Chapter XXXV: A Soul in Shackles 378 (5)

"Indeed and indeed I will help, Tom! And you mustn't let it drive you out into the dark. You poor boy! I know just how it hurts, and I'm so sorry for you!"

He freed himself gently from the comforting arms, got up rather unsteadily, and lifted her to her feet. Then the manly bigness of him sent the hot blood to her cheeks and she was ashamed.

"O Tom!" she faltered; "what must you think of me!"

He turned to gather up the scattered holly.

"I think God made you--and that was one time when His hand didn't tremble," he said gravely.

They had picked their way down the leaf-slippery mountain side and he was giving her the bunch of holly at the Dabney orchard gate before he spoke again. But at the moment of leave-taking he said:

"How did you know what I needed more than anything else in all the world, Ardea?"

She blushed painfully and the blue eyes were downcast.

"You must never speak of that again. I didn't stop to think. It's a Dabney failing, I'm afraid--to do things first and consider them afterward. It was as if we were little again, and you had fallen down and hurt yourself."

"I know," he acquiesced, with the same manly gentleness that had made her ashamed. "I won't speak of it any more--and I'll never forget it the longest day I live. Good-by."

And he went the back way to his own orchard gate, plunging through the leaf beds with his head down and his hands in his pockets, struggling as he could to stem the swift current which was whirling him out beyond all the old landmarks. For now he was made to know that boyhood was gone, and youth was going, and for one intoxicating moment he had looked over the mountain top into the Promised Land of manhood.

XV

NOËL

The night was far spent and the Christmas dawn was graying in the remotest east when Tom, sleeping in his clothes on a lounge before the fire in the lower hall, roused himself and went noiselessly up stairs to beg his father to go and lie down for a little while.

There was a trained nurse from South Tredegar in charge of the sick-room; but from the beginning the three--husband, brother and son--had kept watch at the bedside of the stricken one. There was little to be done; nothing, in fact; and the nurse would have spared them the nights. Yet no one of the three would surrender his privilege.

His father relieved, Tom mended the fire in the grate; and when he found the nurse dozing in her chair, he woke her and persuaded her to go and rest in the adjoining room, promising to call her instantly if she were needed.

Left alone with his mother, he tiptoed to the bedside and stood for many minutes looking with sorrow-blurred eyes at the still, rigid face on the pillow. It was terribly like death; so like, that more than once he laid his hand softly on the bed-covering to make sure that she still breathed. When he could bear it no longer, he crossed the room to the western window, drawing the draperies and standing between them to stare miserably out into the calm, starlit void. While he looked, a meteor burned its way across the inverted bowl of the heavens, and its passing kindled the embers of the inextinguishable fire.

_And, lo, the star ... came and stood over where the young child was._ The curtains of the void were parted by invisible hands, and down the long vista of the centuries he saw the familiar scene of the Nativity, dwelt on so often and so faithfully in his childhood training that it seemed almost like a part of the material scheme of the universe: the Babe in the manger; the shepherds watching their flocks; the heavenly host singing the triumphant anthem of the ages, _Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace_; the star of Bethlehem shining serenely above a world lying in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Was it all true? or was it only a beautiful myth? If it were true, where was the proof? Not in history, for this, the most wonderful and miraculous thing in all the story of mankind, stands unrecorded save by the pens of those who were themselves under the spell of it. In subsequent marvels and wonder-workings?--he shook his head mournfully. If any such there had been, those impartial witnesses who must have known and should have spoken were silent, and now all the earth was silent: storms rose in their fury and were calmed for no man's _Peace, be still_; earthquakes engulfed pagan and Christian believer alike; all nature was cruel, relentless, mechanical.

Was there nothing then to reach down the ages from that Christmas morning so long ago to make the beautiful first-century myth a latter-day reality? Tom cast about him hopelessly. There was the Church--one and indivisible, if the myth were true. The slow Gordon smile gathered at the corners of his eyes. He remembered a thing his mother had said to him long ago, when, in a moment of boyish confidence, he had told her of the climb to Crestcliffe Inn and its purpose. "Ardea's a dear girl, as the children of this world go, Thomas; she's been right loving and kind to me since we've come to be such close neighbors. But"--with a note of solemn warning in her voice--"you must never forget that she's an Episcopalian, a lost soul, dead in forms and ceremonies and trespasses and sins." So his mother scoffed at Ardea's faith; and Ardea--no, she did not scoff, her contempt was too generous for that; but it was there, just the same. And the Methodists fellowshiped neither, and the Baptists excluded the Methodists, and the Catholics retorted to the Protestant charge of apostasy with the centuries-old cry of "heretics all"! Which of the scores of divisions and subdivisions was the one true indivisible body of Christ? Tom shook his head again. There was no hope of proof in the churches.

And the world? He was only now verging on manhood, and he had seen little of the world. But that little was frankly indifferent to the things which, if they were worthy of belief, should shake an unsaved world to its very foundations. Its people bought and sold, built houses and laid up stores of the things that perish, grasped, overreached, did what they listed. But for that matter, even those who professed to be followers of the Christ, who asserted most loudly their belief in the unproved things, fought and struggled and sinned in common with the worldlings, as far as Tom could see.

