Chapter XXXV: A Soul in Shackles 378 (4)

From that station to the top of the high, bare crag of righteous condemnation was but a short stage in the wrathful journey; and while he was choking over the meal of strange dishes the zealous under-thought was reaching out into the future.

Some day, when his tongue should be loosed, he would stand before this mocking, smiling, heathenish world with the open Bible in his hand; then it should be taught what it needed to know--that while it was saying it was rich, and increased with goods, and had need of nothing, it was wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.

So it came about that it was the convert of Little Zoar, and not the self-pitying youth searching for his lost boyhood, who escaped finally from the entanglements of Major Dabney's hospitality.

On the way down the cliff path the fire burned and the revival zeal was kindled anew. There had been times, in the last year, especially, when he had thought coldly of the disciple's calling and was minded to break away and be a skilled craftsman, like his father. Now he was aghast to think that he had ever been so near the brink of apostasy. With the river of the Water of Life springing crystal clear at his feet, should he turn away and drink from the bitter pools in the wilderness of this world? With prophetic eye he saw himself as another Boanerges, lifting, with all the inspiring eloquence of the son of thunder, the Baptist's soul-shaking cry, _Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand_!

The thought thrilled him, and the fierce glow of enthusiasm became an intoxicating ecstasy. The tinkling drip of falling water broke into the noonday silence of the forest like the low-voiced call of a sacred bell. For the first time since leaving the mountain top he took note of his surroundings. He was standing beside the great, cubical boulder under the cedars--the high altar in nature's mountain tabernacle.

Ah, Martha Gordon, mother of many prayers, look now, if you can, but not too closely or too long! Is it merely the boy you have molded and fashioned, or is it the convinced and consecrated evangelist of the future, who falls on his knees beside the great rock, with head bent and fingers tightly interlocked, groping desperately for words in which to rededicate himself to the God of your fathers?

Thomas Jefferson had the deep peace of the fully committed when he rose from his knees and went to drink at the spouting rock lip. It was decided now, this thing he had been holding half-heartedly in abeyance. There would be no more dallying with temptation, no more rebellion, no more irreverent stumblings in the dark valley of doubtful questions. More especially, he would be vigilant to guard against those backslidings that came so swiftly on the heels of each spiritual quickening. His heart was fixed, so irrevocably, so surely, that he could almost wish that Satan would try him there and then. But the enemy of souls was nowhere to be seen in the leafy arches of the wood, and Tom bent again to take a second draft at the spouting rock lip.

XII

THE IRON IN THE FORGE FIRE

He was bending over the sunken barrel. A shadow, not his own, blurred the water mirror. He looked up quickly.

"Nan!" he cried.

She was standing on the opposite side of the barrel basin, looking down on him with good-natured mockery in the dark eyes.

"I 'lowed maybe you wouldn't have such a back load of religion after you'd been off to the school a spell," she said pointedly. And then: "Does it always make you right dry an' thirsty to say your prayers, Tommy-Jeffy?"

Tom sat back on his heels and regarded her thoughtfully. His first impulse was out of the natural heart, rageful, wounded vanity spurring it on. It was like her heathenish impertinence to look on at such a time, and then to taunt him about it afterward.

But slowly as he looked a curious change came over him. She was the same Nan Bryerson, bareheaded, barelegged, with the same tousled mat of dark hair, and the same childish indifference to a whole frock. And yet she was not the same. The subtle difference, whatever it was, made him get up and offer to shake hands with her,--and he thought it was the newly-made vows constraining him, and took credit therefor.

"You can revile me as much as you like now, Nan," he said, with prideful humility. "You can't make me mad any more, like you used to."

"Why can't I?" she demanded.

"Because I'm older now, and--and better, I hope. I shall never forget that you have a precious soul to save."

Her response to this was a scoffing laugh, shrill and challenging. Yet he could not help thinking that it made her look prettier than before.

"You can laugh as much as you want to; but I mean it," he insisted. "And, besides, Nan,--of all the things that I've been wanting to come back to, you're the only one that isn't changed." And again he thought it was righteous guile that was making him kind to her.

In a twinkling the mocking hardness went out of her eyes and she leaned across the barrel mouth and touched his hand.

"D'you reckon you shorely mean that, Tom Gordon?" she said; and the lips which lent themselves so easily to scorn were tremulous. She was just his age, and womanhood was only a step across the threshold for her.

"Of course, I do. Let me carry your bucket for you."

She had hung the little wooden piggin under the drip of the spring and it was full and running over. But when he had lifted it out for her, she rinsed and emptied it.

"I just set it there to cool some," she explained. "I'm goin' up to Sunday Rock afte' huckleberries. Come and go 'long with me, Tom."

He assented with a willingness as eager as it was unaccountable. If she had asked him to do a much less reasonable thing, he was not sure that he could have refused.

And as they went together through the wood, spicy with the June fragrances, questions like those of the boyhood time thronged on him, and he welcomed them as a return of at least one of the vanished thrills--and was grateful to her.

