him cool and determined. Quite methodically he found his pocket-knife,
and he remembered afterward that he had been collected enough to choose
and open the sharper of the two blades. There was a quick, sure slash at
the shoe-lacing and the crippled foot was freed. With another yell, this
time of glad triumph, he snatched up his burden and backed away with it
in the tilting half-second when the deluge of slag, firing the very air
with shriveling heat, was pouring down the slope.
Then he fell in a heap, with Farley under him, and fainted as a woman
might--when the thing was done.
XXXVI
FREE AMONG THE DEAD
The skirmish-line rivulets of melted slag had crept to within a few feet
of the two at the toe of the dump when the men of the engine crew ran
with water to drench them.
Tom recovered consciousness under the dashing of the water, and was one
of the bearers who carried Vincent Farley on a hastily improvised
stretcher to the surrey waiting at the office gate.
Afterward, he went for Doctor Williams, deriding himself Homerically for
playing the second act in the drama of the Good Samaritan, but playing
it, none the less. And not to quit before he was quite through, he drove
with the physician to Warwick Lodge, and sat in the buggy till the other
Good Samaritan had performed his office.
"Nothing very serious, is it, Doctor?" he asked, when the old physician
took the reins to drive his horse-holder home.
"H'm; he'll be rather badly scarred, and there is a chance that he will
lose the sight of one eye," was the reply. Then: "It's none of my
quarrel, Tom, but you hammered him pretty cruelly--with a stone, too, I
should say."
"Did I?" grinned Tom. He was willing to bear the blame until Kincaid
should have ample time to disappear.
"Yes; and with all due allowance for your provocation, it was a good bit
beneath you, my boy."
The younger man laughed grimly. "Wait till you know the full size of the
provocation, Doctor. I'm not half as bad as I might be. Another man
would have left him to burn--here and hereafter."
The doctor said no more. It was not his province to make or meddle in
the quarrel between the Gordons and the Farleys. And Tom also was
silent, having many things to render him reflective.
When he was put down at Woodlawn it was after one o'clock. Yet he sat
for an hour or more on the veranda, smoking many pipes and trying as he
could to prefigure the future in the light of the night's happenings.
What an insufferable animal Farley was, to be sure!--with the love of a
woman like Ardea Dabney failing to keep him on the hither side of common
decency! Would Ardea break with him, now that she knew the truth? Tom
shook his head. Not she; she would stand by him all the more stoutly, if
not for love, then for pride's sake. That was the fine thing in her
loyalty.
That thought led to another. When they were married, there would have to
be a beginning in a new field. Chiawassee was gone, and the Farley
fortune with it; and the new field would be a bald necessity. Tom
decided that not even Ardea's pride and fortitude could face the looks
askance of the Mountain View Avenue folk.
He measured the country colonists justly. They might have forgiven the
moral lapse, though that was not the side they had turned toward him.
Yet he fancied that when the business failure should be super-added, the
Farley sins would become too multitudinous for the broadest mantle of
charity to cover.
"Which brings on more talk," he mused, pulling thoughtfully at the pipe.
"They can't start in the new diggings without money. Anyway, Vincent's
no moneymaker; and if the look on a man's face counts for anything, old
Colonel Duxbury has made his last flight from the promoting perch. O
Lord!"--rising with a cavernous yawn and a mighty stretching of his arms
overhead,--"I reckon it's up to me to go on doing all the things I don't
want to do; that I didn't in the least mean to do. Somebody ought to
write a book and call it _Saints Inveterate_. It would have simplified
things a whole lot if I could have left him to be cremated after all."
* * * * *
Mr. Vancourt Henniker was not greatly surprised when Tom Gordon asked
for a private interview on the morning following the final closing down
of all the industries at Gordonia.
Without being in Gordon's confidence, or in that of American Aqueduct,
the banker had been shrewdly putting two and two together and applying
the result as a healing plaster to the stock he had taken as security
for the final loan to Colonel Duxbury.
"I thought, perhaps, you might wish to buy this stock, Mr. Gordon," he
said, when Tom had stated his business. "Of course, it can be arranged,
with Mr. Farley's consent to our anticipating the maturity of his notes.
But"--with a genial smile and a glance over his eye-glasses--"I'm not
sure that we care to part with it. Perhaps some of us would like to hold
it and bid it in."