He turned from the window and from the vision, and went to stand with his back to the flickering blaze in the grate. It was going to leave a huge rift in his life when this thing, with all its rootings and anchorings in childhood and boyhood, was torn out and cast aside. The mere thought of it was appalling. What would there be to fill the void?

As if the question had evoked them, alluring shapes began to rise out of the depths. Ambition, though he knew it not by name, was the first that beckoned. The craftsman's blood stirred to its reawakening: to know how, and to do things; to compel the iron and steel and the stubborn forces of nature. This would be worthwhile; but better still, he would learn to be a leader of men. The magic vista opened again, but this time it stretched away into the future, and he saw himself keeping step with the ever-advancing march of progress--nay, even setting the pace in his own corner of the vast field. His father was content to follow; he would learn the trick of it and lead. The Farleys were said to be rich and steadily growing richer--not out of Chiawassee Iron, to be sure, but in others of their multifarious out-reachings; very good,--he would be rich, too. What a Duxbury Farley could do, he would do; on a larger scale and with a stubborner patience. He--

It was a mere turning of the head that sent the air-castles tumbling and left him choking in the dust of their dissolution. Something, he fancied it was a noise or some slight movement, made him look quickly toward the bed; and at sight of the still, white face among the pillows, boyish love--God Himself has made no stronger passion--swept doubt, distrust, rebellion, worldly ambition, all, into the abyss of renunciation. He went softly, groping because the quick tears blinded him, to kneel at the bedside. She was his mother; for one thing she had lived and striven and prayed; living or dying she must not, she should not, be disappointed. And if his service must be of the lip and not of the heart, she should never suspect, never, never!

And so it came about that he knelt in the graying dawn of the Christmas morning, with his soul in thick darkness, lifting the prayer that in some form has shaped itself in all the ages on lips of trembling: "O God, if there be a God, have mercy on my soul, if I have a soul!"

XVI

THE BUBBLE, REPUTATION

It was not until late in the afternoon of Christmas Day that Ardea was able to slip away from her guests long enough to run over to apprise herself of the condition of things at the Gordon house.

Tom opened the door for her, and he made her come to the fire before he would answer her questions. Even then he sat glowering at the cheerful blaze as if he had forgotten her presence; and she was womanly enough, or amiable enough, to let him take his own time. When he began, it was seemingly at a great distance from matters present and pressing.

"Say, Ardea; do you believe in miracles?" he asked abruptly.

It was a large question to be answered offhand, but she broke the back of it with a simple, "Yes."

"How do you account for them? Did God make His laws so they could be taken apart and put together again when some little human ant loses its way on a grass stalk or drops its grain of sugar?"

"I don't know," she confessed frankly. "I am not sure that I ever tried to account for them; I suppose I have swallowed them whole, as you say I have swallowed my religion."

"Well, you believe in them, anyway," he said, "and that makes it easier to hit what I'm aiming at. Do you reckon they stopped short in the Apostles' time?"

"I don't know that, either," she admitted.

"You ought to know it, if you're consistent," he said, bluntly dogmatic. "Any answer to any prayer would be a miracle."

"Would it? I never happened to think of it that way."

"It certainly would. You chop a tree in two and it falls; that's cause and effect. If you ask God to make it stand up after it's cut in two, and it does stand, that's a miracle."

"You are the queerest boy," she commented. "I ran over here just for a minute to ask how your mother is, and you won't tell me."

"I'm coming to that," he rejoined gravely. "But I wanted to get this other thing straightened out first. Now tell me this: did you pray for my mother last night, like you said you would?"

Once again he was offending the guardian of the inner shrines, and her heightened color was not all the reflection of the ruddy firelight.

"You can be so barbarously personal when you try, Tom," she protested. And then she added: "But I did."

"Well, the miracle was wrought. Early this morning mother came to herself and asked for something to eat. Doctor Williams has been here, and now he tells us all the things he wouldn't tell us before. It was some little clot in one of the veins or arteries of the brain, and nine times out of ten there is no hope."

"O Tom!--and she will get well again?"

"She has more chances to-day of getting well than she had last night of dying--so the doctor says. But it's a miracle, just the same."

"I'm so glad! And now I really must go home." And she got up.

"No, sit down; I'm not through with you yet. I want to know what you think about promises."

She smiled and pushed her chair back from the soft-coal blaze in the fireplace.

"Don't you know you are a perfect 'old man of the sea,' Tom?"

"That's all right; but tell me: is a bad promise better broken or kept?"

"I am sure I couldn't say without knowing the circumstances. Tell me all about it," and she resigned herself to listen.

"It was at daybreak this morning. I was alone with mother, looking at her lying there so still and helpless--dead, all but the little flicker of breath that seemed just about ready to go out. It came over me all of a sudden that I couldn't disappoint her, living or dead; that I'd have to go on and be what she has always wanted me to be. And I promised her."

"But she couldn't hear you?"

"No; it was before she came to herself. Nobody heard me but God; and I reckon He wasn't paying much attention to anything I said."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because--well, because it wasn't the kind of a promise that makes the angels glad. I said I'd go on and do it, if I had to be a hypocrite all the rest of my life."

"O Tom! would you have to be?"