Why had he never before noticed that she was so much prettier than any other girl he had ever seen? What was there in the touch of her hand to make him feel like the iron in the forge fire--warm and glowing and putty-soft and yielding? Other girls were not that way. Only a half-hour since, Ardea Dabney had put her hand in his when she had said good-by, and that feeling was the kind you have when you have climbed through breathless summer woods to a high mountain top and the cool breeze blows through your hair and makes you quietly glad and lifted-up and satisfied.

These were questions to be buried deep in the secret places, and yet he had a curious eagerness to talk to Nan about them; to find out if she could understand. But he could not get near to any serious or confidential side of her. Her mood was playful, hilarious, daring. Once she ran squirrel-like out on the bole of a great tree leaning to its fall over the cliff, hung her piggin on a broken limb, and told him he must go after it. Next it was a squeeze through some "fat-man's-misery" crevice in the water-worn sandstone, with a cry to him to come on if he were not a girl-boy. And when they were fairly under the overhanging cliff face of Sunday Rock, she darted away, laughing back at him over her shoulder, and daring him to follow her along a dizzy shelf half-way up the crag; a narrow ledge, perilous for a mountain goat.

This, as he remembered later, was the turning-point in her mood. In imagination he saw her try it and fail; saw her lithe, shapely beauty lying broken and mangled at the cliff's foot; and in three bounds he had her fast locked in his restraining arms. She strove with him at first, like a wrestling boy, laughing and taunting him with being afraid for himself. Then--

Tom Gordon, clean-hearted as yet, did not know precisely what happened. Suddenly she stopped struggling and lay panting in his arms, and quite as suddenly he released her.

"Nan!" he said, in a swiftly submerging wave of tenderness, "I didn't go to hurt you!"

She sank down on a stone at his feet and covered her face with her hands. But she was up again and turning from him with eyes downcast before he could comfort her.

"I ain't hurt none," she said gravely. And then: "I reckon we'd better be gettin' them berries. It looks like it might shower some; and paw'll kill me if I ain't home time to get his supper."

Here was an end of the playtime, and Tom helped industriously with the berry-picking, wondering the while why she kept her face turned from him, and why his brain was in such a turmoil, and why his hands shook so if they happened to touch hers in reaching for the piggin.

But this new mood of hers was more unapproachable than the other; and it was not until the piggin was filled and they had begun to retrace their steps together through the fragrant wood, that she let him see her eyes again, and told him soberly of her troubles: how she was fifteen and could neither read nor write; how the workmen's children in Gordonia hooted at her and called her a mountain cracker when she went down to buy meal or to fill the molasses jug; and, lastly, how, since her mother had died, her father had worked little and drunk much, till at times there was nothing to eat save the potatoes she raised in the little patch back of the cabin, and the berries she picked on the mountain side.

"I hain't never told anybody afore, and you mustn't tell, Tom. But times I'm scared paw 'll up and kill me when--when he ain't feelin' just right. He's some good to me when he ain't red-eyed; but that ain't very often, nowadays."

Tom's heart swelled within him; and this time it was not the heart of the Pharisee. There is no lure known to the man part of the race that is half so potent as the tale of a woman in trouble.

"Does--does he beat you, Nan?" he asked; and there was wrathful horror in his voice.

For answer she bent her head and parted the thick black locks over a long scar.

"That's where he give me one with the skillet, a year come Christmas. And this,"--opening her frock to show him a black-and-blue bruise on her breast,--"is what I got only day afore yisterday."

Tom was burning with indignant compassion, and bursting because he could think of no adequate way of expressing it. In all his fifteen years no one had ever leaned on him before, and the sense of protectorship over this abused one budded and bloomed like a juggler's rose.

"I wish I could take you home with me, Nan," he said simply.

There was age-old wisdom in the dark eyes when they were lifted to his.

"No, you don't," she said firmly. "Your mammy would call me a little heathen, same as she used to; and I reckon that's what I am--I hain't had no chanst to be anything else. And you're goin' to be a preacher, Tom."

Why did it rouse a dull anger in his heart to be thus reminded of his own scarce-cooled pledge made on his knees under the shadowing cedars? He could not tell; but the fact remained.

"You hear me, Nan; I'm going to take care of you when I'm able. No matter what happens, I'm going to take care of you," was what he said; and a low rumbling of thunder and a spattering of rain on the leaves punctuated the promise.

She looked away and was silent. Then, when the rain began to come faster: "Let's run, Tom. I don't mind gettin' wet; but you mustn't."

They reached the great rock sheltering the barrel-spring before the shower broke in earnest, and Tom led the way to the right. Half-way up its southern face the big boulder held a water-worn cavity, round, and deeply hollowed, and carpeted with cedar needles. Tom climbed in first and gave her a hand from the mouth of the little cavern. When she was up and in, there was room in the nest-like hollow, but none to spare. And on the instant the summer shower shut down upon the mountain side and closed the cave mouth as with a thick curtain.

There was no speech in that little interval of cloud-lowering and cloud-lifting. The boy tried for it, would have taken up the confidences where the storm-coming had broken them off; but it was blankly impossible. All the curious thrills foregone seemed to culminate now in a single burning desire: to have it rain for ever, that he might nestle there in the hollow of the great rock with Nan so close to him that he could feel the warmth of her body and the quick beating of her heart against his arm.

