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.
Tom put Ardea into the carriage and was giving her hand luggage to
Scipio when she called to him.
"Isn't there any one here to meet you, Tom?"
"They don't know I'm coming," he explained. Whereupon she quickly made
room for him, holding the door open. But he hung back.
"I reckon I'd better ride on the box with Unc' Scipio," he suggested.
"I am sure I don't know why you should," she objected.
He told her straight; or at least gave her his own view of it.
"By to-morrow morning everybody in Gordonia and Paradise Valley will
know that I'm home in disgrace. It won't hurt Unc' Scipio any if I'm
seen riding with him."
It was the first time that he had been given to see the Dabney
imperiousness shining star-like in Miss Ardea's slate-blue eyes.
"I wish you to get your hand-bag and ride in here with me," she said,
with the air of one whose wish was law. But when he was sitting opposite
and the carriage door was shut, she smiled companionably across at him
and added: "You foolish boy!"
"It wasn't foolish," he maintained doggedly. "I know what I ought to
do--and I'm not doing it. Everybody around here knows both of us, and--"
"Hush!" she commanded. "I refuse to hear another word. I said you were a
foolish boy, and it will be inexcusably impolite in you to prove that
you are not."
Tom was glad enough to be silent; and it came to him, after a little,
that she was giving him a chance to pull himself together to meet the
ordeal that was before him. In all the misery of the moment--the misery
which belongs to those who ride to the block, the gallows or other
mortal finalities--he marveled that she could be a girl and still be so
thoughtful and far-seeing; and once again it made him feel young and
inadequate and awkwardly her inferior.
At the Woodlawn gates she pulled the old-fashioned, check-strap signal,
and Scipio reined in his horses.
"Are you quite sure you don't want me to go in with you?" she asked,
while Tom was fumbling the door-latch.
He nodded and said: "There'll be trouble enough to go around among as
many as can crowd in, all right. But I can't let you."
"Still, you won't say you don't want me?"
"No; lying isn't one of the things I was expelled for. When I stand up
to my mother to tell her what I've got to tell her, I'd be glad if there
was a little fise-dog sniffling around to back me up. But I'm not going
to call in the neighbors--you, least of all."
"You are disappointing me right along--and I'm rather glad," she said.
And then, almost wistfully: "You are going to be good, aren't you, Tom?"
His look was so sober that it was well-nigh sullen. "I'm going to say
what I've got to say, and then hold my tongue if I have to bite it," he
answered. "Good-by; and--and a Merry Christmas, and--thank you."
He shut the carriage door and gave Scipio the word to go on; and
afterward stood at the gate looking after the great lumbering ark on
wheels until it turned in at the Deer Trace driveway and was lost in the
winding avenue of thick-set evergreens. Then he let himself in at the
home gate, walking leaden-footed toward the ornate house at the top of
the knoll and wishing the distance were ten times as great.
When he reached the house there was an ominous air of quiet about it,
and a horse and buggy, with a black boy holding the reins, stood before
the door. Tom's heart came into his mouth. The turnout was Doctor
Williams's.
"Who's sick?" he asked of the boy who was holding the doctor's horse,
and his tongue was thick with a nameless fear.
The black boy did not know; and Tom crept up the steps and let himself
in as one enters a house of mourning, breaking down completely when he
saw his father sitting bowed on the hall seat.
"You, Buddy?--I'm mighty glad," said the man; and when he held out his
arms the boy flung himself on his knees beside the seat and buried his
face in the cushions.
"Is she--is she going to die?" he asked; when the dreadful words could
be found and spoken.
"We're hoping for the best, Buddy, son. It's some sort of a stroke, the
doctor says; it took her yesterday morning, and she hasn't been herself
since. Did somebody telegraph to you?"
Tom rocked his head on the cushion. How could he add to the blackness of
darkness by telling his miserable story of disgrace? Yet it had to be
done, and surely no hapless penitent in the confessional ever emptied
his soul with more heartfelt contrition or more bitter remorse.
Caleb Gordon listened, with what inward condemnings one could only guess
from his silence. It was terrible! If his father would strike him, curse
him, drive him out of the house, it would be easier to bear than the
stifling silence. But when the words came finally they were as balm
poured into an angry wound.
"There, there, Buddy; don't take on so. You're might' nigh a man, now,
and the sun's still risin' and settin' just the same as it did before
you tripped up and fell down. And it'll go on risin' and settin', too,
long after you and me and all of us have quit goin' to bed and gettin'
up by it. If it wasn't for your poor mammy--"
"That's it--that's just it," groaned Tom. "It would kill her, even if
she was well."
"Nev' mind; you're here now, and I reckon that's the main thing. If she
gets up again, of course she'll have to know; but we won't cross that
bridge till we come to it. And Buddy, son, whatever happens, your old
pappy ain't goin' to believe that you'll be the first Gordon to die in
the gutter. You've got better blood in you than what that calls for."
Tom felt the lightening of his burden to some extent; but beyond was the
alternative of suffering, or causing suffering. He had never realized
until now how much he loved his mother; how large a place she had filled
in his life, and what a vast void there would be when she was gone. He
was yet too young and too self-centered to know that this is the
mother-cross: to live for love and to be crowned and enthroned oftenest
in memory.