"That's the way it looks to me now. I told you the other day that I didn't know what I believed and what I didn't believe. But I do know some of the _don'ts_. For instance: if there is a hell--and I'm not anyways convinced that there is--I don't believe--but what's the use of cataloguing it? They'd ask me a string of questions when I was ordained, and I'd have to lie like Ananias."

She rose and met his gloomy eyes fairly.

"Tom Gordon, if you should do that, you would be the wickedest thing alive--the basest thing that ever breathed!"

"That's about the way it strikes me," he said coolly. "So you see it comes down to a case of big wicked or little wicked; it's been that way all along. Did you know that one time I asked God to kill you?"

She looked horrified, as was her undoubted right.

"Why, of all things!" she gasped.

"It's so. I took a notion that I'd be mad because your grandfather brought you here to Paradise. And when you took sick--well, I reckon there isn't any hell deeper or hotter than the one I frizzled in for about four days that summer."

It was too deep in the past to be tragic, and she laughed.

"I used to think then that you were the worst, as well as the queerest, boy I had ever seen."

"And now you know it," he said. Then: "What's your rush? I'm not trying to get rid of you now."

"I positively must go back. We have company, and I ran away without saying a word."

"Anybody I know?" inquired Tom.

"Three somebodies whom you know, or ought to know, very well: Mr. Duxbury Farley, Mr. Vincent Farley, Miss Eva Farley."

His eyes darkened suddenly.

"I'd like to know how under the sun they managed to get on your grandfather's good side!" he grumbled.

Ardea Dabney's expressive face mirrored dawning displeasure.

"Why do you say that?" she retorted. "Eva was my classmate for years at Miss De Valle's."

He made a boyish face of disapproval, saying bluntly: "I don't care if she was. You shouldn't make friends of them. They are not fit for you to wipe your shoes on."

For the second time since his home-coming, Tom saw the Dabney imperiousness flash out; saw and felt it.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Gordon! Less than an hour ago, we were speaking of you, and of what happened at Beersheba. Mr. Farley and his son both stood up for you."

"And you took the other side, I reckon," he broke out, quite unreasonably. It had not as yet come to blows between him and his father's business associates, but it made him immeasurably dissatisfied to find them on social terms at Deer Trace Manor.

"Perhaps I did, and perhaps I did not," she answered, matching his tartness.

"Well, you can tell them both that I'm much obliged to them for nothing," he said, rising and going to the door with her. "They would be mighty glad to see it patched up again and me back in the Beersheba school."

"Of course they would; so would all of your friends."

"But they are not my friends. They have fooled my father, and they'll fool your grandfather, if he doesn't watch out. But they can't fool me."

He had opened the outer door for her, and she drew herself up till she could face him squarely, slate-blue eyes flashing scornfully into sullen gray.

"That is the first downright cowardly thing I have ever known you to say!" she declared. "And I wish you to know, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Gordon, that Mr. Duxbury Farley and Mr. Vincent Farley and Miss Eva Farley are my guests and my friends!" And with that for her leave-taking, she turned her back on him and went swiftly across the two lawns to the great gray house on the opposite knoll.

For the first fortnight of his mother's convalescence Tom slept badly, and his days were as the days of the accused whose sentence has been suspended; jail days, these, with chains to clank when he thought of the promise made in the gray Christmas dawn; with whips to flog him when the respite grew shorter and the time drew near when his continued stay at home must be explained to his mother.

Ardea had gone back to Carroll the Saturday before New Year's, and there was no one to talk to. But for that matter, he had cut himself out of her confidence by his assault on the Farleys. Every morning for a week after the Christmas-day clash, Scipio came over with the compliments of "Mawsteh Majah," Miss Euphrasia, and Miss Dabney, and kindly inquiries touching the progress of the invalid. But after New Year's, Tom remarked that there were only the Major and Miss Euphrasia to send compliments, and despair set in. For out of his boyhood he had brought up undiminished the longing for sympathy, or rather for a burden-bearer on whom he might unload his troubles, and Ardea had begun to promise well.

It was on a crisp morning in the second week of January when the prolonged agony of suspense drove him to the mountain. His mother was sitting up, and was rapidly recovering her strength. His father had gone back to his work in the iron plant, and his uncle was preparing to return to his charge in South Tredegar. With Uncle Silas and the nurse both gone, Tom knew that the evil hour must come speedily; and it was with some half-cowardly hope that his uncle would break the ice for him that he ran away on the crisp morning of happenings.

With no particular destination in view, it was only natural that his feet should find the familiar path leading up to the great boulder under the cedars. He had not visited the rock of the spring since the summer day when he and Nan Bryerson had taken refuge from the shower in the hollow heart of it, nor had he seen Nan since their parting at the door of her father's cabin under the cliff. Rumor in Gordonia had it that Tike Bryerson had been hunted out by the revenue officers; and, for reasons which he would have found it difficult to declare in words, Tom had been shy about making inquiries.

