feet should find the familiar path leading up to the great boulder under
the cedars. He had not visited the rock of the spring since the summer
day when he and Nan Bryerson had taken refuge from the shower in the
hollow heart of it, nor had he seen Nan since their parting at the door
of her father's cabin under the cliff. Rumor in Gordonia had it that
Tike Bryerson had been hunted out by the revenue officers; and, for
reasons which he would have found it difficult to declare in words, Tom
had been shy about making inquiries.
For this cause an apparition could scarcely have startled him more than
did the sight of Nan filling her bucket at the trickling barrel-spring
under the cliff face of the great rock. He came on her suddenly at the
end of the long climb up the wooded slopes, at a moment
when--semi-tropical growth having had two full seasons in which to
change the natural aspect of things--he was half-bewildered with the
unwonted look of the place. But there was no doubt about it; it was Nan
in the flesh, a little fuller in the figure, something less childish in
the face, but with all the fascinating, wild-creature beauty of the
child-time promise to dazzle the eye and breed riot in the brain of the
boy-man.
When she stood up with a little cry of pleased surprise, the dark eyes
lighting quick joy-fires, and the welcoming blush mounting swiftly to
neck and cheek, Tom thought she was the most alluring thing he had ever
looked on. Yet the bottom stone in the wall of recrudescent admiration
was the certainty that he had found a sympathetic ear.
"Did you know I was coming? Were you waiting for me, Nan?" he bubbled,
gazing into the great black eyes as eagerly as a freed dog plunges into
the first pool that offers.
"How could I be knowin' to it?" she asked, taking him seriously, or
appearing to. "I nev' knowed school let out this time o' year."
"It's let out for me, Nan," he said meaningly. "I came home--for
good--nearly three weeks ago. My mother has been sick. Didn't you hear
of it?"
She shook her head gravely.
"I hain't been as far as Paradise sence paw and me moved back from Pine
Knob, two months ago. I don't hear nothin' any more."
In times long past, Tom, valley-born and of superior clay, used to be
scornful of the mountain dialect. Now, on Nan's lips, it charmed him.
It was blessedly reminiscent of the care-free days of yore.
"Say, Nan; I hope you haven't got to hurry home," he interposed, when
she stooped to lift the overflowing bucket. "I want to talk to you--to
tell you something."
She looked up quickly, and there were scrolls unreadable in the black
eyes.
"Air you a man now, Tom-Jeff, or on'y a boy like you used to be?" she
asked.
Tom squared his broad shoulders and laughed.
"I'm big enough to be in my own way a good deal of the time. I believe I
could muddy Sim Cantrell's back for him now, at arm-holts."
But there was still a question in the black eyes.
"Where's your preacher's coat, Tom-Jeff? I was allowin' you'd be wearin'
it nex' time we met up."
"I reckon there isn't going to be any preacher's coat for me, Nan;
that's one of the things I want to talk to you about. Let's go over
yonder and sit down in the sun."
The place he chose for her was a flat stone half embedded in the
up-climbing slope beyond the great boulder. She sat facing the path and
the spring, listening, while Tom, stretched luxuriously on a bed of dry
leaves at her feet, told her what had befallen; how he had been turned
out of Beersheba, and what for; how, all the former things having passed
away, he was torn and distracted in the struggle to find a footing in
the new order.
In the midst of it he had a feeling that she was only dimly
apprehending; that some of his keenest pains--most of them, perhaps--did
not appeal to her. But there was comfort in her bodily presence, in the
listening ear. It was a shifting of the burden in some sort, and there
be times when the humblest pack animal may lighten a king's load.
His fears touching her understanding, or her lack of it, were confirmed
when he had reached a stopping-place.
"They-all up yonder in that school where you was at hain't got much
sense, it looks like to me," was her comment. "You're a man growed now,
Tom-Jeff, and if you want to play cards or drink whisky, what-all
business is it o' their'n?"
He smiled at her elemental point of view; laughed outright when the
significance of it struck him fairly. But it betokened allegiance of a
kind to gladden the heart of the masculine tyrant, and he rolled the
declaration of fealty as a sweet morsel under his tongue.
"You stand by your friends, right or wrong, don't you, girl?" he said,
in sheerest self-gratulation. "That's what I like in you. You asked me a
little while back if I was a man or a boy; I believe you could make a
man of me, Nan, if you'd try."
