had believed himself to be Ardea's murderer,--he went softly about the
house, sharing, with his father and his uncle, the watch in the
sick-room; doing what little there was to be done in dumb hopelessness,
and beating at times on the brazen gates of Heaven in sheer despair.
There was no answer to his prayers; in his inmost soul he knew there
would not be; but even in this the eternal query assailed him. Was it
for lack of faith that no whisper of reply came from the unseen world
beyond the veil? Or was it only because there was no ear to hear, no
voice to answer? He could not tell. He made sure he was doomed to live
and die, buffeting with these submerging waves of doubt--doubt of
himself on one hand, and of God on the other.
In that time of sore trial, his Uncle Silas's forbearance wiped out many
a score of boyish resentment. There was no word of reproach, still less
the harsh arraignment and condemnation to which he began to look forward
on the day when Doctor Tollivar had announced his purpose of writing
the facts to his brother in the faith. But Tom remarked that in the
daily morning and evening prayers his uncle spoke of him as a soul in
peril, and he wondered that this pointed reference, which once would
have stirred the pool of bitterness to its bottom, now left him unmoved
and immovable. Later, he knew it was because there was now no pool of
bitterness to be stirred; the spiritual well-springs had failed and
there was no water in them--either for healing or for penitential
cleansing.
The fifth day after his home-coming was Christmas Eve. Late in the
afternoon, when the doctor had made his second visit and had gone away,
leaving no word of encouragement for the watchers, Tom left the house
and took the path that led up through the young orchard to the foot of
Lebanon.
He was deep within the winter-stripped forest on the mountain side,
plunging upward through the beds of dry leaves in the little hollows,
when he met Ardea. She was coming down with her arms full of holly, and
for the moment he forgot his troubles in the keen pleasure of looking at
her. It had not occurred to him sooner to think of her as other than the
girl of his boyhood days, grown somewhat, as he himself had grown. But
now he saw that she was very beautiful.
None the less, his greeting was a brotherly reproof.
"I'd like to know what you're thinking of, tramping around on the
mountain alone," he said, frowning at her.
"I have been thinking of you, most of the time, and wishing you could be
with me," she answered, so artlessly as to mollify him instantly.
[Illustration: "I have been wishing you could be with me."]
"I ought to row you like smoke, but when you say things like that, I
can't. Don't you know you oughtn't to go projecting around in the woods
all alone?"
"I have always done it, haven't I? And Hector was with me till a few
minutes ago, when he took it into his foolish old head to run after a
rabbit. Is your mother any better this afternoon?"
"Sit down," he commanded abruptly. "I want to talk to you."
She hung the bunch of holly on the twigged limb of a small oak and sat
down on a moss-covered rock. Tom sprawled at her feet in the dry leaves,
and for a little while he was silent.
"You haven't told me yet how your mother is," she reminded him.
"She is just the same; lying there so still that you have to look close
to see whether she is breathing. The doctor says that if there isn't a
change pretty soon, she'll die."
"O Tom!"
He looked up at her with the old boyish frown pulling his eyebrows
together.
"She's been good to God all her life; what do you reckon He's letting
her die this way for?"
It was a terrible question, made more terrible by the savage hardihood
that lay behind it. Ardea could not reason with him; and she felt
intuitively that at this crisis only reason would appeal to him. Yet she
could not turn him away empty-handed in his hour of need.
"How can we tell?" she said, and there were tears in her voice. "We only
know that He does everything for the best."
"Yes; that is what they tell us. But how are we going to _know_?" he
demanded.
The girl's faith was as simple and confiding as it was defenseless under
any fire of argument.
"I suppose we can't know, in your sense of the word. But we can
believe."
"_I_ can't," said Tom fiercely. "I can pretend to; I reckon I've been
pretending to all my life; but now I've got to a place where I can't
feel anything that I can't touch, nor hear anything that doesn't make a
noise, nor see anything that everybody else can't see. From what you've
said at different times, you seem to be able to do all these things. Do
you really believe?"
"I hope I do," she answered, and her voice was low and very earnest. But
she would be altogether honest. "Perhaps you wouldn't call it 'belief
unto righteousness,' as your Uncle Silas would say. I've never thought
much about such things--in the way he says we ought to think about them.
They seem to me to be true, like the--well, like the stars and the
universe. You don't think about the universe all the time; but you know
it is there, and that you are a little, tiny fraction of it, yourself."