Yet the sleeping conscience did not stir. The moment of recognition was withheld even when the cloud curtain began to lift and he could see the long lashes drooped over the dark eyes, and the flush in the brown cheek matching his own.

"Nan!" he whispered, catching his breath; "you're--you're the--"

She slipped away from him before he could find the word, and a moment later she was calling to him from below that the rain was over and she must hurry.

He walked beside her to the door of the miserable log shack under the second cliff, still strangely shaken, but striving manfully to be himself again. The needed fillip came when the mountaineer staggered to the threshold to swear thickly at his daughter. In times past, Tom would quickly have put distance between himself and Tike Bryerson in the squirrel-eyed stage of intoxication. But now his promise to Nan was behind him, and the Gordon blood was to the fore.

"It was my fault that Nan stayed so long," he said bravely; and he was immensely relieved when Bryerson, making quite sure of his identity, became effusively hospitable.

"Cap'n Gordon's boy--'f cou'se; didn't make out to know ye, 't firs'. Come awn in the house an' sit a spell; come in, I say!"

Again, for Nan's sake, Tom could do no less. It was the final plunge. The boy was come of abstinent stock, which was possibly the reason why the smell of the raw corn liquor with which the cabin reeked gripped him so fiercely. Be that as it may, he could make but a feeble resistance when the tipsy mountaineer pressed him to drink; and the slight barrier went down altogether when he saw the appealing look in Nan's eyes. Straightway he divined that there would be consequences for her when he was gone if the maudlin devil should be aroused in her father.

So he put the tin cup to his lips and coughed and strangled over a single swallow of the fiery, nauseating stuff; did this for the girl's sake, and then rose and fled away down the mountain with his heart ablaze and a fearful clamor as of the judgment trumpet sounding in his ears.

For now the sleeping conscience was broad awake and plying its merciless dagger; now, indeed, he knew very well what he had done--what he had been doing since that fatal moment at the barrel-spring when he had fallen under the spell of Nan Bryerson's beauty; nay, back of that--how the up-bubbling of zeal had been nothing more than wounded vanity; the smoke of a vengeful fire of anger lighted by a desire to strike back at those who had laughed at him.

The next morning he came hollow-eyed to his breakfast, and when the chance offered, besought his father to give him one of the many boy's jobs in the iron plant during the summer vacation--asked and obtained.

And neither the hotel on the mountain top nor the hovel cabin under the second cliff saw him more the long summer through.

XIII

A SISTER OF CHARITY

It was just before the Christmas holidays, in his fourth year of the sectarian school, that Tom Gordon was expelled.

Writing to the Reverend Silas at the moment of Tom's dismissal, the principal could voice only his regret and disappointment. It was a most singular case. During his first and second years Thomas had set a high mark and had attained to it. On the spiritual side he had been somewhat non-committal, to be sure, but to offset this, he had been deeply interested in the preparatory theological studies, or at least he had appeared to be.

But on his return from his first summer spent at home there was a marked change in him, due, so thought Doctor Tollivar, to his association with the rougher class of workmen in the iron mills. It was as if he had suddenly grown older and harder, and the discipline of the school, admirable as the Reverend Silas knew it to be, was not severe enough to reform him.

"It grieves me more than I can tell you, my dear brother, to be obliged to confess that we can do nothing more for him here," was the concluding paragraph of the principal's letter, "and to add that his continued presence with us is a menace to the morals of the school. When I say that the offense for which he is expelled is by no means the first, and that it is the double one of gambling and keeping intoxicating liquors in his room, you will understand that the good repute of Beersheba was at stake, and there was no other course open to us."

It was as well, perhaps, for what remained of Tom's peace of mind that he knew nothing of this letter at the time of its writing. The long day had been sufficiently soul-harrowing and humiliating. Since the morning exercises, when he had been publicly degraded by having his sentence read out to the entire school, he had spent the time in his room, watched, if not guarded, by some one of the assistants. And now he was to be shipped off on the night train like a criminal, with no chance for a word of leave-taking, however much he might desire it.

He was tramping up and down with his hands in his pockets, the Gordon scowl making him look like a young thunder-cloud, when one of the preceptors came to drive with him to the railroad station. It was the final indignity, and he resented it bitterly.

"I can make out to find my way down to the train without troubling you, Mr. Martin," he burst out in boyish anger.

"Doubtless," said the preceptor, quite unmoved. "But we are still responsible for you. Doctor Tollivar wishes me to see you safely aboard your train, and I shall certainly do so. Take the side stairway down, if you please."

The principal's buggy was waiting at the gate, and the preceptor drove. Tom sat back under the hood with his overcoat across his knees. The evening was freezing cold, with an edged wind, and the drive to the station was a hilly mile. If it had been ten miles he would not have moved or opened his lips.

