see why she did not finish. She was sitting on the edge of the old
watchman's rude bed, bowed low over the sleeping child, and again sobs
were shaking her like an ague fit. There was something heartrending in
this silent, wordless anguish; but there was nothing to be said, and Tom
went on making the fire. After a little she sat up and continued
monotonously:
"_He_ was liken to me thataway, too; the Man 'at I heard your Uncle
Silas tellin' about one night when I sot on the doorstep at Little
Zoar--He hadn't no place to lay His'n head; not so much as the red foxes
'r the birds ... and I hain't."
The blaze was racing up the chimney now with a cheerful roar, and Tom
rose to his feet, every good emotion in him stirring to its awakening.
"Such as it is, Nan, this place is yours, for as long as you want to
stay," he said soberly. And then: "You straighten things around here to
suit you, and I'll be back in a little while."
He was gone less than half an hour, but in that short interval he
lighted another fire: a blaze of curiosity and comment to tingle the
ears and loosen the tongues of the circle of loungers in Hargis's store
in Gordonia. He ignored the stove-hugging contingent pointedly while he
was giving his curt orders to the storekeeper; and the contingent
avenged itself when he was out of hearing.
"Te-he!" chuckled Simeon Cantrell the elder, pursing his lips around the
stem of his corn-cob pipe; "looks like Tom-Jeff was goin' to
house-keepin' right late in the evenin'."
"By gol, I wonder what's doin'?" said another. "Reckon he's done tuk up
with Nan Bryerson, afte' all's been said an' done?"
Bastrop Clegg, whose distinction was that of being the oldest loafer in
the circle, spat accurately into the drafthole of the stove, sat back
and tilted his hat over his eyes.
"Well, boys, I reckon hit's erbout time, ain't hit?" he moralized.
"Leetle Tom must be a-goin' awn two year old; and I don't recommember ez
Tom 'r his pappy has ever done a livin' thing for Nan."
Whereupon one member of the group got up and addressed himself to the
door. It was Japheth Pettigrass; and what he said was said to the
starlit night outside.
"My Lord! that ther' boy _was_ lyin' to me, after all! I didn't believe
hit that night when he r'ared and took on so to me and 'lowed to chunk
me with a rock, and I don't want to believe hit now. But Lordy gracious!
hit do look mighty bad, with him a-buyin' all that outfit and loadin'
hit in his pappy's buggy; hit do, for shore!"
A half-hour later, Brother Japheth, trudging back to Deer Trace on the
pike, saw the light in the long-deserted cabin back of the new foundry
plant; saw this and was overtaken at the Woodlawn gates by Thomas
Jefferson with Longfellow and the buggy. And he could not well help
observing that the buggy had been lightened of its burden of household
supplies.
Tom turned the horse over to William Henry Harrison and went in to his
belated dinner somberly reflective. He was not sorry to find that his
mother and father had gone over to the manor-house. Solitude was
grateful at the moment; he was glad of the chance to try to think
himself uninterruptedly out of the snarl of misunderstanding in which
his impulsiveness had entangled him.
The pointing of the thought was to see Ardea and have it out with her at
once. Reconsidered, it appeared the part of prudence to wait a little.
The muddiest pool will settle if time and freedom from ill-judged
disturbance be given it. But we, who have known Thomas Jefferson from
his beginnings, may be sure that it was the action-thought that
triumphed. _They also serve who only stand and wait_, was meaningless
comfort to him; and when he had finished his solitary dinner and had
changed his clothes, he strode across the double lawns and rang the
manor-house bell.
XXIV
THE UNDER-DEPTHS
The Deer Trace family and the two guests from Woodlawn were in the
music-room when Tom was admitted, with Ardea at the piano playing war
songs for the pleasuring of her grandfather and the ex-artilleryman.
Under cover of the music, Tom slipped into the circle of listeners and
went to sit beside his mother. There was a courteous hand-wave of
welcome from Major Dabney, but Miss Euphrasia seemed not to see him. He
saw and understood, and was obstinately impervious to the chilling east
wind in that quarter. It was with Ardea that he must make his peace, and
he settled himself to wait for his opportunity.
It bade fair to be a long time coming. Ardea's repertoire was apparently
inexhaustible, and at the end of an added hour he began to suspect that
she knew what was in store for her and was willing to postpone the
afflictive moment. From the battle hymns of the Confederacy to the
militant revival melodies best loved by Martha Gordon the transition was
easy; and from these she drifted through a Beethoven sonata to Mozart,
and from Mozart to Chopin.