But these were abstractions, and Tom's need was terribly concrete.
"I suppose you mean you haven't been converted, and all that; never mind
about that. What I want to know is, did you ever ask God for anything
and get it?"
"Why, yes; I ask Him for things every day, and get them. Don't you?"
"No, not now. But are you sure the things you ask for are not things
that you'd get anyway?" he persisted.
She was growing a little restive under the fire of relentless
questions. There are modesties in religion as in morals,--inner shrines
to be defended at any and all costs. In the Crafts part of Thomas
Jefferson's veins ran the blood of those who had fought with the sword
in one hand and the Bible in the other, stabling their horses overnight
in the enemy's churches. Ardea rose and began to untangle the great
bunch of holly.
"I think we had better be going," she said, ignoring his clenching
question. "Cousin Euphrasia gets nervous about me, sometimes, as you
made believe you were."
He did not look around, or make any move toward getting up. But there
was a new note of hardness in his voice when he said: "I thought you'd
have to dodge, just like all the others, if I could only make out to
throw straight enough. 'Way down deep inside of you, you don't believe
God worries Himself much about what happens to us little dry leaves in
His big woods."
"Oh, but I do!--that is, I believe He cares. The things you spoke of are
things I might easily be deprived of; and I choose to believe that He
gives and continues them."
He was quiet for a full minute, sitting with his knees drawn up to his
chin and his hands tightly clasped over them. When he looked up at her
his face was the face of one tormented.
"I wish you'd ask Him to let my mother live!" he said brokenly. "I've
tried and tried, and the words just die in my mouth."
There is a Mother of Sorrows in every womanly heart, to whom the appeal
of the stricken is never made in vain. Ardea saw only a boy-brother
crying out in his pain, and she dropped on her knees and put her arms
around his neck and wept over him in a pure transport of sisterly
sympathy.
"Indeed and indeed I will help, Tom! And you mustn't let it drive you
out into the dark. You poor boy! I know just how it hurts, and I'm so
sorry for you!"
He freed himself gently from the comforting arms, got up rather
unsteadily, and lifted her to her feet. Then the manly bigness of him
sent the hot blood to her cheeks and she was ashamed.
"O Tom!" she faltered; "what must you think of me!"
He turned to gather up the scattered holly.
"I think God made you--and that was one time when His hand didn't
tremble," he said gravely.
They had picked their way down the leaf-slippery mountain side and he
was giving her the bunch of holly at the Dabney orchard gate before he
spoke again. But at the moment of leave-taking he said:
"How did you know what I needed more than anything else in all the
world, Ardea?"
She blushed painfully and the blue eyes were downcast.
"You must never speak of that again. I didn't stop to think. It's a
Dabney failing, I'm afraid--to do things first and consider them
afterward. It was as if we were little again, and you had fallen down
and hurt yourself."
"I know," he acquiesced, with the same manly gentleness that had made
her ashamed. "I won't speak of it any more--and I'll never forget it the
longest day I live. Good-by."
And he went the back way to his own orchard gate, plunging through the
leaf beds with his head down and his hands in his pockets, struggling as
he could to stem the swift current which was whirling him out beyond all
the old landmarks. For now he was made to know that boyhood was gone,
and youth was going, and for one intoxicating moment he had looked over
the mountain top into the Promised Land of manhood.
XV
NOËL
The night was far spent and the Christmas dawn was graying in the
remotest east when Tom, sleeping in his clothes on a lounge before the
fire in the lower hall, roused himself and went noiselessly up stairs to
beg his father to go and lie down for a little while.
There was a trained nurse from South Tredegar in charge of the
sick-room; but from the beginning the three--husband, brother and
son--had kept watch at the bedside of the stricken one. There was little
to be done; nothing, in fact; and the nurse would have spared them the
nights. Yet no one of the three would surrender his privilege.
His father relieved, Tom mended the fire in the grate; and when he found
the nurse dozing in her chair, he woke her and persuaded her to go and
rest in the adjoining room, promising to call her instantly if she were
needed.
