to indoor. The lobby was a gathering-ground for a scattering of
disgruntled tourists, who had used their battle-field stop-over
privilege only to find themselves marooned by the weather. Tregarvon
smoked in solitary misery for what remained of the afternoon, and past
the evening meal, begged some of the hotel stationery, and wrote a
letter to Elizabeth Wardwell.
“It is a sin and a shame to write you after such a day as I’ve
been wearing out here,” he began, “but you know my weakness for
afflicting other people--for unloading my woes upon the nearest pair
of sympathetic shoulders. Your shoulders have always been that; and
sometimes I wonder that you can still stand up straight and queenly, as
you do, after having carried so many of my burdens.” Here followed an
account of the events of the exciting Saturday forenoon, and he tried,
as well as the written words would serve, to transmit some picture of
the boiler explosion, tagged with an attempt to portray the tenterhooks
of suspense upon which the disaster had impaled him.
“You see where it leaves me,” he went on; “still in the air as to
whether the Ocoee is something or nothing. For a few little minutes,
after the drill had passed the eighteen-inch dead-line, I saw
rose-colored, saw my chance to provide for the home-folks, and to
ignore forever and a day, the Uncle Byrd legacy. But now I am no better
assured than I was before we began drilling; and, to make it more
interesting, Hartridge happened along after the explosion--the whole
college turned out and came tramping over through the wood to see what
had broken loose--and he says the sandstone dike is still under us. We
shan’t know positively, of course, until we can get a new engine, and
haul it by inches up the mountain, and drag it into place and set it
going; and by that time I shall be a raving maniac.
“In all this new trouble, Poictiers has been all that you’d expect him
to be; a friend to tie to. He doesn’t lend me money; he simply tosses
me his purse. I have his last dividend check in my pocket at this
present moment, and I’m to cash it to-morrow morning to pay for the
new engine. I suppose I needn’t say that I should have been out of the
fight down here long ago if he hadn’t joined me and given me a checking
account. He is pure gold, Elizabeth; and yet----
* * * * *
“The gap represents a good half-hour, my dear cousin, in which I have
been sitting here at this dinky little table in the hotel writing-room,
trying to screw my courage to the sticking-place. What I have to tell
you concerns four people, and you are one of the four. I’ve written you
a lot about Richardia Birrell--she’s another one of the four--in the
past few weeks, and I have been assuring myself all along that I have
been telling you all there was to tell.
“That isn’t strictly true, Elizabeth. There was a thing that I wouldn’t
admit, even to myself; but I had to admit it three days ago when
Poictiers told me that he had asked Richardia to be his wife. I knew
then what Richardia had done to me, and for a bad half-hour I--well,
I’m not going into details; it is enough to say that I’m not fit to be
your door-mat, Betha, dear--nor Poictiers Carfax’s, for that matter.
“What can I say for myself more than I have said a hundred times in
the past? Nothing, I imagine; I’m simply hopeless where the eternal
feminine is concerned. You’ve known it ever since we went to school
together, and you’ve promised to marry me in spite of the knowledge.
I shall not be a faithless husband, my dear--I know I shan’t be that;
and this last and most humiliating lapse could never have amounted to
anything, anyway, even if Poictiers had not slammed the door in my
face. But it is your right to know about it; to know that for some few
days or hours or minutes, as the case may be, I was daffy, foolish, a
simpleton from the idiotic wards, with a slant toward depravity.
“You see now what an incredible friend Poictiers is. I’ve never
thought of him as a marrying man, and I could swear, even now, that he
isn’t in love with Richardia--though I don’t quite see how any free man
with live blood in him could help being. Let that go: Poictiers has
killed my temptation for me. He has asked Richardia to marry him, and
he and she are good enough for each other--which is the highest praise
I can offer to either. Poictiers will get a wife who could make any
man happy; and Richardia will be able to restore the Birrell fortunes,
which, as you have doubtless gathered from my earlier letters, are
pretty sadly in need of a rich marriage.
“This leaves us two to face things as they are as best we can,
Elizabeth. After what I have written down in this letter, can you still
care enough for me, and for the conventions and the wishes of the
families on both sides, to--not to forgive me; I’m not going to ask
that--but to take me just as I am, and let things go on as before? I
shan’t blame you in the least if you can’t, you know; but if it must
come to a break between us, you must let me be the one to make the
break. By all right and reason the Uncle Byrd legacy is yours; and
whatever happens, I promise you I shall never touch a penny of it.