He was looking up into her face as he said it and the change that came
over her lighted a strange fire in his blood. The black eyes kindled it,
and the red lips, half parted, blew it into a blaze. His face flushed
and he broke the eye-hold and looked down. In their primal state, when
Nature mothered the race, the man was less daring than the woman.
"If you'd said that two year ago," she began, in a half-whisper that
melted the marrow in his bones. "But you was on'y a boy then; and now I
reckon it's too late."
"You mean that you don't care for me any more, Nan? I know better than
that. You'd back me if I had come up here to tell you that I'd killed
somebody. Wouldn't you, now?"
He waited overlong for his answer. There were sounds in the air: a
metallic tapping like the intermittent drumming of a woodpecker mingled
with a rustling as of some small animal scurrying back and forth over
the dead leaves. The girl leaned forward, listening intently. Then three
men appeared in the farther crooking of the spring path, and at the
first glimpse of them she slipped from the flat stone to cower behind
Tom, trembling, shaking with terror.
"Hide me, Tom-Jeff! Oh, for God's sake, hide me, quick!" she panted.
"Lookee there!"
He looked and saw the three men walking slowly up the pipe-line which
drained the barrel-spring. They were too far away to be recognizable to
him, and since they were stopping momently to examine the pipe, there
was good hope of an escape unseen.
Tom waited breathless for the propitious instant when the tapping of the
pipe-men's hammers should drown the noise of a dash for effacement. When
it came, he flung himself backward, whipped Nan over his head and out of
the line of sight as if she had been feather-light, and rolled swiftly
after her.
Before she could rise he had picked her up and was dragging her to the
climbing point under the lip of the boulder cave.
"Up with you!" he commanded, making a step of his hand. "Give me your
foot and then climb to my shoulder--quick!" But she drew back.
"Oh, I can't!" she gasped. "I--I'm too skeered!"
Tom's brows went together in the Gordon frown. Bone-meltings and
blood-firings apart, he was neither a fool nor a dastard, and he was
older now than on that day when the storm had driven them to take refuge
in the heart of the great rock. And since he had decided that the cavern
was only big enough for one, he had meant to put Nan up, going himself
to meet the intruders to make sure that they should not discover her.
But her trembling fit--a new and curious thing in the girl who used to
make his flesh creep with her reckless daring--spoiled the plan.
"Can't you climb up?" he demanded.
She shook her head despairingly, and he lost no time in trying to
persuade her. Jumping to catch the lip of the cavern's mouth, he
ascended cat-like, and a moment later he had drawn her up after him.
"I'd like to know what got the matter with you all at once," he said
severely, when they were crowded together in the narrow rock cell; and
then, without waiting for her answer: "You stay here while I drop down
and keep those fellows away from this side of things."
But it was too late. The men were already at the barrel-spring, as an
indistinct murmur of voices testified. The girl had another trembling
fit when she heard them, and Tom's wonder was fast lapsing into contempt
or something like it.
"Oh-h-h!" she shuddered. "Do you reckon they saw us, Tom-Jeff?"
"I shouldn't wonder," he whispered back unfeelingly. "We could see them
plain enough."
"He'll kill me, for shore, Tom-Jeff! O God!"
Tom's lip curled. The wolf does not mate with the jackal. Not all her
beauty could atone for such spiritless cringing. Love would have pitied
her, but passion is not moved by qualities opposite to those which have
evoked it.
"Then you know them--or one of them, at least," he said. "Who is he?"
She would not tell; and since the murmur of voices was still plainly
audible, she begged in dumb-show for silence. Whereupon Tom shut his
mouth and did not open it again until the sound of the voices had died
away and the fainter tappings of the hammers on the pipe-line advertised
the retreat of the inspection party.
"They're gone now," he said shortly. "Let's get out of here before we
stifle."
But a second time ill chance intervened. Tom had a leg over the brink
and was looking for a soft leaf bed to drop into, when the baying of a
hound broke on the restored quiet of the mountain side. "Oh, dang it
all!" said Tom heartily, and drew back into hiding.
The girl's ague fit of fear had passed, and she seemed less concerned
about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is
the way Tom's thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in
Nan's place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the
Dabneys would never run and cower and beg to be hidden at the possible
cost of her good name. And Nan's word did not help matters.
"What makes you so cross to me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked, when he drew back
with the impatient exclamation. "I hain't done nothin' to make you let
on like you hate me, have I?"
