"Do you suppose it was his loss in the fire?" she asked.
The manager shook his head.
"No; that was next to nothing, and we're doing a good business. It was
something else; something that happened about the same time. If I can't
find out what it is, I'll have to quit. He's freezing me out."
Ardea was inconsistent enough to oppose the alternative.
"No," she objected. "You mustn't do that, Mr. Norman. It is a friend's
part to stand by at such times, don't you think?"
"Oh, I'm willing," was the generous reply. "Only I'm a little lonesome;
that's all."
At another time Norman told her of the mysterious walking delegate, who
was admitted to the private office when an anxious and zealous business
manager was excluded. Later still, he made a half-confidence. Caleb, in
despair at the latest transformation in his son, had finally unfolded
his doubts and fears, business-wise, to the manager. The Farleys were
returning; a legal notice of a called meeting of the Chiawassee
Consolidated had been published; and it was evident that Colonel Duxbury
meant to take hold with his hands. And Tom seemed to have forgotten that
there was a battle to be fought.
Norman's recounting of this to Miss Dabney was the merest unburdening of
an overloaded soul, and he was careful to garble it so that the
prospective daughter-in-law of Colonel Duxbury might not be hurt. But
Ardea read between the lines. Could it be possible that Tom's lifelong
enmity for the Farleys, father and son, had even a little justification
in fact? She put the thought away, resolutely setting herself the task
of disbelieving. Yet, in the conversation which followed, Mr. Frederic
Norman was very thoroughly cross-questioned without his suspecting it.
Ardea meant to cultivate the open mind, and she did not dream that it
was the newly-discovered love which was prompting her to master the
intricacies of the business affair.
Two days later the Farleys came home, and since Vincent went promptly
into residence at Crestcliffe, the evenings with Norman were
interrupted. But they had served their purpose; and when Vincent began
to press for the naming of an early day in September for the wedding,
Ardea found it quite feasible to be calmly indefinite. You see, she had
still to tell him that it had become purely a matter of promise-keeping
with her--a task easy only for the heartless.
It was in the third week in August, a full month, earlier than their
original plans contemplated, that the Dabneys returned to Paradise and
Deer Trace. Miss Euphrasia was led to believe that the Major had tired
of the hotel and the mountain; and the Major thought the suggestion came
first from Miss Euphrasia.
But the real reason for the sudden return lay in a brief note signed
"Norman," and conveyed privately to Ardea's hands by a grimy-faced boy
from the foundry.
"Mr. Tom was waylaid by two footpads at the Woodlawn gates Saturday
night and half killed," it read. "He is delirious and asks continually
for you. Could you come?"
XXXI
THE NET OF THE FOWLER
Which of the Cynic Fathers was it who defined virtue as an attitude of
the mind toward externals? One may not always recall a pat quotation on
the spur of the moment, but it sounds like Demonax or another of the
later school, when the philosophy of cynicism had sunk to the level of a
sneer at poor human nature.
To say that Mr. Duxbury Farley, returning to find Chiawassee
Consolidated in some sense at the mercy of the new pipe plant, regarded
himself as a benefactor whose confidence had been grossly abused, is
only to take him at his word. What, pray tell us, was Caleb Gordon in
the crude beginning of things?--a village blacksmith or little more,
dabbling childishly in the back-wash of the great wave of industry and
living poverty-stricken between four log walls. To whom did he owe the
brick mansion on the Woodlawn knoll, the comforts and luxuries of
civilized life, the higher education of his son?
In Mr. Farley's Index Anathema, ingratitude ranked with crime. He had
trusted these Gordons, and in return they had despoiled him; crippled a
great and growing industry by segregating the profitable half of it;
cast doubt on the good name of its founder by reversing his business
methods. Chiawassee had been making iron by the hundreds of tons: where
were the profits? The query answered itself. They were in the credit
account of Gordon and Gordon, every dollar of which justly belonged to
the parent company. Was not the pipe-making invention perfected by a
Chiawassee stock-holder, who was also a Chiawassee employee, on
Chiawassee time, and with Chiawassee materials? Then why, in the name of
justice, was it not to be considered a legitimate Chiawassee asset?