For this cause an apparition could scarcely have startled him more than did the sight of Nan filling her bucket at the trickling barrel-spring under the cliff face of the great rock. He came on her suddenly at the end of the long climb up the wooded slopes, at a moment when--semi-tropical growth having had two full seasons in which to change the natural aspect of things--he was half-bewildered with the unwonted look of the place. But there was no doubt about it; it was Nan in the flesh, a little fuller in the figure, something less childish in the face, but with all the fascinating, wild-creature beauty of the child-time promise to dazzle the eye and breed riot in the brain of the boy-man.

When she stood up with a little cry of pleased surprise, the dark eyes lighting quick joy-fires, and the welcoming blush mounting swiftly to neck and cheek, Tom thought she was the most alluring thing he had ever looked on. Yet the bottom stone in the wall of recrudescent admiration was the certainty that he had found a sympathetic ear.

"Did you know I was coming? Were you waiting for me, Nan?" he bubbled, gazing into the great black eyes as eagerly as a freed dog plunges into the first pool that offers.

"How could I be knowin' to it?" she asked, taking him seriously, or appearing to. "I nev' knowed school let out this time o' year."

"It's let out for me, Nan," he said meaningly. "I came home--for good--nearly three weeks ago. My mother has been sick. Didn't you hear of it?"

She shook her head gravely.

"I hain't been as far as Paradise sence paw and me moved back from Pine Knob, two months ago. I don't hear nothin' any more."

In times long past, Tom, valley-born and of superior clay, used to be scornful of the mountain dialect. Now, on Nan's lips, it charmed him. It was blessedly reminiscent of the care-free days of yore.

"Say, Nan; I hope you haven't got to hurry home," he interposed, when she stooped to lift the overflowing bucket. "I want to talk to you--to tell you something."

She looked up quickly, and there were scrolls unreadable in the black eyes.

"Air you a man now, Tom-Jeff, or on'y a boy like you used to be?" she asked.

Tom squared his broad shoulders and laughed.

"I'm big enough to be in my own way a good deal of the time. I believe I could muddy Sim Cantrell's back for him now, at arm-holts."

But there was still a question in the black eyes.

"Where's your preacher's coat, Tom-Jeff? I was allowin' you'd be wearin' it nex' time we met up."

"I reckon there isn't going to be any preacher's coat for me, Nan; that's one of the things I want to talk to you about. Let's go over yonder and sit down in the sun."

The place he chose for her was a flat stone half embedded in the up-climbing slope beyond the great boulder. She sat facing the path and the spring, listening, while Tom, stretched luxuriously on a bed of dry leaves at her feet, told her what had befallen; how he had been turned out of Beersheba, and what for; how, all the former things having passed away, he was torn and distracted in the struggle to find a footing in the new order.

In the midst of it he had a feeling that she was only dimly apprehending; that some of his keenest pains--most of them, perhaps--did not appeal to her. But there was comfort in her bodily presence, in the listening ear. It was a shifting of the burden in some sort, and there be times when the humblest pack animal may lighten a king's load.

His fears touching her understanding, or her lack of it, were confirmed when he had reached a stopping-place.

"They-all up yonder in that school where you was at hain't got much sense, it looks like to me," was her comment. "You're a man growed now, Tom-Jeff, and if you want to play cards or drink whisky, what-all business is it o' their'n?"

He smiled at her elemental point of view; laughed outright when the significance of it struck him fairly. But it betokened allegiance of a kind to gladden the heart of the masculine tyrant, and he rolled the declaration of fealty as a sweet morsel under his tongue.

"You stand by your friends, right or wrong, don't you, girl?" he said, in sheerest self-gratulation. "That's what I like in you. You asked me a little while back if I was a man or a boy; I believe you could make a man of me, Nan, if you'd try."

He was looking up into her face as he said it and the change that came over her lighted a strange fire in his blood. The black eyes kindled it, and the red lips, half parted, blew it into a blaze. His face flushed and he broke the eye-hold and looked down. In their primal state, when Nature mothered the race, the man was less daring than the woman.

"If you'd said that two year ago," she began, in a half-whisper that melted the marrow in his bones. "But you was on'y a boy then; and now I reckon it's too late."

"You mean that you don't care for me any more, Nan? I know better than that. You'd back me if I had come up here to tell you that I'd killed somebody. Wouldn't you, now?"

He waited overlong for his answer. There were sounds in the air: a metallic tapping like the intermittent drumming of a woodpecker mingled with a rustling as of some small animal scurrying back and forth over the dead leaves. The girl leaned forward, listening intently. Then three men appeared in the farther crooking of the spring path, and at the first glimpse of them she slipped from the flat stone to cower behind Tom, trembling, shaking with terror.

"Hide me, Tom-Jeff! Oh, for God's sake, hide me, quick!" she panted. "Lookee there!"

He looked and saw the three men walking slowly up the pipe-line which drained the barrel-spring. They were too far away to be recognizable to him, and since they were stopping momently to examine the pipe, there was good hope of an escape unseen.

Tom waited breathless for the propitious instant when the tapping of the pipe-men's hammers should drown the noise of a dash for effacement. When it came, he flung himself backward, whipped Nan over his head and out of the line of sight as if she had been feather-light, and rolled swiftly after her.

Before she could rise he had picked her up and was dragging her to the climbing point under the lip of the boulder cave.

"Up with you!" he commanded, making a step of his hand. "Give me your foot and then climb to my shoulder--quick!" But she drew back.

