, then, that when the call for testimony was made, the old pounding and heart-hammering set in, and duty, _duty_, duty, wrote itself in flaming letters on the dingy walls?

Tom set his teeth and swallowed hard, and let a dozen of the others rise and speak and sit again. He could feel the beating of his mother's heart, and he knew she was praying silently for him, praying that he would not deny his Master. For her sake, then ... but not yet; there was still time enough--after the next hymn--after the next testimony--when the minister should give another invitation. He was chained to the bench and could not rise; his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth and his lips were like dry leaves. The silences grew longer; all, or nearly all, had spoken. He was stifling.

"_Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven._" It was the solemn voice of the young minister, and Tom staggered to his feet with the lamps whirling in giddy circles.

"I feel to say that the Lord is precious to my soul to-night. Pray for me, that I may ever be found faithful."

He struggled through the words of the familiar form gaspingly and sat down. A burst of triumphant song arose,

"O happy day, that fixed my choice On Thee, my Saviour and my God!"

and the ecstatic aftermath came. Truly, it was better to be a doorkeeper in the house of God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. What bliss was there to be compared with this heart-melting, soul-lifting blessing for duty done?

It went with him a good part of the way home, and Martha Gordon respected his silence, knowing well what heights and depths were engulfing the young spirit.

But afterward--alas and alas! that there should always be an "afterward"! When Tom had kissed his mother good night and was alone in his upper room, the reaction set in. What had he done? Were the words the outpouring of a full heart? Did they really mean anything to him, or to those who heard them? He grasped despairingly at the fast-fading glories of the vision, dropping on his knees at the bedside. "O God, let me see Thee and touch Thee, and be sure, _sure_!" he prayed, over and over again; and so finally sleep found him still on his knees with his face buried in the bed-clothes.

XI

THE TRUMPET-CALL

For the first few vacation days Tom rose with the sun and lived with the industries, marking all the later expansive strides and sorrowing keenly that he had not been present to see them taken in detail.

But this was a passing phase. When the mechanical hunger was sated; when he had started and stopped every engine in the big plant, had handled the levers of the great steam-hoist that shot the coal-cars from the mine to the coke-yard bins, and had prevailed on the engineer of the dinkey engine to let him haul out and dump a pot of slag, he had a sharp relapse into the primitive, and went roaming afield in search of his lost boyhood.

It was not to be found in any of the valley haunts, these having been transformed by the country-house colony. The old water-wheel below the dam hung motionless, being supplanted by the huge, modern, blowing-engines; and the black wash from the coal-mines had driven the perch from the pools and spoiled the swimming-holes in the creek. In the farther forests of the rampart hills the chopper's ax had been busy; and the blackberry patches in all the open spaces were sacked daily by chattering swarms of the work-people's children, white and black.

On the third morning Tom turned his steps despairingly toward the slopes of the mountain. He was at a pass when he would have given worlds to find one of the sacred places undesecrated. And there remained now only the high altar under the cedars of Lebanon to be visited.

It comforted him not a little to find that he had the old-time, burning thirst when he came within earshot of the dripping spring under the great rock. But when he would have knelt to drink from his palms like Gideon's men, there was no pool in the rocky basin. A barrel had been sunk in the sand-filled crevice, and a greedy pipe-line sucked up the water as fast as it trickled from the rock, to pass it on to one of the thirsty mechanisms in the iron plant a thousand feet below.

In its way this was the final straw, and Tom sat down beside the utilized spring with a lump in his throat. Afterward, he slaked his thirst as he could at the trickle from the rock's lip, and then set his face toward the higher steeps. Major Dabney,--not yet fully in tune with his new neighbors of the country-house colony,--and his granddaughter were spending the summer at Crestcliffe Inn, the new hotel on top of the mountain, and Tom felt that Ardea would understand if he could find and tell her. There are times when one must find a sympathetic ear, or be rent and torn by the pent-up things within.

In one sense the sympathy quest was a devitalizing failure. When he reached the summit of the mountain, hot and tired and dusty, the mere sight of the great hotel, with its thronged verandas and its overpowering air of grandeur and exclusiveness, quenched all desires save that which prompted a hasty retreat. The sectarian school paid as little attention to the social as to the athletic side of its youth; and Tom Gordon at fifteen past was as helpless conventionally as if he had never set foot outside of Paradise.

But at the retractive moment he ran plump into the Major, stalking grandly along the tile-paved walk and smoking a war-time cheroot of preposterous length. The despot of Paradise, despot now only by courtesy of the triumphant genius of modernity, put on his eye-glasses and stared Thomas into respectful rigidity.

