explained. "I wrestled it out Saturday night when I was tramping the
hills after Doc Williams had brought mother around. One member of the
purchasing committee was ready to dodge; he gave me a pointer before I
left Louisville. I didn't see anything in it then but revenge; but
afterward I saw how we might spend some money to a possible advantage."
Caleb's eyes had grown narrow.
"I reckon I'm sort o' dull, Buddy; what-all did you do?"
"Wired the disgruntled one that there was a letter and a check in the
mail for him, to be followed by another and a bigger if his pole proved
long enough to reach the persimmons."
The old iron-master left his chair and began to walk the floor, six
steps and a turn. After a little he said:
"Tom, is that business?"
"It is the modern definition of it."
"What's goin' to happen up yonder in Indiany?"
"If I knew, I'd be a good bit easier in my mind. What I'm hoping is that
the rumpus will be big enough to make 'em turn the contract our way."
Caleb stopped short.
"My God!" he ejaculated. "Where's your heart, Buddy? Would you take the
chance of sendin' these fellows to jail for the sake of gettin' that
contract?"
"Cheerfully," said Tom. "They're rascals; I could have bought them if
I'd had money enough; and the other fellow did buy them."
The old man resumed his monotonous tramp up and down the room. The
hardness in Tom's voice unnerved him. After another interval of silence
he spoke again.
"I wish you hadn't done it, son. It's a dirty job, any way you look at
it."
Tom shrugged.
"Norman says it's a condition, not a theory; and he is right. We are
living under a new order of things, and if we want to stay alive, we've
got to conform to it. It gagged me at first: I reckon there are some
traces of the Christian tradition left. But, pappy, I'm going to win.
That is what I'm here for."
Caleb Gordon shook his head as one who deprecates helplessly, but he sat
down again and asked Tom what the programme was to be.
"There is nothing for us to do but to sit tight and wait. If we get a
telegram from Indiana before these idiots of ours lose their heads and
go to rioting and burning, we shall still have a fighting chance. If
not, we're smashed."
"You mustn't be too hard on the men, Buddy. They've been mighty
patient."
The scowl deepened between the level gray eyes.
"If I could do what I'd like to, I'd fire the last man of them. It makes
me savage to have them turn up and knock us on the head after we've been
sweating blood to pull through. Have you seen Ludlow?"
"Yes; I saw him last night. He's right ugly; swore he wouldn't raise a
hand even if the boys took kerosene and dynamite to us."
"Well, if they do, he'll be the first man to pay for it," said Tom; and
he left the office and the house to make the round of the guarded gates.
Ludlow was as good as his word. On the night following the day of
suspense an attempt was made to wreck the inclined railway running from
the mines on Lebanon to the coke yard. It was happily frustrated; but
when Tom and his handful of guards got back to the foot of the hill they
found a fire started in a pile of wooden flasks heaped against the end
of the foundry building.
The fire was easily extinguishable by a willing hand or two, but Tom
tried an experiment. Steam had been kept up in a single battery of
boilers against emergencies, and he directed Helgerson to throw open the
great gates while he ran to the boiler room and sent the fire call of
the huge siren whistle shrieking out on the night.
The experiment was only meagerly successful. Less than a score of the
strikers answered the call, but these worked with a will, and the fire
was quickly put out.
Tom was under the arc-light at the gates when the volunteers straggled
out. He had a word for each man,--a word of appreciation and a plea for
suspended judgment. Most of the men shook their heads despondently, but
a few of them promised to stand on the side of law and order. Tom took
the names of the few, and went back to his guard duty with the burden a
little lightened. But the succeeding night there were more attempts at
violence, three of them so determined as to leave no doubt that the
crisis was at hand. This was Tom's discouraged admission when his father
came to relieve him in the morning.
"We're about at the end of the rope," he said wearily, when Caleb had
closed the door of the log-house yard office behind him. "The two
Helgersons are played out, and neither of us can stand this strain for
another twenty-four hours. I'm just about dead on my feet for sleep, and
I know you are."
The old ex-artilleryman stifled a yawn, and admitted the fact.
