The Quickening Part 14

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 a.s.sert 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-a.s.surance. "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 d.a.m.ned." And you will note the verb in the original--_is d.a.m.ned_, 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 G.o.ds, 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 wors.h.i.+p. So Paul, or whoever it was that wrote the chapter, said: 'He that doubteth is d.a.m.ned 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 G.o.d. 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 d.a.m.ned!"' 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 a.s.sent.

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 s.h.i.+ning 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--"

"Hus.h.!.+" 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-fas.h.i.+oned, 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."