gone, and as yet he had said nothing about wishing to be relieved from
the night-watching. But it was clear that a man who put in full time
during the day could scarcely be expected to sleep with one eye open
at night. Moreover, if Rucker were to start in the morning for Whitlow
with the drills, it would be necessary for him to sleep at Coalville.
“What is your programme for to-night?” asked Carfax, as he walked with
Tregarvon to the tool-house. “I suppose you’ll send Rucker down for
the early start to Whitlow. You’ll hardly care to leave things up here
without a watchman, will you?”
“Not at the present stage of the game,” was the prompt reply. “You may
go down in the car with Rucker, and I’ll stay here for the night. I’d
like to see some of these queer happenings for myself.”
“I can beat that plan,” Carfax put in. “You’ve forgotten that we have
an invitation to Highmount for dinner this evening. Mrs. Caswell gave
it, and I accepted for both of us. We’ll go down and dress, and come
back in the car, leaving Rucker to stand watch here while we do the
social act. Later, Rucker can come for us, trundling us over here,
first, and himself and the drills to Coalville afterward. How will that
answer?”
Tregarvon demurred upon two counts. “You mean that you’ll sit up with
me? You don’t have to play night-watchman to this sick project of mine,
Poictiers. Besides, I don’t care to go to the Highmount faculty dinner.
More than that, you ought to be the last man in the world to put me in
for it. I’ve already wasted too much time in that way, and you know
it.”
“In the present instance I’ve promised for you, and I guess you’ll
have to go,” said Carfax quietly. “And as for my sitting up with you
afterward, that’s a part of the game. I’m immensely interested in
skulls and things.”
And thus, without further argument, it was decided.
XIII
The Burnt Child
The dinner in the president’s dining-room at Highmount College was
anything but formal. By this time the two young men from the North
were on a footing which lacked little of the household relation, Mrs.
Caswell having said hospitably, more than once, that their plates were
always laid at the faculty table.
Quite naturally, the Ocoee experiment came in for a share of the
table-talk, and in this field Tregarvon let Carfax do most of the
ploughing. For one reason, Miss Richardia had changed her place and was
sitting on the other side of the golden one; and for another, his own
companion was the French teacher, who persisted in talking, and making
him talk, of things trans-atlantic and Parisian.
Later, however, he was tempted--and fell. The night was too cool for
the veranda, and the after-dinner dispersal was to the music-room.
Richardia played, and for a time Tregarvon sat beside Miss Farron and
said “Yes” and “No,” as the occasion demanded, coming always afterward
to a rapt and regretful contemplation of the pearl of great price on
the piano-bench.
Being an artist to her finger-tips, Miss Birrell at the piano
became a breaker of hearts by just so much more as the mask of
self-consciousness fell away, leaving the true art soul free to express
itself in the musician’s ecstasy of detachment. In such moments
Tregarvon saw her as the embodied spirit of all that was most desirable
in the world of women; gazed spellbound, sinned, repented, and sinned
again; calling himself hard names in one breath, and rhapsodizing
deliriously over the supernal charm of her in the next.
Again and again he told himself in caustic self-derision that his
infatuation was merely the result of propinquity--the nearness of
Richardia coupled with the remoteness of Elizabeth. But as often as he
pleaded this excuse, the merciless inner and final court of appeals
assured him that the evasion was but the adding of self-deception to
unfaithfulness, and insisted upon a restatement of the humiliating
facts: that he had promised to marry a woman whom he did not love,
when he knew he did not love her; and that he was now adding to this
baseness by admitting his love for another.
This restatement of the case was dinning itself into his ears for
the hundredth time while he was saying “Yes” and “No” to the pretty
assistant in mathematics, and praying in his more lucid intervals
that Rucker might come early with the motor-car and so forestall any
chance of deeper mirings. But Rucker was apparently in no hurry.
Miss Richardia played until she was tired; Madame Fortier and Miss
Farron excused themselves and went to their duties in the dormitories;
Hartridge and Miss Longstreet went to brave the chill of the evening in
a pacing constitutional on the veranda; and the group in the music-room
was cut down to the Caswells, their guests, and Miss Birrell.
