The Quickening Part 21

"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 ma.s.ses of c.o.ke 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 G.o.d 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 sh.o.r.e of joyous and irresponsible adolescence to that further one of conscious grapplings with the adult fact.

For Thomas Jefferson, grinding tenaciously in the Boston technical school, whither he had gone late in the winter of Beersheban discontent, the stream-crossing fell in the spring of the panic year 1893, what time he was twenty-one, a quarter-back on his college eleven, fit, hardy, studious and athletic; a pace-setter for his fellows and the pride of the faculty, but still little more than an overgrown, care-free boy in his outlook on life. Glimpses there had been over into the Promised Land of manhood, but the br.i.m.m.i.n.g cup of college work and play quaffed in health-giving heartiness is the elixir of youth. The speculative habit of the boy slept in the college undergraduate. The days were full, each of the things of itself, and if Tom looked forward to the workaday future,--as he did by times,--the boyish impatience to be at it was gone. Chiawa.s.see Consolidated was moderately prosperous; the home letters were mere chronicles of sleepy Paradise. The skies were clear, and the present was acutely present. Tom studied hard and played hard; ate like an ogre and slept like a log. And when he finally awoke to find himself stumbling bewildered on the bank of the epoch-marking Rubicon, he was over and across before he could realize how so narrow a stream should fill so vast a chasm.

The call of the ferryman--to keep the figure whole--was a letter from his father, a letter longer than the commonplace chronicles, and painfully written with the mechanic hand on both sides of a company letter-head. Caleb Gordon wrote chiefly of business. Mutterings of the storm of financial depression were already in the air. Iron, more sensitive than the stock-market, was the barometer, and its readings in the Southern field were growing portentous. Within the month several of the smaller furnaces had gone out of blast, and Chiawa.s.see Consolidated, though still presenting a fair exterior, was, Caleb feared, rotten at heart. What would Tom advise?

Tom found this letter in his mail-box one evening after a strenuous day in the laboratory; and that night he sat up with the corpse of his later boyhood, though he was far enough from putting it that way. His father was in trouble, and the letter was a call for help. It seemed vastly incredible. Thomas Jefferson's ideal of steady courage, of invincible human puissance, was formed on the model of the stout-hearted old soldier who had fought under Stonewall Jackson. What a trumpet blast of alarm must have sounded to make such a man turn to a raw recruit for help!

Suddenly Tom began to realize that he was no longer a raw recruit, a boy to ride care-free while men were afoot and fighting. It astounded him that the realization had been so slow in arriving. It was as if he had been led blindfolded to the firing line, there to have the bandage plucked from his eyes by an unseen hand. Tumultuously it rushed on him that he was weaponed as the men of his father's generation could not be; that his hand could be steady and his heart fearless under threatenings that might well shake the courage of the old man who had borne only the burden and the heat of the day of smaller things.

He sat long with his elbows on the study table and his chin resting on his hands. The room was small but the walls gave before the steady gaze of the gray eyes, and Tom saw afar; down a vistaed highway wherein a strong man walked, leading a boy by the hand. Swiftly, with a click like that of the mechanism in a kinetoscope, the scene changed. The highway was the same, but now the man's steps had grown cautious and uncertain and he was groping for the shoulder of the boy, as for a leaning-staff.

Tom broke the eye-hold on the vision and sprang up to pace the narrow limits of the study.

"It's up to me," he mused, "and I'd like to know what I've been thinking of all this time. Why, pappy's old! he was forty before I was born. And I've been up here taking it easy and having all sorts of a good time, while he's been playing Sindbad to Duxbury Farley's Old Man of the Sea.

Coming, pappy!" he shouted; and forthwith flung himself down at the table to write a letter that was to put new life into a weary old man who was fighting against odds in the far-away Southland.

The lone soldier was to take heart of grace, remembering that he had a son; remembering also that the son was now a man grown, stout of arm, steady of head, and otherwise fighting-fit. If the storm should come, the watchword must be to hold on all, keeping steerage-way on the Chiawa.s.see Consolidated craft at all hazards. The June examinations were not far off, and these disposed of, the man-son would be ready to lay hold. Meanwhile, let Caleb Gordon, in his capacity of princ.i.p.al minor stock-holder, insist on a full and exact statement of the company's affairs, and--here the new manhood a.s.serted itself boldly--let that statement, or a copy of it, come to Boston by the first mail.