As it chanced, there were no other passengers for the train, which was a through south-bound express. Tom was meaning to sit up all night and think; and the most comfortless seat in the smoking-car would answer. There would be the meeting with his father and mother in the morning, and he thought he should not dare to let sleep come between. He had a firm grip of himself now, and it must not be relaxed until that meeting was over.

But the preceptor had already stepped to the ticket window. "That sleeping-car reservation for Thomas Gordon--have you secured it?" he asked of the agent; and Tom heard the reply: "Lower ten in car number two." That disposed of the seat in the smoker and the bit of penance, and he was unreasonable enough to be resentful for favors.

Hence, when the train came to a stand beside the platform, he went straight to the Pullman, ignoring his keeper. But the preceptor followed him to the car step, held out his hand coldly, and said: "I'm sorry for you, Gordon. Good-by."

Tom drew himself up stiffly, overlooking the extended hand.

"'Good-by'--that is 'God be with you,' isn't it, Mr. Martin? I reckon you don't mean that. Good night." And this is the way Thomas Jefferson turned his back on three and a half years of Beersheba, with hot tears in his eyes and an angry word on his lips.

The Pintsch lights were burning brightly in the Pullman, and these--and the tears--blinded him. Some of the sections in the middle of the car were made down for the night, and while he was stumbling in the wake of the porter over the shoes and the hand-bags left in the aisle, the train started.

"Lower ten, sah," said the black boy, and went about his business in the linen locker. But Tom stood balancing himself with the swaying of the car and staring helplessly at the occupant of lower twelve, a young girl in a gray traveling coat and hat, sitting with her face to the window.

"Why, you--somebody!" she exclaimed, turning to surprise him in the act of glowering down on her. "Do you know, I thought there might be just one chance in a thousand that you'd go home for Christmas, so I made the porter tell me when we were coming to Beersheba. Why don't you sit down?"

Tom edged into the opposite seat and shook hands with her, all in miserable, comfortless silence. Then he blurted out:

"If I'd had any idea you were on this train, I'd have walked."

Ardea laughed, and for all his misery he could not help remarking how much sweeter the low voice was growing, and how much clearer the blue of her eyes was under the forced light of the gas-globes. He had seen her only two or three times since that blush-kindling noon at Crestcliffe Inn. Their Paradise goings and comings had not coincided very evenly.

"You are just the same rude boy, aren't you?" she said leniently. "Are there no girls in Beersheba to teach you how to be nice?"

"I didn't mean it that way," he hastened to say. "I'm always saying the wrong thing to you. But if you only knew, you wouldn't speak to me; much less let me sit here and talk to you."

"If I only knew what? Perhaps you would better tell me and let me judge for myself," she suggested; and out of the past came a flick of the memory whip to make him feel again that she was immeasurably his senior.

"I'm expelled," he said bluntly.

"Oh!" For a full minute, as it seemed to him, she looked steadfastly out of the window at the wall of blackness flitting past, and the steady drumming of the wheels grated on his nerves and got into his blood. When it was about to become unbearable she turned and gave him her hand again. "I'm just as sorry as I can be!" she declared, and the slate-blue eyes confirmed it.

Tom hung his head, just as he had in the trying interview with Doctor Tollivar. But he told her a great deal more than he had told the principal.

"It was this way: three of the boys came to my room to play cards--because their rooms were watched. I didn't want to play--oh, I'm none too good;"--this in answer to something in her eyes that made him eager to tell her the exact truth--"I've done it lots of times. But that night I'd been thinking--well, I just didn't want to, that's all. Then they said I was afraid, and of course, that settled it."

"Of course," she agreed loyally.

"Wait; I want you to know it all," he went on doggedly. "When Martin--he's the Greek and Latin, you know--slipped up on us, there was a bottle of whisky on the table. He took down our names, and then he pointed at the bottle, and said, 'Which one of you does that belong to?' Nobody said anything, and after it began to get sort of--well, kind of monotonous, I picked up the bottle and offered him a drink, and put it in my pocket. That settled _me_."

"But it wasn't yours," she averred.

His smile was a rather ferocious grin. "Wasn't it? Well, I took it, anyway; and I've got it yet. Now see here: that's my berth over there and I'm going over to it. You needn't let on like you know me any more."

"Fiddle!" she said, making a face at him. "You say that like a little boy trying, oh, so hard, to be a man. I'll believe you are just as bad as bad can be, if you want me to; but you mustn't be rude to me. We don't play cards or drink things at Carroll College, but some of us have brothers, and--well, we can't help knowing."

Tom was soberly silent for the space of half a hundred rail-lengths. Then he said: "I wish I'd had a sister; maybe it would have been different."

She shook her head.

"No, indeed, it wouldn't. You're going to be just what you are going to be, and a dozen sisters wouldn't make any difference."

"One like you would make a lot of difference." It made him blush and have a slight return of the largeness of hands; but he said it.

She laughed. "That's nice. You couldn't begin to say anything like that the day you came up to Crestcliffe Inn. But I mean what I say. Sisters wouldn't help you to be good, unless you really wanted to be good yourself. They're just comfortable persons to have around when you are taking your whipping for being naughty."

"Well, that's a good deal, isn't it?"

