There were still traces of the shocked grin to temper the mask of
feverish anxiety which was slowly displacing it. Everything he had
ever written to Elizabeth about Richardia--everything he had ever
told Richardia about Elizabeth--clamored for instant recollection and
revision in the light of the unnerving fact that the two of them were
here on the Coalville platform, together, as friends of long standing.
The train had moved on, the loungers were dispersing, and Miss Birrell
was leading the way to the venerable surrey.
[Illustration: “Poictiers, I’m a ruined man!”]
“Mr. Carfax has promised me that he will drive you up to Westwood House
to-morrow. I think you will be very sure to come, now,” she said,
after Tregarvon had flogged himself into some livelier sense of the
requirements of the moment. Then she added: “You may come as early as
you please.”
“I think I shall be very ill to-morrow,” he returned gravely, as he
handed her into the carriage. “These sudden shocks are very bad--for
the heart.” Then, while Carfax was helping Miss Wardwell to the front
seat with the judge: “I didn’t believe you could be so wicked!”
“I am not the wicked one,” was the quick retort. “I tried to tell you
last Wednesday; that was why I asked Mr. Carfax to drive down to where
you were working. But you wouldn’t let me.”
“If I am not too ill to come, you must let me see you first, before
I--” Tregarvon was beginning; but Miss Richardia was not willing to be
dragged even into the vicinity of things confidential.
“Hear him!” she said to Miss Wardwell; “Mr. Tregarvon is intimating
that we have made him ill, between us!” Then she spoke to her father:
“Judge Birrell, you will please command these two young gentlemen to
report to you to-morrow at Westwood House--do you hear?”
The judge gave the invitation in due and courteous form, and Carfax
accepted promptly for himself and for Tregarvon. After which the big
dapple gray, mildly urged by his master, began to jog up and down and
the age-worn surrey crept out of sight around the barrier rank of
coke-ovens.
“We might have offered to take them up in the motor,” said Carfax, when
the afterthought had been given time to come to the surface.
“_You_ might have,” Tregarvon returned moodily. “I wouldn’t trust
myself to drive a wheel-barrow in the present state of things.”
Carfax was about to swing himself behind the wheel to drive the car
over to its shed and he paused with a foot on the running-board.
“When it comes to wrestling with the fateful tangles, you haven’t so
much the best of me as you may think you have--thanks to your little
gift of letter-writing,” he remarked darkly.
Tregarvon walked across to the office-building while Carfax was housing
the car, went to his room, and was visible no more until Uncle William
called him to dinner. At table he ate like an ogre--a sure sign of
disturbment--and refused to rise to any of the small conversational
baits flung out by Carfax. But afterward, over the tobacco-jar, there
were things to be said and he said them.
“Poictiers, I believe I’ll write my will to-night and let you witness
it,” he began. “The easiest thing for me to do now is to go and offer
myself to the chief of the bureau of tests as a candidate for the
poison squad.”
“Meaning that Elizabeth is here to answer your letter in person?”
queried Carfax. “There is nothing so very deadly about that, is there?”
“That remark shows how little you know women. I was perfectly frank
with Elizabeth, as I told you, but of course I didn’t write as I should
have written if I had known that she and Richardia were bosom friends.
Now they will proceed to exchange confidences and compare notes--if
they haven’t already done both in their letters to each other. And what
the comparison will leave of me won’t be fit to fling to a starved
puppy.”
Carfax smoked in silence for quite some time before he said: “How they
may stick pins into you, to your face or behind your back, seems a very
inconsiderable factor in the case to me, Vance. The deadly part of it
is that you are still in love--or you think you are--with Richardia
Birrell, while you are going to marry Elizabeth Wardwell.”
“No,” Tregarvon objected, staring gloomily into the fire; “that isn’t
the worst of it. There is a still deeper depth: I can’t help being the
one or doing the other.”
Carfax began to show signs of becoming restive.
“If Elizabeth only didn’t care so much for you....” Then he took a
new tack. “You didn’t tell her all you ought to have told her in
that letter, Vance; if you had, you wouldn’t be dreading the actual
show-down as you are now. Which means that you still have it to do.”
“That is it, exactly,” said the dejected one. “And I’d much rather be
shot full of holes.”
Carfax took another dose of his own prescription of silence. Then
he said: “What is going to come of it?--after you have made her
understand?”