Left alone with his mother, he tiptoed to the bedside and stood for many
minutes looking with sorrow-blurred eyes at the still, rigid face on the
pillow. It was terribly like death; so like, that more than once he laid
his hand softly on the bed-covering to make sure that she still
breathed. When he could bear it no longer, he crossed the room to the
western window, drawing the draperies and standing between them to stare
miserably out into the calm, starlit void. While he looked, a meteor
burned its way across the inverted bowl of the heavens, and its passing
kindled the embers of the inextinguishable fire.
_And, lo, the star ... came and stood over where the young child was._
The curtains of the void were parted by invisible hands, and down the
long vista of the centuries he saw the familiar scene of the Nativity,
dwelt on so often and so faithfully in his childhood training that it
seemed almost like a part of the material scheme of the universe: the
Babe in the manger; the shepherds watching their flocks; the heavenly
host singing the triumphant anthem of the ages, _Glory to God in the
highest, and on earth, peace_; the star of Bethlehem shining serenely
above a world lying in darkness and in the shadow of death.
Was it all true? or was it only a beautiful myth? If it were true, where
was the proof? Not in history, for this, the most wonderful and
miraculous thing in all the story of mankind, stands unrecorded save by
the pens of those who were themselves under the spell of it. In
subsequent marvels and wonder-workings?--he shook his head mournfully.
If any such there had been, those impartial witnesses who must have
known and should have spoken were silent, and now all the earth was
silent: storms rose in their fury and were calmed for no man's _Peace,
be still_; earthquakes engulfed pagan and Christian believer alike; all
nature was cruel, relentless, mechanical.
Was there nothing then to reach down the ages from that Christmas
morning so long ago to make the beautiful first-century myth a
latter-day reality? Tom cast about him hopelessly. There was the
Church--one and indivisible, if the myth were true. The slow Gordon
smile gathered at the corners of his eyes. He remembered a thing his
mother had said to him long ago, when, in a moment of boyish confidence,
he had told her of the climb to Crestcliffe Inn and its purpose.
"Ardea's a dear girl, as the children of this world go, Thomas; she's
been right loving and kind to me since we've come to be such close
neighbors. But"--with a note of solemn warning in her voice--"you must
never forget that she's an Episcopalian, a lost soul, dead in forms and
ceremonies and trespasses and sins." So his mother scoffed at Ardea's
faith; and Ardea--no, she did not scoff, her contempt was too generous
for that; but it was there, just the same. And the Methodists
fellowshiped neither, and the Baptists excluded the Methodists, and the
Catholics retorted to the Protestant charge of apostasy with the
centuries-old cry of "heretics all"! Which of the scores of divisions
and subdivisions was the one true indivisible body of Christ? Tom shook
his head again. There was no hope of proof in the churches.
And the world? He was only now verging on manhood, and he had seen
little of the world. But that little was frankly indifferent to the
things which, if they were worthy of belief, should shake an unsaved
world to its very foundations. Its people bought and sold, built houses
and laid up stores of the things that perish, grasped, overreached, did
what they listed. But for that matter, even those who professed to be
followers of the Christ, who asserted most loudly their belief in the
unproved things, fought and struggled and sinned in common with the
worldlings, as far as Tom could see.
He turned from the window and from the vision, and went to stand with
his back to the flickering blaze in the grate. It was going to leave a
huge rift in his life when this thing, with all its rootings and
anchorings in childhood and boyhood, was torn out and cast aside. The
mere thought of it was appalling. What would there be to fill the void?
As if the question had evoked them, alluring shapes began to rise out of
the depths. Ambition, though he knew it not by name, was the first that
beckoned. The craftsman's blood stirred to its reawakening: to know how,
and to do things; to compel the iron and steel and the stubborn forces
of nature. This would be worthwhile; but better still, he would learn to
be a leader of men. The magic vista opened again, but this time it
stretched away into the future, and he saw himself keeping step with the
ever-advancing march of progress--nay, even setting the pace in his own
corner of the vast field. His father was content to follow; he would
learn the trick of it and lead. The Farleys were said to be rich and
steadily growing richer--not out of Chiawassee Iron, to be sure, but in
others of their multifarious out-reachings; very good,--he would be
rich, too. What a Duxbury Farley could do, he would do; on a larger
scale and with a stubborner patience. He--
It was a mere turning of the head that sent the air-castles tumbling and
left him choking in the dust of their dissolution. Something, he fancied
it was a noise or some slight movement, made him look quickly toward the
bed; and at sight of the still, white face among the pillows, boyish
love--God Himself has made no stronger passion--swept doubt, distrust,
rebellion, worldly ambition, all, into the abyss of renunciation. He
went softly, groping because the quick tears blinded him, to kneel at
the bedside. She was his mother; for one thing she had lived and striven
and prayed; living or dying she must not, she should not, be
disappointed. And if his service must be of the lip and not of the
heart, she should never suspect, never, never!