Thomas Jefferson knew music as the barbarian knows it, which is to say
that it lighted strange fires in him; stirred and thrilled him in
certain heart or soul labyrinths locked against all other influences. As
Ardea's fingers sought the changing chords he felt vaguely that she was
speaking to him, now scorning, now rebuking, now pleading, but always in
a tongue that he only half comprehended. He stole a glance at his watch,
impatient to come to hand-grips with her and have it over. The suspense
could not last much longer. It was past ten; the Major was dozing
peacefully in his great arm-chair, and Miss Euphrasia yawned decorously
behind her hand.
Ardea lingered lovingly on the closing harmonies of the nocturne, and
when the final chord was struck her hands lingered on the keys until the
sweet voices of the strings had sung themselves afar into the higher
sound heaven. Then she turned quickly and surprised her anesthetized
audience.
"You poor things!" she laughed. "In another five minutes the last one of
you would have succumbed. Why didn't somebody stop me?"
The iron-master said something about the heavy work of the day, and
helped his wife to her feet. The Major came awake with a start and
bestirred himself hospitably, and Miss Euphrasia rose to speed the
parting guests--or rather the two of them who had been invited. In the
drift down the wide hall Ardea fell behind with Tom, whom Cousin
Euphrasia continued to ignore.
"I came to tell you," he said in a low tone, snatching his opportunity.
"I can't sleep until I have fought it out with you."
"You don't deserve a hearing, even from your best friend," was her
discouraging reply; but when they were at the door she gave him a
formal reprieve. "I shall walk for a few minutes on the portico to rest
my nerves," she said. "If you want to come back--"
He thanked her gravely, and went obediently when his mother called to
him from the steps. But on the Woodlawn veranda he excused himself to
smoke a cigar in the open; and when the door closed behind the two
in-going, he swiftly recrossed the lawns to pay the penalty.
The front door of the manor-house was shut and the broad, pillared
portico was untenanted. He sat down in one of the rustic chairs and
searched absently in his pockets for a cigar. Before he could find it
the door opened and closed and Ardea stood before him. She had thrown a
wrap over her shoulders, and the light from the music-room windows
illuminated her. There was cool scorn in the slate-blue eyes, but in
Tom's thought she had never appeared more unutterably beautiful and
desirable--and unattainable.
"I have come," she said, in a tone that cut him to the heart for its
very indifference. "What have you to say for yourself?"
He rose quickly and offered her the chair; and when she would not take
it, he put his back to the wall and stood with her.
"I'm afraid I haven't left myself much to say," he began penitently. "I
was born foolish, and it seems that I haven't outgrown it. But, really,
if you could know--"
"Unhappily, I do know," she interrupted. "If I did not, I might listen
to you with better patience."
"It did look pretty bad," he confessed. "And that's what I wanted to
say; it looked a great deal worse than it was, you know."
"I _don't_ know," she retorted.
"You are tangling me," he said, gaining something in self-possession
under the flick of the whip. "First you say you know, and then you say
you don't know. Which is which?"
"If you are flippant I shall go in," she threatened. "There are things
that not even the most loyal friendship can condone."
"That's the difference between friendship and love," he asserted. "I
believe I'd enjoy a little more real confidence and a little less of the
dutiful kind of loyalty."
"You ask too much," she said, quite coolly. "Forgiveness implies
penitence and continued good behavior."
"No, it doesn't, anything of the kind," he denied, matching her tone.
"That is the purely pagan point of view, and you are barred from taking
it. You are bound to consider the motive."
"I am bound to believe what I see with my own eyes," she rejoined.
"Perhaps you can make it appear that seeing is not believing."
"Of course I can't, if you take that attitude," he complained. And then
he said irritably: "You talk about friendship! You don't know the
meaning of the word!"
"If I didn't, I should hardly be here at this moment," she suggested.
"You don't seem to apprehend to what degrading depths you have sunk."
His sins in the business field rose before him accusingly and prompted
his reply.
"Yes, I do; but that is another matter. We were speaking of what you
saw this evening. Will you let me try to explain?"
"Yes, if you will tell the plain truth."