"Why, bless my soul!--if it isn't Captain Gordon's boy! Well, well, you young limb! If you didn't faveh youh good fatheh in eve'y line and lineament of youh face, I should neveh have known you--you've grown so. Shake hands, suh!"

Tom did it awkwardly. It is a gift to be able to shake hands easily; a gift withheld from most girls and all boys up to the soulful age. But there was worse to follow. Ardea was somewhere on the peopled verandas, and the Major, more terrible in his hospitality than he had ever appeared in the old-time rage-fits, dragged his hapless victim up and down and around and about in search of her. "Not say 'Howdy' to Ardea? Why, you young cub, where are youh mannehs, suh?" Thus the Major, when the victim would have broken away.

It was a fiery trial for Tom--a way-picking among red-hot plowshares of embarrassment. How the well-bred folk smiled, and the grand ladies drew their immaculate skirts aside to make passing-room for his dusty feet! How one of them wondered, quite audibly, where in the world Major Dabney had unearthed that young native! Tom was conscious of every fleck of dust on his clothes and shoes; of the skilless knot in his necktie; of the school-desk droop in his shoulders; of the utter superfluousness of his big hands.

And when, at the long last, Ardea was discovered sitting beside a gorgeously-attired Queen of Sheba, who also smiled and examined him minutely through a pair of eye-glasses fastened on the end of a gold-mounted stick, the place of torment, wherever and whatever it might be, held no deeper pit for him. What he had climbed the mountain to find was a little girl in a school frock, who had sat on the yellowing grass with one arm around the neck of a great dog, looking fearlessly up at him and telling him she was sorry he was going away. What he had found was a very statuesque little lady, clad in fluffy summer white, with the other Ardea's slate-blue eyes and soft voice, to be sure, but with no other reminder of the lost avatar.

From first to last, from the moment she made room for him, dusty clothes and all, on the settee between herself and the Queen of Sheba, Tom was conscious of but one clearly-defined thought--an overmastering desire to get away--to be free at any cost. But the way of escape would not disclose itself, so he sat in stammering misery, answering Ardea's questions about the sectarian school in bluntest monosyllables, and hearing with his other ear a terrible Major tell the Queen of Sheba all about the railroad invasion, and how he--Tom Gordon--had run to find a punk match to fire a cannon in the Dabney cause.

All of which was bad enough, but the torture rack had still another turn left in its screw. After he had sat for awkward hours, as it seemed, though minutes would have measured it, there was a stir on the veranda and he became vaguely conscious of an impending catastrophe.

"Grandpa is telling you you must stay to luncheon with us," prompted Ardea. "Will you take me in?"

The Major had already given his arm to the Queen of Sheba, and there was no help for the helpless. Tom crooked his arm as stiffly as possible and said "May I?"--which was an inspiration--and they got to the great dining-room with no worse mishap than a collision at the door brought about by his stepping on the train of one of the grand ladies.

But at luncheon his troubles began afresh; or rather, a new and more agonizing set of them took the field. The fourth seat at the small table was occupied by the lady with the stick eye-glasses, and Tom was made aware that she was a Dabney cousin once removed. Thereupon, what little dexterity was left in him fled away, and the table-trial, under the smiling eyes of a Miss Euphrasia, became a chapter of horrors.

From absently picking and choosing among the forks, and trying to drink his bouillon out of the cup in which it was served, to upsetting his glass of iced tea, he stumbled on in a dream of awkwardness; and when, to cover the tea mishap, Ardea, emulating the lady hostess who broke one of her priceless tea-cups at a similar crisis, promptly overturned her own glass, he was unreasonable enough to be angry.

Taking it all in all, anger was coming to be the one constant quantity in the procession of varying emotions. By what right did this hollow, insincere, mocking world, of whose very existence he had been in utter ignorance, make him a butt for its well-bred sneers? Its fashions and fripperies and meaningless forms were not beyond learning; and, by Heaven! he would learn them, too, and put them all to shame. They should see!

And Ardea: was she laughing at him, too, in the depths of her big, beautiful eyes? No, that was too much; he would never believe that. But she was insincere, like the rest of them. It was acting a lie for her to make-believe clumsiness just to keep the others from laughing at him. She must stand with her kind.

From that station to the top of the high, bare crag of righteous condemnation was but a short stage in the wrathful journey; and while he was choking over the meal of strange dishes the zealous under-thought was reaching out into the future.

Some day, when his tongue should be loosed, he would stand before this mocking, smiling, heathenish world with the open Bible in his hand; then it should be taught what it needed to know--that while it was saying it was rich, and increased with goods, and had need of nothing, it was wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.