"Oh, I can't!" she gasped. "I--I'm too skeered!"

Tom's brows went together in the Gordon frown. Bone-meltings and blood-firings apart, he was neither a fool nor a dastard, and he was older now than on that day when the storm had driven them to take refuge in the heart of the great rock. And since he had decided that the cavern was only big enough for one, he had meant to put Nan up, going himself to meet the intruders to make sure that they should not discover her. But her trembling fit--a new and curious thing in the girl who used to make his flesh creep with her reckless daring--spoiled the plan.

"Can't you climb up?" he demanded.

She shook her head despairingly, and he lost no time in trying to persuade her. Jumping to catch the lip of the cavern's mouth, he ascended cat-like, and a moment later he had drawn her up after him.

"I'd like to know what got the matter with you all at once," he said severely, when they were crowded together in the narrow rock cell; and then, without waiting for her answer: "You stay here while I drop down and keep those fellows away from this side of things."

But it was too late. The men were already at the barrel-spring, as an indistinct murmur of voices testified. The girl had another trembling fit when she heard them, and Tom's wonder was fast lapsing into contempt or something like it.

"Oh-h-h!" she shuddered. "Do you reckon they saw us, Tom-Jeff?"

"I shouldn't wonder," he whispered back unfeelingly. "We could see them plain enough."

"He'll kill me, for shore, Tom-Jeff! O God!"

Tom's lip curled. The wolf does not mate with the jackal. Not all her beauty could atone for such spiritless cringing. Love would have pitied her, but passion is not moved by qualities opposite to those which have evoked it.

"Then you know them--or one of them, at least," he said. "Who is he?"

She would not tell; and since the murmur of voices was still plainly audible, she begged in dumb-show for silence. Whereupon Tom shut his mouth and did not open it again until the sound of the voices had died away and the fainter tappings of the hammers on the pipe-line advertised the retreat of the inspection party.

"They're gone now," he said shortly. "Let's get out of here before we stifle."

But a second time ill chance intervened. Tom had a leg over the brink and was looking for a soft leaf bed to drop into, when the baying of a hound broke on the restored quiet of the mountain side. "Oh, dang it all!" said Tom heartily, and drew back into hiding.

The girl's ague fit of fear had passed, and she seemed less concerned about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is the way Tom's thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in Nan's place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the Dabneys would never run and cower and beg to be hidden at the possible cost of her good name. And Nan's word did not help matters.

"What makes you so cross to me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked, when he drew back with the impatient exclamation. "I hain't done nothin' to make you let on like you hate me, have I?"

"I don't hate you," said Tom, frowning. "If I did, I shouldn't care." Just then the hound burst out of the laurel thicket on the brow of the lower slope, running with its nose to the ground, and he added: "That's Japhe Pettigrass's dog; I hope to goodness he isn't anywhere behind it."

But the horse-trader was behind the dog; so close behind that he came out on the continuation of the pipe-line path while the hound was still nosing among the leaves where Tom had lain sunning himself and telling his tale of woe.

"Good dog--seek him! What is it, old boy?" Pettigrass came up, patted the hound, and sat down on the flat stone to look on curiously while the dog coursed back and forth among the dead leaves. "Find him, Cæsar; find him, boy!" encouraged Japheth; and finally the hound pointed a sensitive nose toward the rift in the side of the great boulder and yelped conclusively.

"D'ye reckon he climm up thar', Cæsar?" Pettigrass unfolded his long legs and stood up on the flat stone to attain an eye-level with the interior of the little cavern. Tom crushed Nan into the farthest cranny, and flattened himself lizard-like against the nearer side wall. The horse-trader looked long and hard, and they could hear him still talking to the dog.

"You're an old fool, Cæsar--that's about what you are--and Solomon allowed thar' wasn't no fool like an old one. But you needn't to swaller that whole, old boy; I've knowed some young ones in my time--sometimes gals, sometimes boys, sometimes _both_. But thar' ain't no 'possum up yonder, Cæsar; you've flew the track this time, for certain. Come on, old dog; let's be gettin' down the mountain."

The baying dog and the whistling man were still within hearing when Tom swung Nan lightly to the ground and dropped beside her. No word was spoken until she had emptied and refilled her bucket at the spring, then Tom said, with the bickering tang still on his tongue:

"Say, Nan, I want to know who it is that's going to kill you if he happens to find you talking to me."

She shook her head despondently. "I cayn't nev' tell you that, Tom-Jeff."

"I'd like to know why you can't."

"Because he'd shore kill me then."

"Then I'll find out some other way."

"What differ' does it make to you?" she asked; and again the dark eyes searched him till he was fain to look away from her.

"I reckon it doesn't make any difference, if you don't want it to. But one time you were willing enough to tell me your troubles, and--"

"And I'll nev' do it nare 'nother time; never, _never_. And let me tell you somethin' else, Tom-Jeff Gordon: if you know what's good for you, don't you nev' come anigh me again. One time we usen to be a boy and a girl together; you're nothin' but a boy yet, but I--oh, God, Tom-Jeff--I'm a woman!"

And with that saying she snatched her bucket and was gone before he could find a word wherewith to match it.