Mr. Duxbury Farley asked these questions pathetically and insistently;
at the Cupola Club, in the Manufacturers' Association, in season and out
of season, wherever there was a willing ear to hear or the smallest
current of public sentiment to be diverted into the channel so patiently
dug for it. Was his virtuous indignation merely the mental attitude of
all the Duxbury Farleys toward things external? That bubble is too huge
for this pen to prick; besides, its bursting might devastate a world.
But if we may not probe too deeply into primal causes, we may still be
regardful of the effects. Mr. Farley's bid for public sympathy was not
without results. True, there were those who hinted that the veteran
promoter was only paving the way for a _coup de grâce_ which should
obliterate the Gordons, root and branch; but when the days and weeks
passed, and Mr. Farley had done nothing more revolutionary than to
reëlect himself president of Chiawassee Consolidated, and to resume,
with Dyckman as his lieutenant, the direction of its affairs, these
prophets of evil were discredited.
It was observed also that Caleb remained general manager at Gordonia,
and still received the patronizing friendship of former times; and to
Tom the full width of the pike was given--a distance which he kept
scrupulously. But as for the younger Gordon, he knew it was the lull
before the storm, and he was watching the horizon for the signs of its
coming--when he was not searching for clues or brooding behind the
closed door of his private office with the devil of homicide for a
closet companion.
During this reproachful period Vincent Farley gave himself unreservedly,
as it would seem, to the sentimental requirements, spending much time on
the mountain top and linking his days to Ardea's in a way to give her a
sinking of the heart at the thought that this was an earnest of all time
to come.
Mountain View Avenue had understood that the wedding was to be in
September; but as late as the final week in August the cards were not
out, and Miss Euphrasia, the source and fountainhead of the Avenue's
information, could only say that she supposed the young people were
making up for the time lost by separation and absence, and were willing
to prolong the delights sentimental of an acknowledged engagement.
But at the risk of cutting sentiment to the very bone, it must be
admitted that, after the first ardent attempt to commit Ardea to a
certain and early day, the delay was of Vincent's own making; and the
motive was basely commercial. Through Major Dabney, who was not proof
against Colonel Duxbury's blandishments at short range, however much he
might distrust them at a distance, Tom's plan of reorganization, with
the suggestion of the trusteeship for Ardea's third, had become known
to the Farleys. Thereupon ensued a conference of two held in Vincent's
room in the hotel, and sentence of extinction was passed on Tom and
Caleb.
"The ungrateful cub!" was Colonel Duxbury's indignant comment. "To use
his influence over Major Dabney to sequestrate, absolutely sequestrate,
a full third of our property!"
"Forewarned is forearmed," said the son coolly. "It's up to us to break
the slate."
"We'll do it, never fear. Just give me a little more time in which to
win public sentiment over to our side, and don't press Ardea to name the
exact day until I give the word," was the promoter's parting injunction
to his son; and Vincent trimmed his sails accordingly, as we have seen.
Planting the good seed, which was a little later to yield an abundant
harvest of public approbation sanctioning anything he might see fit to
do to the Gordons, was a congenial task to Mr. Farley; but in the midst
it was rather rudely interrupted by a belated unburdening on the part of
his first lieutenant in the South Tredegar offices.
Dyckman held his peace as long as he dared; in point of fact he did not
speak until he saw his superiors rushing blindly into the pit digged for
their feet by the astute young tyrant of the pipe foundry. If they could
have fallen without carrying him with them, it is conceivable that the
bookkeeper might have remained dumb. But their immunity was doubly his,
and the end of it was a bad quarter of an hour for him, two of them, to
be precise: the first, in which he told the president and the treasurer
the story of the missing cash-book and ledger pages and the extorted
confession, and the other, during which he sat under a scathing fire of
abuse poured on him by the younger of his two listeners. After it was
over, he escaped to the welcome refuge of his own office while father
and son took counsel together against this new and unsuspected peril.
"Anybody but an idiot like Dyckman would have found out long ago if
those papers were burned in Gordon's safe," snapped Vincent, when the
danger had been duly weighed and measured.
The president shook his head mournfully.
"Anybody but Dyckman would have burned them himself, you'd think. It was
criminally careless in him not to do so."
"They are the key to the lock," summed up the younger man. "We've got to
have them."
"Assuredly--if they are in existence."
"You needn't try to squeeze comfort out of that. I tell you, they went
through the fire all right, and Tom has them."