“Good night, my dear. My love for you is precisely the same as it has
always been. The madness which Richardia Birrell was stirring up in me
was something entirely different, and no doubt everybody would say it
was worlds less worthy.”
Tregarvon had a bad habit of not reading his letters after they were
written and signed, and he did not break the habit now. Folding,
sealing, and addressing his confession, he went to the lobby to mail
it. Thanks to the rainy Sunday, the hotel mail-box was stuffed to
repletion with week-end missives, and Tregarvon, after trying in vain
to wedge his own through the slit, exemplified his careless habit by
leaving it on top of the box with the newspapers.
Later in the evening there were other additions made to the
overflow newspaper mail, and some one, still more careless than the
Philadelphian, displaced the letter, which fell, unnoted, to the
floor. Here, during the small hours, one of the sweepers found it; and
since some muddy boot heel had defaced the postage-stamp, and all but
obliterated the address, the sweeper passed his find on to the night
clerk. At this point another phase of Tregarvon’s heedlessness came
to the fore. He had neglected to put his own name and address in the
corner of the envelope, hence the clerk had no means of identifying the
sender. Being a young man of resource, he enclosed the letter, just as
it was, in a larger envelope, copying, or trying to copy, the address.
But the marring boot heel had done its work too thoroughly. The
Philadelphia street number was entirely effaced; and “Miss Elizabeth
Wardwell” became, in the night clerk’s transcription, “Miss Eliza Bell
Woodwell.”
Tregarvon was astir early on the Monday morning, was fortunate enough
to be able to purchase the new power-plant without waiting to have it
shipped in from some Northern supply house, hustled busily until he
had seen his purchase entrained for Coalville, and took the afternoon
local for his return. As often happened, the local was late, and
he found Carfax waiting dinner for him when he dropped off on the
office-building side of the train at the home station.
Over Uncle William’s chicken gumbo the talk ran easily upon the
business affair. Tregarvon had driven a rather good bargain on the new
engine, and was inclined to expatiate upon it. In reality, however,
he was trying to postpone the moment when Carfax should begin to talk
of the more intimate things. That moment came with the pipe-filling
before the cheerful wood-fire, after Uncle William had cleared the
table and disappeared.
“After you left, Saturday, I took Hartridge’s hint and went into the
explosion details a little deeper,” said Carfax. “Rucker stayed with me
and lent me his mechanical wit.”
“What is the verdict?”
“It is the Scotch verdict: ‘Not proven,’” was the thoughtful rejoinder.
“Knowing, as we do, that at least one attempt was made to dynamite
the boiler, I may have been oversuspicious. In such circumstances the
judicial frame of mind is hard to attain. Rucker swears he left the
furnace-door open when we stopped at noon. When we found the front
sheet of the boiler three or four hundred yards away in the woods, the
door was shut and latched.”
“That proves nothing,” Tregarvon said.
“No; anything might happen to a door, or to anything else, in a hurry
trip of that kind. On the other hand, it would have been a very easy
matter for some one to have sneaked up on the farther side of the
engine while we were eating. And Rucker insists that only the closed
door could have accounted for the sudden rise in pressure which caused
the explosion.”
“We’ll never know,” was Tregarvon’s comment. “But why Hartridge should
shield our obstacle-thrower at one time, and try to set us on to him at
another, is beyond me.”
Carfax smiled soberly. “Mr. William W. Hartridge appears to be a
unique. I had the pleasure of meeting him again, socially, no longer
ago than yesterday.”
“You spent the Sunday at Highmount?”
“No; I did better than that. Wilmerding was down from Whitlow, and
I found that he knows Judge Birrell familiarly and well. I took my
courage in my hand, borrowed your beast of a car, and Wilmerding and I
drove to Westwood House in the rain.”
“So you have met Richardia’s father?”
“I have; and a finer old citizen doesn’t exist. That suspicion of yours
that he may be inspiring the fight on us is all bosh. He isn’t at all
the kind of man to knife an enemy in the dark. He is a poem on the
Old South, Vance; a whole heart-breaking epic. His manners would put
a Chesterfield to shame; and you can see at once where Richardia gets
her keen little mind. The judge was disposed to place me in the Parker
class at first--quite naturally; I could see that plainly enough--that,
and his prejudice against all things Northern. But I was there as the
friend of his friend Wilmerding, and that settled it. A Bedouin chief
couldn’t have been more hospitable.”