Again she made the adorable little face at him. "Do you want me to be your sister for a little while--till you get out of this scrape? Is that what you are trying to say?"

He took heart of grace, for the first time in three bad days. "Say, Ardea; I'm hunting for sympathy; just as I used to a long time ago. But you mustn't mix up with me. I'm not worth it."

"Oh, I suppose not; no boy is. But tell me; what are you going to do when you get back to Paradise?"

"Why--I don't know; I haven't thought that far ahead; go to work in the iron plant and be a mucker all the rest of my life, I reckon."

"How silly! You are nearly eighteen, now, aren't you?--and about six feet tall?"

"Both," he said briefly.

"And all the way along you've been meaning to be a minister?"

He gritted his teeth. "That's all over, now; I reckon it's been over for a long time."

"That is more serious. Does your mother know?"

He shook his head.

"She mustn't, Tom; it will just break her heart."

"As if I didn't know!" he said bitterly. "But, Ardea, I haven't been quite square with you. The way I told it about the cards and the whisky you might think--"

"I know what you are going to say. But it needn't make any all-the-time difference, need it? You've been backsliding--isn't that what you call it?--but now you are sorry, and--"

"No; that's the worst of it. I'm not sorry, the way I ought to be. Besides, after what I've been these last two years--but you can't understand; it would just be mockery--mocking God. I told you I wasn't worth your while."

She smiled gravely. "You are such a boy, Tom. Don't you know that all through life you'll have two kinds of friends: those who will stand by you because they won't believe anything bad about you, and those who will take you for just what you are and still stand by you?"

He scowled thoughtfully at her. "Say, Ardea; I'd just like to know how old you are, anyhow! You say things every once in a while that make me feel as if I were a little kid in knee-breeches."

She laughed in his face. "That is the rudest thing you've said yet! But I don't mind telling you--since I'm to be your sister. I'll be seventeen a little while after you're eighteen."

"Haven't you ever been foolish, like other girls?" he asked.

She laughed again, more heartily than ever. "They say I'm the silliest tomboy in our house, at Carroll. But I have my lucid intervals, I suppose, like other people, and this is one of them. I am going to stand by you to-morrow morning, when you have to tell your father and mother--that is, if you want me to."

His gratitude was too large for speech, but he tried to look it. Then the porter came to make her section down, and he had to say good night and vanish.

XIV

ON JORDAN'S BANK

Ardea saw cause for increasing satisfaction in Thomas Jefferson the next morning, when they sat together in section nine to give the porter a chance to rehabilitate ten and twelve.

He had grown so much surer of himself in the two years, and his manners were gratefully improved. Also, she was constrained to admit--frank glances of the slate-blue eyes appraising him--that he was developing hopefully in the matter of good looks. The dust-colored hair of boyhood had become a sort of viking yellow, and the gray eyes, so they should not be overcast by trouble shadows, were honest and fearless.

Then, too, the Gordon jaw was beginning to assert itself--square in the angle and broad at the point of the chin, with a deep cleft to mark its center. Ardea thought it would not be well, later on, for those who should find that jaw and chin opposing them. There would certainly be stubborn and aggressive resistance--and none too much mercy when the fight should end.

The improved manners were pleasantly apparent when the train reached South Tredegar. There were twenty minutes for breakfast, and Tom bestirred himself manfully, and as if the awkward day at Crestcliffe Inn had never been; helping Ardea with her coat, steering her masterfully through the crowd, choosing the fortunate seats at the most convenient table, and commanding the readiest service in spite of the hurry and bustle.

Ardea marked it all with a little thrill of vicarious triumph, which was straightway followed by a little pang personal. What had wrought the change in him? Was it merely the natural chivalry of the coming man breaking through the crust of boyish indifference to the social conventions? Or was it one of the effects of the late plunge into rebellious wickedness?

She hoped it was the chivalry, but she had a vague fear that it was the wickedness. There was a young woman among the seniors in Carroll College who was old in a certain brilliant hardness of mind--a young woman with a cynical outlook on life, and who was not always regardful of her seed-sowing in fresher hearts. Ardea remembered a saying of hers, flung out one evening in the college parlors when the talk of her group had turned on the goodness of good boys: "Why can't you be sincere with yourselves? Not one of you has any use for the truly good boy until after he has learned how to respect you by being a bad boy. You haven't been saying it in so many words, perhaps, but that is the crude fact." Was this the secret of Tom's new acceptability? Ardea hoped it was not--and feared lest it might be.

When they were once more in the train, and the mile-long labyrinth of the factory chimneys had been threaded and left behind, Thomas Jefferson gave proof of another and still more gratifying change.

"Say, Ardea," he began, "you said last night that you'd stand by me in what I've got to face this morning. That's all right; and I reckon I'll never live long enough to even it up with you. But, of course, you know I'm not going to let you do it."

"Why not?" she asked.

"Because I'm not mean enough, or coward enough. After a while, if you get a chance to sort of make it easier for mother--"

"I'll do that, if I can," she promised quickly. "But I hope you are not going to break her heart, Tom."

