striving desperately to maintain the foothold given to him by the
pipe-casting invention, and he had little time for the amenities. So it
came about that he escaped for the moment; or, which was quite the same,
he did not know he was pursued. Another Northern city, with its full
complement of grafting officials, was in the market for some train-loads
of water-mains, and again Thomas Jefferson was fighting the old battle
of conscience against expediency, this time in the evil-smelling ditches
where the dead and wounded lie.
"You are sure you went into it thoroughly, Norman?" he demanded of his
lieutenant, when the latter returned from a personal reconnaissance of
the field. "The break they are making at us seems almost too rank to be
taken at its face value."
"Oh, yes; I dug it up from the bottom," said the henchman. "It's rotten
and riotous. The political machine runs the town, and the bosses own the
machine. So much to this one, so much to that, so much to half a dozen
others, and we get the contract. Otherwise, most emphatically _nit_."
"That comes straight, does it?"
"As straight as a shot out of a gun. They got together on it, eight of
the big bosses, called me in and told me flat-footed what we had to do,"
said the salesman. "Oh, I tell you, those fellows are on to their job."
"No chance to go behind the returns and stir up popular indignation, as
we did in Indiana?" suggested Tom.
"No show on top of earth. The ring owns or controls two of the dailies,
and has the other two scared. Besides, they've just had their municipal
election."
The Gordon-and-Gordon manager was absently jabbing holes in the desk
blotter with the paper-knife.
"Well, we can do what we have to, I suppose," he said, after a hesitant
pause. "Say nothing to my father, but make your arrangements to take the
train for the North again to-night. I'll meet you in town at the
Marlboro at four o'clock."
To prepare for the new exigency, Tom took the afternoon local for South
Tredegar. The lump sum required for the bribery was considerably in
excess of his balance in bank. Notwithstanding the stringency of the
times, he made sure he could borrow; but it was in some vague hope that
the moral chasm might be widened to impassibility, or decently bridged
for him, that he was moved to state the case in detail to President
Henniker of the Iron City National. Mr. Vancourt Henniker could dig
ditches, on occasion, making them too vast for the boldest borrower to
cross; but Tom's credit was gilt-edged, and in the present instance the
president chose rather to build bridges.
"We have to shut our eyes to a good many disagreeable things in
business, Mr. Gordon," he said, genially didactic. "Our problem in this
day and generation is so to draw the line of distinction that these
necessary concessions to human frailty will not debauch us; may be made
without prejudice to that high sense of personal honor and integrity
which must be the corner-stone of any successful business career. This
state of affairs which you describe is deplorable--most deplorable;
but--well, we may think of such obstacles as we do of toll-gates on the
highway. The road is a public utility, and it should be free; but we pay
the toll, under protest, and pass on."
Mr. Henniker was a large man, benign and full-favored, not to say
unctuous; and his manner in delivering an opinion was blandly
impressive, and convincing to many. Yet Tom was not convinced.
"Of course, I came to ask for the loan, and not specially to justify
it," he said, in mild irony which was quite lost on the philosopher in
the president's chair. "I wasn't sure just how you would regard it if
you should know the object for which we are borrowing, and this high
sense of personal honor you speak of impelled me to be altogether frank
with you."
"Quite right; you were quite right, Mr. Gordon," said the banker
urbanely. "You are young in business, but you have learned the first
lesson in the book of success--to be perfectly open and outspoken with
your banker. As I have said, the venality of these men with whom you are
dealing is most deplorable, but...."
There was some further glozing over of the putrid fact, a good bit of
it, and Tom sat back in his chair and listened, outwardly respectful,
inwardly hot-hearted and contemptuous. Was this smooth-spoken, oracular
prince of the market-place a predetermined hypocrite, shaping his words
to fit the money-gathering end without regard to their demoralizing
effect? Or was he only a subconscious Pharisee, self-deceived and
complacent? Tom's thought ran lightning-like over the long list of the
Vancourt Hennikers: men of the business world successful to the Croesus
mark, large and liberal benefactors, founders of colleges, libraries and
hospitals, gift-givers to their fellow men, irreproachable in private
life, and yet apparently stone blind on the side of the larger equities.
Could it be possible that such men deliberately admitted and accepted
the double standard in morals? It seemed fairly incredible, and yet
their lives appeared to proclaim it.
