The Quickening Part 2

"You stole it, Nan Bryerson!"

"Well, what if I did? You didn't."

He bit into it, and she held him in talk till it was eaten to the core.

"Have you heard tell anything more about the new railroad?" she asked.

Thomas Jefferson shook his head. "I heard Squire Bates and Major Dabney naming it one day last week."

"Well, it's sh.o.r.e comin'--right thoo' Paradise. I heard tell how it was goin' to cut the old Maje's gra.s.s patch plumb in two, and run right smack thoo' you-uns' peach orchard."

"Huh!" said Thomas Jefferson. "What do you reckon my father'd be doing all that time? He'd show 'em!"

A far-away cry, long-drawn and penetrating, rose on the still air of the lower slope and was blown on the breeze to the summit of the great rock.

"That's maw, hollerin' for me to get back home with that bucket o'

water," said the girl; and, as she was descending the tree ladder: "You didn't s'picion why I give you that apple, did you, Tommy-Jeffy?"

"'Cause you didn't want it yourself, I reckon," said the second Adam.

"No; it was 'cause you said I was goin' to h.e.l.l and I wanted comp'ny.

That apple was stole and you knowed it!"

Thomas Jefferson flung the core far out over the tree-tops and shut his eyes till he could see without seeing red. Then he rose to the serenest height he had yet attained and said: "I forgive you, you wicked, wicked girl!"

Her laugh was a screaming taunt.

"But you've et the apple!" she cried; "and if you wasn't scared of goin'

to h.e.l.l, you'd cuss me again--you know you would! Lemme tell you, Tom-Jeff, if the preacher had dipped me in the creek like he did you, I'd be a mighty sight holier than what you are. I cert'nly would."

And now anger came to its own again.

"You don't know what you're talking about, Nan Bryerson! You're nothing but a--a miserable little heathen; my mother said you was!" he cried out after her.

But a back-flung grimace was all the answer he had.

III

OF THE FATHERS UPON THE CHILDREN

Thomas Jefferson's grandfather, Caleb the elder, was an old man before his son, Caleb the younger, went to the wars, and he figured in the recollections of those who remembered him as a grim, white-haired octogenarian who was one day carried home from the iron-furnace which he had built, and put to bed, dead in every part save his eyes. The eyes lived on for a year or more, following the movements of the sympathetic or curious visitor with a quiet, divining gaze; never sleeping, they said--though that could hardly be--until that last day of all when they fixed themselves on the wall and followed nothing more in this world.

Caleb, the son, was well past his first youth when the Civil War broke out; yet youthful ardor was not wanting, nor patriotism, as he defined it, to make him the first of the Paradise folk to write his name on the muster-roll of the South. And it was his good fortune, rather than any lack of battle hazards, that brought him through the four fighting years to the Appomattox end of that last running fight on the Petersburg and Lynchburg road in which, with his own hands, he had helped to destroy the guns of his battery.

Being alive and not dead on the memorable April Sunday when his commander-in-chief signed the articles of capitulation in Wilmer McLean's parlor in Appomattox town, this soldier Gordon was one among the haggard thousands who shared the enemy's rations to bridge over the hunger gap; and it was the sane, equable Gordon blood that enabled him to eat his portion of the bread of defeat manfully and without bitterness.

Later it was the steadfast Gordon courage that helped him to mount the crippled battery horse which had been his own contribution to the lost cause; to mount and ride painfully to the distant Southern valley, facing the weary journey, and the uncertain future in a land despoiled, as only a brave man might.

His homing was to the old furnace and the still older house at the foot of Lebanon. The tale of the years succeeding may be briefed in a bare sentence or two. It was said of him that he reached Paradise and the old homestead late one evening, and that the next day he was making ready for a run of iron in the antiquated blast-furnace. This may be only neighborhood tradition, but it depicts the man: st.u.r.dy, tenacious, dogged; a man to knot up the thread of life broken by untoward events, following it thereafter much as if nothing had happened.

Such men are your true conservatives. When his son was born, nine years after the great struggle had pa.s.sed into history, Caleb, the soldier, was still using charcoal for fuel and blowing his cupola fire with the wooden air-pump whose staves had been hooped together by the hands of his father, and whose motive power was a huge overshot wheel swinging rhythmically below the stone dam in the creek.

The primitive air-blast being still in commission, it may itself say that the South, in spite of the war upheaval and the far more seismic convulsion of the reconstruction period, was still the Old South when Caleb married Martha Crafts.

It was as much a love match as middle-age marriages are wont to be, and following it there was Paradise gossip to a.s.sert that Caleb's wife brought gracious womanly reforms to the cheerless bachelor house at the furnace. Be this as it may, she certainly brought one innovation--an atmosphere of wholesome, if somewhat austere, piety hitherto unbreathed by the master or any of his dusky va.s.sals.