XVII

ABSALOM, MY SON!

Three days after the episode at the barrel-spring, Tom went afield again, this time to gather plunging courage for the confession to his mother--a thing which, after so many postponements, could be put off no longer.

It was more instinct than purpose that led him to avoid the mountain. Thinking only of the crying need for solitude, he crossed the pike and the creek and rambled aimlessly for an hour or more over that farther hill ground beyond the country-house colony where he had once tried to break the Dabney spirit in a weary, bedraggled little girl with colorless lips and saucer-like eyes.

When he recrossed the stream, at a point some distance above the boy-time perch pools, the serving foot-log chanced to be that used by the Little Zoar folk coming from beyond the boundary hills. Following the windings of the path he presently came out in the rear of the weather-beaten, wooden-shuttered church standing, blind-eyed and silent, in week-day desertion in the midst of its groving of pines.

The spot was rife with memories, and Tom passed around the building to the front, treading softly as on hallowed ground. Whatever the future might hold for him, there would always be heart-stirring recollections to cluster about this frail old building sheltered by the whispering pines.

How many times he had sat on the steps in the door-opening days of boyhood, looking out across the dusty pike and up to the opposing steeps of Lebanon lifting the eastward horizon half-way to the zenith! Leg-weariness, and a sudden desire to live over again thus much of the past turning him aside, he went to sit on the highest of the three steps, with the brooding silence for company and the uplifted landscape to revamp the boyhood memories.

The sun had set for Paradise Valley, but his parting rays were still volleying in level lines against the great gray cliffs at the top of Lebanon, silvering the bare sandstone, blackening the cedars and pines by contrast, and making a fine-lined tracery, blue on gray, of the twigs and leafless branches of the deciduous trees. Off to the left a touch of sepia on the sky-line marked the chimneys of Crestcliffe Inn, and farther around, and happily almost hidden by the shouldering of the hills, a grayer cloud hung over the industries at Gordonia.

Nearer at hand were the wooded slopes of the Dabney lands--lordly forests culled and cared for through three generations of land-lovers until now their groves of oaks and hickories, tulip-trees and sweet-and black-gums were like those the pioneers looked on when the land was young.

Thomas Jefferson had the appreciative eye and heart of one born with a deep and abiding love of the beautiful in nature, and for a time the sunset ravishment possessed him utterly. But the blurring of the fine-lined traceries and the fading of the silver and the gray into twilight purple broke the spell. The postponed resolve was the thing present and pressing. His mother was as nearly recovered as she was ever likely to be, and his uncle would be returning to South Tredegar in the morning. The evil tale must be told while there was yet one to whom his mother could turn for help and sympathy in her hour of bitter disappointment.

He was rising from his seat on the church step when he heard sounds like muffled groans. Recovering quickly from the first boyish startle of fear oozing like a cool breeze blowing up the back of his neck, he saw that the church door was ajar. By cautiously adding another inch to the aperture he could see the interior of the building, its outlines taking shape when his eyes had become accustomed to darkness relieved only by the small fan-light over the door. Some one was in the church: a man, kneeling, with clasped hands uplifted, in the open space fronting the rude pulpit. Tom recognized the voice and withdrew quickly. It was his Uncle Silas, praying fervently for a lost sheep of the house of Israel.

In former times, with grim rebellion gripping him as it gripped him now, Tom would have run away. But there was a prompting stronger than rebellion: a sudden melting of the heart that made him remember the loving-kindnesses, and not any of the austerities, of the man who was praying for him, and he sat down on the lowest step to wait.

The twilight was glooming to dusk when Silas Crafts came out of the church and locked the door behind him. If he were surprised to find Tom waiting for him, he made no sign. Neither was there any word of greeting passed between them when he gathered his coat tails and sat down on the higher step, self-restraint being a heritage which had come down undiminished from the Covenanter ancestors of both. A little grayer, a little thinner, but with the deep-set eyes still glowing with the fires of utter convincement and the marvelous voice still unimpaired, Silas Crafts would have refused to believe that the passing years had changed him; yet now there was kinsman love to temper solemn austerity when he spoke to the lost sheep--as there might not have been in the sterner years.

"The way of the transgressor is hard, grievously hard, Thomas. I think you are already finding it so, are you not?"

Tom shook his head slowly.

"That doesn't mean what it used to, to me, Uncle Silas; nothing means the same any more. It's just as if somebody had hit that part of me with a club; it's all numb and dead. I'm sure of only one thing now: that is, that I'm not going to be a hypocrite after this, if I can help it."

The man put his hand on the boy's knee.

"Have you been that all along, Thomas?"

"I reckon so,"--monotonously. "At first it was partly scare, and partly because I knew what mother wanted. But ever since I've been big enough to think, I've been asking why, and, as you would say, doubting."

Silas Crafts was silent for a moment. Then he said:

"You have come to the years of discretion, Thomas, and you have chosen death rather than life. If you go on as you have begun, you will bring the gray hairs of your father and mother in sorrow to the grave. Leaving your own soul's salvation out of the question, can you go on and drag an upright, honorable name in the dust and mire of degradation?"