“The only thing that can come of it. While I have insisted, and still
insist, that there has never been any sentiment wasted between us, the
fact remains that Elizabeth is a woman, and she isn’t going to sit down
meekly and say, ‘All right, Vance, dear; never mind,’ when I make her
understand that I have been trying my hardest to make love to another
woman. She has plenty of spirit; she can fairly set you afire with
those brown eyes of hers when the occasion demands it.”
“Well?” said Carfax.
“It will be all over but the shouting, then. She will doubtless tell me
what she thinks of me and break the engagement, there and then--or try
to. But that is the one thing I can’t let her do, Poictiers. She needs
the Uncle Byrd legacy, and I mustn’t let her lose it.”
Carfax got up and reached for the matches and his bed-room candle.
“No,” he said slowly; “you mustn’t let her lose the legacy. To a man
up a tree it would seem that the money is about all she is going to
salvage out of the wreck.” With which unkind daggering of the sinner
whose sin had found him out, he went to bed.
XXIII
At Westwood House
The autumn Sunday afternoon figured as the flawless half of a day of
perfection, with the sky a vivid blue and the hardwood forest of the
mountain top, lately touched by the first sharp frosts, a riot of
gorgeous coloring. On the broad veranda of the ancient manor-house of
Westwood the conversation, which had been desultory at best, languished
in sympathy with the reposeful spell of time and place and the peaceful
surroundings.
With a gently worded phrase of apology to his daughter’s guest, the
judge had pleaded an old man’s privilege, dragging his chair to the
farther end of the veranda and lighting his corn-cob pipe in courteous
isolation. Tregarvon marked the bit of old-fashioned chivalric
deference to Elizabeth, and wondered how many men of his own generation
would be as thoughtfully considerate of the small amenities.
The thought was one of a series emphasizing the gross incredibility
of the theory involving Richardia’s father in the conspiracy against
the Ocoee. That the white-haired, ruddy-faced Chesterfield of Westwood
House might challenge an antagonist, give him the choice of weapons,
and afterward kill him unflinchingly, was easily conceivable. But
that he would descend to the methods of the dynamiter or the midnight
assassin was momently growing more and more unbelievable.
With Elizabeth for his _vis-à-vis_ in her broad-armed veranda
chair, Tregarvon was finding it increasingly difficult to fix his
attention upon the Ocoeean mysteries. For some reasons--the unfamiliar
surroundings, the gap of absence so suddenly and unexpectedly bridged,
or because there was some subtle change in her--his cousin was
singularly reticent. While the talk remained general she took her part
in it; but whenever it threatened to become a dialogue, Tregarvon was
instantly made to feel the raising of the barrier.
Since the guilty flee when no man pursueth, Tregarvon fancied he
need be at no loss to account for Miss Wardwell’s attitude. She had
doubtless received his confession letter--though no mention had been
made of it--and beyond that, she and Richardia had in all probability
been comparing notes. He could feel the presence of the Damoclean sword
suspended above his head, and was looking forward unjoyously to the
moment when chance, or design on the part of Carfax and Richardia,
would give Miss Wardwell her reproachful opportunity.
The dreaded moment came when Miss Richardia, who had been discussing
autumn flowers with Carfax, asked the golden youth if he would like to
see her chrysanthemums and asters in the sheltered posy-patch in the
rear of the manor-house. And when they were gone, Tregarvon was left
alone with his responsibilities.
It was Miss Wardwell who first broke the little silence which followed
the departure of the flower seekers, and her manner was distinctly at
variance with her accustomed attitude of serenity and self-possession;
was rather the manner of one marching reluctantly but firmly up to the
mouth of a loaded cannon.
“Were you tremendously shocked yesterday afternoon when you learned
that I was coming?” she asked.
“It is no use to deny it,” he confessed bravely. “It was a complete
surprise--as you probably intended it to be.”
“No; I didn’t intend it--until just at the last. Richardia has been
asking me to come down, and she knew a week or more ago that I was
coming. I supposed, of course, she would tell you, and didn’t know that
she hadn’t told you until I received her last letter, just as we were
leaving.”
“You came with your father and mother?”
“Yes. Pennsylvania has been building some monuments on the old
battle-fields, and papa is one of the commissioners. He and mamma
didn’t particularly wish to be bothered with me, I imagine, but I had
to come. Have you guessed why, Vance?”
Tregarvon thought he knew the constraining reason very well, indeed,
but he was not quite courageous enough to say so. Instead, he
temporized, as a man will, postponing the instant when the hair-hung
sword must fall.