To this letter there was a grateful reply in which Tom read with a smile his father's half-bewildered attempt to get over to the new point of view. It began, "Dear Buddy," and ended, "Your affectionate pappy," but there was man-to-man matter between the salutation and the signature.

The inquiry into the affairs of Chiawa.s.see Consolidated had revealed little or nothing more than the general manager already knew. The president had turned the inquiring stock-holder over to Dyckman, the bookkeeper, with instructions to give Mr. Gordon the fullest possible information, and:

"Dyckman slid out of it, smooth and easy-like," Caleb's letter went on.

"He allowed he was _mighty_ busy, right about then. Wouldn't I just make myself at home and examine the books for myself? I reckon that was about what Farley wanted him to do. I'm no book expert, and I couldn't make head or tail out of Dyckman's spider tracks. Looks to me like all the books are good for is to keep people from finding where the company is at. What little I found out, young Norman told me. He says we're in a hole, and the first wagon-load of dirt that comes along will bury us out of sight."

Tom, driven now with the closing work of the college year, yet took time to write another heartening letter to the hard-pressed old soldier. It had been his good fortune to win the Clarkson prize for crucible tests, and to have gained thereby a speaking acquaintance with the multimillionaire iron king who had founded it. Mr. Clarkson did not believe that the financial storm would grow to panic size. As for himself, Tom thought the hazard was less in the times than in the Farleys. Father Caleb was to keep his finger on the pulse of the main office, wiring Boston at the first sign of its weakening.

The junior metallurgical was in the thick of the June examinations when the catastrophe befell. The brief story of it came to Tom in the first dictated letter he had ever received from his father, and the tremulous shakiness of the signature pointed eloquently to the reason. Chiawa.s.see Consolidated was out of blast--"temporarily suspended," in the pleasant euphemism of the elder Farley; the force, clerical and manual, was discharged, with only Dyckman left in the deserted South Tredegar offices to answer questions; and the three Farleys, with Major Dabney, Ardea and Miss Euphrasia, were to spend the summer in Europe.

Caleb wrote in some bitterness of spirit. Though the Gordon holdings in the company, increased from time to time as the iron-master had prospered, amounted to a little more than a third of the capital stock, everything had been done secretly. The general manager's own notice of the shut-down had come in the posted "Notice to Employees." When the Farleys should leave, he would be utterly helpless; on their return they could repudiate everything he might do in their absence. Meantime, ruin was imminent. The affairs of the company were in the utmost confusion; the treasury was empty, and there were no apparent a.s.sets apart from the idle plant. Creditors were pressing; the discharged workmen, led by the white coal-miners, were on the verge of riot; and Major Dabney's royalties on the coal lands were many months in arrears.

Tom rose promptly to the occasion, and in all the stress of things found s.p.a.ce to wonder how it chanced that he knew instinctively what to do and how to go about it. Before his information was an hour old a rush telegram had gone to his father, asking from what port and by what steamer the Farleys would sail; asking also that certain doc.u.ments be sent to a given New York address by first mail.

This done, he laid the exigencies frankly before the examiners in the technical school, praying for such lenity as might be extended under the circ.u.mstances. Since all things are possible for an honor-man, beloved of those whose mission it is to grind the human weapon to its edge, the difficulties in this field vanished. Mr. Gordon could go on with the examinations until his presence was needed elsewhere; and after the stressful moment was pa.s.sed he could return and finish.

Tom, the boy, could not have gone on. It would have been blankly impossible. But Tom, the man, was a new creature. While waiting for the reply to his telegram, he plunged doggedly back into the scholastic whirlpool, kicked, struggled, strangled, got his head above water, and found, vastly to his own amazement, that the thing was actually compa.s.sable in spite of the mighty distractions.