Tom's smile matched the genial expansiveness of the president's.
"I reckon you don't want it, Mr. Henniker. You'll understand that it
isn't worth the paper it is printed on when I tell you that I have sold
my pipe-pit patents to American Aqueduct."
"Heavens and earth! Then the plant doesn't carry the patents? You've
kept this mighty quiet, among you!"
"Haven't we!" said Tom fatuously. "I know just how you feel--like a man
who has been looking over the edge of the bottomless pit without knowing
it. You'll let me have the stock for the face of the loan, won't you?"
But the president was already pressing the button of the electric bell
that summoned the cashier. There was no time like the present when the
fate of a considerable bank asset hung on the notion of a smiling young
man whose mind might change in the winking of an eye.
With the Farley stock in his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and
spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight
following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled
skein of Chiawassee affairs. Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the
bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed
everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement
were vanquished, one by one.
When it was all over, Tom began to draw checks on the small fortune
realized from the sale of the patents. One was to Major Dabney,
redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawassee Limited at par. Another
was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a
valuation based on the prosperous period before the crash of '93. With
this check in his pocket he went home--for the first time in two weeks.
It was well beyond the Woodlawn dinner-hour before he could muster up
the courage to cross the lawns to Deer Trace. No word had passed between
him and Ardea since the September afternoon when he had overtaken her at
the church door,--counting as nothing the effort she had made to speak
to him on the night of vengeance.
How would she receive him? Not too coldly, he hoped. It was known that
Vincent's assailant in the furnace yard was a stranger; a man who had
taken service as a guard: also that Mr. Gordon--they gave him his
courtesy title now--had saved Vincent from a terrible death. Tom thought
the rescue should count for something with Ardea.
It did. She was sitting at the piano in the otherwise deserted
music-room when he entered; and she broke a chord in the middle to give
him both of her hands, and to say, with eyes shining, as if the rescue
were a thing of yesterday:
"O Tom! I _knew_ you had it in you! It was fine!"
"Hold on," he said, a bit unsteadily. "There must be no more
misunderstandings. What happened that night three weeks ago, had to
happen; and five minutes before it happened I was wondering if I could
aim straight enough in the light from the slag-pot to hit him. And I
fully meant to do it."
She shuddered.
"I--I was afraid," she faltered. "I knew, you know--Japheth had told
me, in--in justice to you. That was why I ran across the lawn and called
to you."
The sweet beauty of her laid hold on him and he felt his grip going.
Another word and he would be trespassing again. To keep from saying it
he crossed to the recessed window and sat down in the sleepy-hollow
chair which was the Major's peculiar possession in the music-room.
After a little he said: "Play something, won't you?--something that will
make me a little less sorry that I didn't kill him."
"The idea!" she said. But when he settled himself in the big easy-chair
as a listener, lying back with his eyes closed and his hands locked over
one knee, she turned to the piano and humored him. When the final chord
of the _Wanderlied_ had sung itself asleep, he sat up and nodded
approvingly.
"I wonder if you appreciate your gift as you should?--to be able to make
a man over in the moral part of him with the tips of your fingers? The
devil is exorcised, for the moment, and I can tell you all about it now,
if you care to know."
"Of course I care," she assented.
"Well, to begin with, I'm no better than I have been; a little less
despicable than you've been thinking me, perhaps, but more wicked. I've
hated these two men ever since I was old enough to know how; and to get
square with them, I haven't scrupled to sink to their level. The smash
at Gordonia is my smash, I'm responsible for everything that has
happened."
"I know it," she said. "Mr. Norman has told me."
"Looking it all over, I don't see that there is much to choose between
me and the men I've been hunting down. They went after the things they
needed, without much compunction for other people; and so did I. On the
night of the--on the night when you called to me and I wouldn't answer,
I was going down to rub it in; to tell them they were in the hole and
that I had put them there. I met a man at the gate who told me what
Japheth told you. It made a devil of me, Ardea. I took the man's gun and
followed Vincent around the yard. I meant to kill him."
She nodded complete intelligence.
"The provocation was very great," she said evenly. "Why didn't you do
it, Tom?"