“I’m the poorest of mind-readers,” he protested. “I can’t even read my
own, at times. But I suppose you have my letter, and you thought it
ought to be answered in person.”
“I have had many letters from you: which one do you mean?”
“The one I wrote a week ago to-day in the hotel in Chattanooga.”
She shook her head slowly. “No; your last letter was written two weeks
ago, and it was postmarked ‘Coalville.’ I remember you said you were
writing after Poictiers had gone to bed.”
Tregarvon groaned inwardly. The thing which he thought had been safely
done had not been done at all; it still remained to be done. He was
bracing himself to take the plunge when she went on hurriedly:
“You were saying just now that you couldn’t read your own
mind--sometimes. I wish I might read it now--this moment, Cousin
Vance!” She was trying to look him fairly in the eyes and was not
succeeding very well.
“Read my mind?--heaven forbid!” he gasped. Then he came to his senses
and tried to repair the terrible misstep. “You know--er--you know what
I mean; a man’s mind is seldom fit for a--a good woman to look into,
Elizabeth.”
“Yours is, always,” she asserted loyally, and he winced as if she had
struck him a blow. “I assure you I haven’t known you all my life for
nothing, Vance. And it was because I had known you as no other woman
ever will, that I was willing to try to make you happy.”
He was wondering dumbly how much of this he could stand when she
continued, quite calmly, though the brown eyes were looking past him.
“As I have said, I had to come: there is a crisis; and with your
letters before me, I couldn’t write. We agreed once, you remember, to
go around the sentimental field instead of going through it; but--but
you haven’t been living up to the spirit of that agreement in your
letters.”
Tregarvon found his handkerchief and mopped his face. The matchless
autumn afternoon had grown suddenly sweltering for him.
“You mean that I’ve been writing you love-letters? I’m a brute,
Elizabeth. I----”
“Please don’t make it any harder for me than you are obliged to,” she
pleaded gently. “If you stop me now, I shall never be able to go on.
I have come all the way down here to say something to you; something
that I couldn’t write, and a thing that every added letter of yours was
making more difficult to say. But one word from you now will make it
easier--if it is the right word. Tell me, Vance; hasn’t this separation
proved to you that we couldn’t--that cousins ought not to marry?”
Slowly it ground its way into his brain that the worst had befallen;
that Elizabeth, really and truly in love with him, now, had guessed,
either from his letters or from Richardia’s, the true state of affairs;
and that womanly pride and affection had brought her to the scene of
action to commit martyrdom.
“Oh, by Jove!--you mustn’t, Elizabeth!” he broke out in a sudden access
of contrition. “I can’t allow you to outdo me in pure generosity that
way! And, besides, there is Uncle Byrd’s money.”
“I have thought of that, too,” she said, quite judicially. “But,
Vance, dear, we must simply rise superior to all the mere money
considerations. Richardia has been telling me about your prospects
here--your mine--and your brave struggle to make something out of
nothing. You will need Uncle Byrd’s money; you are needing it now.
And I--if we--well, I shall not need it, anyhow,” she ended rather
incoherently.
“The Lord help me, Elizabeth!” he groaned, entirely ignoring the
white-haired, white-mustached figure smoking peacefully at the farther
end of the veranda. “I don’t deserve----”
“I know you don’t,” she agreed instantly; “you deserve ... well, you
deserve something quite different. But whatever happens, and whatever
you say, I must do what I came here to do. I--I have made a discovery,
Cousin Vance.”
“Of course you have,” he said desperately. “I knew you would, sooner or
later, though I have tried awfully hard to make myself believe that
there wasn’t any discovery to be made.”
“I know: but seriously, Vance; deep down in your heart, you don’t
really care, do you?”
“Why, Elizabeth! Of course I care. And I have blamed myself straight
through from the first.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t do that!” she protested quickly. “It is all my
fault, or my--no, I simply _won’t_ call it a misfortune.”
“Your fault?” he queried. “You mean because you didn’t suspect it and
choke it off right at the beginning. But I haven’t give you a chance to
do that, have I?”
“I didn’t suspect it,” she said musingly; “I was very far from
suspecting it. It came all at once, like a blow, you know; and then it
was too late to ‘choke it off,’ as you say.”
The man, the true man, in him rose up in its might to buffet him into
the path of uprightness and straightforwardness. “No; it is not too
late, Elizabeth,” he assured her gravely.
“Yes, it is,” she objected with pathetic earnestness.