So it came about that it was the convert of Little Zoar, and not the self-pitying youth searching for his lost boyhood, who escaped finally from the entanglements of Major Dabney's hospitality.

On the way down the cliff path the fire burned and the revival zeal was kindled anew. There had been times, in the last year, especially, when he had thought coldly of the disciple's calling and was minded to break away and be a skilled craftsman, like his father. Now he was aghast to think that he had ever been so near the brink of apostasy. With the river of the Water of Life springing crystal clear at his feet, should he turn away and drink from the bitter pools in the wilderness of this world? With prophetic eye he saw himself as another Boanerges, lifting, with all the inspiring eloquence of the son of thunder, the Baptist's soul-shaking cry, _Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand_!

The thought thrilled him, and the fierce glow of enthusiasm became an intoxicating ecstasy. The tinkling drip of falling water broke into the noonday silence of the forest like the low-voiced call of a sacred bell. For the first time since leaving the mountain top he took note of his surroundings. He was standing beside the great, cubical boulder under the cedars--the high altar in nature's mountain tabernacle.

Ah, Martha Gordon, mother of many prayers, look now, if you can, but not too closely or too long! Is it merely the boy you have molded and fashioned, or is it the convinced and consecrated evangelist of the future, who falls on his knees beside the great rock, with head bent and fingers tightly interlocked, groping desperately for words in which to rededicate himself to the God of your fathers?

Thomas Jefferson had the deep peace of the fully committed when he rose from his knees and went to drink at the spouting rock lip. It was decided now, this thing he had been holding half-heartedly in abeyance. There would be no more dallying with temptation, no more rebellion, no more irreverent stumblings in the dark valley of doubtful questions. More especially, he would be vigilant to guard against those backslidings that came so swiftly on the heels of each spiritual quickening. His heart was fixed, so irrevocably, so surely, that he could almost wish that Satan would try him there and then. But the enemy of souls was nowhere to be seen in the leafy arches of the wood, and Tom bent again to take a second draft at the spouting rock lip.

XII

THE IRON IN THE FORGE FIRE

He was bending over the sunken barrel. A shadow, not his own, blurred the water mirror. He looked up quickly.

"Nan!" he cried.

She was standing on the opposite side of the barrel basin, looking down on him with good-natured mockery in the dark eyes.

"I 'lowed maybe you wouldn't have such a back load of religion after you'd been off to the school a spell," she said pointedly. And then: "Does it always make you right dry an' thirsty to say your prayers, Tommy-Jeffy?"

Tom sat back on his heels and regarded her thoughtfully. His first impulse was out of the natural heart, rageful, wounded vanity spurring it on. It was like her heathenish impertinence to look on at such a time, and then to taunt him about it afterward.

But slowly as he looked a curious change came over him. She was the same Nan Bryerson, bareheaded, barelegged, with the same tousled mat of dark hair, and the same childish indifference to a whole frock. And yet she was not the same. The subtle difference, whatever it was, made him get up and offer to shake hands with her,--and he thought it was the newly-made vows constraining him, and took credit therefor.

"You can revile me as much as you like now, Nan," he said, with prideful humility. "You can't make me mad any more, like you used to."

"Why can't I?" she demanded.

"Because I'm older now, and--and better, I hope. I shall never forget that you have a precious soul to save."

Her response to this was a scoffing laugh, shrill and challenging. Yet he could not help thinking that it made her look prettier than before.

"You can laugh as much as you want to; but I mean it," he insisted. "And, besides, Nan,--of all the things that I've been wanting to come back to, you're the only one that isn't changed." And again he thought it was righteous guile that was making him kind to her.

In a twinkling the mocking hardness went out of her eyes and she leaned across the barrel mouth and touched his hand.

"D'you reckon you shorely mean that, Tom Gordon?" she said; and the lips which lent themselves so easily to scorn were tremulous. She was just his age, and womanhood was only a step across the threshold for her.

"Of course, I do. Let me carry your bucket for you."

She had hung the little wooden piggin under the drip of the spring and it was full and running over. But when he had lifted it out for her, she rinsed and emptied it.

"I just set it there to cool some," she explained. "I'm goin' up to Sunday Rock afte' huckleberries. Come and go 'long with me, Tom."

He assented with a willingness as eager as it was unaccountable. If she had asked him to do a much less reasonable thing, he was not sure that he could have refused.

And as they went together through the wood, spicy with the June fragrances, questions like those of the boyhood time thronged on him, and he welcomed them as a return of at least one of the vanished thrills--and was grateful to her.