"Lacking imagination, I can't do anything else. Nan has had a
falling-out with the old scamp of a moonshiner who calls himself her
father. She came to me for help, and broke down in the midst of telling
me about it. I can't stand a woman's crying any better than other men."
The slate-blue eyes were transfixing him.
"And that was all--absolutely all, Tom?"
"I don't lie--to you," he said briefly.
She gave him her hand with an impulsive return to the old comradeship.
"I believe you, Tom, in the face of all the--the unlikelinesses. But
please don't try me again. After what has happened--" she stopped in
deference to something in his eyes, half anger, half bewilderment, or a
most skilful simulation of both.
"Go on," he said; "tell me what has happened. I seem to have missed
something."
"No," she said, with sudden gravity. "I don't want to be your accuser or
your confessor; and if you should try to prevaricate, I should hate
you!"
"There is nothing for me to confess to you, Ardea," he said soberly,
still holding the hand she had given him. "You have known the worst of
me, always and all along, I think."
"Yes, I _have_ known," she replied, freeing the imprisoned hand and
turning from him. "And I have been sorry, sorry; not less for you than
for poor Nancy Bryerson. You know now what I thought--what I _had_ to
think--when I saw you with her this evening."
It was slowly beating its way into his brain. Little things, atoms of
suggestion, were separating themselves from the mass of things
disregarded to cluster thickly on this nucleus of revealment: the old
story of his companying with Nan on the mountain; his uncle's and
Japheth's accusation at the time; and now the old moonshiner's enmity,
Japheth's meaning look and distrustful silence, Nan's appearance with a
child bearing his own name, the glances askance in Hargis's store when
he was buying the little stock of necessaries for the poor outcast. It
was all plain enough. For reasons best known to herself, Nan had not
revealed the name of her betrayer, and all Gordonia, and all Paradise,
believed him to be the man. Even Ardea ...
She had moved aside out of the square of window light, and he followed
her.
"Tell me," he said thickly; "you heard this: you have believed it. Have
I been misjudging you?"
"Not more than I misjudged you, perhaps. But that is all over, now: I am
trusting you again, Tom. Only, as I said before, you mustn't try me too
hard."
"Let me understand," he went on, still in the same strained tone.
"Knowing this, or believing it, you could still find a place in your
heart for me--you could still forgive me, Ardea?"
"I could still be your friend; yes," she replied. "I believed--others
believed--that your punishment would be great enough; there are all the
coming years for you to be sorry in, Tom. But in the fullness of time I
meant to remind you of your duty. The time has come; you must play the
man's part now. What have you done with her?"
"Wait a moment. I must know one other thing," he insisted. "You heard
this before you went to Europe?"
"Long before."
"And it didn't make any difference in the way you felt toward me?"
"It did; it made the vastest difference." They were pacing slowly up and
down the portico, and she waited until they had made the turn at the
Woodlawn end before she went on. "I thought I knew you when we were boy
and girl together, and, girl-like, I suppose I had idealized you in some
ways. I thought I knew your wickednesses, and that they were not
weaknesses; so--so it was a miserable shock. But it was not for me to
judge you--only as you might rise or sink from that desperate starting
point. When I came home I was sure that you had risen; I have been sure
of it ever since until--until these few wretched hours to-night. They
are past, and now I'm going to be sure of it some more, Tom."
It was his turn to be silent, and they had measured twice the length of
the pillared floor when at last he said:
"What if I should tell you that you are mistaken--that all of them are
mistaken?"
"Don't," she said softly. "That would only be smashing what is left of
the ideal. I think I couldn't bear that."
"God in Heaven!" he said, under his breath. "And you've been calling
this friendship! Ardea, girl, it's _love_!"
She shook her head slowly.
"No," she rejoined gravely. "At one time I thought--I was afraid--that
it might be. But now I know it isn't."
"How do you know it?"
"Because love, as I think of it, is stronger than the traditions,
stronger than anything else in the world. And the traditions are still
with me. I admit the existence of the social pale, and as long as I live
within it I have a right to demand certain things of the man who marries
me."
"And love doesn't demand anything," he said, putting the remainder of
the thought into words for her. "You are right. If I could clear myself
with a word, I should not say it."
"Why?"
"Because your--loyalty, let us call it, is too precious to be exchanged
for anything else you could give me in place of it--esteem, respect, and
all the other well-behaved and virtuous bestowals."