“You told him you were going to marry Richardia?”
“Oh, dear, no; you mustn’t hurry things that way!” laughed the golden
one. “You simply _can’t_ hurry them, you know, with a man like Judge
Birrell. But I flatter myself that I made good in the try-out.
Hartridge was there, with Miss Farron--though I can’t imagine how they
got over from Highmount in the rain--so there was quite a house-party
of us. At dinner-time it was raining harder than ever, and the judge
wouldn’t hear to our going, though I had the top up on the car, and, of
course, offered to take Hartridge and Miss Farron back to the college.
So we all stayed to dinner. That dinner would have broken your heart,
Vance.”
“Why?”
“Because it showed in a thousand little ways what the family has
been, and what it has now come to. The china was Sèvres, but much of
it was chipped and broken, and hardly any two pieces were alike. The
table-cloth had once been somebody’s pride, but it had been laundered
and darned until it was like a piece of old lace. The silver was
evidently an heirloom, and it was so worn with much polishing that you
could scarcely make out the engraving. We had chicken--I imagine nobody
in the South ever gets so poor that he can’t have chicken--but the
luxuries were conspicuous by their absence. Do you know what I think,
Vance? I believe that the Westwood House cash assets are measured
exactly by the size of Richardia’s Highmount salary.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Tregarvon, keenly sympathetic. “Richardia
has given me to understand that there is a lot of mountain land, which
is practically valueless now that the tan-bark timber has all been cut
off; but there is nothing to bring an income.”
“Wilmerding has told me something of the judge’s involvement with the
original Ocoee promoters, and the struggle he made to keep his name
good after he and his friends had been frozen out,” Carfax resumed. “He
had recommended the scheme to a good many others, and when the smash
came, he stripped himself bare to make good the losses of his friends,
withholding nothing but a little money he had put aside for Richardia’s
musical education.”
Tregarvon nodded. “That explains something that Richardia said to me
one time when we were talking about people marrying and settling down;
she said, in that perfectly straightforward way of hers, that she would
like to marry, but that she was in debt, and couldn’t marry until after
she had earned enough money to pay herself out.”
“She has said something of the same nature to me,” Carfax admitted.
“But it seems that there were other troubles besides the property
losses. The judge had a son, a year or so older than Richardia. He
was a school-boy at the time of the big smash, but was old enough,
Wilmerding says, to be hot-headed and a bit wild and ungovernable.
Parker, the promoter, was foolish enough to show up here again, after
the _débâcle_; and this boy actually tried to kill him; emptied a
pistol at him, winged him with one of the shots, and then ran away. He
has never been heard from since.”
“That is all new to me,” Tregarvon commented. “I didn’t know Richardia
had a brother. She has never spoken of him to me.”
“Wilmerding says nobody ever speaks of him,” Carfax went on. “Parker
was vindictive, and pushed the assault case. A grand jury found a true
bill against young Birrell, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He
couldn’t be found; has never been found. His son’s disappearance, and
the struggle to keep faith with his friends, made the judge what he is
now, a proud, broken-spirited old hermit who is carrying the heaviest
burden a father can bear--the disgrace of a son.”
“Disgrace?” echoed Tregarvon. “It’s hardly that, is it? Haven’t we been
taught that it is a part of the Southern code that a son should shoot
his father’s betrayer?”
“Oh, yes; that part of it was all right. The disgrace was in showing
the white feather by running away; in not staying to face the
consequences. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose there would have
been any consequences. Any jury that could have been impanelled in this
vicinity at that particular time would have acquitted the boy. The
cowardly streak is what broke the judge’s heart.”
“This story of the boy opens up a bit of new ground,” said Tregarvon
musingly. “I wonder if Richardia doesn’t know where he is? She has
given me the impression, more than once, that she has a deep-buried
trouble of some sort--a trouble that she never shares with anybody.
Haven’t you had the same notion?”
Carfax shook his head.
“She doesn’t need to go that far afield to find her troubles. The
wrecked family fortunes, and a broken old man to shield and comfort
and care for on a music teacher’s wages, are enough to fill all the
requirements, I should imagine.”
“Surely. But as to the money hardship ... you’ll be able to change all
that, Poictiers.”