At this conjuncture Tregarvon saw that Carfax was about to add
insult to injury by leaving him alone with Richardia. The president
was talking about some improvements he wished to make in the school
gymnasium: would Mr. Carfax be good enough to look the plans over and
give a country schoolmaster the benefit of his advice? Tregarvon turned
to the nearest window to watch for the headlamps of the expected auto.
They were not yet in sight; and when the silence behind him gave token
that Carfax and the Caswells had gone, he knew that he had been basely
deserted.
Miss Richardia was still at the piano, letting her fingers run in
delicate little harmonies up and down the keyboard. Tregarvon meant to
keep his distance, but she drew him so irresistibly that he was beside
her before he realized that he was once more breaking all the good
resolutions.
“Don’t go just yet,” he pleaded, when she looked around, saw that the
others were gone, and made as if she would rise. Then he added: “It
isn’t my fault this time: I didn’t wish to come, but Poictiers had
accepted for me. You mustn’t punish me when I don’t deserve it.”
She looked up at him with the air of detachment which he had always
found more trying than her sharpest accusations.
“Why should I punish you at all? Hasn’t your conscience been doing that
much for you?”
“Don’t!” he begged again. “Now that it is all over, I am going to tell
you that I have been a liar and a hypocrite.”
She stopped him with a quick little gesture of dismay.
“Please don’t spoil it all now--just because we happen to be alone
together for a minute or two. When are you going home to marry Miss
Wardwell?”
“You are perfectly merciless,” he complained. “Must we talk about
Elizabeth?”
“Ask your conscience,” she retorted.
“My conscience is busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed. One would
think you had been born and bred in New England!”
“I wasn’t; I was born on this mountain.”
He sat down in the nearest chair and tried to remember that he was
talking to the woman who was as good as promised to Poictiers Carfax.
“I know,” he offered; “in a rambling old house with a groved lawn. It
has a box-bordered carriage drive, and a big, pillared veranda fronting
the west.”
“Yes; when have you ever seen Westwood House?”
“Perhaps I haven’t seen it; perhaps I am only imagining how it ought
to look. But the name ‘Westwood’ is familiar enough. It is written all
over the Ocoee maps.”
Her smile, on any other lips, would have had more than a hint of
bitterness in it.
“I suppose we ought to be proud of the distinction. The printing of the
home name on the maps was the only return my father ever had for what
he did for Mr. Parker. But, of course, you know all about that.”
“Not so much as I’d like to know. I have understood that your father
was a heavy investor in the original Ocoee company, and that Parker
contrived to give him the hot end of things in the reorganization.”
“It is all true.”
“It makes me feel as if I had been caught stealing sheep,” he
volunteered. “Ethically, I suppose the Ocoee doesn’t belong to me at
all, though I hope it is clear to everybody that neither I nor my
father had any part in the crookedness. So far as that goes, my father
never knew anything about the early history of the mine; and neither
did I before I came down here. How does your father feel about it?”
It did not strike him at the moment as being particularly significant
that she did not answer the question categorically.
“Those things are all past and gone,” she said half-absently. And then:
“I wish you might meet my father; you and Mr. Carfax.”
The mention of Carfax’s name was as salt to a fresh wound.
“You’ve changed your mind about Poictiers, haven’t you?” he said, and
he tried to make the saying of it entirely judicial. “You made fun of
him at first, you know.”
“Not of him, but of some of the things that he said and did,” she
corrected quickly. “And that was only because I didn’t know him;
because I was so stupid as not to recognize the real man under the
transparent little mask of affectation that he delights in holding up
between himself and all the rest of the world.”
Tregarvon made a loud call upon his magnanimity, and concurred heartily.
“He is the finest there is, Richardia. I--I hope he will be able to
make you as happy as you deserve to be.”
For the moment he was puzzled. Sheer maiden modesty might have
accounted for the blush, but why should the slate-blue eyes grow
suspiciously bright, as with tears?
“Then he has told you?” She had turned away from him and there was a
little catch in her voice.
“Yes. It broke my heart, Richardia--which shows you how far I had gone
on the road to depravity. Poictiers said to me once that I was playing
the dog in the manger, and so I was. There was no excuse, of course;
there never is an excuse for dishonor. But you were heart and soul and
conscience to me, and I seemed to need you so much more than anybody
else ever could. I can say all this without blame now, can’t I? You
are going to marry Poictiers, and I am going to marry Elizabeth.”