"I don't hate you," said Tom, frowning. "If I did, I shouldn't care."
Just then the hound burst out of the laurel thicket on the brow of the
lower slope, running with its nose to the ground, and he added: "That's
Japhe Pettigrass's dog; I hope to goodness he isn't anywhere behind it."
But the horse-trader was behind the dog; so close behind that he came
out on the continuation of the pipe-line path while the hound was still
nosing among the leaves where Tom had lain sunning himself and telling
his tale of woe.
"Good dog--seek him! What is it, old boy?" Pettigrass came up, patted
the hound, and sat down on the flat stone to look on curiously while the
dog coursed back and forth among the dead leaves. "Find him, Cæsar; find
him, boy!" encouraged Japheth; and finally the hound pointed a sensitive
nose toward the rift in the side of the great boulder and yelped
conclusively.
"D'ye reckon he climm up thar', Cæsar?" Pettigrass unfolded his long
legs and stood up on the flat stone to attain an eye-level with the
interior of the little cavern. Tom crushed Nan into the farthest cranny,
and flattened himself lizard-like against the nearer side wall. The
horse-trader looked long and hard, and they could hear him still talking
to the dog.
"You're an old fool, Cæsar--that's about what you are--and Solomon
allowed thar' wasn't no fool like an old one. But you needn't to swaller
that whole, old boy; I've knowed some young ones in my time--sometimes
gals, sometimes boys, sometimes _both_. But thar' ain't no 'possum up
yonder, Cæsar; you've flew the track this time, for certain. Come on,
old dog; let's be gettin' down the mountain."
The baying dog and the whistling man were still within hearing when Tom
swung Nan lightly to the ground and dropped beside her. No word was
spoken until she had emptied and refilled her bucket at the spring, then
Tom said, with the bickering tang still on his tongue:
"Say, Nan, I want to know who it is that's going to kill you if he
happens to find you talking to me."
She shook her head despondently. "I cayn't nev' tell you that,
Tom-Jeff."
"I'd like to know why you can't."
"Because he'd shore kill me then."
"Then I'll find out some other way."
"What differ' does it make to you?" she asked; and again the dark eyes
searched him till he was fain to look away from her.
"I reckon it doesn't make any difference, if you don't want it to. But
one time you were willing enough to tell me your troubles, and--"
"And I'll nev' do it nare 'nother time; never, _never_. And let me tell
you somethin' else, Tom-Jeff Gordon: if you know what's good for you,
don't you nev' come anigh me again. One time we usen to be a boy and a
girl together; you're nothin' but a boy yet, but I--oh, God,
Tom-Jeff--I'm a woman!"
And with that saying she snatched her bucket and was gone before he
could find a word wherewith to match it.
XVII
ABSALOM, MY SON!
Three days after the episode at the barrel-spring, Tom went afield
again, this time to gather plunging courage for the confession to his
mother--a thing which, after so many postponements, could be put off no
longer.
It was more instinct than purpose that led him to avoid the mountain.
Thinking only of the crying need for solitude, he crossed the pike and
the creek and rambled aimlessly for an hour or more over that farther
hill ground beyond the country-house colony where he had once tried to
break the Dabney spirit in a weary, bedraggled little girl with
colorless lips and saucer-like eyes.
When he recrossed the stream, at a point some distance above the
boy-time perch pools, the serving foot-log chanced to be that used by
the Little Zoar folk coming from beyond the boundary hills. Following
the windings of the path he presently came out in the rear of the
weather-beaten, wooden-shuttered church standing, blind-eyed and silent,
in week-day desertion in the midst of its groving of pines.
The spot was rife with memories, and Tom passed around the building to
the front, treading softly as on hallowed ground. Whatever the future
might hold for him, there would always be heart-stirring recollections
to cluster about this frail old building sheltered by the whispering
pines.
How many times he had sat on the steps in the door-opening days of
boyhood, looking out across the dusty pike and up to the opposing steeps
of Lebanon lifting the eastward horizon half-way to the zenith!
Leg-weariness, and a sudden desire to live over again thus much of the
past turning him aside, he went to sit on the highest of the three
steps, with the brooding silence for company and the uplifted landscape
to revamp the boyhood memories.