"I'm gettin' right old and no-account, son; there's no denyin' that. And
you can't make out to shoulder it all, stout as you are. But what-all
can we do different?"
"I know what I'm going to do. I had a 'phone wire from Bradley, the
sheriff, last night after you went home. He funked like a boy; said he
couldn't raise a posse in South Tredegar that would serve against
striking workmen. Then I wired the governor, and his answer came an hour
ago. We can have the soldiers if we make a formal demand for them."
"But, Tom, son; you wouldn't do that!" protested Caleb tremulously.
Then, getting up to walk the floor as was his wont under sharp stress:
"Let's try to hold out a little spell longer, Buddy. It'll be like fire
to tow; there'll be men killed--men that I've known ever since they were
boys: men killed, and women made widders. Tom, I've seen enough of war
to last me."
"I know," said Tom. None the less, he found a telegraph blank and began
to write the message. There had been shots fired in the night, in a
sally on the inclined railway, and one of them had scored his arm. If
the rioters needed the strong hand to curb them, they should have it.
"Think of what it'll mean for this town that we've built up, son. We'll
have to stay here--'er leastwise, I will, and there'll be blood on the
streets for me to see as long as I walk 'em."
"I know," Tom reiterated, in the same monotonous tone. But his pen did
not pause.
"Then there's your mammy," Caleb pleaded, and now the pen stopped.
"Mother must not know."
"How can we he'p her knowin', Buddy? I tell you, son, the very stones o'
Paradise'll rise up to testify against us, now, and at the last great
day, maybe."
The frown deepened between the young man's eyes.
"The old, old phantom!" he said, half to himself. "Will it never be
laid, even for those who know it to be a myth?" And then to his father:
"It's no use, pappy. I tell you we've got to take this thing by the
neck. See here; that's how near they came to settling me last night,"
and he showed the perforated coat-sleeve.
Caleb Gordon was silenced. He resumed his restless pacing while Tom
signed the call for help, read it over methodically, and placed it
between dampened sheets in the letter-press. He had pushed the electric
button which summoned Stub Helgerson, when the door opened silently and
Jeff Ludlow's boy thrust face and hand through the aperture.
"Well; what is it?" demanded Tom, more sharply than he meant to. The
strain was beginning to tell on his nerves.
"Hit's a letter for you-all from Mr. Stamford at the dee-po," said the
boy. "He allowed maybe you-all'd gimme a nickel for bringin' hit."
The coin was found and passed, and the small boy was whooping and
yelling for Helgerson to come and let him through the gates when Tom
tore the envelope across and read the telegram. It was from the Indiana
city, and it was signed by the chairman of the Board of Public Works.
"Proposals for water-pipe have been reopened, and your bid is accepted.
Wire how soon you can begin to ship eighteen-inch mains," was what it
said. Tom handed it to his father and stepped quickly to the telephone.
There was a little delay in getting the ear of the president of the Iron
City National at South Tredegar, and the bounding, pulsing blood of
impatience made it seem interminable.
"Is that you, Mr. Henniker? This is Gordon at the Chiawassee plant,
Gordonia. We have secured that Indiana contract I was telling you about,
and I'll be in to see you on the ten o'clock train. Will you save five
minutes for me? Thank you. Good-by."
Tom hung the ear-piece on its hook and turned to face his father.
"Have you surrounded it?" he laughed, with a little quaver of excitement
in his voice, which he had been careful to master in the announcement to
the bank president. "We live, pappy; we live and win! Get word to the
men to come up here at three o'clock for their pay. Tell them we blow in
again to-morrow, and they can all come back to work and no questions
asked. Can you stay on your feet long enough to do all that?"
Caleb was nodding gravely; yet bewilderment was still in the saddle.
"But the money for the pay-rolls, son--this is only an order to go to
work," he said, fingering the telegram doubtfully.
Tom laughed joyously.
"If I can't make Mr. Henniker believe that he can afford to carry us a
while longer on the strength of that bit of yellow paper, I'll rob his
bank. You get the men together by three o'clock, and I'll be here with
the money. If I'm not, it will be because somebody has sandbagged me
between the bank and the train."
