Chapter 8

They reached the great rock sheltering the barrel-spring before the shower broke in earnest, and Tom led the way to the right. Half-way up its southern face the big boulder held a water-worn cavity, round, and deeply hollowed, and carpeted with cedar needles. Tom climbed in first and gave her a hand from the mouth of the little cavern. When she was up and in, there was room in the nest-like hollow, but none to spare. And on the instant the summer shower shut down upon the mountain side and closed the cave mouth as with a thick curtain.

There was no speech in that little interval of cloud-lowering and cloud-lifting. The boy tried for it, would have taken up the confidences where the storm-coming had broken them off; but it was blankly impossible. All the curious thrills foregone seemed to culminate now in a single burning desire: to have it rain for ever, that he might nestle there in the hollow of the great rock with Nan so close to him that he could feel the warmth of her body and the quick beating of her heart against his arm.

Yet the sleeping conscience did not stir. The moment of recognition was withheld even when the cloud curtain began to lift and he could see the long lashes drooped over the dark eyes, and the flush in the brown cheek matching his own.

"Nan!" he whispered, catching his breath; "you're--you're the--"

She slipped away from him before he could find the word, and a moment later she was calling to him from below that the rain was over and she must hurry.

He walked beside her to the door of the miserable log shack under the second cliff, still strangely shaken, but striving manfully to be himself again. The needed fillip came when the mountaineer staggered to the threshold to swear thickly at his daughter. In times past, Tom would quickly have put distance between himself and Tike Bryerson in the squirrel-eyed stage of intoxication. But now his promise to Nan was behind him, and the Gordon blood was to the fore.

"It was my fault that Nan stayed so long," he said bravely; and he was immensely relieved when Bryerson, making quite sure of his identity, became effusively hospitable.

"Cap'n Gordon's boy--'f cou'se; didn't make out to know ye, 't firs'. Come awn in the house an' sit a spell; come in, I say!"

Again, for Nan's sake, Tom could do no less. It was the final plunge. The boy was come of abstinent stock, which was possibly the reason why the smell of the raw corn liquor with which the cabin reeked gripped him so fiercely. Be that as it may, he could make but a feeble resistance when the tipsy mountaineer pressed him to drink; and the slight barrier went down altogether when he saw the appealing look in Nan's eyes. Straightway he divined that there would be consequences for her when he was gone if the maudlin devil should be aroused in her father.

So he put the tin cup to his lips and coughed and strangled over a single swallow of the fiery, nauseating stuff; did this for the girl's sake, and then rose and fled away down the mountain with his heart ablaze and a fearful clamor as of the judgment trumpet sounding in his ears.

For now the sleeping conscience was broad awake and plying its merciless dagger; now, indeed, he knew very well what he had done--what he had been doing since that fatal moment at the barrel-spring when he had fallen under the spell of Nan Bryerson's beauty; nay, back of that--how the up-bubbling of zeal had been nothing more than wounded vanity; the smoke of a vengeful fire of anger lighted by a desire to strike back at those who had laughed at him.

The next morning he came hollow-eyed to his breakfast, and when the chance offered, besought his father to give him one of the many boy's jobs in the iron plant during the summer vacation--asked and obtained.

And neither the hotel on the mountain top nor the hovel cabin under the second cliff saw him more the long summer through.

XIII

A SISTER OF CHARITY

It was just before the Christmas holidays, in his fourth year of the sectarian school, that Tom Gordon was expelled.

Writing to the Reverend Silas at the moment of Tom's dismissal, the principal could voice only his regret and disappointment. It was a most singular case. During his first and second years Thomas had set a high mark and had attained to it. On the spiritual side he had been somewhat non-committal, to be sure, but to offset this, he had been deeply interested in the preparatory theological studies, or at least he had appeared to be.

But on his return from his first summer spent at home there was a marked change in him, due, so thought Doctor Tollivar, to his association with the rougher class of workmen in the iron mills. It was as if he had suddenly grown older and harder, and the discipline of the school, admirable as the Reverend Silas knew it to be, was not severe enough to reform him.