“No,” he insisted. “We must still make good. Do you know what people at
home will say if our engagement is broken now? They will say that I
made it impossible for you to carry out Uncle Byrd’s wishes; and that I
did it deliberately, to get the money for myself.”
“But you haven’t!” she cried in wide-eyed astonishment. “_I_ am the
guilty one.”
“You?”
“Yes. This is what I came all the way from Philadelphia to say to you,
Vance. Do you remember, one time when we were trying to ‘galvanize,’
I think that was the word you used, ourselves into the sentimental
ecstasy supposed to be the normal condition of engaged people, I told
you jokingly that if I ever found any one whom I could really lo--like
better----”
“_Elizabeth!_”
She nodded, soberly and looked away from him. “Yes; it is true; and I
had to come and tell you. You may despise me; it is your privilege.”
Tregarvon got up and took the necessary step to the veranda end which
gave him the view into the rearward flower-garden. They were there,
Carfax and Richardia, bending together over the chrysanthemums. When he
turned back to face his cousin he was smiling grimly.
“As our cattle-ranching cousin in the West would say, you mustn’t
‘rawhide’ yourself too severely, Elizabeth. Leaving the dollars out of
it--and I’ll find a way to leave them out if I have to throw them to
the birds--I’m getting about what I deserve; which is the glad hand all
around the block.”
“You are bitter, and I can’t blame you,” she said, with something
alarmingly like a sob at the catching of her breath. “But really, at
the very bottom of it all, you don’t care so very much, do you, Vance?”
“Don’t I? I’d be a mighty good specimen of the superman if I didn’t
care. Who is this fellow who, coming after me, is preferred before me?”
“I--I can’t tell you that.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because--oh, you are perfectly savage with me!--because he has had no
right to speak, nor I to listen. He hasn’t spoken; he may never speak.
But that doesn’t make any difference.”
“No,” said Tregarvon wearily; “nothing makes any difference now. But I
told you a moment ago not to reproach yourself too bitterly. I am in
precisely the same sort of a boat myself, Elizabeth--without your good
hope of getting ashore.”
“You? _Vance!_”
The grim smile came again, and he said--though rather in shame than
in malice: “It hurts a little, doesn’t it?--when it is the other way
about. For nearly a week I have been thinking that you knew. I told
you all about it, you know, in the letter I wrote last Sunday night in
Chattanooga; the letter which seems to have gone astray. That is why I
was so slow in getting your meaning: I was looking for you to dagger me
the other way around, you know.”
Miss Wardwell was no longer embarrassed, but she was well-nigh tearful.
“I suppose it is one of those horridly pretty Southern girls in the
school,” she said half-spitefully. “Have you----”
“No,” he hastened to say; “I have been almost as decent as the other
fellow; the fellow you won’t name for me. I haven’t asked her to marry
me.”
“And she?”
“She is going to marry a man old enough to be her father--if she
doesn’t reconsider and marry a young donkey of a millionaire.”
Rucker, following an order which had been given him earlier in the day,
was tooling the yellow car up the weed-grown carriage approach, coming
to drive the two young men back to Coalville. Also, Carfax and Miss
Birrell were returning from the posy-patch. Miss Wardwell stood up and
put her hands into Tregarvon’s.
“I’m sorry and happy and miserable all in the same breath,” she said.
“I shall be here for a few days. Papa and mamma are going over to the
Shiloh battle-field after they leave Chattanooga, and I shall stay
until they come back. You’ll come again, won’t you?”
He was able to smile down into the brown eyes of beseeching. The
stabbed-vanity pain was passing--a little.
“Most certainly I shall come, as often as you can get me an invitation,
and as my job on the Ocoee will permit. I don’t propose to lose my best
cousin just because I happen to have lost a lot of other things.”
This was the key-note of the cheerful tone which he contrived to
preserve throughout the leave-takings. But at the car boarding he let
Carfax have the tonneau to himself, taking the seat beside Rucker for
the better chance it offered for a needed interval in which to bind up
the wounds of the pierced _amour-propre_.
XXIV
The Unknown Quantity
When the yellow motor-car, driven by Rucker with his customary
disregard for speed limitations, had crossed the mountain and was
approaching Highmount and the forking of the wood road leading to the
old negro burying-ground, Tregarvon told the mechanician to stop and
let him out. To Carfax he made plausible excuse: Tryon was watching at
the drilling plant and he might have something to report. It was still
only mid-afternoon, and Tregarvon added that he would walk to Coalville
by way of the tramhead and the short-cut path.