"But the loyalty is based on the belief that you are trying to earn the
well-behaved approvals," she continued.
"No, it isn't. It exists 'in spite of' everything, and not 'because of'
anything. The traditions may try to make you stand it on the other leg,
it's a way they have; but the fact remains."
She shook her head in deprecation.
"The 'traditions,' are about to send me into the house, and the
principal problem is yet untouched. What have you done with Nancy?"
He told her briefly and exactly, adding nothing and omitting nothing;
and her word for it was "impossible."
"Don't you understand?" she objected. "I may choose to believe that
this home making for poor Nan and her waif is merely a bit of tardy
justice on your part and honor you for it. But nobody else will take
that view of it. If you keep her in that little cabin of yours, Mountain
View Avenue will have a fit--and very properly."
"I don't see why it should," he protested densely.
"Don't you? That's because you are still so hopelessly primeval. People
won't give you credit for the good motive; they will quote that
Scripture about the dog and the sow. You must think of some other way."
"Supposing I say I don't care a hang?"
"Oh, but you do. You have your father and mother and--and me to
consider, however reckless you may be for yourself and Nancy. You
mustn't leave her where she is for a single day."
"I can leave her there if I like. I've told her she may stay as long as
she wants to."
They had paused in front of the great door, and Ardea's hand was on the
knob.
"No," she said decisively, "you will have a perfect hornets' nest about
your ears. Every move you make will be watched and commented on. Don't
you see that you are playing the part of the headstrong, obstinate boy
again?"
"Yet you think I ought to provide for Nan, in some way; how am I going
to do it unless I ignore the hornets?"
"Now you are more reasonable," she said approvingly. "I shall ride
to-morrow morning, and if you should happen to overtake me, we might
think up something."
The door was opening gently under the pressure of her hand, but he was
loath to go.
"I wouldn't take five added years of life for what I've learned
to-night, Ardea;" he said passionately. And then: "Have you fully made
up your mind to marry Vincent Farley?"
In the twinkling of an eye she was another woman--cold, unapproachable,
with pride kindling as if she had received a mortal affront.
"Sometimes--and they are bad times for you, Mr. Gordon--I am tempted to
forget the boy-and-girl anchorings in the past. Have you no sense of the
fitness of things--no shame?"
"Not very much of either, I guess," he said quite calmly. "Love hasn't
any shame; and it doesn't concern itself much about the fitness of
anything but its object."
And then he bade her good night and went his way with a lilting song of
triumph in his heart which not even the chilling rebuff of the
leave-taking was sufficient to silence.
"She loves me! She would still love me if she were ten times Vincent
Farley's wife!" he said, over and over to himself; the words were on his
lips when he fell asleep, and they were still ringing in his ears the
next morning at dawn-break when he rose and made ready to go to ride
with her.
XXV
THE PLOW IN THE FURROW
One of Miss Ardea Dabney's illuminating graces was the ability to return
easily and amicably to the _status quo ante bellum_; to "kiss and be
friends," in the unfettered phrase of Margaret Catherwood, her chum and
room-mate at Carroll College.
Wherefore, when Tom, mounted on Saladin, overtook her on the morning
next after the night of offenses, she greeted him quite as if nothing
had happened, challenging him gaily to a gallop with the valley head for
its goal, and refusing to be drawn into anything more serious than
joyous persiflage until they were returning at a walk down a
boulder-strewn wood road at the back of the Dabney horse pasture. Then,
and not till then, was the question of Nancy Bryerson's future suffered
to present itself.
For Miss Dabney the question was settled before it came up for
discussion. In the Major's young manhood Deer Trace had maintained a
pack of foxhounds, and it was the Major's bride, a city-bred Charleston
belle, who first objected to the dooryard kennels and the clamor of the
dogs. Back of the horse pasture, and a hundred yards vertical above the
road Ardea and Tom were traversing, a pocket-like glen indented the
mountain side, and in this glen the kennels had been established, with
a substantial log cabin for the convenience of the dog-keeper.
Dogs and dog-keeper had long since gone the way of most of the old-time
Southern manorial largenesses; but the cabin still stood solidly planted
in the midst of its overgrown garden patch, with a dense thicket of
mountain laurel backgrounding it, and a giant tulip-tree standing
sentinel over a gate hanging by one rusted hinge.