When the president had finished his apology for those who bow the head
in the house of Rimmon, Tom rose to take his bit of approved paper
around to the cashier's window. The bridge was built, and he meant to
cross it; but he was honest enough, or blunt enough, to give his own
point of view in a crisp sentence or two.
"I wish I could look at it in some such way as you do, Mr. Henniker, but
I can't," he objected. "To me it is just plain bribery; the corrupting
of officials who have sworn, among other things, to administer their
offices honestly. I'm immoral, or unmoral, enough to yield to the
apparent necessity, but it is quite without prejudice to a firm
conviction that I am no better than the men I am going to purchase."
Having obtained the sinews of war, he kept the appointment with Norman,
and their joint discussion of the business situation made him too late
for the early dinner at Woodlawn. To complete the delay, the evening
train lost half an hour with a hot box at a point a mile short of
Gordonia. Two things came of these combined time-killings: a man in a
slouched hat and the brown jeans of the mountaineers, who had been
watching the Woodlawn gates since dusk from his hiding-place behind the
field wall across the pike, got up stiffly and went away; and Tom
reached home just in time to intercept Ardea on the steps of the
picturesque veranda.
"Been visiting the little mother?" he asked, when she paused on the step
above him.
"Yes--no; I ran over to tell you that we moved Nancy to-day."
"Oh! Well, that's comfortable. She was willing?"
"Y-es: almost, at first; and altogether willing when I told her that
I--that she--" There was an embarrassed moment and then the truth came
out. "Perhaps I should have asked you first: but she was quite satisfied
when I told her that she owed her changed condition to the person whose
duty it was to provide for her. You don't mind, do you?"
The question was almost a beseechment; but Tom was thinking of something
else.
"No, I don't mind," he said absently, and the under-thought dealt
savagely with Nan--with a woman who, for the sake of the loaves and the
fishes, and the shielding of the real offender, would suffer an innocent
man to go to the social gallows for lack of the word which would have
cleared him. He laughed rather bitterly and added, out of the heart of
the under-thought: "I'm glad I'm not naturally inclined to be
pessimistic."
"What makes you say that?"
"Because, after hearing"--he changed his mind suddenly, and transferred
the hard word from Nan to Mr. Vancourt Henniker--"after what I've been
hearing this afternoon I find myself more in the notion of weeping with
the angels than of laughing with the devils."
"What has happened?" she asked, sympathetically alive to his need in one
breath, and keenly apprehensive for her own peace of mind in the next.
"An exceedingly small thing, as the world's measurements go. I was in
town, and made a business call on Mr. Henniker. He's a member of your
church, isn't he?"
"Of St. Michael's in the city," she corrected. "You know I claim
membership here at home in St. John's."
"Well, it's all the same. He is what you would call a Christian man, I
take it?"
"Why not?" she demanded. "What has he done to make you doubt it?"
"Oh, nothing worth mentioning, perhaps. I needed some money to bribe a
lot of political grafters in a Pennsylvania city where I'm trying to
sell a bill of water-pipe. I went to Mr. Henniker to borrow it."
"And, of course, he wouldn't let you have it for any such wretched
purpose!" she flamed out.
"No, you are mistaken; it's just the other way around. I told him what
it was for, hoping rather vaguely, I think, that he'd sit on me and make
the crime impossible. But he didn't."
"You don't mean that he lent you the money after you had told him what
you purposed doing with it?" It was too dark for him to see her face,
but there was something like a breath-catching of horror in her voice.
"I'm sorry it shocks you, but he did. More than that, he took the
trouble to try to explain away my scruples; made it seem quite a
virtuous thing before he got through. You wouldn't believe it now, would
you?"
"But, Tom! you didn't take the money?"
"How could I refuse so good a man? Norman is on his way to Pennsylvania
at this present moment, with a letter of credit in his pocket big enough
to make the mouth of even a professional grafter water. At least, I hope
it is big enough."
She was hurt, shocked, horrified, and he knew it and found pleasure of a
certain sort in the knowledge. When a man has done violence to his own
best impulses, the thing that comes nearest to the holy joy of penitence
is the unholy joy of making somebody else sorry for him. There were
unmistakable tears in her voice when she said:
"Tom, why have you told me this--this unspeakable thing?"