After the car had gone on, Tregarvon kept the first part of his
promise, covering the half-mile briskly. Tryon was at his post, killing
time with the aid of strong tobacco and a railroad man’s clay pipe. He
had relieved Rucker at noon, in accordance with his orders; there had
been no Sunday-afternoon visitors--nothing to disturb the peace of the
day of rest.
Tregarvon listened perfunctorily to the foreman’s report. His object
in delaying his return to Coalville had been only half formed at the
moment of car stopping, but it had nothing to do with checking up the
day-watchman. The talk with Elizabeth and its astounding revelations
had opened new vistas. With Elizabeth calmly proposing to marry some
one else, if the some one else should ask her, a full half of the spur
which had been driving him to fight the Ocoee battle to a finish was
gone.
Under the changed conditions the sensible thing to do, after all, might
be to close with the coal trust’s offer. But before committing himself
finally to this, he was inclined to go to Hartridge with a frank plea
for a word of friendly advice. From what had transpired it was evident
that the professor of mathematics knew much more about the Ocoee and
its mysteries than he had as yet been willing to tell; and though the
episode of the steel cubes seemed to array him definitely on the side
of the enemy, his later warning in the matter of bargain and sale was
unquestionably disinterested, if not actively amicable.
Tregarvon was still considering the half-formed resolve to appeal to
Hartridge when Tryon fished in the pocket of his overalls and brought
up three small cubes of metal, the exact counterparts of the one which
Carfax had taken from the pocket of the schoolmaster’s overcoat.
“I been savin’ these to show you,” said the foreman, handing the bits
of metal to Tregarvon. “What-all d’you reckon they’re meant for?”
Tregarvon permitted the query to go unanswered. “Where did you find
them?” he asked.
“In the pocket of an old coat that Jim Sawyer’s been wearin’ here on
the job. It’s hangin’ up in the tool shanty. I run out o’ matches a
little spell ago, and went to rummagin’ ’round to see if I couldn’t
find some.”
“Sawyer’s coat, eh?” said Tregarvon, struck suddenly alert.
Tryon nodded soberly. “An’ that ain’t all,” he went on. “I got a file
and tried ’em; they’re harder ’n flint--been tempered till you couldn’t
cut ’em with anything softer ’n an emery-wheel. Rucker’d been tellin’
me how the drills went all to the bad that time when you was hung up
before the old b’iler bu’sted. Sawyer’s got a tool-box in the shanty
where he keeps his wrenches and little traps. It was locked, but I
happened to have a key that fitted. What d’you reckon I found?”
“More of these?”
“You’ve hit it plumb centre; a tomatter can about half full of ’em.”
“Tell me all you know about Sawyer,” Tregarvon cut in concisely.
“What I know about him wouldn’t get him a job anywheres where I had the
say-so. Last summer he was workin’ for the C. C. & I. at Whitlow--a
strike-breaker. Before that he was doin’ time at Brushy Mountain, for
some sort o’ crookedness, I dunno what. Maybe I ort to ’a’ told you
this when you hired him, but I allowed you knowed what you was doin’,
an’ it wasn’t none o’ my business. He’s a good drill boss.”
Tregarvon was examining the bits of steel critically. “Tryon, I’d give
something to know just where these came from originally,” he said.
“Maybe I might help out a little on that, too. I served my time in the
shop before I went to work for the railroad. D’you know what kind o’
steel that is?”
“No.”
“It’s some o’ that new-fangled, high-speed tool-steel that you temper
by heatin’ it white-hot and coolin’ it in a fan blast. Jenkins, the
Whitlow blacksmith, was showin’ me a piece of it last Sat’day night at
Tait’s. Looked like it might ’a’ been cut off the same bar with these
little chunks o’ Jim Sawyer’s.”
“In other words, you believe that these bits were made in the Whitlow
blacksmith shop?”
“I ain’t a-sayin’ so, because I can’t prove it. But my boy, Tom, saw
Thaxter, the Whitlow bookkeeper, stop his buggy in the big road two or
three days ago whilst a man came out o’ the bushes to talk to him. The
man was Jim Sawyer. More ’n that, there’s just natchelly only the one
place in the Wehatchee where that steel _could_ come from. They’ve got
it at Whitlow, an’ I don’t reckon there’s ar’ another blacksmith shop
in the valley that ever heerd tell of it.”