And so it came about that he knelt in the graying dawn of the Christmas
morning, with his soul in thick darkness, lifting the prayer that in
some form has shaped itself in all the ages on lips of trembling: "O
God, if there be a God, have mercy on my soul, if I have a soul!"
XVI
THE BUBBLE, REPUTATION
It was not until late in the afternoon of Christmas Day that Ardea was
able to slip away from her guests long enough to run over to apprise
herself of the condition of things at the Gordon house.
Tom opened the door for her, and he made her come to the fire before he
would answer her questions. Even then he sat glowering at the cheerful
blaze as if he had forgotten her presence; and she was womanly enough,
or amiable enough, to let him take his own time. When he began, it was
seemingly at a great distance from matters present and pressing.
"Say, Ardea; do you believe in miracles?" he asked abruptly.
It was a large question to be answered offhand, but she broke the back
of it with a simple, "Yes."
"How do you account for them? Did God make His laws so they could be
taken apart and put together again when some little human ant loses its
way on a grass stalk or drops its grain of sugar?"
"I don't know," she confessed frankly. "I am not sure that I ever tried
to account for them; I suppose I have swallowed them whole, as you say I
have swallowed my religion."
"Well, you believe in them, anyway," he said, "and that makes it easier
to hit what I'm aiming at. Do you reckon they stopped short in the
Apostles' time?"
"I don't know that, either," she admitted.
"You ought to know it, if you're consistent," he said, bluntly dogmatic.
"Any answer to any prayer would be a miracle."
"Would it? I never happened to think of it that way."
"It certainly would. You chop a tree in two and it falls; that's cause
and effect. If you ask God to make it stand up after it's cut in two,
and it does stand, that's a miracle."
"You are the queerest boy," she commented. "I ran over here just for a
minute to ask how your mother is, and you won't tell me."
"I'm coming to that," he rejoined gravely. "But I wanted to get this
other thing straightened out first. Now tell me this: did you pray for
my mother last night, like you said you would?"
Once again he was offending the guardian of the inner shrines, and her
heightened color was not all the reflection of the ruddy firelight.
"You can be so barbarously personal when you try, Tom," she protested.
And then she added: "But I did."
"Well, the miracle was wrought. Early this morning mother came to
herself and asked for something to eat. Doctor Williams has been here,
and now he tells us all the things he wouldn't tell us before. It was
some little clot in one of the veins or arteries of the brain, and nine
times out of ten there is no hope."
"O Tom!--and she will get well again?"
"She has more chances to-day of getting well than she had last night of
dying--so the doctor says. But it's a miracle, just the same."
"I'm so glad! And now I really must go home." And she got up.
"No, sit down; I'm not through with you yet. I want to know what you
think about promises."
She smiled and pushed her chair back from the soft-coal blaze in the
fireplace.
"Don't you know you are a perfect 'old man of the sea,' Tom?"
"That's all right; but tell me: is a bad promise better broken or kept?"
"I am sure I couldn't say without knowing the circumstances. Tell me all
about it," and she resigned herself to listen.
"It was at daybreak this morning. I was alone with mother, looking at
her lying there so still and helpless--dead, all but the little flicker
of breath that seemed just about ready to go out. It came over me all of
a sudden that I couldn't disappoint her, living or dead; that I'd have
to go on and be what she has always wanted me to be. And I promised
her."
"But she couldn't hear you?"
"No; it was before she came to herself. Nobody heard me but God; and I
reckon He wasn't paying much attention to anything I said."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because--well, because it wasn't the kind of a promise that makes the
angels glad. I said I'd go on and do it, if I had to be a hypocrite all
the rest of my life."
"O Tom! would you have to be?"
"That's the way it looks to me now. I told you the other day that I
didn't know what I believed and what I didn't believe. But I do know
some of the _don'ts_. For instance: if there is a hell--and I'm not
anyways convinced that there is--I don't believe--but what's the use of
cataloguing it? They'd ask me a string of questions when I was ordained,
and I'd have to lie like Ananias."