"Why--I guess it was because I wanted to ask you how you supposed the
Mr. Henniker kind of men square such things with their conscience; or
don't they have any conscience?"
"That is _not_ the reason," she faltered.
"You are right," he rejoined quickly. "It was diabolism pure and
unstrained. I had hurt myself, and I wanted to pass it along--to hurt
some one else. But it is too cold to keep you standing here. Won't you
come in again?"
"No; I must go home." And she went down the broad steps.
He drew her arm through his and walked with her, down one grassy slope
and up the other. At the manor-house steps he found at last sufficient
grace to say: "It was a currish thing to do; will you forgive me,
Ardea?"
"I don't know," she said, in a tone that thrilled him curiously. "Such
things are hard to forgive. I don't mean your slapping me in the face
with it, that is nothing. But to know that you have gone so far aside
... that you have sunk your manhood and all the promise of it...."
He nodded perfect intelligence. "I know; it's hell, Ardea. I've been
frizzling in it for the past six months, more or less; ever since I came
home with the one sole, single determination to climb out of the panic
ditch if I had to make steps of dead bodies or lost souls. I'm doing it,
and I'm paying the price. Sometimes I can find it in my heart to curse
the mistaken mother-love that gave me to eat of the fruit of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil. I'm pagan in all else, but I can't sin
like a pagan. Why is it? Why can't I be a smug, peaceful, sound-sleeping
scoundrel like other men?"
She was standing on the step above him, as she had stood on the other
side of the two dew-wet lawns.
"I have a theory," she rejoined, "but you wouldn't accept it. You'll
never be able to do wrong without paying for it. Is it worth while to
try?"
"Nothing is worth while--nothing at all. I don't mean that I'm going to
quit; I shall doubtless go on trampling and grinding the face of the
poor, and the rich, if they come in my way. But at the end of the ends I
shall curse God and die, as Job's wife wanted him to."
She put her hands on his shoulders impulsively, and again the tears were
in her voice.
"What can I say to help you, Tom? God knows I would do anything that a
true friend may do!"
He freed himself of the touch of her hands, but very gently.
"There might have been a thing; but you have made it impossible. No,
don't freeze me again--it's the last time. If I could have won your love
... but what is the use of trying to put it in words; you know--you have
always known. And now it is too late."
For a single instant Vincent Farley's chance of marrying the Deer Trace
coal lands trembled in the balance. Ardea forgot him, forgot Nan,
thought of nothing but the passionate yearning that was drawing her like
gripping hands toward the man who had bared his inmost heart to her.
Again she leaned on him with a touch so light that he scarcely felt it,
and her lips brushed his forehead.
"It is not too late for you to be a man, noble, upright, honorable. Let
the world find that for which it is looking, my friend--my brother: the
strong man armed who can stand where others faint and fall. Oh, I wish I
knew how to say the word that would make you the man you were meant to
be!"
When it was said, she was gone and the sound of the closing door was in
his ears when he turned and went slowly down the driveway and out on the
white pike, lying like a snowy ribbon under the December stars. On the
highway he hung undecided for a moment; but an hour later, William
Layne, driving homeward from South Tredegar, overtook him plodding
slowly southward far beyond the head of Paradise; and it was nearing
midnight when he won back, pacing steadily past the Deer Trace and
Woodlawn gates and holding his way down the pike to Gordonia.
The railway station was his goal; and when he had aroused the sleepy
night operator and gained admittance, he sat at the telegraph table to
write a message. It was to Norman, addressed to intercept the salesman
at the breakfast stop.
"Cancel Pennsylvania date and come in at once to take managership of
plant," was the wording of it; and at the breakfast-table the following
morning Tom announced his intention of leaving the industrial plow in
the furrow while he should go to Boston to complete his course in the
technical school.