She had turned farther away, as if to conceal emotions too profound to
be shared. At first he thought she was crying, and wondered why. Then
it was borne in upon him that she was laughing, and he became instantly
and hotly resentful.
“If you are laughing at me and my little lunacy, it is all right,” he
exploded. “But if it’s at Poictiers----”
When she let him see her face again it was perfectly straight, but
there were twin imps of mockery dancing in the eyes of desire.
“Between you and Mr. Carfax it is hard for a poor country mouse to find
breathing space,” she asserted. “Am I to understand that you are trying
to congratulate me?”
Tregarvon frowned heavily. “No; Poictiers is the one to be
congratulated--if you were not laughing at him.”
“I wasn’t,” she denied promptly. “He is much too splendid to be laughed
at. Don’t criticise the word; it is the only one that fits him.”
“Then you were laughing at me?”
“No.”
“At what I said, then? that is just as cruel.”
“Why will you insist upon being so quarrelsome? I was laughing because
I couldn’t help it. Let us talk about something else; about your mine.
Have you been having any more of the mysterious trouble?”
“Yes; it is one thing after another. You heard what Poictiers was
telling at the table this evening. He made it sound like hard luck, but
it isn’t luck; it’s design. Some one is making the trouble for us.”
“Who would do such a thing as that?”
“For a long time we were totally in the dark. But now we know the man.”
Miss Richardia had the translucent complexion that harmonizes perfectly
with cloudy blue eyes and masses of light-brown hair brightened by
touches of warmer tints; hence there was no telltale pink to vanish at
the command of sudden emotion. Yet Tregarvon saw she was startled, and
that the exciting cause was quick-springing anxiety.
“You have seen him?” she asked.
“Rucker, the machinist, has.” Tregarvon was always making good
resolutions about not talking too much, and always breaking them.
It had been no part of his intention to refer to the incriminating
incident in which Richardia herself figured as one of the two actors,
but the inexpedient thing was said and he could only hope that
Richardia would not ask for more.
She was looking away again when she said: “Now that you know, I suppose
you will defend your rights?”
“Take legal steps, you mean? I don’t wish to do that, if it can be
avoided.”
“No; anything but that!” she pleaded in low tones. “You must remember
the provocation.”
“I didn’t give the provocation.”
“No; but you are associated, in a way, with those who did. You have
inherited a legacy of ill will.”
“I might be able to understand that, if the man who is making the
trouble were one of the ignorant natives. But he is not.”
“No,” she agreed half-absently; “he is not.”
“Then you know who it is?” said Tregarvon, again permitting himself to
say one of the things which might better have been left unsaid.
She nodded slowly. “I--I am afraid I do. And I am going to plead for
him, if you will let me. There are mitigating circumstances--prejudices
against all Northerners _as_ Northerners. You can’t understand that,
because the North didn’t suffer as the South did in the war between
the States--at least, not in the same way. And the South has suffered
bitterly since the war; from such men as Mr. Parker. There was a
disposition on our part to let bygones be bygones, after the great
struggle; but a few unprincipled promoters have done much to keep the
old sectional animosities alive.”
Tregarvon was regarding her thoughtfully.
“You are wise beyond your years and your sex,” he said soberly. “What
do you think I ought to do to this anachronistic gentleman who is
visiting the sins of other people upon my poor head?”
“I can only beg of you to be broad-minded and charitable and slow to
anger for the sake of all concerned--for my sake, if you must put it
upon narrower ground.”
At this appeal, the earnestness of which could not be questioned,
Tregarvon was frankly puzzled. A little earlier in the adventure he
would not have been surprised to find Richardia Birrell pleading for
Hartridge; but now, with Carfax apparently elbowing the professor aside
in the sentimental field, there seemed to be less reason for the plea,
unless pure friendship might account for it.
“I shall put it wholly upon ‘narrower ground,’ as you call it,” he
maintained. “If you tell me that you care enough for the man you are
pleading for to ask me to spare him for your sake----”
“Care enough?” she exclaimed, wide-eyed. “I should be singularly
inhuman if I didn’t care!”
As in a flash of revealing lightning Tregarvon saw and thought he
understood. It was not Hartridge for whom she was interceding; the
professor of mathematics was not the man who had driven with her to the
glade on the night of strange happenings--who had stood with her in the
shadow of the drill derrick, shaking his fist at the inanimate symbol
of the renewed Ocoee activities. The moving spirit in all the enmities
and antagonisms was her father!