"It grieves me more than I can tell you, my dear brother, to be obliged to confess that we can do nothing more for him here," was the concluding paragraph of the principal's letter, "and to add that his continued presence with us is a menace to the morals of the school. When I say that the offense for which he is expelled is by no means the first, and that it is the double one of gambling and keeping intoxicating liquors in his room, you will understand that the good repute of Beersheba was at stake, and there was no other course open to us."

It was as well, perhaps, for what remained of Tom's peace of mind that he knew nothing of this letter at the time of its writing. The long day had been sufficiently soul-harrowing and humiliating. Since the morning exercises, when he had been publicly degraded by having his sentence read out to the entire school, he had spent the time in his room, watched, if not guarded, by some one of the assistants. And now he was to be shipped off on the night train like a criminal, with no chance for a word of leave-taking, however much he might desire it.

He was tramping up and down with his hands in his pockets, the Gordon scowl making him look like a young thunder-cloud, when one of the preceptors came to drive with him to the railroad station. It was the final indignity, and he resented it bitterly.

"I can make out to find my way down to the train without troubling you, Mr. Martin," he burst out in boyish anger.

"Doubtless," said the preceptor, quite unmoved. "But we are still responsible for you. Doctor Tollivar wishes me to see you safely aboard your train, and I shall certainly do so. Take the side stairway down, if you please."

The principal's buggy was waiting at the gate, and the preceptor drove. Tom sat back under the hood with his overcoat across his knees. The evening was freezing cold, with an edged wind, and the drive to the station was a hilly mile. If it had been ten miles he would not have moved or opened his lips.

As it chanced, there were no other passengers for the train, which was a through south-bound express. Tom was meaning to sit up all night and think; and the most comfortless seat in the smoking-car would answer. There would be the meeting with his father and mother in the morning, and he thought he should not dare to let sleep come between. He had a firm grip of himself now, and it must not be relaxed until that meeting was over.

But the preceptor had already stepped to the ticket window. "That sleeping-car reservation for Thomas Gordon--have you secured it?" he asked of the agent; and Tom heard the reply: "Lower ten in car number two." That disposed of the seat in the smoker and the bit of penance, and he was unreasonable enough to be resentful for favors.

Hence, when the train came to a stand beside the platform, he went straight to the Pullman, ignoring his keeper. But the preceptor followed him to the car step, held out his hand coldly, and said: "I'm sorry for you, Gordon. Good-by."

Tom drew himself up stiffly, overlooking the extended hand.

"'Good-by'--that is 'God be with you,' isn't it, Mr. Martin? I reckon you don't mean that. Good night." And this is the way Thomas Jefferson turned his back on three and a half years of Beersheba, with hot tears in his eyes and an angry word on his lips.

The Pintsch lights were burning brightly in the Pullman, and these--and the tears--blinded him. Some of the sections in the middle of the car were made down for the night, and while he was stumbling in the wake of the porter over the shoes and the hand-bags left in the aisle, the train started.

"Lower ten, sah," said the black boy, and went about his business in the linen locker. But Tom stood balancing himself with the swaying of the car and staring helplessly at the occupant of lower twelve, a young girl in a gray traveling coat and hat, sitting with her face to the window.

"Why, you--somebody!" she exclaimed, turning to surprise him in the act of glowering down on her. "Do you know, I thought there might be just one chance in a thousand that you'd go home for Christmas, so I made the porter tell me when we were coming to Beersheba. Why don't you sit down?"

Tom edged into the opposite seat and shook hands with her, all in miserable, comfortless silence. Then he blurted out:

"If I'd had any idea you were on this train, I'd have walked."

Ardea laughed, and for all his misery he could not help remarking how much sweeter the low voice was growing, and how much clearer the blue of her eyes was under the forced light of the gas-globes. He had seen her only two or three times since that blush-kindling noon at Crestcliffe Inn. Their Paradise goings and comings had not coincided very evenly.

"You are just the same rude boy, aren't you?" she said leniently. "Are there no girls in Beersheba to teach you how to be nice?"