Carfax rose, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and slowly refilled it.
“You have come to see things in their right light, at last, have you?”
he inquired at the end of the little interval of silence.
“Partly. There is only one light in which they can be seen. I had no
shadow of right to fall in love with Richardia.”
“Wait a minute,” said Carfax in his gentlest tone. “Are you sure it was
real? You know, you have had so many of these--er--these little erotic
explosions in the past----”
“I know,” was the humble admission. “But this was different. You
may say that the difference lay in the fact that it was forbidden,
and point me to the moral twist--as old as the race--that makes the
forbidden thing figure as the one thing altogether desirable. Doubtless
I have the twist, in common with other men: but the difference
remains.”
“You have written to Elizabeth?”
“Yes; I wrote last night at the hotel in Chattanooga.”
“I hope you said all you ought to say.”
“I tried conscientiously to do just that, Poictiers. I’ll confess now
that I didn’t begin to see how dastardly it would look when it was
written out in black on white. But I didn’t spare myself in the least.”
“What kind of an answer do you expect?” Carfax had sat down again and
his face was turned away.
“Honestly, I don’t know. Every word that I have ever told you about the
lack of sentiment between us is true: and yet ... well, Elizabeth is a
woman, after all, Poictiers. Even in a relationship as unsentimental as
ours has been there are limitations--there must be limitations.”
Carfax was gazing now into the heart of the dying fire.
“If the case were reversed, Vance, what would your answer be?”
Tregarvon gave a short laugh. “I can’t imagine the reversal,” he
parried. “Elizabeth is one of those splendid, serene, _élevé_ women who
go through life without ever knowing the meaning of a grand passion.”
“Still, you haven’t answered my question.”
“I am not afraid to answer it. If Elizabeth had told me, even before I
met Richardia, that she had-- Oh, piffle! it’s no use; I can’t imagine
it!”
For a long time Carfax said nothing. But when the final whiff had been
drawn from the bedtime pipes, he ventured a small request.
“I’ve been butting in on your affairs so long that it has come to be
a habit, Vance,” he said, with his quaint smile. “When you hear from
Elizabeth, will you tell me what she says?”
Tregarvon, who had been thinking of many things during the speechless
interval, answered on the impulse of the moment.
“Of course; I’ll let you read the letter, if you care to. Why shouldn’t
I? There’s your candle on the mantel, when you want it. I’m going to
bed.”
XIX
The Human Equation
On the Tuesday after Tregarvon’s return to Coalville the arrival of the
new equipment was the signal for a brisk renewal of the activities.
Tregarvon had spent the day scouring the valley for men and teams, and
by Wednesday morning he had a small army at his command. Many hands
made light work, and by noon the machinery was unloaded, and all was
ready for the beginning of the toilsome haul up the mountain.
“I suppose you know how you are going to do it,” Carfax remarked,
dallying over his luncheon in the office-building dining-room while
Tregarvon was hastily bolting his meal as fast as Uncle William could
serve it. “Where did you learn? The university didn’t teach you, I’m
sure.”
“Experience,” mumbled the working-man. “I learned the trade getting the
other boiler and engine up the hill.”
Carfax was apparently in a reflective mood. “This rough-and-tumble
game down here is making a different man of you,” he offered. “Don’t
you realize the change?”
“I’ve never been afraid of work, if that is what you mean.”
“Yes, I know; but the kind of work that implies the wearing of
corduroys and a flannel shirt, and builds horny lumps on the palms of
your hands, and makes you talk to a mule in the only language a mule
understands--I never used to dream it of you in the old days, Vance.”
“I work for the same reason that other men do--because it’s up to me.
This would be a damned lazy world if necessity didn’t crack the whip.”
“There it is again,” Carfax smiled; “you even let bits of the mule
language come to the table with you. It runs in my mind that Elizabeth
is going to have her hands full recivilizing you.”
“Perhaps she won’t care to. Quite likely she won’t need to. If the
Ocoee should turn out to be a real mine with a dividend attachment,
it is altogether probable that I shall become again what I have been
heretofore--an ornament to polite society and a wart on the body
economic.”
Carfax shook his head as one who refuses to be convinced.
“That will never happen in the wide, wide world, my dear Vance. We may
go around, but we never go back. I have heard you spoken of, in times
past, as a woman’s man: you’ll never be that again.”
“That is the kindest thing you’ve said in a week,” Tregarvon averred.