For a moment the thing seemed unbelievable. That a man who had formerly
been a judge and a champion of the law should become a feudist,
carrying his vindictiveness over from those who had defrauded him
to the defrauders’ innocent successor, appeared blankly incredible.
Yet Tregarvon remembered that the South still held many archaic
well-springs of thought and action--he had to fight anachronisms
daily in his laborers--and that the older generation was not to be
judged by the standards of the new. Judge Birrell had felt the heel of
the invader, not only in the great conflict between the States, but
afterward, when the invader came as a friend and robbed him in the name
of business.
Tregarvon had little time in which to determine what he ought to say;
time for nothing but a sudden and loyal resolve not to fail Richardia
in her moment of need. Voices in the hall warned him that Carfax and
the Caswells were returning, and at the same moment he heard the honk
of the motor announcing Rucker’s approach. He was upon his feet when he
said: “You have told me something that I didn’t know--didn’t suspect.
I can scarcely believe it yet. But you need have no fears for anything
that I shall do. You mustn’t worry for a single moment. It will all
come out right in the end.”
He had his reward in a quick little grasp of the hand, in eyes filling
this time with real tears, and in a low-toned outpouring of gratitude.
“I knew you would say that,” she avouched. “It is what you have taught
me to expect of you. I am doing all I can to--to bring about a better
understanding, and if you will only be patient and wait a little
while----”
Carfax and the two Caswells were entering the music-room, and
Tregarvon turned quickly and made a pretense of rearranging the music
on the piano desk. The small diversion gave him a chance for another
whispered word of assurance. “I’ve been advertising myself to you as
all kinds of a graceless wretch, but now I’ll show you that I can rise
to the occasion. Don’t be afraid: there will be no scandal--no tragedy,
so far as you and yours are concerned.”
She caught instantly at the qualification. “Then there are others?” she
queried.
“One other, at least. And after what you have just told me I am quite
sure he is acting entirely upon his own responsibility. I’ll tell you
more about him some other time.”
Carfax was already taking leave, and Tregarvon joined him. The host
and hostess went no farther than the door with the departing guests,
and Miss Richardia remained in the music-room. At the veranda steps
there was a little delay while Rucker was doing something to the motor.
In the waiting interval Tregarvon found himself answering a question
of Hartridge’s about the progress of the test-drilling, the professor
having outstayed his art-teacher companion in their retreat to the open
air.
“No,” said Tregarvon, “we are not getting along as well as we might.
There seems to be a curious obstructive fatality dogging us. If you
were in the chair of psychology instead of that of mathematics,
we might give you a very handsome little problem to work on, Mr.
Hartridge. I wonder if you would attack it?”
The mild-eyed professor’s smile was blandly incommunicative.
“You mustn’t expect any sympathy from me,” he returned genially. “The
proverb tells us specifically that the burnt child dreads the fire;
but it doesn’t add the corollary, which is equally true, and as old as
human nature--namely, that the burnt child experiences an unholy joy
when his playmate attempts to pick up the same hot nail.”
“Ah?” said Tregarvon. And then: “I had forgotten, if, indeed, I ever
knew. You were one of the original stockholders in the Ocoee?”
“To the extent of my entire savings account; which was a mere drop
in the promoter’s bucket, after all. Nevertheless, I can still be
magnanimous enough to wish you all success.” Then, abruptly: “You have
a delightful night for your drive to Coalville. I could almost envy
you.”
Tregarvon did not undeceive him about the destination of the drive;
for good and sufficient reasons it did not seem necessary to tell
Hartridge that the drilling plant would have two watchers that night,
instead of none. With a word of leave-taking he joined Carfax in the
tonneau seat, and the yellow car rolled away down the drive, with
Rucker at the wheel.
It was less than an eighth of a mile from the college gates to the
point where the glade road turned to the left out of the downward pike,
and when Rucker would have taken the left-hand road, Tregarvon made him
stop the car.
“We can walk in from here, Billy,” he explained, and the two volunteer
watchers got out to do it while the car, lightened of two-thirds of its
load, coasted noiselessly on down the steep mountain road and out of
sight around the first curve.