The sun had set for Paradise Valley, but his parting rays were still
volleying in level lines against the great gray cliffs at the top of
Lebanon, silvering the bare sandstone, blackening the cedars and pines
by contrast, and making a fine-lined tracery, blue on gray, of the twigs
and leafless branches of the deciduous trees. Off to the left a touch of
sepia on the sky-line marked the chimneys of Crestcliffe Inn, and
farther around, and happily almost hidden by the shouldering of the
hills, a grayer cloud hung over the industries at Gordonia.
Nearer at hand were the wooded slopes of the Dabney lands--lordly
forests culled and cared for through three generations of land-lovers
until now their groves of oaks and hickories, tulip-trees and sweet-and
black-gums were like those the pioneers looked on when the land was
young.
Thomas Jefferson had the appreciative eye and heart of one born with a
deep and abiding love of the beautiful in nature, and for a time the
sunset ravishment possessed him utterly. But the blurring of the
fine-lined traceries and the fading of the silver and the gray into
twilight purple broke the spell. The postponed resolve was the thing
present and pressing. His mother was as nearly recovered as she was ever
likely to be, and his uncle would be returning to South Tredegar in the
morning. The evil tale must be told while there was yet one to whom his
mother could turn for help and sympathy in her hour of bitter
disappointment.
He was rising from his seat on the church step when he heard sounds like
muffled groans. Recovering quickly from the first boyish startle of fear
oozing like a cool breeze blowing up the back of his neck, he saw that
the church door was ajar. By cautiously adding another inch to the
aperture he could see the interior of the building, its outlines taking
shape when his eyes had become accustomed to darkness relieved only by
the small fan-light over the door. Some one was in the church: a man,
kneeling, with clasped hands uplifted, in the open space fronting the
rude pulpit. Tom recognized the voice and withdrew quickly. It was his
Uncle Silas, praying fervently for a lost sheep of the house of Israel.
In former times, with grim rebellion gripping him as it gripped him now,
Tom would have run away. But there was a prompting stronger than
rebellion: a sudden melting of the heart that made him remember the
loving-kindnesses, and not any of the austerities, of the man who was
praying for him, and he sat down on the lowest step to wait.
The twilight was glooming to dusk when Silas Crafts came out of the
church and locked the door behind him. If he were surprised to find Tom
waiting for him, he made no sign. Neither was there any word of
greeting passed between them when he gathered his coat tails and sat
down on the higher step, self-restraint being a heritage which had come
down undiminished from the Covenanter ancestors of both. A little
grayer, a little thinner, but with the deep-set eyes still glowing with
the fires of utter convincement and the marvelous voice still
unimpaired, Silas Crafts would have refused to believe that the passing
years had changed him; yet now there was kinsman love to temper solemn
austerity when he spoke to the lost sheep--as there might not have been
in the sterner years.
"The way of the transgressor is hard, grievously hard, Thomas. I think
you are already finding it so, are you not?"
Tom shook his head slowly.
"That doesn't mean what it used to, to me, Uncle Silas; nothing means
the same any more. It's just as if somebody had hit that part of me with
a club; it's all numb and dead. I'm sure of only one thing now: that is,
that I'm not going to be a hypocrite after this, if I can help it."
The man put his hand on the boy's knee.
"Have you been that all along, Thomas?"
"I reckon so,"--monotonously. "At first it was partly scare, and partly
because I knew what mother wanted. But ever since I've been big enough
to think, I've been asking why, and, as you would say, doubting."
Silas Crafts was silent for a moment. Then he said:
"You have come to the years of discretion, Thomas, and you have chosen
death rather than life. If you go on as you have begun, you will bring
the gray hairs of your father and mother in sorrow to the grave.
Leaving your own soul's salvation out of the question, can you go on and
drag an upright, honorable name in the dust and mire of degradation?"
"No," said Tom definitely. "And what's more, I don't mean to. I don't
know what Doctor Tollivar wrote you about me, and it doesn't make any
difference now. That's over and done with. You haven't been seeing me
every day for these three weeks without knowing that I'm ashamed of it."
"Ashamed of the consequences, you mean, Thomas. You are not repentant."
"Yes, I am, Uncle Silas; though maybe not in your way. I don't allow to
make a fool of myself again."
The preacher's comment was a groan.
"Tom, my boy, if any one had told me a year ago that a short twelvemonth
would make you, not only an apostate to the faith, but a shameless liar
as well--"
Tom started as if he had been struck with a whip.
"Hold on, Uncle Silas," he broke in hardily. "That's mighty near a
fighting word, even between blood kin. When have you ever caught me in a
lie?"