"I didn't mean it that way," he hastened to say. "I'm always saying the wrong thing to you. But if you only knew, you wouldn't speak to me; much less let me sit here and talk to you."

"If I only knew what? Perhaps you would better tell me and let me judge for myself," she suggested; and out of the past came a flick of the memory whip to make him feel again that she was immeasurably his senior.

"I'm expelled," he said bluntly.

"Oh!" For a full minute, as it seemed to him, she looked steadfastly out of the window at the wall of blackness flitting past, and the steady drumming of the wheels grated on his nerves and got into his blood. When it was about to become unbearable she turned and gave him her hand again. "I'm just as sorry as I can be!" she declared, and the slate-blue eyes confirmed it.

Tom hung his head, just as he had in the trying interview with Doctor Tollivar. But he told her a great deal more than he had told the principal.

"It was this way: three of the boys came to my room to play cards--because their rooms were watched. I didn't want to play--oh, I'm none too good;"--this in answer to something in her eyes that made him eager to tell her the exact truth--"I've done it lots of times. But that night I'd been thinking--well, I just didn't want to, that's all. Then they said I was afraid, and of course, that settled it."

"Of course," she agreed loyally.

"Wait; I want you to know it all," he went on doggedly. "When Martin--he's the Greek and Latin, you know--slipped up on us, there was a bottle of whisky on the table. He took down our names, and then he pointed at the bottle, and said, 'Which one of you does that belong to?' Nobody said anything, and after it began to get sort of--well, kind of monotonous, I picked up the bottle and offered him a drink, and put it in my pocket. That settled _me_."

"But it wasn't yours," she averred.

His smile was a rather ferocious grin. "Wasn't it? Well, I took it, anyway; and I've got it yet. Now see here: that's my berth over there and I'm going over to it. You needn't let on like you know me any more."

"Fiddle!" she said, making a face at him. "You say that like a little boy trying, oh, so hard, to be a man. I'll believe you are just as bad as bad can be, if you want me to; but you mustn't be rude to me. We don't play cards or drink things at Carroll College, but some of us have brothers, and--well, we can't help knowing."

Tom was soberly silent for the space of half a hundred rail-lengths. Then he said: "I wish I'd had a sister; maybe it would have been different."

She shook her head.

"No, indeed, it wouldn't. You're going to be just what you are going to be, and a dozen sisters wouldn't make any difference."

"One like you would make a lot of difference." It made him blush and have a slight return of the largeness of hands; but he said it.

She laughed. "That's nice. You couldn't begin to say anything like that the day you came up to Crestcliffe Inn. But I mean what I say. Sisters wouldn't help you to be good, unless you really wanted to be good yourself. They're just comfortable persons to have around when you are taking your whipping for being naughty."

"Well, that's a good deal, isn't it?"

Again she made the adorable little face at him. "Do you want me to be your sister for a little while--till you get out of this scrape? Is that what you are trying to say?"

He took heart of grace, for the first time in three bad days. "Say, Ardea; I'm hunting for sympathy; just as I used to a long time ago. But you mustn't mix up with me. I'm not worth it."

"Oh, I suppose not; no boy is. But tell me; what are you going to do when you get back to Paradise?"

"Why--I don't know; I haven't thought that far ahead; go to work in the iron plant and be a mucker all the rest of my life, I reckon."

"How silly! You are nearly eighteen, now, aren't you?--and about six feet tall?"

"Both," he said briefly.

"And all the way along you've been meaning to be a minister?"

He gritted his teeth. "That's all over, now; I reckon it's been over for a long time."

"That is more serious. Does your mother know?"

He shook his head.

"She mustn't, Tom; it will just break her heart."

"As if I didn't know!" he said bitterly. "But, Ardea, I haven't been quite square with you. The way I told it about the cards and the whisky you might think--"

"I know what you are going to say. But it needn't make any all-the-time difference, need it? You've been backsliding--isn't that what you call it?--but now you are sorry, and--"

"No; that's the worst of it. I'm not sorry, the way I ought to be. Besides, after what I've been these last two years--but you can't understand; it would just be mockery--mocking God. I told you I wasn't worth your while."

