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.
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.