Caleb was still wrestling with the incredible thing, but light was
breaking in on him slowly.
"Hold on, son," he said, and the old-time smile was wrinkling at the
corners of his eyes; "how much did you allow to make out o' this job? I
disremember what you said when you talked about it before."
Tom checked off the items on his fingers.
"Enough to put us through the winter; enough to stand us on our feet
independent of Duxbury Farley and his son; enough to let us pay Major
Dabney the back royalties on the coal. More than this, it's going to use
up iron--hundreds of tons of it. We'll buy out of our own yards, and the
men shall have the back-pay dividends."
The general manager had taken his burned-out corn-cob pipe from his
pocket and was looking at it speculatively.
"Well, now, if that's the case, I reckon I can go down to Hargis's and
buy me a new pipe, Buddy; and I--I'll be switched if I don't do it right
now."
And in such gladsome easing of the strain were the wheels of Chiawassee
Consolidated oiled to their new whirlings on the road to fortune. If
Caleb Gordon remembered how the miracle had been wrought, he said no
word to clench his disapproval; and as for Tom--ah, well; it was not the
first time in the history of the race that the end has served to justify
the means--to make them clean and white and spotless, if need were.
XXII
LOVE
If Tom Gordon could have known how slightly the Dabney's European plans
coincided with those of the Farleys, he might have had fewer
heartburnings in those intervals when the harassing struggle for
industrial existence gave him time to think of Ardea.
As a strict matter of fact, the voyage across, and some little
guide-book touring of England, were the sum total of coincidence. On
leaving London the Farleys set out on the grand tour which was to land
them in Naples for the winter, while the Dabneys went directly to Paris
and to a modest pension in the Rue Cambon to spend the European holiday
in a manner better befitting the purse of a country gentleman.
So it befell that by the time Miss Eva Farley was rhapsodizing over the
Rhine castles in twenty-page letters, boring Ardea a little, if the
truth must be told, the Dabneys had settled down to their quiet life in
the French capital. Ardea was anxious to do something with her music
under a Parisian master--and was doing it. The Major found melancholy
pleasure in reviewing at large the city of his son's long exile; and
Miss Euphrasia came and went with one or the other of her cousins, as
the exigencies of chaperonage or companionship constrained her.
In such moderate pleasuring the French summer began for the Major and
his charges; so it continued, and so it ended; and late in September
they began to talk about going home.
"We really mean it this time," wrote Ardea in a letter to Martha Gordon.
"I confess we are all a little homesick for America, and Paradise, and
dear old Deer Trace Manor. The Farleys are settled for the remainder of
the year or longer in a fine old palazzo on the Bay of Naples, and we
have a very pressing invitation to go and help them inhabit it. But thus
far we have not been tempted beyond our strength. Major Grandpa is
talking more and more pointedly about the Morgan mares, and is growing a
habit of comparison-drawing in which America profits at the expense of
Europe; so I suppose by the time you are reading this we shall have made
our sailing arrangements. Nevertheless, the Naples invitation is dying
hard. Eva seems to have set her heart on having us for the winter."
Ardea's figure of speech was no figure. The palazzo-sharing invitation
did die hard; and when Miss Farley's letters failed, Mr. Vincent Farley
made a journey to Paris for the express purpose of persuading the
Dabneys to reconsider. Miss Euphrasia was neutral. The Major was
homesick for a sight of his native Southland, but for Ardea's sake he
generously concealed the symptoms--or thought he did. So the decision
was finally left to Ardea.
She said no, and adhered to it, partly because she knew her grandfather
was pining for Paradise, and partly on her own account. Ardea at twenty
was a young woman who might have made King Solomon pause with suspended
pen when he was writing that saying about his inability to find one
woman among a thousand. She was not beautiful beyond compare, as the
Southern young woman is so likely to be under the pencil of her loyal
limners. She had the Dabney nose, which was not quite classical, and the
Courtenay mouth, well-lined and expressive, rather than too suggestive,
of feminine softness. But her eyes were beautiful, and her luxuriant
masses of copper-gold hair fitted her shapely head like a glorious
aureole; also, she had that indefinable adorableness called charm, and
the sweet, direct, childlike frankness of speech which is its
characteristic.
