The Quickening Part 15

"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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 cus.h.i.+ons.

"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 cus.h.i.+on. 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 a.s.sailed 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 G.o.d 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 wis.h.i.+ng you could be with me," she answered, so artlessly as to mollify him instantly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I have been wis.h.i.+ng you could be with me."]

"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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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.