XXVI
AS WITH A MANTLE
The month of March in the great, southward-reaching bight of the
Tennessee River is the pattern and form of fickleness climatic. Normally
it is the time of starting sap and swelling buds and steaming leaf beds
odorous of spring; the month when the migratory crows wing their flight
northward, and Nature, lightest of winter sleepers in the azurine
latitudes, stirs to her vernal awakening. None the less, in the
Tennessee March the orchardist, watching the high-blown clouds in skies
of the softest blue, is glad if the peach buds are slow in responding to
the touch of the wooing airs, or, chewing a black birch twig as he makes
the leisurely round of his line fence, warns his gardening neighbor that
it is too early to plant beans. True, the poplars may be showing a tinge
of green, and the buds of the hickory may have lighted their tiny candle
flames on the winter-bared boughs; but the "blackberry winter" is yet to
come, and there are rigorous possibilities still lingering in the
high-flying clouds and the sudden-shifting winds.
It was on the fourth Sunday in the month that Ardea rose early and went
fasting to the communion service at St. John's-in-Paradise. Primarily,
St. John's was merely the religious factor in Mr. Duxbury Farley's
scheme of country-colony promotion, and for the greater part of the year
its silver-toned bell was silent and its appeal was mainly to the
artistic eye. But latterly St. Michael's, the mother church in South
Tredegar, had attained a new assistant rector whose zeal was not yet
dulled by apathetic unresponsiveness on the part of the to-be-helped.
Hence St. Michael's various missions flourished for the time, and once a
month, if not oftener, the bell of St. John's sent its note abroad on
the still morning air of Paradise.
On this particular Sunday morning Ardea was early at the church, and she
was glad she had decided to wear her cloth gown. It had turned cooler in
the night and the azure March sky was hidden behind a gray cloud mass
which hung low on the slopes of the mountain. There was no fire in the
church heater; and the few worshipers--the Vancourt Henniker girls, the
two Misses Harrison, John Young-Dickson, of The Dell, dragged out at the
chilly hour by his new wife, and Mrs. Schuyler Farnsworth and her
daughter, all of the country-house colony beyond the creek--sat or
knelt, and shivered through the service in decorous discomfort.
Miss Dabney was not looking quite as well as usual, as Miss Betsy
Harrison remarked to her sister, Miss Willie, in a church whisper. She
had grown thinner during the winter, and though the slate-blue eyes were
as clear and steadfast as before, there was a strained look in them like
that in the eyes of the spent runner. Mountain View Avenue, rurally
alert for something to talk about, decided it was trouble rather than
ill health. Miss Eva Farley corresponded with Jessica Farnsworth, and
there had been European hints of an understanding between Vincent and
Ardea. Coupling this with young Gordon's ostentatious devotion, Nan's
appearance, and Tom's sudden determination to go back to college, there
was the groundwork for a very pretty story which sufficiently accounted
for Miss Dabney's changed looks and for her growing reluctance to be
included in the country colony's social divagations. She was engaged to
one man and in love with another, who was clearly ineligible--this was
the Mountain View Avenue summing-up of the matter; and some condemned
and some pitied, and all were careful not to step within the barrier of
aloofness with which Miss Dabney had of late surrounded herself.
On this Sunday morning of weather portents it chanced to be Ardea's turn
to entertain the young minister, or rather to give him his breakfast
after the service; and she waited for him in the vestibule after the
others had gone. The outer doors were open, and she could see the gray
cloud mass feathering on its under side and creeping lower on the slopes
of Lebanon in every stormy gust of the chill wind.
"It was prudent to bring your overcoat this morning, Mr. Morelock," she
said, when her guest emerged from the vesting-room with his cassock in a
neat bundle under his arm. "If I'd had any idea it would turn cold so
fast, I should have had the carriage come for us."
"Indeed, my dear Miss Dabney, if you could walk to church, I'm sure I
can walk home with you," was the ready response; nevertheless, the
rather fragile-looking young man shuddered a little in sympathy with the
rawness of the wind. He was from well-sheltered New England, and he had
not yet acquired the native Southron's indifference to weather
discomforts; would never acquire them this side of a consumptive's
grave, it was to be feared.
"The attendance was pretty good for such a disagreeable morning, don't
you think?" Ardea ventured, trying to make talk as they breasted the
gusts together on the Deer Trace side of the pike.
The young missioner shook his head rather despondently. "There are
English churchmen among the English and Welsh miners at Gordonia,--quite
a number of them," he rejoined. "Not one of them was present."
It was the clear-sighted inner Ardea that smiled. There was little in
the stately service and luxurious appointments of the country colony's
church to attract the working-men, and much to repel them. She wondered
that Mr. Morelock, young as he was, did not understand this.