"No," said Tom definitely. "And what's more, I don't mean to. I don't know what Doctor Tollivar wrote you about me, and it doesn't make any difference now. That's over and done with. You haven't been seeing me every day for these three weeks without knowing that I'm ashamed of it."

"Ashamed of the consequences, you mean, Thomas. You are not repentant."

"Yes, I am, Uncle Silas; though maybe not in your way. I don't allow to make a fool of myself again."

The preacher's comment was a groan.

"Tom, my boy, if any one had told me a year ago that a short twelvemonth would make you, not only an apostate to the faith, but a shameless liar as well--"

Tom started as if he had been struck with a whip.

"Hold on, Uncle Silas," he broke in hardily. "That's mighty near a fighting word, even between blood kin. When have you ever caught me in a lie?"

"Now!" thundered the accusing voice; "this moment! You have been giving me to understand that your sinful rebellion at Beersheba was the worst that could be charged against you. Answer me: isn't that what you want me to believe?"

"I don't care whether you believe it or not. It's so."

"It is not so. Here, at your own home, when your mother had just been spared to you by the mercies of the God whose commandments you set at naught, you have been wallowing in sin--in crime!"

Tom locked his clasped fingers fast around his knees and would not open the flood-gates of passion.

"If I can sit here and take that from you, it's because it isn't so," he replied soberly.

Silas Crafts rose, stern and pitiless.

"Wretched boy! Out of your own mouth you shall be convicted. Where were you on Wednesday morning?"

Tom had to think back before he could place the Wednesday morning, and his momentary hesitation was immediately set down to the score of conscious guilt.

"I was at home most of the time; between ten o'clock and noon I was on the mountain."

"Alone?"

"No; not all of the time."

"You say well. There were three of you: a hardened, degraded boy, a woman no less wicked and abandoned, and the devil who tempted you."

The flood-gates of passion would hold no longer.

"It's a lie!" he denied hotly. "I just happened to meet Nan Bryerson at the spring under the big rock, and--"

"Well, go on," said the inexorable voice.

Tom choked in a sudden fit of rage and helplessness. He saw how incredible the simple truth would sound; how like a clumsy equivocation it must appear to one who already believed the worst of him. So he took refuge in the last resort alike of badgered innocence and hardened guilt.

"I don't have to defend myself!" he burst out. "If you can believe I'm that low-down, you're welcome to!" Then, abruptly: "I reckon we'd better be going on home; they'll be waiting dinner for us at the house."

He got on his feet with that, but the accuser was still confronting him, with the dark eyes glowing and a monitory finger pointed to detain him.

"Not yet, Thomas Gordon; there is a duty laid on me. I had hoped and prayed that I might find you repentant; you are not repentant."

"No," said Tom, and he confirmed it with an oath in sheer bravado.

"Peace, miserable boy! God is not mocked. Your father has a letter from Doctor Tollivar; the doors of Beersheba are open to you again. I had hoped--" The pause was not for effect. It was merely that the man and the kinsman in Silas Crafts had throttled the righteous judge. "It breaks my heart, Thomas, but I must say it. You have put it out of your power to say with the Psalmist, 'I will wash mine hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar, O Lord.' You must give up all thoughts of going back to Beersheba."

"Don't trouble yourself," said Tom, with more bravado. "I wouldn't go back there if it was the only place on earth." Then suddenly: "Who was it that told on me, Uncle Silas?"

"Never mind about that. It was one who could have no object in misstating the fact--which you have not denied. Let us go home."

The mile walk down the pike, lying white and ghostly under the starlight, was paced in silence, man and boy striding side by side and each busy with his own thoughts. As they were passing the Deer Trace gates a loose-jointed figure loomed black against the palings, and the voice of Japheth Pettigrass said:

"Why, howdy, Brother Silas! Thought ye'd gone back to South Tredegar. When are ye comin' out to Little Zoar ag'in to give us another o' them old-fashioned, spiritual times o' refreshin' from the presence of the Lord?"

Silas Crafts turned short on the scoffer.

"Why do you ask that, Japheth Pettigrass? The Lord will deal with you, one day."

"Yes, I reckon so; that's what makes me say what I does. There's a heap o' sinners left round here, yit, Brother Silas. There's the Major, for one, and I know you're always countin' me in for another. I dunno but you might snatch me as a brand from the burnin', if you could make out to try it one more lap around the you'se. I been thinkin' right p'intedly about--"

But the preacher had cut in with a curt "Good night," and was gone, with his broad-shouldered nephew at his heels; and the horse-trader went on, with the stars for his audience.

"Look at that, now, will ye? Old Brother Silas is gettin' right smart tetchy with the passin' of the years; he is, so. But he's a powerful preacher. If anybody ever gits me for a star in their crown, it's Brother Silas ag'inst the field, even money up."

Pettigrass turned and was groping for the gate latch when a hand fell on his shoulder, and a clutch that was more than half a blow twirled him about to face the roadway. He was doubling his fists for defense when he saw who his assailant was.

"Why, Tom-Jeff! what's ailin' ye?" he began; but Tom broke in with gaspings of rage.

"Japhe Pettigrass, what did you think you saw last Wednesday forenoon up yonder at Big Rock Spring on the mountain? Tell it straight, this time, or by the God you don't believe in, I'll dig the truth out of you with my bare hands!"