"You can be mighty sure I'm not; if anything I can do now will help it. But--but, say, Ardea, I can't go back and begin all over again. I should be the meanest, low-down thing in all this world--and that's a hypocrite."

"Oh!" said Ardea, catching her breath. Her religion was very much a matter of fact to her, and the thought of Tom--Martha Gordon's son--stumbling in the plain path of belief was dismaying. "Why would you have to be a hypocrite? Do you mean that you are not sure you ought to be a minister?"

"I mean that I don't know any more what I believe and what I don't believe. I feel as if I'd just like to let myself alone on that side for a while, and make everybody else let me alone. It seems--but you don't know; a girl can't know."

She smiled up at him, and the smile effaced some of the trouble furrows between his eyes.

"Last night you were telling me that I seemed ages older than you; what is it that I can't know?"

"Stumpings like mine,--a man's stumpings," he said, with a touch of the old self-assurance. "You've swallowed your religion whole; it's the best thing for a girl to do, I reckon. But I've got to have whys and wherefores; I've always had to have them. And there are no wherefores in religion; just none whatever."

She was plainly shocked. "O Tom!" she urged; "think of your mother!"

"Thinking of her isn't going to change the value of pi any," he rejoined soberly. "I suppose I've thought of her, and of what she wants me to be, ever since the first day I went to Beersheba. The first two years I tried, honestly tried. But it's no use. It appears like we've got so far away from taw that we can't even see what-all we're aiming at. I've been grinding theology till I'm fairly sick of the word, and I've learned just one thing, Ardea, and that is that you can't prove a single theorem in it."

"But there are some things that don't appear to need any proof; one seems to have been born knowing them. Don't you feel that way?"

He shook his head slowly.

"I used to think I did; but now I'm afraid I don't. I can't remember the time when I wasn't asking why. Don't they teach you to ask why at Carroll?"

"Not in matters of--of conscience."

"Well, they don't at Beersheba, when you come right down to it. And when you do ask, they put you off with a text out of the Bible that, just as like as not, doesn't come within a row of apple-trees of hitting the mark. I remember one time I said something about the 'why' to Doctor Tollivar. He sniffled--he _does_ sniffle, Ardea--and said: 'Mr. Gordon, I recommend that you read what Paul says to the Romans, fourteen and twenty-three: "He that doubteth is damned." And you will note the verb in the original--_is damned_, present tense.' Do you happen to remember the verse?"

Ardea confessed ignorance, and he went on, with a lip-curl of contempt.

"Well, the whole chapter is about being careful for the weak brother. The Romans used to eat the flesh of the animals offered in the sacrifices to the gods, and some of the Christian Romans didn't seem to be strong enough or sensible enough to eat it as just plain, every-day meat. They tangled it up with the idol worship. So Paul, or whoever it was that wrote the chapter, said: 'He that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith,' that is, the Christian faith, I suppose, which would teach him that the meat wasn't any the worse for having been offered to a block of wood or stone called a god. Now, honestly, Ardea, what would you think of a teacher who would deliberately cut a verse in two in the middle and make his half of it mean something else, just to put a fellow down?"

"It doesn't seem quite honest," she could not help admitting.

"Honest! It's low-down trickery. And they all do it. Last year when I was going up to Beersheba I happened to sit in the same seat with a Catholic priest. We got to talking, I don't remember just how, and I said something about doubting the Pope's infallibility. Out pops the same old text: 'My son, hear the words of the holy Apostle, Saint Paul--" He that doubteth is damned!"' He was old enough to be my father, but I couldn't help slapping the other half of the verse at him, and saying that we'd most luckily escape because there wasn't any dinner-stop for our train."

The flippant tone of all this disheartened Thomas Jefferson's listener, and a silence succeeded which lasted until the train had stormed around the nose of Lebanon and the whistle was blowing for Gordonia. Then Tom said: "I didn't mean to hurt you; but now you see why I can't go back and begin all over again." And she nodded assent.

There was no one at the station to meet the disgraced one, news of the disaster at Beersheba being as yet only on the way. Thomas Jefferson was rather glad of it; especially glad that there was no one from Woodlawn--this was the name of the new home--to recognize him and ask discomforting questions. But Ardea was expected, and the Dabney carriage, with old Scipio on the box, was drawn up beside the platform.

Tom put Ardea into the carriage and was giving her hand luggage to Scipio when she called to him.

"Isn't there any one here to meet you, Tom?"

"They don't know I'm coming," he explained. Whereupon she quickly made room for him, holding the door open. But he hung back.

"I reckon I'd better ride on the box with Unc' Scipio," he suggested.

"I am sure I don't know why you should," she objected.

He told her straight; or at least gave her his own view of it.

"By to-morrow morning everybody in Gordonia and Paradise Valley will know that I'm home in disgrace. It won't hurt Unc' Scipio any if I'm seen riding with him."

It was the first time that he had been given to see the Dabney imperiousness shining star-like in Miss Ardea's slate-blue eyes.

"I wish you to get your hand-bag and ride in here with me," she said, with the air of one whose wish was law. But when he was sitting opposite and the carriage door was shut, she smiled companionably across at him and added: "You foolish boy!"