Such moderate prosperity as the steadily pulsating iron-furnace could bring was Martha Gordon's portion from the beginning. Yet there was a fly in her pot of precious ointment; an obstacle to her complete happiness which Caleb Gordon never understood, nor could be made to understand. Like other zealous members of her communion, she took the Bible in its entirety for her creed, striving, as frail humanity may, to live up to it. But among the many admonitions which, for her, were no less than divine commands, was one which she had wilfully disregarded: _Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers._

Caleb respected her religion; stood a little in awe of it, if the truth were known, and was careful to put no straw of hindrance in the th.o.r.n.y upward way. But there are times when neutrality bites deeper than open antagonism. In the slippery middle ground of tolerance there is no foothold for one who would push or pull another into the kingdom of Heaven.

Under such conditions Thomas Jefferson was sure to be the child of many prayers on the mother's part; and perhaps of some naturally prideful hopes on Caleb's. When a man touches forty before his firstborn is put into his arms, he is likely to take the event seriously. Martha Gordon would have named her son after the great apostle of her faith, but Caleb a.s.serted himself here and would have a manlier name-father for the boy.

So Thomas Jefferson was named, not for an apostle, nor yet for the statesman--save by way of an intermediary. For Caleb's "Thomas Jefferson" was the stout old schoolmaster-warrior, Stonewall Jackson; the soldier iron-master's general while he lived, and his deified hero ever afterward.

When the mother was able to sit up in bed she wrote a letter to her brother Silas, the South Tredegar preacher. On the margin of the paper she tried the name, writing it "Reverend Thomas Jefferson Gordon." It was a rather appalling mouthful, not nearly so euphonious as the name of the apostle would have been. But she comforted herself with the thought that the boy would probably curtail it when he should come to a realizing sense of owners.h.i.+p; and "Reverend" would fit any of the curtailments.

So now we see to what high calling Thomas Jefferson's mother purposed devoting him while yet he was a helpless monad in pinning-blankets; to what end she had striven with many prayers and groanings that could not be uttered, from year to year of his childhood.

Does it account in some measure for the self-conscious young Pharisee kneeling on the top of the high rock under the cedars, and crying out on the girl scoffer that she was no better than she should be?

IV

THE NEWER EXODUS

One would always remember the first day of a new creation; the day when G.o.d said, _Let there be light_.

It has been said that nothing comes suddenly; that the unexpected is merely the overlooked. For weeks Thomas Jefferson had been scenting the unwonted in the air of sleepy Paradise. Once he had stumbled on the engineers at work in the "dark woods" across the creek, spying out a line for the new railroad. Another day he had come home late from a fis.h.i.+ng excursion to the upper pools to find his father shut in the sitting-room with three strangers resplendent in town clothes, and the talk--what he could hear of it from his post of observation on the porch step--was of iron and coal, of a "New South," whatever that might be, and of wonderful changes portending, which his father was exhorted to help bring about.

But these were only the gentle heavings and crackings of the ground premonitory of the real earthquake. That came on a day of days when, as a reward of merit for having faultlessly recited the eighty-third Psalm from memory, he was permitted to go to town with his father. Behold him, then, dangling his feet--uncomfortable because they were stockinged and shod--from the high buggy seat while the laziest of horses ambled between the shafts up the white pike and around and over the hunched shoulder of Mount Lebanon. This in the cool of the morning of the day of revelations.

In spite of the premonitory tremblings, the true earthquake found Thomas Jefferson totally unprepared. He had been to town often enough to have a clear memory picture of South Tredegar--the prehistoric South Tredegar.

There was a single street, hub-deep in mud in the rains, beginning vaguely at the steamboat landing, and ending rather more definitely in the open square surrounding the venerable court-house of pale brick and stucco-pillared porticoes. There were the shops--only Thomas Jefferson and all his kind called them "stores"--one-storied, these, the wooden ones with lying false fronts to hide the mean little gables; the brick ones honester in face, but sadly chipped and crumbling and dingy with age and the weather.

Also, there were houses, some of them built of the pale red brick, with pillared porticoes running to the second story; hip-roofed, with a square bal.u.s.tered observatory on top; rather grand looking and impressive till you came near enough to see that the bricks were shaling, and the portico floors rotting, and the plaster falling from the pillars to show the grinning lath-and-frame skeletons behind.

Also, on the banks of the river, there was the antiquated iron-furnace which, long before the war, had given the town its pretentious name. And lastly, there was the Calhoun House, dreariest and most inhospitable inn of its kind; and across the muddy street from it the great echoing train-shed, ridiculously out of proportion to every other building in the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle, once-a-day train that wheezed and rattled and clanked into and out of it.

Thomas Jefferson had seen it all, time and again; and this he remembered, that each time the dead, weather-worn, miry or dusty dullness of it had crept into his soul, sending him back to the freshness of the Paradise fields and forests at eventide with grateful gladness in his heart.

But now all this was to be forgotten, or to be remembered only as a dream. On the day of revelations the earlier picture was effaced, blacked out, obliterated; and it came to the boy with a pang that he should never be able to recall it again in its entirety. For the genius of modern progress is contemptuous of old landmarks and impatient of delays. And swift as its race is elsewhere, it is only in that part of the South which has become "industrial" that it came as a thunderclap, with all the intermediate and accelerative steps taken at a bound. Men spoke of it as "the boom." It was not that. It was merely that the spirit of modernity had discovered a hitherto overlooked corner of the field, and made haste to occupy it.