Whereupon he bolted the final mouthful and left the prophet to his own
devices.
Somewhat later, Carfax joined the working party--but only as an
onlooker. The engine was mounted on heavy trucks, and a string
of twelve mule-spans was inching it up the mountain pike to an
accompaniment of cracking whips and much profanity. Tregarvon was in
the thick of it, and the young purse-holder stood aside and tried to
realize that this sweating, bullying gang boss and man-of-all-work was
the light-hearted _flâneur_ of whom his best friends had predicted
nothing either very good or very bad, and certainly nothing strenuous.
Carfax was given to nice weighings and measurings of the human
atom, and he wondered if the roughing-out process owed anything to
sentimental reactions. Disappointments are rude tonics to some natures,
and defeat in one field may be the germ of victory in another. Being
a good friend, he proceeded to administer an additional dose of the
tonic, dragging Tregarvon aside while the mules were catching their
breath.
“I like your nerve,” he began, with the drawl more than usually
pronounced. “You are taking up the entire road with your beastly
contrivances. How am I going to get past all this clutter with the
motor-car, I’d like to know?”
“That’s your lookout,” growled the man-of-all-work. “The road is mine
while I’m using it.”
“But I have an engagement,” was the mild protest. “I’m to take
Richardia out for a drive after three o’clock.”
“Well, I can’t help that, can I? You’ve got all the time there is for
your courting, and then some. My job is to get this engine up the
mountain.”
Carfax chuckled softly. “In another minute or so you’ll be mistaking
me for one of the mules. I suppose I can take the other road, from
Hesterville; but as likely as not it will make me late--it’s such a
long way around.”
“Can’t you send a note up by one of Tryon’s boys explaining the
situation?”
“Why, my dear Vance! Can it be possible that you are suggesting that I
should break an engagement with a young lady?--you who just a few weeks
ago would have broken your neck to----”
“Cut it out,” was the gruff interruption. “I’m busy now, and you are
delaying the game. Tag along behind us when you are ready to drive up,
and we’ll make room for you if we can.” Then to his farmer helpers:
“Now, then--are you fellows going to let those mules rest all day?
Push ’em into the collars and let’s go somewhere! _Hi!_ you fellows up
ahead--straighten out those leaders!”
The cherubic smile was at its shining best when Carfax turned away and
sauntered back toward the coke-ovens. Human atoms are among the most
interesting things in the world, once the study of them has passed the
elementary stages. Carfax, deep in the contemplation of the subject,
had reached the ovens themselves before he saw two men coming toward
him, stopping at each stoke-door to allow the taller of the two to go
on his hands and knees to inspect the cavern-like interiors. Carfax
recognized the shorter of the pair at once. It was Thaxter.
“Mr. Carfax, shake hands with Mr. Thirlwall, our consulting
engineer--or rather, you’d better not, because his hands are dirty: Mr.
Thirlwall, this is Mr. Poictiers Carfax, Mr. Tregarvon’s friend and
financial backer.” Thus the bookkeeper, when Carfax came up.
Carfax acknowledged the introduction and shook hands with the tall man,
in spite of the warning.
“Delighted,” he murmured; “always delighted to meet any friend of
Mr. Thaxter’s. Tregarvon is up the road a bit, wrestling with a
transportation problem. Shall I send for him?”
Thaxter negatived the suggestion at once. “It isn’t at all necessary to
take him away from his work,” he protested genially. “Mr. Thirlwall was
with us for the day, and we thought we would run down and have a look
at your coking-plant. It’s in rather bad repair, isn’t it?”
Now what Carfax did not know about coking-plants would have filled
volumes, but he was careful not to betray his ignorance.
“There are years of service in these old ovens yet,” he asserted
confidently. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Thirlwall? But as to that, we
should expect to put them in good repair if any one wished to buy them.”
“Mr. Tregarvon is still in the mind to sell?” queried the round-faced
bookkeeper.
“Candidly, Vance doesn’t know his own mind from one day to another,”
said Carfax, parrying nimbly. “But I guess we are all that way, more or
less; up one day and down the next.”
The tall engineer smiled because it seemed obvious that he was expected
to. “You have been having some more bad luck up on the mountain, so Mr.
Thaxter tells me,” he put in. “It seems rather a pity that you and your
friend won’t take the word of those who know, and stop throwing good
money away.”