"It wasn't foolish," he maintained doggedly. "I know what I ought to do--and I'm not doing it. Everybody around here knows both of us, and--"

"Hush!" she commanded. "I refuse to hear another word. I said you were a foolish boy, and it will be inexcusably impolite in you to prove that you are not."

Tom was glad enough to be silent; and it came to him, after a little, that she was giving him a chance to pull himself together to meet the ordeal that was before him. In all the misery of the moment--the misery which belongs to those who ride to the block, the gallows or other mortal finalities--he marveled that she could be a girl and still be so thoughtful and far-seeing; and once again it made him feel young and inadequate and awkwardly her inferior.

At the Woodlawn gates she pulled the old-fashioned, check-strap signal, and Scipio reined in his horses.

"Are you quite sure you don't want me to go in with you?" she asked, while Tom was fumbling the door-latch.

He nodded and said: "There'll be trouble enough to go around among as many as can crowd in, all right. But I can't let you."

"Still, you won't say you don't want me?"

"No; lying isn't one of the things I was expelled for. When I stand up to my mother to tell her what I've got to tell her, I'd be glad if there was a little fise-dog sniffling around to back me up. But I'm not going to call in the neighbors--you, least of all."

"You are disappointing me right along--and I'm rather glad," she said. And then, almost wistfully: "You are going to be good, aren't you, Tom?"

His look was so sober that it was well-nigh sullen. "I'm going to say what I've got to say, and then hold my tongue if I have to bite it," he answered. "Good-by; and--and a Merry Christmas, and--thank you."

He shut the carriage door and gave Scipio the word to go on; and afterward stood at the gate looking after the great lumbering ark on wheels until it turned in at the Deer Trace driveway and was lost in the winding avenue of thick-set evergreens. Then he let himself in at the home gate, walking leaden-footed toward the ornate house at the top of the knoll and wishing the distance were ten times as great.

When he reached the house there was an ominous air of quiet about it, and a horse and buggy, with a black boy holding the reins, stood before the door. Tom's heart came into his mouth. The turnout was Doctor Williams's.

"Who's sick?" he asked of the boy who was holding the doctor's horse, and his tongue was thick with a nameless fear.

The black boy did not know; and Tom crept up the steps and let himself in as one enters a house of mourning, breaking down completely when he saw his father sitting bowed on the hall seat.

"You, Buddy?--I'm mighty glad," said the man; and when he held out his arms the boy flung himself on his knees beside the seat and buried his face in the cushions.

"Is she--is she going to die?" he asked; when the dreadful words could be found and spoken.

"We're hoping for the best, Buddy, son. It's some sort of a stroke, the doctor says; it took her yesterday morning, and she hasn't been herself since. Did somebody telegraph to you?"

Tom rocked his head on the cushion. How could he add to the blackness of darkness by telling his miserable story of disgrace? Yet it had to be done, and surely no hapless penitent in the confessional ever emptied his soul with more heartfelt contrition or more bitter remorse.

Caleb Gordon listened, with what inward condemnings one could only guess from his silence. It was terrible! If his father would strike him, curse him, drive him out of the house, it would be easier to bear than the stifling silence. But when the words came finally they were as balm poured into an angry wound.

"There, there, Buddy; don't take on so. You're might' nigh a man, now, and the sun's still risin' and settin' just the same as it did before you tripped up and fell down. And it'll go on risin' and settin', too, long after you and me and all of us have quit goin' to bed and gettin' up by it. If it wasn't for your poor mammy--"

"That's it--that's just it," groaned Tom. "It would kill her, even if she was well."

"Nev' mind; you're here now, and I reckon that's the main thing. If she gets up again, of course she'll have to know; but we won't cross that bridge till we come to it. And Buddy, son, whatever happens, your old pappy ain't goin' to believe that you'll be the first Gordon to die in the gutter. You've got better blood in you than what that calls for."

Tom felt the lightening of his burden to some extent; but beyond was the alternative of suffering, or causing suffering. He had never realized until now how much he loved his mother; how large a place she had filled in his life, and what a vast void there would be when she was gone. He was yet too young and too self-centered to know that this is the mother-cross: to live for love and to be crowned and enthroned oftenest in memory.

For days,--days which brought back the boyhood agony of the time when he had believed himself to be Ardea's murderer,--he went softly about the house, sharing, with his father and his uncle, the watch in the sick-room; doing what little there was to be done in dumb hopelessness, and beating at times on the brazen gates of Heaven in sheer despair. There was no answer to his prayers; in his inmost soul he knew there would not be; but even in this the eternal query assailed him. Was it for lack of faith that no whisper of reply came from the unseen world beyond the veil? Or was it only because there was no ear to hear, no voice to answer? He could not tell. He made sure he was doomed to live and die, buffeting with these submerging waves of doubt--doubt of himself on one hand, and of God on the other.