"I am afraid you are right, Vincent; afraid, also, that Dyckman so far
forgot himself as to set fire to Gordon's office in the hope of
retrieving his own neglect. But how are we to regain them?" Mr. Farley's
weapons were two, only: first persuasion, and when that failed,
corruption.
Vincent's cold blue eyes were darkening. The little virtues interpose
but a slight barrier to a sharp attack of the large vices.
"The fight has fallen into halves," he said briefly. "You go on with
your part as if nothing had happened, and I'll do mine. Has the old
iron-melter been taken in on it, do you think?"
"No; I don't believe Caleb knows."
"That's better. Are you going up the mountain to-night?"
"Yes, I had thought of it. Eva wants me to take her."
"All right; you go, and get Major Dabney to yourself for a quiet
half-hour. Tell him we are all ready to close the deal, and we're only
waiting on the Gordons. I'll be up to dinner, and if anybody asks for me
later, let it be understood that I have gone to my room to write
letters."
This bomb-hurling of Dyckman's occurred on the Wednesday. That night,
between the hours of nine and eleven, the new steel safe in Tom Gordon's
private office was broken open and ransacked, though nothing was taken.
On Thursday afternoon, while Martha Gordon was over at Deer Trace
training the new growth on Ardea's roses, Tom's room at Woodlawn was
thoroughly and systematically pillaged: drawers were pulled out and
emptied on the floor, the closets were stripped of their contents, and
even the bed mattresses were ripped open and destroyed.
Mrs. Martha was terrified, as so bold a daylight housebreaking gave her
a right to be; and Caleb was for sending to the county workhouse for the
bloodhounds. But Tom was apparently unmoved.
"It won't happen again," he said; and it did not. But on the Saturday
evening, just before the late dinner-hour at Woodlawn, Japheth
Pettigrass, who had been trying to halter a shy filly running loose in
the field across the pike, saw a stirring little drama enacted at the
Woodlawn gates; saw it, and played some small part in it.
It centered on Tom, who was late getting home. He never rode with his
father now if he could avoid it, and Japheth saw him swinging along up
the pike, with his head down and his hands in the pockets of his short
coat. The Woodlawn entrance was a walled semicircle giving back from the
roadway, with the carriage gates hinged to great stone pillars in the
center, and a light iron grille at the side for foot-passengers. Tom's
hand was on the latch of the little gate when two men darted from the
shadow of the nearest pillar and flung themselves on him.
Japheth saw them first and gave a great yell of warning. Tom turned at
the cry, and so was not taken entirely unawares. But the two had beaten
him down and were busily searching him when Japheth dashed across the
pike, shouting as he ran. The footpads persisted until the horse-trader
came near enough to see that they were black men, or rather white men
with blackened faces and hands. Then they sprang up and vanished in the
gathering dusk.
Tom was conscious when Pettigrass got him on his feet and hastily bound
a handkerchief over the ugly wound in his head. He was still conscious
when Japheth walked him slowly up the path to the house, and was sanely
concerned lest his mother should be frightened.
But after they got him to bed he sank into an inert sleep out of which
he awoke the next morning wildly delirious. Ardea's name was oftenest on
his lips in his ravings, and while his strength remained, his calling
for her was monotonously insistent. He seemed to think she was at the
great house across the lawns, and it took the united efforts of Japheth
and Norman to hold him when he tried to get to the window to shout
across for her.
Norman stood it until late Monday afternoon. Then, when Caleb had
relieved him at Tom's bedside, he drove down to Gordonia and wrote the
note to Miss Dabney, sending it up the mountain by one of the Helgerson
boys with strict injunctions to give it to Miss Ardea herself.
The Dabneys came down from the mountain Tuesday morning, and Ardea was
so far from disregarding her summons that she stopped the carriage at
the Woodlawn gates and went directly to comfort Mrs. Martha and to offer
her services in the sick-room. Tom was in one of his stubbornest
paroxysms when she entered, but at the touch of her hand he became
quiet, and a little later fell into a deep sleep, the first since the
Saturday night of coma and stertorous breathings.
That same afternoon Crestcliffe Inn lost another guest, and the
smoking-room at Warwick Lodge was lighted far into the night. Two men
talked in low tones behind the carefully-shaded windows, one of them,
the younger, lounging in the depths of an easy-chair, and the other
pacing the floor in deepest abstraction.
