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."
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."