This was the external Ardea, known of men, and of those women who were
large-minded enough not to envy her. But the inner Ardea was a being
apart--high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too
clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded
either by passion or the conventions. This inner Ardea knew Vincent
Farley better than he knew himself: the small mind, the mask of outward
correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic
soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and
conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still
yields open-eyed and undeceived.
He was the most moderate of lovers, as such a man must needs be, but his
anxiety to second the wishes of his father and sister was not to be
misunderstood by the clear-eyed inner Ardea, whose intuition served her
as a sixth sense. She knew that sometime he would ask her to marry him;
and in that region where her answer should lie she found only a vast
indecision. He was not her ideal, but the all-seeing inner self told
her that she would never find the ideal. There comes to every woman,
sooner or later, the conviction that if she would marry she must take
men as they are, weighing the good against the evil, choosing as she may
the man whose vices may be condoned or whose virtues are great enough to
overshadow them. Ardea knew that Vincent Farley was not great in either
field; but the little virtues were not to be despised. If he were not,
in the best sense of the word, well-bred, he had at least been well
nurtured, well schooled in the conventions. Ardea sighed. It was in her
to be something more than the conventional wife, yet she saw no reason
to believe that she would ever be called on to be anything else. By
which it will be apparent that the sacred flame of love had not yet been
kindled in her maiden heart.
As for Vincent Farley, the real man, Ardea's appraisal of him was not
greatly at fault. He was tall, like his father, but there the
resemblance paused. The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the
point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same
hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many
facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the
ability always to present the same side to the same person. His attitude
toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so
faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such
men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating
instinct. And even lust finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on
occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them
into some brief, fierce flame. At times, Farley's thought of Ardea was
libertine; but oftener she figured as the woman who would grace the home
of affluence, giving it charm and tone. Also, he had an affection for
the Dabney manorial acres, and especially for that portion of them
overlying the coal measures.
The pose-facet was at the precisely effective angle when he came to
Paris as his sister's messenger and pictured, with what warmth there was
in him, the delights in the prospect of a Neapolitan winter. But Ardea,
shrinking from a six months' guesting with any one, said no, and told
her grandfather she was ready to go home.
The start was from Havre, and Vincent, with time on his hands, was her
companion on the railway journey, her _courrier du place_ in the
embarkation, and her faithful shadow up to the instant when the warning
cry for the shore-goers rang through the ship. It was scarcely a moment
for sentimental passages, and under the most favoring conditions,
Vincent Farley was something less than sentimental. Yet he found time to
declare himself in conventional fashion, modestly asking only for the
right to hope.
Ardea was not ready to give an answer, even to the tentative question;
yet she did it--was, in a manner, surprised into doing it. For the young
woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the
seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities. At the
very crucial moment the clear-sighted inner self was assuring her that
this cold-eyed young man, who walked in the paths of righteousness
because he found them easier and pleasanter than the way of the
transgressor, was at best only a mildly exciting apotheosis of the
negative virtues. But the negative virtues, failing to score
brilliantly, nevertheless have the advantage of continuous innings.
Ardea was turned twenty in the year of the European holiday, and she
had--or believed she had--her heritage of the Dabney impetuosity well in
hand. Vincent's self-restraint was admirable, and his gentle deference,
conventional as it was, rose almost to the height of sentiment. So she
gave him his answer; gave him her hand at parting, and stood dutifully
fluttering her handkerchief for him while the liner drew out of its slip
and pointed its prow toward the headlands.
With rough weather on the homeward passage, she had space and
opportunity to consider the consequences. Being the only good sailor in
the trio, she had her own self-communings for company during the greater
part of the six days, and the incident sentimental took on an aspect of
finality which was rather dismaying. It was quite in vain that she
sought comfort in the reflection that she was committed to nothing
conclusive. Vincent Farley had not taken that view of it. True, he had
asked for nothing more than a favorable attitude on her part; but she
thought he would be less than a man if he had not seen his final answer
foreshadowed in her acquiescence.