"I only know what Ardea tells me," said the lounger, answering the final
question put by the floor pacer. "He's out of his head--and out of the
way, temporarily, at least. Now is your time to strike."
Mr. Duxbury Farley nodded his head slowly.
"It was providential for us, Vincent, this assault just at the critical
moment. I have struck. I had an interview with Caleb this evening and
made him an offer for the pipe plant. He is to give us his answer
to-morrow morning."
Silence fell for a little time, and then the younger man in the wicker
chair smote his palms together.
"Curse him!" he gritted vengefully, transferring his thought from Caleb
Gordon to Caleb Gordon's son. "I hope he'll die!"
The elder man paused in his walk. "Why, Vincent, my son! What has come
over you? It is merely a matter of business, and we mustn't be
vindictive."
"Business be damned!" snarled the younger man. "Can't you see? She has
promised to marry me--and she loves _him_. Are you going to bed? Well,
I'm not. I've got something else to do first."
A few minutes later he let himself noiselessly out at the side door of
the Lodge, and turned down the avenue in the direction of Deer Trace.
But after crossing the bridge over the creek, he took a diagonal course
through the stubble-fields and bore to the right. And when he finally
reached and climbed the wall into the pike, it was at a point directly
opposite the forking of the rough wood road which led off to the Pine
Knob settlement.
As he leaped over into the highway, a man carrying a squirrel gun
stepped from behind a tree.
"I was allowin' you'd done forgot," said the man, yawning sleepily.
"I never forget," was the short rejoinder. Then: "Come with me, and you
shall hear with your own ears, since you won't take my word for it.
Then, if you still want to sleep on your wrongs, it's your own affair."
XXXII
WHOSO DIGGETH A PIT
If Thomas Gordon, opening his eyes to consciousness on the mid-week
morning, felt the surprise which might naturally grow out of the sight
of Ardea sitting in a low rocker at his bedside, he did not evince it,
possibly because there were other and more perplexing things for the
tired brain to grapple with first.
For the moment he did not stir or try to speak. There was a long dream
somewhere in the past in which he had been lost in the darkness,
stumbling and groping and calling for her to come and lead him out to
life and light. It must have been a dream, he argued, and perhaps this
was only a continuation of it. Yet, no; she was there in visible
presence, bending over a tiny embroidery frame; and they were alone
together.
"Ardea!" he said tremulously.
She looked up, and her eyes were like cooling well-springs to quench the
fever fires in his.
"You are better," she said, rising. "I'll go and call your mother."
"Wait a minute," he pleaded; then his hand found the bandage on his
head. "What happened to me?"
"Don't you remember? Two men tried to rob you last Saturday evening as
you were coming home. One of them struck you."
"Saturday? And this is--"
"This is Wednesday."
The cool preciseness of her replies cut him to the heart. He did not
need to ask why she had come. It was mere neighborliness, and not for
him, but for his mother. He remembered the Saturday evening quite
clearly now: Japheth's shout; the two men springing on him; the instant
just preceding the crash of the blow when he had recognized one of his
assailants and guessed the identity of the other.
"It was no more than right that you should come," he said bitterly. "It
was the least you could do, since your--"
She was moving toward the door, and his ungrateful outburst had the
effect of stopping her. But she did not go back to him.
"I owe your mother anything she likes to ask," she affirmed, in the same
colorless tone.
"And you owe me nothing at all, you would say. I might controvert that.
But no matter; we have passed the Saturday and have come to the
Wednesday. Where is Norman? Hasn't he been here?"
"He has been with you almost constantly from the first. He was here less
than an hour ago."
"Where is he now?"
She hesitated. "There is urgency of some kind in your business affairs.
Your father spent the night in South Tredegar; and a little while ago he
telephoned for Mr. Norman--from the iron-works, I think." She had moved
away again, and her hand was on the door-knob.
He raised himself on one elbow.
"You are in a desperate hurry, aren't you?" he gritted; though the
teeth-grinding was from the pain it cost him to move. "Would you mind
handing me that desk telephone before you go?"
She came back and tried it, but the wired cord was not long enough to
reach to the bed.
"If you wish to speak to some one, perhaps I could do it for you," she
suggested, quite in the trained-nurse tone.