On the short walk over to the drilling plant Tregarvon spoke but once,
and that was to say: “Your guess about Hartridge was right, Poictiers.
He was one of the native crowd which was pinched out in the first
reorganization of the Ocoee.”
“Did Richardia tell you that?”
“No; he told me himself, just as we were leaving. And he is still sore
about it, though he tried to turn it off as a joke.”
“Um,” said Carfax reflectively. “If he is the man who is putting a
finger into your pie, we’ll be likely to see him within the next
half-hour or so, don’t you think? He supposes we are on the road to
Coalville, and he knows that Rucker is driving. Which presumably leaves
the plant unguarded. What will you do if we should happen to catch him
red-handed?”
“That remains to be seen,” said Tregarvon moodily. “We’ll cross that
bridge when we come to it.” And for the remainder of the walk he
was silent; it being no part of his intention to tell Carfax that
Richardia’s father was the one who, arguing from conclusions which
seemed to be well-founded in inference, if not in fact, was most likely
to be caught red-handed.
XIV
The Logic of Fact
Upon their arrival at the drilling plant the two young men who had been
Mrs. Caswell’s dinner-guests made a dressing-room of the small tool
shanty and changed quickly to their working clothes; after which they
sat upon the door-step to smoke in sober silence, each busy with his
own thoughts.
For Tregarvon the talk with Richardia had wrenched the point of view
violently aside, adding new perplexities and fresh discouragement.
Richardia’s apparent fear that her father was responsible for the
obstacles which had been thrown in the way of the test-drilling was a
thing to be believed only because Richardia’s plea could apparently
have no other meaning. Being alien to the South and a townlander,
the Philadelphian found it difficult to understand the attitude of a
man who would make a personal matter of an ancient business defeat,
carrying his animosity over from the real offender to an innocent third
party. But seemingly--since Richardia’s word was not to be doubted--the
fact remained.
Tregarvon saw at once that the Ocoee experiment was made vastly less
hopeful by the discovery to which Richardia had led him. Though he
had never met Judge Birrell, Coalville gossip had done the fiery old
recluse ample justice. For the loungers at Tait’s store the judge
figured as a venerable survival of the _ancien régime_; of the good old
times when the great landed proprietors ruled their small kingdoms with
an iron rod; and were coincidentally and in the meliorating sense of
the word, kindly and generous tyrants to all and sundry. Tregarvon had
heard enough to assure him that the sentiment of the entire countryside
would be with Judge Birrell in any cause he might see fit to champion;
but apart from this, the one insurmountable bar to any defensive
reprisals on his own part lay in Richardia’s appeal. Tregarvon felt
that the appeal, and his yielding thereto, had effectually tied his
hands, and he was still sufficiently infatuated to be glad. Carfax
might marry Richardia and endow her with his millions; but her greatest
debt would still be to the man who had refused to defend himself at her
father’s expense.
Back of the dismaying discovery which had changed the point of view,
there was other food for reflection. When he had ventured to hope
that Carfax might make her happy, why had Richardia laughed? The query
led to the recognition of another impression, given often when he was
with her, and as often slurred over and dismissed when it came to be
analyzed. Not the least of her charms for him was her crystal-clear
straightforwardness. Nevertheless, there had been times when he had
been made to feel that behind the frankness there were reservations;
times when he had been given fleeting glimpses of an inner Richardia
hiding behind the slate-blue eyes and whimsically mocking him.
“I hope the good Mrs. Caswell’s dinner is not disagreeing with you,”
Carfax broke in, in the midst of the analyzing abstraction; and
Tregarvon came back to things present with a jerk.
“Not at all,” he denied. “I was just thinking.”
“Better not think too much after a hearty meal. It’s bad for the
digestion,” was the gentle rejoinder.
Tregarvon grunted. “You didn’t leave out anything but the name. I can’t
help thinking of her, Poictiers. It’s no disloyalty to you, or to
Elizabeth. You had no business to leave me alone with her when Doctor
Caswell asked you to go and look over the gymnasium things.”
Carfax chuckled softly.
“You are a wild ass of the plains, Vance. It is borne in upon me that I
shall have to marry her out of hand to bring you to your senses.”
“The quicker the better,” said Tregarvon gloomily. “There is no use in
prolonging the agony.”
“Then you’ll admit that it is an agony?”