The finality admitted, a query arose. Was Vincent Farley the man who,
giving her his best, could call out the best there was in her? It
annoyed her to admit the query, or rather the doubt which fathered it;
it distressed her when the doubt appeared to grow with the lengthening
leagues of distance.
Now vacillation was not a Dabney failing; and the aftermath of these
storm-tossed musings made for Vincent Farley's cause. Romance also, in
the eternal feminine, is a constant quantity, and if it be denied the
Romeo-and-Juliet form of expression, will find another. Vincent Farley,
as man or as lover, presented obstacles to any idealizing process, but
Ardea set herself resolutely to overcome them. Distance and time have
other potentialities besides the obliterative: they may breed halos.
When the French liner reached its New York slip, Ardea was remembering
only the studied kindnesses, the conventional refinements, the
correctnesses which, if they did seem artificial at times, were so many
guarantees of self-respect: when the Great Southwestern train had roared
around the cliffs of Lebanon with the returning exiles, and the
locomotive whistle was sounding for Gordonia, some other of the negative
virtues had become definitely positive, and the halo was beginning to be
distinctly visible.
How Tom Gordon had informed himself of the precise day and train of
their home-coming, Ardea did not think to inquire. But he was on the
platform when the train drew in, and was the first to welcome them.
She was quick to see and appreciate the changes wrought in him, by time,
by the Boston sojourn, by the summer's struggle with adverse men and
things--though of this last she knew nothing as yet. It seemed scarcely
credible that the big, handsome young fellow who was shaking hands with
her grandfather, helping Miss Euphrasia with her multifarious
belongings, and making himself generally useful and hospitable, could be
a later reincarnation of the abashed school-boy who had sweated through
the trying luncheon at Crestcliffe Inn.
"Not a word for me, Tom?" she said, when the last of Cousin Euphrasia's
treasures had been rescued from the impatient train porter and added to
the heap on the platform.
"All the words are for you--or they shall be presently," he laughed.
"Just let me get your luggage out of pawn and started Deer-Traceward,
and I'll talk you to a finish."
She stood by and looked on while he did it. Surely, he had grown and
matured in the three broadening years! There was conscious manhood,
effectiveness, in every movement; in the very bigness of him. She had a
little attack of patriotism, saying to herself that they did not fashion
such young men in the Old World--could not, perhaps.
Mammy Juliet's grandson, Pete, was down with the family carriage, and he
took his orders from Tom touching the bestowal of the luggage as he
would have taken them from Major Dabney. Ardea marked this, too, and
being Southern bred, wrote the Gordon name still a little higher on the
scroll of esteem. Pete's respectful obedience was, in its way, a patent
of nobility. The negro house-servant, to the manner born, draws the line
sharply between gentle and simple and is swift to resent interlopings.
When Pete had done his office with the European gatherings of the party
the ancient carriage looked like a van, and there was scant room inside
for three passengers.
"That means us for old Longfellow and the buggy," said Tom to Ardea.
"Do you mind? Longfellow is fearfully and wonderfully slow, same as
ever, but he's reasonably sure."
"Any way," said Ardea; so he put her into the buggy and they drew in
behind the carriage. Before they were half-way to the iron-works they
had the pike to themselves, and Tom was not urging the leisurely horse.
"My land! but it's good for tired eyes to have another sight of you!" he
declared, applying the remedy till she laughed and blushed a little.
Then: "It has been a full month of Sundays. Do you realize that?"
"Since we saw each other? It has been much longer than that, hasn't it?"
"Not so very much. I saw you in New York the day you sailed."
"You did! Where was I?"
"You had just come down in the elevator at the hotel with your
grandfather and Miss Euphrasia."
"And you wouldn't stop to speak to us? I think that was simply
barbarous!"
"Wasn't it?" he laughed. "But the time was horribly unpropitious."
"Why?"
He looked at her quizzically.
"I'm wondering whether I'd better lie out of it; say I knew you were on
your way to breakfast, and that I hoped to have a later opportunity, and
all that. Shall I do it?"