She smiled gravely. "You are such a boy, Tom. Don't you know that all through life you'll have two kinds of friends: those who will stand by you because they won't believe anything bad about you, and those who will take you for just what you are and still stand by you?"

He scowled thoughtfully at her. "Say, Ardea; I'd just like to know how old you are, anyhow! You say things every once in a while that make me feel as if I were a little kid in knee-breeches."

She laughed in his face. "That is the rudest thing you've said yet! But I don't mind telling you--since I'm to be your sister. I'll be seventeen a little while after you're eighteen."

"Haven't you ever been foolish, like other girls?" he asked.

She laughed again, more heartily than ever. "They say I'm the silliest tomboy in our house, at Carroll. But I have my lucid intervals, I suppose, like other people, and this is one of them. I am going to stand by you to-morrow morning, when you have to tell your father and mother--that is, if you want me to."

His gratitude was too large for speech, but he tried to look it. Then the porter came to make her section down, and he had to say good night and vanish.

XIV

ON JORDAN'S BANK

Ardea saw cause for increasing satisfaction in Thomas Jefferson the next morning, when they sat together in section nine to give the porter a chance to rehabilitate ten and twelve.

He had grown so much surer of himself in the two years, and his manners were gratefully improved. Also, she was constrained to admit--frank glances of the slate-blue eyes appraising him--that he was developing hopefully in the matter of good looks. The dust-colored hair of boyhood had become a sort of viking yellow, and the gray eyes, so they should not be overcast by trouble shadows, were honest and fearless.

Then, too, the Gordon jaw was beginning to assert itself--square in the angle and broad at the point of the chin, with a deep cleft to mark its center. Ardea thought it would not be well, later on, for those who should find that jaw and chin opposing them. There would certainly be stubborn and aggressive resistance--and none too much mercy when the fight should end.

The improved manners were pleasantly apparent when the train reached South Tredegar. There were twenty minutes for breakfast, and Tom bestirred himself manfully, and as if the awkward day at Crestcliffe Inn had never been; helping Ardea with her coat, steering her masterfully through the crowd, choosing the fortunate seats at the most convenient table, and commanding the readiest service in spite of the hurry and bustle.

Ardea marked it all with a little thrill of vicarious triumph, which was straightway followed by a little pang personal. What had wrought the change in him? Was it merely the natural chivalry of the coming man breaking through the crust of boyish indifference to the social conventions? Or was it one of the effects of the late plunge into rebellious wickedness?

She hoped it was the chivalry, but she had a vague fear that it was the wickedness. There was a young woman among the seniors in Carroll College who was old in a certain brilliant hardness of mind--a young woman with a cynical outlook on life, and who was not always regardful of her seed-sowing in fresher hearts. Ardea remembered a saying of hers, flung out one evening in the college parlors when the talk of her group had turned on the goodness of good boys: "Why can't you be sincere with yourselves? Not one of you has any use for the truly good boy until after he has learned how to respect you by being a bad boy. You haven't been saying it in so many words, perhaps, but that is the crude fact." Was this the secret of Tom's new acceptability? Ardea hoped it was not--and feared lest it might be.

When they were once more in the train, and the mile-long labyrinth of the factory chimneys had been threaded and left behind, Thomas Jefferson gave proof of another and still more gratifying change.

"Say, Ardea," he began, "you said last night that you'd stand by me in what I've got to face this morning. That's all right; and I reckon I'll never live long enough to even it up with you. But, of course, you know I'm not going to let you do it."

"Why not?" she asked.

"Because I'm not mean enough, or coward enough. After a while, if you get a chance to sort of make it easier for mother--"

"I'll do that, if I can," she promised quickly. "But I hope you are not going to break her heart, Tom."

"You can be mighty sure I'm not; if anything I can do now will help it. But--but, say, Ardea, I can't go back and begin all over again. I should be the meanest, low-down thing in all this world--and that's a hypocrite."

