The Quickening Part 13

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 'G.o.d 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 princ.i.p.al.

"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?' n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ce 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 sc.r.a.pe? 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 G.o.d. 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 grat.i.tude 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