Why had he never before noticed that she was so much prettier than any other girl he had ever seen? What was there in the touch of her hand to make him feel like the iron in the forge fire--warm and glowing and putty-soft and yielding? Other girls were not that way. Only a half-hour since, Ardea Dabney had put her hand in his when she had said good-by, and that feeling was the kind you have when you have climbed through breathless summer woods to a high mountain top and the cool breeze blows through your hair and makes you quietly glad and lifted-up and satisfied.

These were questions to be buried deep in the secret places, and yet he had a curious eagerness to talk to Nan about them; to find out if she could understand. But he could not get near to any serious or confidential side of her. Her mood was playful, hilarious, daring. Once she ran squirrel-like out on the bole of a great tree leaning to its fall over the cliff, hung her piggin on a broken limb, and told him he must go after it. Next it was a squeeze through some "fat-man's-misery" crevice in the water-worn sandstone, with a cry to him to come on if he were not a girl-boy. And when they were fairly under the overhanging cliff face of Sunday Rock, she darted away, laughing back at him over her shoulder, and daring him to follow her along a dizzy shelf half-way up the crag; a narrow ledge, perilous for a mountain goat.

This, as he remembered later, was the turning-point in her mood. In imagination he saw her try it and fail; saw her lithe, shapely beauty lying broken and mangled at the cliff's foot; and in three bounds he had her fast locked in his restraining arms. She strove with him at first, like a wrestling boy, laughing and taunting him with being afraid for himself. Then--

Tom Gordon, clean-hearted as yet, did not know precisely what happened. Suddenly she stopped struggling and lay panting in his arms, and quite as suddenly he released her.

"Nan!" he said, in a swiftly submerging wave of tenderness, "I didn't go to hurt you!"

She sank down on a stone at his feet and covered her face with her hands. But she was up again and turning from him with eyes downcast before he could comfort her.

"I ain't hurt none," she said gravely. And then: "I reckon we'd better be gettin' them berries. It looks like it might shower some; and paw'll kill me if I ain't home time to get his supper."

Here was an end of the playtime, and Tom helped industriously with the berry-picking, wondering the while why she kept her face turned from him, and why his brain was in such a turmoil, and why his hands shook so if they happened to touch hers in reaching for the piggin.

But this new mood of hers was more unapproachable than the other; and it was not until the piggin was filled and they had begun to retrace their steps together through the fragrant wood, that she let him see her eyes again, and told him soberly of her troubles: how she was fifteen and could neither read nor write; how the workmen's children in Gordonia hooted at her and called her a mountain cracker when she went down to buy meal or to fill the molasses jug; and, lastly, how, since her mother had died, her father had worked little and drunk much, till at times there was nothing to eat save the potatoes she raised in the little patch back of the cabin, and the berries she picked on the mountain side.

"I hain't never told anybody afore, and you mustn't tell, Tom. But times I'm scared paw 'll up and kill me when--when he ain't feelin' just right. He's some good to me when he ain't red-eyed; but that ain't very often, nowadays."

Tom's heart swelled within him; and this time it was not the heart of the Pharisee. There is no lure known to the man part of the race that is half so potent as the tale of a woman in trouble.

"Does--does he beat you, Nan?" he asked; and there was wrathful horror in his voice.

For answer she bent her head and parted the thick black locks over a long scar.

"That's where he give me one with the skillet, a year come Christmas. And this,"--opening her frock to show him a black-and-blue bruise on her breast,--"is what I got only day afore yisterday."

Tom was burning with indignant compassion, and bursting because he could think of no adequate way of expressing it. In all his fifteen years no one had ever leaned on him before, and the sense of protectorship over this abused one budded and bloomed like a juggler's rose.

"I wish I could take you home with me, Nan," he said simply.

There was age-old wisdom in the dark eyes when they were lifted to his.

"No, you don't," she said firmly. "Your mammy would call me a little heathen, same as she used to; and I reckon that's what I am--I hain't had no chanst to be anything else. And you're goin' to be a preacher, Tom."

Why did it rouse a dull anger in his heart to be thus reminded of his own scarce-cooled pledge made on his knees under the shadowing cedars? He could not tell; but the fact remained.

"You hear me, Nan; I'm going to take care of you when I'm able. No matter what happens, I'm going to take care of you," was what he said; and a low rumbling of thunder and a spattering of rain on the leaves punctuated the promise.

She looked away and was silent. Then, when the rain began to come faster: "Let's run, Tom. I don't mind gettin' wet; but you mustn't."