"The mission of St. John's is hardly to the working people of Gordonia,
is it?" she said, more in exculpation than in criticism.
"Oh, my dear young lady! the church knows no class distinctions!"
protested the zealous one warmly. "Her call is to rich and poor, gentle
and simple, young and old alike; and it is imperative. I must make a
round of visitation among these miners at the very first opportunity."
Ardea bent low to the buffet of a stronger blast and fought for a moment
with her clinging skirts. When she had breath to say it, she said: "Will
you really do that? Then let me tell you how. Come out here some
week-day in your roughest clothes, and make your round among the men
while they are at work in the mine. They will listen to you then."
"Bless me! what an idea!" he gasped.
"It is not original with me," was the gentle reply. "You will remember
that the example was set a good many hundred years ago among the
fishermen of Galilee. And, after all, Mr. Morelock, it is the only way.
You can not reach down to a living soul on this earth--that is worth
saving."
It had begun to rain in spiteful little dashes and squalls, and the
clergyman was turning up the collar of his overcoat and buttoning it
about his throat. Moreover, the wind had risen to half a gale, and
talking was difficult when it was not wholly impossible. But when they
reached the Deer Trace gates and the shelter of the driveway evergreens,
he had a defensive word ready.
"I can't fully agree with you, you know, Miss Ardea," he said. "Of
course, we must not reach down in the Pharisaical sense. But neither
must we lower the dignity of the sacred calling."
Her smile was neither disloyal nor cynical; it was merely pitying. She
was thinking in her heart of hearts how much this zealous young apostle
had yet to learn.
"Do you call it undignified to be a man among men?" she asked; adding
quickly: "But I know you don't. And what other way is open to the true
brother-helper?"
"There is the church and its ministrations," he began, but she broke in.
"To get the drowning man ashore you have first to go down into the water
and lay hold of him, Mr. Morelock. That means personal contact, personal
association."
The young man was clearly bewildered. His experience thus far had not
been enriched by many intimacies with clear-eyed young women who calmly
defined the larger humanities for him.
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand your point of view," he demurred.
"Don't you? I'm not sure that I can explain just what I mean. But it
seems to me that really to help any one, you must know that one; not
superficially, as people meet in ordinary ways, but intimately. And you
can't hope to do that if you hold aloof; if you--if you--pose as a
minister all the time." The word was not flattering, but she could lay
hold of no other.
"Oh, I hope I don't do that!" he laughed. "But to creep around
underground in a sooty coal-mine, a laughing-stock to those who know how
to do it--er--professionally--"
"The men have to do it as breadwinners, Mr. Morelock, and the most
ribald one of them wouldn't laugh at you. I wouldn't be afraid to
promise that you could fill St. John's, forbidding as its atmosphere is
to the average working-man, the very next Sunday after such a
visitation."
Now this young zealot was a man of imagination, hidebound only in his
traditions. Also, he was not above taking ideas where he found them.
"Really, Miss Dabney, I'm not sure but you have hold of the matter at
the practical end," he conceded. "I--I'd like to talk with you further
about it, when we have time. Do you suppose I could get permission to go
into the mines during working-hours?"
"Certainly you could--for the mere asking. We can speak to Mr. Caleb
Gordon about it after breakfast, if you wish. My! doesn't that rain
sting! I'm glad we are at home."
"Yes; and it is freezing as it falls. At home in New England we should
say it was too cold to rain."
"It is never too cold or too anything to rain here," she said; and she
let him take her arm to help her up the slippery stone steps to the
stately portico.
A moment later the hospitable door of the manor house yawned for them,
and the warmth of the Major's welcome, the light and glow of the
crackling wood fires, and the solid comfort of surrounding stone walls
soon banished the memory of the small struggle with the elements.
"Oh, my deah suh! you are not going back to town this mo'ning!"
protested the warm-hearted Major Caspar, as the quartet was rising from
the breakfast-table an hour later. "Why, bless youh soul! I wouldn't
think of letting you go from undeh my roof in such weatheh as this! Tell
him it's his duty to stay, Ardea, my deah; persuade him that he'll neveh
have a betteh oppo'tunity to wrestle with the wickedest old sinner in
Paradise Valley."