"Now you've cornered me: I don't know why I didn't. I had only to walk
away and let him alone when the time came. The slag-spilling would have
settled him. But I couldn't do it."
"Of course you couldn't," she agreed convincingly. "God wouldn't let
you."
"He lets other men commit murder; one a day, or such a matter."
"Not one of those who have named His name, Tom--as you have."
He shook his head slowly. "I wish that appealed to me, as it ought. But
it doesn't. Where is the proof?"
She rose from the piano seat and went to stand before him.
"Can you ask that, soberly and in earnest, after the wonderful
experience you have had?"
"I have asked it," he insisted stubbornly. "You mustn't take anything
for granted. Just at that moment I couldn't kill a man; but that is all
the difference. I've done what I meant to do, or most of it."
She was holding him steadily with her eyes. "Are you glad, or sorry,
Tom?"
He frowned up at her.
"I don't know. Now that it's all over, the taste of it is like sawdust
in the mouth; I'll admit that much. I'm free; 'free among the dead, like
the slain that lie in the grave,' as David put it when he had sounded
all the depths. Is that being sorry?"
"No--I don't know," she confessed.
He was smiling now.
"You think I ought to go back to first principles: get down on my knees
and agonize over it? Sometimes I wish I could be a boy long enough to do
just that thing, Ardea. But I can't. The mill won't grind with the water
that has passed."
"But the stream isn't dry," she asserted, taking up his figure. "What
will you do now? That is the question: the only one that is ever worth
asking."
He was frowning thoughtfully again, and the words came as an unconscious
voicing of vague under-depths.
"They took to the woods, the waste places, the deserts--those men of old
who didn't understand. Some of them went blind and crazy and died there;
and some of them had their eyes opened and came back to make the world a
little better for their having lived in it. I'm minded to try it."
She caught her breath in a little gasp which she was careful not to let
him see.
"You are going away?" she asked.
"Yes; out to the 'beyond' in northern Arizona. There is a new iron
field out there to be prospected, and Mr. Clarkson wants me to go and
report on it. And that brings us back to business. May I talk
business--cold money business--to you for a minute or two?"
"If you like," she permitted. "Only I think the other kind of talk is
more profitable."
"Wait till you hear what I have to say in dollars and cents. That ought
to interest you."
"Why should it--particularly?"
"Because you are going to marry a poor man, and--"
She turned away from him quickly and stood facing the window. But he
went on with what he had to say.
"That's all right; I can say it to your back, just as well. You know, I
suppose, that your--that the Farleys have lost out completely?"
"Yes,"--to the window-pane.
"Well, a curious thing has come to pass--quite a miraculous thing, in
fact. Chiawassee will pay the better part of its debts and--and redeem
its stock; or some of it, at least." He rose and stood beside her.
"Isn't it a thousand pities that Colonel Duxbury couldn't have held on
to his shares just a little longer?"
"Yes; he is an old man and a broken one, now." There was a sob in her
voice, or he thought there was. But it was only the great heart of
compassion that missed no object of pity.
"True; but the next best thing is to have the young woman who marries
into the family bring it back with her, don't you think? Here is a check
for what Mr. Farley's stock would have sold for before the troubles
began. It's made payable to you because--well, for obvious reasons; as I
have said, he lost out."
She turned on him, and the blue eyes read him to his innermost depths.
"You are still the headlong, impulsive boy, aren't you?" she said, not
altogether approvingly. "You are paying this out of your own money."
"Well, what if I am?"
"If you are, it is either a just restitution, or it is not. In either
case, I can not be your go-between."
"Now look here," he argued; "you've got to be sensible about this.
There'll be four of you, and at least two incompetents; and you've got
to have money to live on. I made Colonel Duxbury lose it, and--"
She stopped him with the imperious little gesture he knew so well.
"Not another word, if you please. I can't do your errand in this, and I
wouldn't if I could."
"You think I ought to be generous and give it to him, anyway, do you?"
"I don't presume to say," was the cool rejoinder. "When you have come
fully to your right mind, you will know what to do, and how to go about
it."
He crumpled the check, thrusting it into his pocket, and made two turns
about the room before he said:
"I'll see them both hanged first!"
"Very well; that is your own affair."
He fell to walking again, and for a full minute the silence was broken
only by the murmur of men's voices in the library adjoining. The Major
had company, it seemed.