"Sho, now, Tom-Jeff; don't you git so servigrous over nothin'. I didn't see nothin' but a couple o' young fly-aways playin' 'possum in a hole in the big rock. And I'll leave it to you if I didn't call Cæsar off and go my ways, jes' like I'd like to be done by."

"Yes," snarled Tom, dog-mad and furious in this second submergence of the wave of wrath. "Yes; and then you came straight down here and told my uncle!" The hand he had been holding behind him came to the front, clutching a stone snatched up from the metaling of the pike as he ran. "If I should break your face in with this, Japhe Pettigrass, it wouldn't be any more than you've earned!"

"By gravy! _I_ tell Brother Silas on you, Tom-Jeff? You show me the man 'at says I done any such low-down thing as that, and I'll frazzle a fifty-dollar hawsswhip out on his ornery hide--I will, so. Say, boy; you don't certain'y believe that o' me, do ye?"

"I don't want to believe it of you, Japhe," quavered Tom, as near to tears as the pride of his eighteen years would sanction. "But somebody saw and told, and made it a heap worse than it was." He leaned over the top of the wall and put his face in the crook of his elbow, being nothing better than a hurt child, for all his bigness.

"Well, now; I wouldn't let a little thing like that gravel me, if I was you, Tom-Jeff," said Pettigrass, turned comforter. "Nan's a mighty pretty gal, and you ort to be willin' to stand a little devilin' on her account--more especially as you've--"

Tom put up his arm as if to ward a blow.

"Don't you say it, Japhe, or I'll go mad again," he broke out.

"I ain't sayin' nothin'. But who do you reckon it was told on you? Was there anybody else in the big woods that mornin'?"

"Yes; there were three men testing the pipe-line. We both saw them, and Nan was scared stiff at sight of one of them; that's why I put her up in that hole."

"Who was the man?"

"I don't know. I didn't recognize any of them--they were too far off when I saw them. And afterward, Nan wouldn't tell me."

"Did any of 'em see you and Nan?"

"I thought not. Nan was sitting on the flat rock where you stood and looked into the cave, and when she began to whimper, I flung her over into the leaves and ran with her to the hole."

"H'm," said Japheth. "When you find out who that feller is that Nan's skeered of, you can lay your hand on the man that told Brother Silas on you. But I wouldn't trouble about it none, if I was you. You've got a long ways the best of him, whoever he is, and--"

But Tom had turned to go home, feeling his way by the wall because the angry tears were still blinding him, and the horse-trader fell back into his star-gazing.

"Law, law," he mused; "'the horrible pit an' the miry clay.' What a sufferin' pity it is we pore sinners cayn't dance a little now and ag'in 'thout havin' to walk right up and pay the fiddler! Tom-Jeff, there, now, he's a-thinkin' the price is toler'ble high; and I don't know but it is--I don't know but what it is."

The dinner at Woodlawn that night was a stiff and comfortless meal, as it had come to be with the taking on of four-tined forks and the other conventions for which an oak-paneled dining-room in an ornate brick mansion sets the pace. Caleb Gordon was fathoms deep in the mechanical problems of the day's work, as was his wont. Silas Crafts was abstracted and silent. Tom's food choked him, as it had need under the sharp stress of things; and the convalescent housemother remained at table only long enough to pour the coffee.

Tom excused himself a few minutes later, and followed his mother to her room, climbing the stair to her door, leaden-footed and with his heart ready to burst.

"Is that you, Thomas?" said the gentle voice within, answering his tap on the panel. "Come in, son; come in and sit by my fire. It's right chilly to-night."

Thomas Jefferson entered and placed his chair so that she could not see him without turning, and for many minutes the silence was unbroken. Then he began, as begin he must, sometime and in some way.

"Mammy," he said, feeling unconsciously for the childish phrase, "Mammy, has Uncle Silas been telling you anything about me?"

She gave a little nod of assent.

"Something, Thomas, but not a great deal. You have had some trouble with Doctor Tollivar?"

"Yes."

"I have known that for some little time. Your uncle might have told me more, but I wouldn't let him. There has never been anything between us to break confidence, Tom. I knew you would tell me yourself, when the time came."

"I have come to tell you to-night, mammy. You must hear it all, from beginning to end. It goes back a long way--back to the time when you used to let me kneel with my head in your lap to say my prayers; when you used to think I was good...."

The fire had died down to a few glowing masses of coke on the grate bars when he had finished the story of his wanderings in the valley of dry bones. Through it all, Martha Gordon had sat silent and rigid, her thin hands lying clasped in her lap, and her low willow rocking-chair barely moving at the touch of her foot on the fender.

But when it was over; when Tom, his voice breaking in spite of his efforts to control it, told her that he could walk in the way she had chosen for him only at the price a conscious hypocrite must pay, she reached up quickly and took him in her arms and wept over him as those who sorrow without hope, crying again and again, _"O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"_

XVIII

THE AWAKENING

Once in a lifetime for every youngling climbing the facile or difficult slope of the years there comes a day of realization, of a sudden extension of vision, of Rubicon-crossing from the hither shore of joyous and irresponsible adolescence to that further one of conscious grapplings with the adult fact.