His smile was a mere grimace of torture.
"If you could stretch your good-will to--to my mother--that far," he
said. "Please call my office--number five-twenty-six G--and ask for Mr.
Norman."
She complied, but with only a strange young-woman stenographer at the
other end of the wire, a word of explanation was necessary. "This is
Miss Dabney, at Woodlawn. Mr. Gordon is better, and he wishes to
say--what did you want to say?" she asked, turning to him.
"Just ask what's going on; if it's Norman you've got, he'll know," said
Tom, sinking back on the pillows.
What the stenographer had to say took some little time, and Ardea's
color came and went in hot flashes and her eyes grew large and
thoughtful as she listened. When she put the ear-piece down and spoke to
the sick man, her tone was kinder.
"There is an important business meeting going on over at the furnace
office, and Mr. Norman is there with your father," she said. "The
stenographer wants me to ask you about some papers Mr. Norman thinks you
may have, and--"
She stopped in deference to the yellow pallor that was creeping like a
curious mask over the face of the man in the bed. Through all the strain
of the last twenty hours she had held herself well in hand, doing for
him only what she might have done for a sick and suffering stranger. But
there were limits beyond which love refused to be driven.
"Tom!" she gasped, rising quickly to go to him.
"Wait," he muttered; "let me pull myself together. The
papers--are--in--"
He seemed about to relapse into unconsciousness, and she hastily poured
out a spoonful of the stimulating medicine left by Doctor Williams and
gave it to him. It strangled him, and she slipped her hand under the
pillow and raised his head. It was the nearness of her that revived him.
"I--I'm weaker than a girl," he whispered. "Vince--I mean the thug, hit
me a lot harder than he needed to. What was I saying?--oh, yes; the
papers. Will you--will you go over there in the corner by the door and
look behind the mopboard? You will find a piece of it sawed so it will
come out. In the wall behind it there ought to be a package."
She found it readily,--a thick packet securely tied with heavy twine and
a little charred at the corners.
"That's it," he said weakly. "Now one more last favor; please send Aunt
'Phrony up as you go down. Tell her I want my clothes."
Miss Dabney became the trained nurse again in the turning of a leaf.
"You are not going to get up?" she said.
"Yes, I must; I'm due this minute at that meeting down yonder."
"Indeed, you shall do no such insane thing!" she cried. "What are you
thinking of!"
"Listen!" he commanded. "My father has worked hard all his life, and
he's right old now, Ardea. If I should fail him--but I'm not going to.
Please send Aunt 'Phrony."
"I'm going to call your mother," she said firmly.
"If you do, you'll regret it the longest day you live."
"Then let me take the papers down to Mr. Norman for you."
He considered the alternative for a moment--only a moment. What an
exquisite revenge it would be to make her the messenger! But he found he
did not hate her so bitterly as he had been trying to since that
soul-torturing evening on the cliff's edge.
"No, I can't quite do that," he objected; and again he besought her to
send the old negro housekeeper.
She consented finally, and as she was leaving him, she said:
"I hope your mother is still asleep. She was here with you all night,
and Mr. Norman and I made her go to bed at daybreak. If you must go, get
out of the house as quietly as you can, and I'll have Pete and the buggy
waiting for you at the gate."
"God bless you!" said Tom fervently; and then he set his teeth hard and
did that which came next.
The Dabney buggy was waiting for him when, after what seemed like a
pilgrimage of endless miles, he had crept down to the gate. But it was
Miss Dabney, and not Mammy Juliet's Pete, who was holding the reins.
"I couldn't find Pete, and Japheth has gone to town," she explained.
"Can you get in by yourself?"
He was holding on by the cut wheel, and the death-look was creeping
over his face again.
"I can't let you," he panted; and she thought he was thinking of the
disgrace for her.
"I am my own mistress," she said coldly. "If I choose to drive you when
you are too sick to hold the reins, it is my own affair."
He shook his head impatiently.
"I wasn't thinking of that; but you must first know just what you're
doing. My father stands to lose all he has got to--to the Farley's.
That's what the meeting is for. Do you understand?"
She bit her lip and a far-away look came into her eyes. Then she turned
on him with a little frown of determination gathering between her
straight eyebrows--a frown that reminded him of the Major in his
militant moods.