"This is 'good-by,' Ardea; I'm going to-morrow. Can't we part friends?"
he said, when the silence had begun to rankle unbearably.
"You've hurt me," she declared, turning again to the window.
"You've hurt me, more than once," he retorted, raising his voice more
than he meant to; and she faced about quickly, holding up a warning
finger.
"Mr. Henniker and Mr. Young-Dickson are in the library with grandpa.
They will hear you."
"I don't care. I came here to-night with a heart full of what few good
things there are left in me, and you--you are so wrapped up in that
beggar that I didn't kill--"
"Hush!" she commanded imperatively. "Grandfather has not heard: he knows
nothing, and he must nev--"
The murmur of voices in the adjoining room had suddenly become a storm,
with the smooth tones of Mr. Henniker trying vainly to allay it. In the
thick of it the door of communication flew open and a white-haired,
fierce-mustached figure of wrath appeared on the threshold. For a moment
Tom's boyish awe of the old autocrat of Deer Trace came uppermost and he
was tempted to run away. But the wrath was not directed at him. Indeed,
the Major seemed not to see him.
"What's all this I'm hearing now for the ve'y first time about these
heah low-down, schemin' scoundrels that want to mix thei-uh white-niggeh
blood with ouhs?" he roared at Ardea, quite beside himself with passion.
"Wasn't it enough that they should use my name and rob my good friend
Caleb? No, by heavens! That snivelin' young houn'-dog must pay his cou't
to you while he was keepin' his--"
The Major's face had been growing redder, and he choked in sheer
poverty of speech. Moreover, Tom had come between; had taken Ardea in
his arms protectingly and was fronting the firebrand Dabney like a man.
"That's enough, Major," he said definitely. "You mustn't say things
you'll be sorry for after you cool down a bit. Miss Ardea is like the
king: she can do no wrong."
There was a gasping pause, the sound of a big man breathing hard,
followed by the slamming of the door, and they were alone together
again, Ardea crying softly, with her face hidden on the shoulder of
shielding.
"Oh, isn't it terrible?" she sobbed; and Tom held her the closer.
"Never mind," he comforted. "He was crazy-mad, as he had a good right to
be. You know he will be heart-broken when he comes to himself. You are
his one ewe lamb, Ardea."
"I know," she faltered; "but O Tom! it was so unnecessary; so wretchedly
unnecessary! It's--it's more than two whole months since--since Vincent
Farley broke the engagement, and--"
He held her at arm's length to look at her, but she hid her face in her
hands.
"Broke the engagement!" he exclaimed, almost roughly. "Why did he do
that?"
She stood before him with her hands clasped and the clear-welled eyes
meeting his bravely.
"Because I told him I could not marry him without first telling him that
I loved you, Tom; that I had been loving you always and in spite of
everything," she said.
And what more she said I do not know.
XXXVII
WHOSE YESTERDAYS LOOK BACKWARD
"Tom, isn't this the same foot-log you made me walk that day when you
were trying to convince me that you were the meanest boy that ever
breathed?" asked Ardea, gathering her skirts preparatory to the stream
crossing.
"It is. But you didn't walk it, as you may remember: you fell off. Wait
a second and give me those azaleas. I'll go first and take your hand."
Tom Gordon, lately home from a full half-year spent in the unfettered
solitudes of the Carriso iron fields, to be married first, and afterward
to start up--with Caleb for superintendent--the idle Chiawassee plant as
a test and experimental shop for American Aqueduct, was indemnifying
himself for the long exile.
On this Saturday evening in the lovers' month of June he had walked
Ardea around and about through the fragrant summer wood of the upper
creek valley, retracing, in part, the footsteps of the boy whose fishing
had been spoiled and the little girl who was to be bullied into
submission; and so rambling they had come at length to the old
moss-grown foot-log which had been a newly-felled tree in the former
time. Tom went first across the rustic bridge, holding the hand of
ecstatic thrillings, and pausing in mid-passage that he might have
excuse for holding it the longer. Ah me! we were all young once; and
some of us are still young,--God grant,--in heart if not in years.
It was during the mid-passage pause, and while she was looking down on
the swirling waters sometime of terrifying, that Miss Dabney said:
"How deep is it, Tom? Would I really have drowned if you and Hector had
not pulled me out?"