"Now!" thundered the accusing voice; "this moment! You have been giving
me to understand that your sinful rebellion at Beersheba was the worst
that could be charged against you. Answer me: isn't that what you want
me to believe?"
"I don't care whether you believe it or not. It's so."
"It is not so. Here, at your own home, when your mother had just been
spared to you by the mercies of the God whose commandments you set at
naught, you have been wallowing in sin--in crime!"
Tom locked his clasped fingers fast around his knees and would not open
the flood-gates of passion.
"If I can sit here and take that from you, it's because it isn't so," he
replied soberly.
Silas Crafts rose, stern and pitiless.
"Wretched boy! Out of your own mouth you shall be convicted. Where were
you on Wednesday morning?"
Tom had to think back before he could place the Wednesday morning, and
his momentary hesitation was immediately set down to the score of
conscious guilt.
"I was at home most of the time; between ten o'clock and noon I was on
the mountain."
"Alone?"
"No; not all of the time."
"You say well. There were three of you: a hardened, degraded boy, a
woman no less wicked and abandoned, and the devil who tempted you."
The flood-gates of passion would hold no longer.
"It's a lie!" he denied hotly. "I just happened to meet Nan Bryerson at
the spring under the big rock, and--"
"Well, go on," said the inexorable voice.
Tom choked in a sudden fit of rage and helplessness. He saw how
incredible the simple truth would sound; how like a clumsy equivocation
it must appear to one who already believed the worst of him. So he took
refuge in the last resort alike of badgered innocence and hardened
guilt.
"I don't have to defend myself!" he burst out. "If you can believe I'm
that low-down, you're welcome to!" Then, abruptly: "I reckon we'd better
be going on home; they'll be waiting dinner for us at the house."
He got on his feet with that, but the accuser was still confronting
him, with the dark eyes glowing and a monitory finger pointed to detain
him.
"Not yet, Thomas Gordon; there is a duty laid on me. I had hoped and
prayed that I might find you repentant; you are not repentant."
"No," said Tom, and he confirmed it with an oath in sheer bravado.
"Peace, miserable boy! God is not mocked. Your father has a letter from
Doctor Tollivar; the doors of Beersheba are open to you again. I had
hoped--" The pause was not for effect. It was merely that the man and
the kinsman in Silas Crafts had throttled the righteous judge. "It
breaks my heart, Thomas, but I must say it. You have put it out of your
power to say with the Psalmist, 'I will wash mine hands in innocency: so
will I compass thine altar, O Lord.' You must give up all thoughts of
going back to Beersheba."
"Don't trouble yourself," said Tom, with more bravado. "I wouldn't go
back there if it was the only place on earth." Then suddenly: "Who was
it that told on me, Uncle Silas?"
"Never mind about that. It was one who could have no object in
misstating the fact--which you have not denied. Let us go home."
The mile walk down the pike, lying white and ghostly under the
starlight, was paced in silence, man and boy striding side by side and
each busy with his own thoughts. As they were passing the Deer Trace
gates a loose-jointed figure loomed black against the palings, and the
voice of Japheth Pettigrass said:
"Why, howdy, Brother Silas! Thought ye'd gone back to South Tredegar.
When are ye comin' out to Little Zoar ag'in to give us another o' them
old-fashioned, spiritual times o' refreshin' from the presence of the
Lord?"
Silas Crafts turned short on the scoffer.
"Why do you ask that, Japheth Pettigrass? The Lord will deal with you,
one day."
"Yes, I reckon so; that's what makes me say what I does. There's a heap
o' sinners left round here, yit, Brother Silas. There's the Major, for
one, and I know you're always countin' me in for another. I dunno but
you might snatch me as a brand from the burnin', if you could make out
to try it one more lap around the you'se. I been thinkin' right
p'intedly about--"
But the preacher had cut in with a curt "Good night," and was gone, with
his broad-shouldered nephew at his heels; and the horse-trader went on,
with the stars for his audience.
"Look at that, now, will ye? Old Brother Silas is gettin' right smart
tetchy with the passin' of the years; he is, so. But he's a powerful
preacher. If anybody ever gits me for a star in their crown, it's
Brother Silas ag'inst the field, even money up."
Pettigrass turned and was groping for the gate latch when a hand fell on
his shoulder, and a clutch that was more than half a blow twirled him
about to face the roadway. He was doubling his fists for defense when he
saw who his assailant was.