The return telegram from Gordonia was a day late. Knowing diplomacy only by name, Caleb Gordon had gone directly to Dyckman for information regarding the Farleys' movements. Dyckman was polite to the general manager, but unhappily he knew nothing of Mr. Farley's plans. Caleb tried elsewhere, and the little mystery thickened. At his club, Mr.

Farley had spoken of taking a Cunarder from Boston; to a friend in the South Tredegar Manufacturers' a.s.sociation he had confided his intention of sailing from Philadelphia. But at the railway ticket office he had engaged Pullman reservations for six persons to New York.

This last was conclusive, as far as it went; and j.a.pheth Pettigra.s.s supplied the missing item. The Dabneys and the Farleys made one party, and j.a.pheth knew the steamer and the sailing date.

"Party will sail by White Star Line Baltic, New York, to-morrow. New York address, Fifth Avenue Hotel. Papers to you care 271 Broadway by mail yesterday," was the message which was signed for by the doorkeeper at the mines and metallurgy examination room in Boston, late in the forenoon of the second day; and Tom looked at the clock. Nothing would be gained by taking a train which would land him in New York late in the evening; so he plunged again into the examination pool and thought no more of Chiawa.s.see Consolidated until his paper on qualitative a.n.a.lysis had been neatly folded, docketed and handed to the examiner.

The hands of his watch were pointing to eight o'clock the following morning when Tom made his way through the throng in the Grand Central station and found a cab. The sailing hour of the _Baltic_ was ten, and he picked his cabman accordingly.

"I shall want you for a couple of hours, and it's double fare if you don't miss. 271 Broadway, first," was his fillip for the driver; and he was speedily rattling away to the down-town address.

The taking of the cab was his first mistake, and he discovered it before he had gone very far. Time was precious, and the horse, pushed to the police limit, was too slow. Tom signaled his Irishman.

"Get me over to the Elevated, and then go to Madison Square and wait for me," he ordered; and by this change of conveyance he obtained his mail and won back to the Fifth Avenue Hotel by late breakfast time.

From that on, luck was with him. The Farleys, father and son, were in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for the others to come down to the cafe breakfast. Tom saw them, confronted them, and went at things very concisely.

"I have come all the way from Boston to ask for a few minutes of your time, Mr. Farley," he said to the president. "Will you give it to me now?"

"Surely!" was the genial reply, and the promoter signed to his son and drew apart with the importunate one. "Well, go on, my boy; what can I do for you at this last American moment?--some message from your good father?"

"No," said Tom shortly; "it's from me, individually. You know in what shape you have left things at home; they've got to be stood on their feet before you go aboard the _Baltic_."

"What's this--what's this? Why, my dear young man! what can you possibly mean?"--this in b.u.t.tered tones of the gentlest expostulation.

"I mean just about what I say. You have smashed Chiawa.s.see Consolidated, and now you are going off to leave my father to hold the bag. Or rather I should say, you are taking the bag with you."

The president was visibly moved.

"Why, Thomas--you must be losing your mind! You've--you've been studying too hard; that's it--the term work up there in Boston has been too much for you."

"Cut it out, Mr. Farley," said Tom savagely, all the Gordon fighting blood singing in his veins. "You've got a thing to do, and it is going to be done before you leave America. Will you talk straight business, or not?"

The president adjusted his eye-gla.s.ses, and gave this brand-new Gordon a calm over-look.

"And if I decline to discuss business matters with a rude school-boy?"

he intimated mildly.

"Then it will be rather the worse for you," was the defiant rejoinder.

"Acting for my father and the minority stock-holders, I shall try to have you and your son held in America, pending an expert examination of the company's affairs."

It was a long shot, with a thousand chances of missing. If there was anything criminal in the Farley administration, the evidences were doubtless well buried. But Tom was looking deep into the s.h.i.+fty blue eyes of his antagonist when he fired, and he saw that he had not wholly missed. None the less, the president attempted to carry it off lightly.

"What do you think of this, Vincent?" he said, turning to his son. "Here is Tom Gordon--our Tom--talking wildly about investigations and arrests, and I don't know what all. Shall we give him his breakfast and send him back to school?"