She rose and met his gloomy eyes fairly.
"Tom Gordon, if you should do that, you would be the wickedest thing
alive--the basest thing that ever breathed!"
"That's about the way it strikes me," he said coolly. "So you see it
comes down to a case of big wicked or little wicked; it's been that way
all along. Did you know that one time I asked God to kill you?"
She looked horrified, as was her undoubted right.
"Why, of all things!" she gasped.
"It's so. I took a notion that I'd be mad because your grandfather
brought you here to Paradise. And when you took sick--well, I reckon
there isn't any hell deeper or hotter than the one I frizzled in for
about four days that summer."
It was too deep in the past to be tragic, and she laughed.
"I used to think then that you were the worst, as well as the queerest,
boy I had ever seen."
"And now you know it," he said. Then: "What's your rush? I'm not trying
to get rid of you now."
"I positively must go back. We have company, and I ran away without
saying a word."
"Anybody I know?" inquired Tom.
"Three somebodies whom you know, or ought to know, very well: Mr.
Duxbury Farley, Mr. Vincent Farley, Miss Eva Farley."
His eyes darkened suddenly.
"I'd like to know how under the sun they managed to get on your
grandfather's good side!" he grumbled.
Ardea Dabney's expressive face mirrored dawning displeasure.
"Why do you say that?" she retorted. "Eva was my classmate for years at
Miss De Valle's."
He made a boyish face of disapproval, saying bluntly: "I don't care if
she was. You shouldn't make friends of them. They are not fit for you to
wipe your shoes on."
For the second time since his home-coming, Tom saw the Dabney
imperiousness flash out; saw and felt it.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Gordon! Less than an hour ago,
we were speaking of you, and of what happened at Beersheba. Mr. Farley
and his son both stood up for you."
"And you took the other side, I reckon," he broke out, quite
unreasonably. It had not as yet come to blows between him and his
father's business associates, but it made him immeasurably dissatisfied
to find them on social terms at Deer Trace Manor.
"Perhaps I did, and perhaps I did not," she answered, matching his
tartness.
"Well, you can tell them both that I'm much obliged to them for
nothing," he said, rising and going to the door with her. "They would be
mighty glad to see it patched up again and me back in the Beersheba
school."
"Of course they would; so would all of your friends."
"But they are not my friends. They have fooled my father, and they'll
fool your grandfather, if he doesn't watch out. But they can't fool me."
He had opened the outer door for her, and she drew herself up till she
could face him squarely, slate-blue eyes flashing scornfully into sullen
gray.
"That is the first downright cowardly thing I have ever known you to
say!" she declared. "And I wish you to know, Mr. Thomas Jefferson
Gordon, that Mr. Duxbury Farley and Mr. Vincent Farley and Miss Eva
Farley are my guests and my friends!" And with that for her
leave-taking, she turned her back on him and went swiftly across the two
lawns to the great gray house on the opposite knoll.
For the first fortnight of his mother's convalescence Tom slept badly,
and his days were as the days of the accused whose sentence has been
suspended; jail days, these, with chains to clank when he thought of the
promise made in the gray Christmas dawn; with whips to flog him when the
respite grew shorter and the time drew near when his continued stay at
home must be explained to his mother.
Ardea had gone back to Carroll the Saturday before New Year's, and there
was no one to talk to. But for that matter, he had cut himself out of
her confidence by his assault on the Farleys. Every morning for a week
after the Christmas-day clash, Scipio came over with the compliments of
"Mawsteh Majah," Miss Euphrasia, and Miss Dabney, and kindly inquiries
touching the progress of the invalid. But after New Year's, Tom remarked
that there were only the Major and Miss Euphrasia to send compliments,
and despair set in. For out of his boyhood he had brought up
undiminished the longing for sympathy, or rather for a burden-bearer on
whom he might unload his troubles, and Ardea had begun to promise well.
It was on a crisp morning in the second week of January when the
prolonged agony of suspense drove him to the mountain. His mother was
sitting up, and was rapidly recovering her strength. His father had gone
back to his work in the iron plant, and his uncle was preparing to
return to his charge in South Tredegar. With Uncle Silas and the nurse
both gone, Tom knew that the evil hour must come speedily; and it was
with some half-cowardly hope that his uncle would break the ice for him
that he ran away on the crisp morning of happenings.