This was what Tom saw when he had followed Ardea's lead up the steep bit
of path climbing from the road and the pasture wall, and it evoked
memories. Often in the boyhood days, when the Nazarite fit was on, he
had climbed to the deserted solitude of the glen to sit on the broad
door-stone of the dog-keeper's cabin as a hermit at large,--monarch for
the monastic moment of a kingdom as remote as that of John the Baptist
in the Wilderness of Sin.
"I thought of it last night," said Ardea, nodding toward the cabin. "It
is just the place for Nancy, if she can not, or will not, go back to her
father. After breakfast, I shall send Dinah and a man up to set things
in order, and she can come as soon as she likes. She won't mind the
loneliness?"
Tom shook his head. "I should think not; she has never been used to
anything else. I'll bring her and the youngster over in the buggy any
time you telephone." He had quite forgotten his lesson of the previous
evening.
"Indeed, you will do nothing of the kind," was the quick reply. "Japheth
will go after her when we are ready; and if you are prudently wise you
will have business in South Tredegar for the next few days."
The blue-grass, seeded once in the dog-keeper's dooryard, had spread to
the farthest limits of the glen, and the autumn rains had given it a
spring-like start. Tom let Saladin crop a dozen mouthfuls unchecked
before he said:
"That looks like dodging; and I don't like to dodge."
"You will have to do many things you don't like before you say your _ave
atque vale_," she remarked. "But you shall be permitted to carry your
full share of the burden. I mean to let you give me some money, if you
can afford it, and I'll spend it for you."
"Charity itself couldn't be kinder," he asseverated. "And, luckily, I
can afford it. But--"
He was looking at her wistfully, and the old longing for sympathy, for
the sympathy which has been quite to the bottom of the well where truth
lies, was about to cry out against this riveting of the fetters of
misunderstanding and false accusation.
"But you would rather spend it yourself?" she broke in, fancying she had
divined his thought. "That cannot be. The one condition on which I shall
consent to help is the completest isolation for Nan. You must promise me
you will not try to see her. I am hoping against hope that none of the
Mountain View Avenue people will find out what you did last night."
"Oh, confound their gossiping tongues!" he railed; adding hastily: "Not
that I care so very much what they say, either."
Ardea let her horse pick his way down to the wood road, and when they
were approaching the Deer Trace gate: "You haven't promised yet, Tom;
and you must, you know."
"Not to see Nan? That's easy. I'll keep out of her way, if you can keep
her out of mine. All I care is to know that she is comfortably provided
for."
This he said, thinking only of the boy-time obligation voluntarily
assumed; but it was quite inevitable that Ardea should mistake the
motive.
"It is right and proper that you should care about that," she said
judicially. And a little farther along she added: "But I don't like your
attitude."
"I don't like it myself," he rejoined heartily. "I never wanted so badly
to say things in all my life! But you've nailed the lid on and I can't."
"They are better unsaid," she returned quickly. "Will you take that for
your cue in the future?"
"Certainly; it is for you to command," he said lightly, swinging from
his saddle to open the pasture gate for her; and so the morning ride
came to its end.
Since provincialism is by no means the exclusive distinction of the
landward bred, there was an immediate restirring of the gossip pool when
the story of Tom's befriending of Nancy Bryerson and her child got
abroad in Gordonia and among the country colonists.
In the comment of the simpler-minded Gordonia folk, the iron-master's
son had finally "made it up" with Nancy, and here the note of approval
was not wholly lacking. There were good-hearted souls to say that boys
will be boys, and to express the hope that Tom would go on from this
beginning and make an honest woman of Nancy by marrying her.
Quite naturally, the point of view of the country-house people was
different; more critical, if not less charitable. Though the social
acceptance of the Gordons, as an ancient family, as friends of the
Dabneys, and as land-holding neighbors was fairly complete, it still
lacked somewhat of the class kinship which breeds leniency and the
closed eye to the sins of its own household. But for Tom, personally, as
a distinct social improvement on honest Caleb, the welcome into the
charmed circle of Mountain View Avenue had been warm enough to make his
sudden apparent relapse into the primitive figure as an affront to the
colony. Hence, there were rods laid in pickle for the sinner, as when
Mrs. Vancourt Henniker gave the footman at Rook Hill a hint that for the
present the Misses Henniker were not at home to Mr. Thomas Gordon; and
if Tom had known it, there were other and similar chastenings lying in
wait for him behind more of the colonial doors.