In that time of sore trial, his Uncle Silas's forbearance wiped out many a score of boyish resentment. There was no word of reproach, still less the harsh arraignment and condemnation to which he began to look forward on the day when Doctor Tollivar had announced his purpose of writing the facts to his brother in the faith. But Tom remarked that in the daily morning and evening prayers his uncle spoke of him as a soul in peril, and he wondered that this pointed reference, which once would have stirred the pool of bitterness to its bottom, now left him unmoved and immovable. Later, he knew it was because there was now no pool of bitterness to be stirred; the spiritual well-springs had failed and there was no water in them--either for healing or for penitential cleansing.

The fifth day after his home-coming was Christmas Eve. Late in the afternoon, when the doctor had made his second visit and had gone away, leaving no word of encouragement for the watchers, Tom left the house and took the path that led up through the young orchard to the foot of Lebanon.

He was deep within the winter-stripped forest on the mountain side, plunging upward through the beds of dry leaves in the little hollows, when he met Ardea. She was coming down with her arms full of holly, and for the moment he forgot his troubles in the keen pleasure of looking at her. It had not occurred to him sooner to think of her as other than the girl of his boyhood days, grown somewhat, as he himself had grown. But now he saw that she was very beautiful.

None the less, his greeting was a brotherly reproof.

"I'd like to know what you're thinking of, tramping around on the mountain alone," he said, frowning at her.

"I have been thinking of you, most of the time, and wishing you could be with me," she answered, so artlessly as to mollify him instantly.

"I ought to row you like smoke, but when you say things like that, I can't. Don't you know you oughtn't to go projecting around in the woods all alone?"

"I have always done it, haven't I? And Hector was with me till a few minutes ago, when he took it into his foolish old head to run after a rabbit. Is your mother any better this afternoon?"

"Sit down," he commanded abruptly. "I want to talk to you."

She hung the bunch of holly on the twigged limb of a small oak and sat down on a moss-covered rock. Tom sprawled at her feet in the dry leaves, and for a little while he was silent.

"You haven't told me yet how your mother is," she reminded him.

"She is just the same; lying there so still that you have to look close to see whether she is breathing. The doctor says that if there isn't a change pretty soon, she'll die."

"O Tom!"

He looked up at her with the old boyish frown pulling his eyebrows together.

"She's been good to God all her life; what do you reckon He's letting her die this way for?"

It was a terrible question, made more terrible by the savage hardihood that lay behind it. Ardea could not reason with him; and she felt intuitively that at this crisis only reason would appeal to him. Yet she could not turn him away empty-handed in his hour of need.

"How can we tell?" she said, and there were tears in her voice. "We only know that He does everything for the best."

"Yes; that is what they tell us. But how are we going to _know_?" he demanded.

The girl's faith was as simple and confiding as it was defenseless under any fire of argument.

"I suppose we can't know, in your sense of the word. But we can believe."

"_I_ can't," said Tom fiercely. "I can pretend to; I reckon I've been pretending to all my life; but now I've got to a place where I can't feel anything that I can't touch, nor hear anything that doesn't make a noise, nor see anything that everybody else can't see. From what you've said at different times, you seem to be able to do all these things. Do you really believe?"

"I hope I do," she answered, and her voice was low and very earnest. But she would be altogether honest. "Perhaps you wouldn't call it 'belief unto righteousness,' as your Uncle Silas would say. I've never thought much about such things--in the way he says we ought to think about them. They seem to me to be true, like the--well, like the stars and the universe. You don't think about the universe all the time; but you know it is there, and that you are a little, tiny fraction of it, yourself."

But these were abstractions, and Tom's need was terribly concrete.

"I suppose you mean you haven't been converted, and all that; never mind about that. What I want to know is, did you ever ask God for anything and get it?"

"Why, yes; I ask Him for things every day, and get them. Don't you?"

"No, not now. But are you sure the things you ask for are not things that you'd get anyway?" he persisted.

She was growing a little restive under the fire of relentless questions. There are modesties in religion as in morals,--inner shrines to be defended at any and all costs. In the Crafts part of Thomas Jefferson's veins ran the blood of those who had fought with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, stabling their horses overnight in the enemy's churches. Ardea rose and began to untangle the great bunch of holly.

"I think we had better be going," she said, ignoring his clenching question. "Cousin Euphrasia gets nervous about me, sometimes, as you made believe you were."

He did not look around, or make any move toward getting up. But there was a new note of hardness in his voice when he said: "I thought you'd have to dodge, just like all the others, if I could only make out to throw straight enough. 'Way down deep inside of you, you don't believe God worries Himself much about what happens to us little dry leaves in His big woods."

"Oh, but I do!--that is, I believe He cares. The things you spoke of are things I might easily be deprived of; and I choose to believe that He gives and continues them."

He was quiet for a full minute, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin and his hands tightly clasped over them. When he looked up at her his face was the face of one tormented.

"I wish you'd ask Him to let my mother live!" he said brokenly. "I've tried and tried, and the words just die in my mouth."

There is a Mother of Sorrows in every womanly heart, to whom the appeal of the stricken is never made in vain. Ardea saw only a boy-brother crying out in his pain, and she dropped on her knees and put her arms around his neck and wept over him in a pure transport of sisterly sympathy.