"Oh!" said Ardea, catching her breath. Her religion was very much a matter of fact to her, and the thought of Tom--Martha Gordon's son--stumbling in the plain path of belief was dismaying. "Why would you have to be a hypocrite? Do you mean that you are not sure you ought to be a minister?"

"I mean that I don't know any more what I believe and what I don't believe. I feel as if I'd just like to let myself alone on that side for a while, and make everybody else let me alone. It seems--but you don't know; a girl can't know."

She smiled up at him, and the smile effaced some of the trouble furrows between his eyes.

"Last night you were telling me that I seemed ages older than you; what is it that I can't know?"

"Stumpings like mine,--a man's stumpings," he said, with a touch of the old self-assurance. "You've swallowed your religion whole; it's the best thing for a girl to do, I reckon. But I've got to have whys and wherefores; I've always had to have them. And there are no wherefores in religion; just none whatever."

She was plainly shocked. "O Tom!" she urged; "think of your mother!"

"Thinking of her isn't going to change the value of pi any," he rejoined soberly. "I suppose I've thought of her, and of what she wants me to be, ever since the first day I went to Beersheba. The first two years I tried, honestly tried. But it's no use. It appears like we've got so far away from taw that we can't even see what-all we're aiming at. I've been grinding theology till I'm fairly sick of the word, and I've learned just one thing, Ardea, and that is that you can't prove a single theorem in it."

"But there are some things that don't appear to need any proof; one seems to have been born knowing them. Don't you feel that way?"

He shook his head slowly.

"I used to think I did; but now I'm afraid I don't. I can't remember the time when I wasn't asking why. Don't they teach you to ask why at Carroll?"

"Not in matters of--of conscience."

"Well, they don't at Beersheba, when you come right down to it. And when you do ask, they put you off with a text out of the Bible that, just as like as not, doesn't come within a row of apple-trees of hitting the mark. I remember one time I said something about the 'why' to Doctor Tollivar. He sniffled--he _does_ sniffle, Ardea--and said: 'Mr. Gordon, I recommend that you read what Paul says to the Romans, fourteen and twenty-three: "He that doubteth is damned." And you will note the verb in the original--_is damned_, present tense.' Do you happen to remember the verse?"

Ardea confessed ignorance, and he went on, with a lip-curl of contempt.

"Well, the whole chapter is about being careful for the weak brother. The Romans used to eat the flesh of the animals offered in the sacrifices to the gods, and some of the Christian Romans didn't seem to be strong enough or sensible enough to eat it as just plain, every-day meat. They tangled it up with the idol worship. So Paul, or whoever it was that wrote the chapter, said: 'He that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith,' that is, the Christian faith, I suppose, which would teach him that the meat wasn't any the worse for having been offered to a block of wood or stone called a god. Now, honestly, Ardea, what would you think of a teacher who would deliberately cut a verse in two in the middle and make his half of it mean something else, just to put a fellow down?"

"It doesn't seem quite honest," she could not help admitting.

"Honest! It's low-down trickery. And they all do it. Last year when I was going up to Beersheba I happened to sit in the same seat with a Catholic priest. We got to talking, I don't remember just how, and I said something about doubting the Pope's infallibility. Out pops the same old text: 'My son, hear the words of the holy Apostle, Saint Paul--" He that doubteth is damned!"' He was old enough to be my father, but I couldn't help slapping the other half of the verse at him, and saying that we'd most luckily escape because there wasn't any dinner-stop for our train."

The flippant tone of all this disheartened Thomas Jefferson's listener, and a silence succeeded which lasted until the train had stormed around the nose of Lebanon and the whistle was blowing for Gordonia. Then Tom said: "I didn't mean to hurt you; but now you see why I can't go back and begin all over again." And she nodded assent.

There was no one at the station to meet the disgraced one, news of the disaster at Beersheba being as yet only on the way. Thomas Jefferson was rather glad of it; especially glad that there was no one from Woodlawn--this was the name of the new home--to recognize him and ask discomforting questions. But Ardea was expected, and the Dabney carriage, with old Scipio on the box, was drawn up beside the platform.