He laughed.
"It's a thankless thing to spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way
with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You
could have waded out."
She made the adorable little grimace which was one of the survivals of
the yesterdays, and suffered him to lead her across.
"And I have always believed that I owed my life to you--and Hector!" she
said reproachfully.
"You owe me much more than that," he affirmed broadly, when they had sat
down to rest--they had often to do this, lest the way should prove
shorter than the happy afternoon--on the end of the bridge log.
"Money?"--flippantly.
"No; love. If it hadn't been for me, you might never have known what
love is."
His saying it was only an upbubbling of love's audacity, but she chose
to take it seriously. She was gazing afar into the depths of the
fresh-green forest darkening softly to the sunset, with her hands
clasped around the tangle of late-blooming white azaleas in her lap.
"It is a high gift," she said soberly; "the highest of all for a woman.
Once I thought I should live and die without knowing it, as many women
do. I wish I might give you something as great."
"I am already overpaid," he asserted. "For a man there is nothing so
great, no influence so nearly omnipotent, as the love of a good woman.
It is the lever that moves the world--what little it does move--up the
hill to the high planes."
"A lever?" she mused; "yes, perhaps. But levers are only links in the
chain binding cause to effect."
His smile was lovingly tolerant.
"Is that what your religion has brought you to, Ardea--a full-grown
belief in a Providence that takes cognizance of our little
ant-wanderings up and down the human runways?"
"Yes, I think so," she said; but she said it without hesitancy or a
shadow of doubt.
"I'm glad; glad you have attained," he rejoined quite unaffectedly.
"It was hardly attainment, in my case," she qualified; and, after a
momentary pause, she added: "any more than it was in yours."
"You think I, too, have attained?" he smiled. "I am not so sure of that.
Sometimes I think I am like my father, who is like Mahomet's coffin;
hanging somewhere between Heaven and earth, unable to climb to one or to
fall to the other. But I'm not as brash as I was a year or so ago; at
least, I'm not so cock-sure that I know it all. That evening in the
music-room at Deer Trace changed me--changed my point of view. You
haven't heard me rail once at the world, or at the hypocrites in it,
since I came home, have you?"
"No."
"Well, I don't feel like railing. I reckon the old world is good enough
to live in--to work in; and certainly there are men in it who are
better than I'm ever likely to be. I met one of them last winter out in
the Carriso cow country; a 'Protestant' priest, he called himself, of
your persuasion. He was the most hopeless bigot I've ever known, and by
long odds the nearest masculine approach to true, gritty saintliness.
There was nothing he wouldn't do, no hardship he wouldn't cheerfully
undergo, to brother a man who was down, and the wickedest devil in all
that God-forsaken country swore by him. Yet he would argue with me by
the hour, splitting hairs over Apostolic Succession, or something of
that sort."
She smiled in her turn. "Did he regard you as a heretic?" she asked.
"Oh, sure! though he admitted that I might escape at the last by virtue
of my 'invincible ignorance.' Then I would laugh at him, telling him he
was a lot better than his bigotry. But he got the best of me in other
ways. I owned the one buckboard in the northern half of Apache County,
and my broncos were harness-broken and fast. So, when there was a
shoot-up at the Arroyo dance-hall, or any other job of swift brothering
to be done, I had to drive Father Philip."
She was musing again. "You used to write me that you were on the edge of
things out there: it was a mistake, Tom; you were in the very heart of
them."
He shook his head.
"No; the heart of them was back yonder in the music-room. There were
chaos and thick darkness to go before that day of days; and it was your
woman's love that changed the world for me."
"No," she denied; "that was only an incident. When chaos and darkness
fled away, it was God who said, 'Let there be light.' The dawn had come
for you before our day of days, Tom."
He stretched himself luxuriously on the sward at her feet.
"You may put it that way if you please. But I shall go on revering you
as my torch-bearer," he asserted.
"Tell me," she said quickly; "was it for my sake that you spared Vincent
Farley when all you had to do was to turn your back and go away?"
He took time to consider, and his answer put love under the foot of
truth.
"No, it wasn't. If you make me confess the bald fact, I was not thinking
of you at all, just at that one moment."