The Quickening Part 36

"You don't mean that he lent you the money after you had told him what you purposed doing with it?" It was too dark for him to see her face, but there was something like a breath-catching of horror in her voice.

"I'm sorry it shocks you, but he did. More than that, he took the trouble to try to explain away my scruples; made it seem quite a virtuous thing before he got through. You wouldn't believe it now, would you?"

"But, Tom! you didn't take the money?"

"How could I refuse so good a man? Norman is on his way to Pennsylvania at this present moment, with a letter of credit in his pocket big enough to make the mouth of even a professional grafter water. At least, I hope it is big enough."

She was hurt, shocked, horrified, and he knew it and found pleasure of a certain sort in the knowledge. When a man has done violence to his own best impulses, the thing that comes nearest to the holy joy of penitence is the unholy joy of making somebody else sorry for him. There were unmistakable tears in her voice when she said:

"Tom, why have you told me this--this unspeakable thing?"

"Why--I guess it was because I wanted to ask you how you supposed the Mr. Henniker kind of men square such things with their conscience; or don't they have any conscience?"

"That is _not_ the reason," she faltered.

"You are right," he rejoined quickly. "It was diabolism pure and unstrained. I had hurt myself, and I wanted to pa.s.s it along--to hurt some one else. But it is too cold to keep you standing here. Won't you come in again?"

"No; I must go home." And she went down the broad steps.

He drew her arm through his and walked with her, down one gra.s.sy slope and up the other. At the manor-house steps he found at last sufficient grace to say: "It was a currish thing to do; will you forgive me, Ardea?"

"I don't know," she said, in a tone that thrilled him curiously. "Such things are hard to forgive. I don't mean your slapping me in the face with it, that is nothing. But to know that you have gone so far aside ... that you have sunk your manhood and all the promise of it...."

He nodded perfect intelligence. "I know; it's h.e.l.l, Ardea. I've been frizzling in it for the past six months, more or less; ever since I came home with the one sole, single determination to climb out of the panic ditch if I had to make steps of dead bodies or lost souls. I'm doing it, and I'm paying the price. Sometimes I can find it in my heart to curse the mistaken mother-love that gave me to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I'm pagan in all else, but I can't sin like a pagan. Why is it? Why can't I be a smug, peaceful, sound-sleeping scoundrel like other men?"

She was standing on the step above him, as she had stood on the other side of the two dew-wet lawns.

"I have a theory," she rejoined, "but you wouldn't accept it. You'll never be able to do wrong without paying for it. Is it worth while to try?"

"Nothing is worth while--nothing at all. I don't mean that I'm going to quit; I shall doubtless go on trampling and grinding the face of the poor, and the rich, if they come in my way. But at the end of the ends I shall curse G.o.d and die, as Job's wife wanted him to."

She put her hands on his shoulders impulsively, and again the tears were in her voice.

"What can I say to help you, Tom? G.o.d knows I would do anything that a true friend may do!"

He freed himself of the touch of her hands, but very gently.

"There might have been a thing; but you have made it impossible. No, don't freeze me again--it's the last time. If I could have won your love ... but what is the use of trying to put it in words; you know--you have always known. And now it is too late."

For a single instant Vincent Farley's chance of marrying the Deer Trace coal lands trembled in the balance. Ardea forgot him, forgot Nan, thought of nothing but the pa.s.sionate yearning that was drawing her like gripping hands toward the man who had bared his inmost heart to her.

Again she leaned on him with a touch so light that he scarcely felt it, and her lips brushed his forehead.

"It is not too late for you to be a man, n.o.ble, upright, honorable. Let the world find that for which it is looking, my friend--my brother: the strong man armed who can stand where others faint and fall. Oh, I wish I knew how to say the word that would make you the man you were meant to be!"

When it was said, she was gone and the sound of the closing door was in his ears when he turned and went slowly down the driveway and out on the white pike, lying like a snowy ribbon under the December stars. On the highway he hung undecided for a moment; but an hour later, William Layne, driving homeward from South Tredegar, overtook him plodding slowly southward far beyond the head of Paradise; and it was nearing midnight when he won back, pacing steadily past the Deer Trace and Woodlawn gates and holding his way down the pike to Gordonia.

The railway station was his goal; and when he had aroused the sleepy night operator and gained admittance, he sat at the telegraph table to write a message. It was to Norman, addressed to intercept the salesman at the breakfast stop.

"Cancel Pennsylvania date and come in at once to take managers.h.i.+p of plant," was the wording of it; and at the breakfast-table the following morning Tom announced his intention of leaving the industrial plow in the furrow while he should go to Boston to complete his course in the technical school.

XXVI

AS WITH A MANTLE

The month of March in the great, southward-reaching bight of the Tennessee River is the pattern and form of fickleness climatic. Normally it is the time of starting sap and swelling buds and steaming leaf beds odorous of spring; the month when the migratory crows wing their flight northward, and Nature, lightest of winter sleepers in the azurine lat.i.tudes, stirs to her vernal awakening. None the less, in the Tennessee March the orchardist, watching the high-blown clouds in skies of the softest blue, is glad if the peach buds are slow in responding to the touch of the wooing airs, or, chewing a black birch twig as he makes the leisurely round of his line fence, warns his gardening neighbor that it is too early to plant beans. True, the poplars may be showing a tinge of green, and the buds of the hickory may have lighted their tiny candle flames on the winter-bared boughs; but the "blackberry winter" is yet to come, and there are rigorous possibilities still lingering in the high-flying clouds and the sudden-s.h.i.+fting winds.

It was on the fourth Sunday in the month that Ardea rose early and went fasting to the communion service at St. John's-in-Paradise. Primarily, St. John's was merely the religious factor in Mr. Duxbury Farley's scheme of country-colony promotion, and for the greater part of the year its silver-toned bell was silent and its appeal was mainly to the artistic eye. But latterly St. Michael's, the mother church in South Tredegar, had attained a new a.s.sistant rector whose zeal was not yet dulled by apathetic unresponsiveness on the part of the to-be-helped.

Hence St. Michael's various missions flourished for the time, and once a month, if not oftener, the bell of St. John's sent its note abroad on the still morning air of Paradise.

On this particular Sunday morning Ardea was early at the church, and she was glad she had decided to wear her cloth gown. It had turned cooler in the night and the azure March sky was hidden behind a gray cloud ma.s.s which hung low on the slopes of the mountain. There was no fire in the church heater; and the few wors.h.i.+pers--the Vancourt Henniker girls, the two Misses Harrison, John Young-d.i.c.kson, of The Dell, dragged out at the chilly hour by his new wife, and Mrs. Schuyler Farnsworth and her daughter, all of the country-house colony beyond the creek--sat or knelt, and s.h.i.+vered through the service in decorous discomfort.

Miss Dabney was not looking quite as well as usual, as Miss Betsy Harrison remarked to her sister, Miss Willie, in a church whisper. She had grown thinner during the winter, and though the slate-blue eyes were as clear and steadfast as before, there was a strained look in them like that in the eyes of the spent runner. Mountain View Avenue, rurally alert for something to talk about, decided it was trouble rather than ill health. Miss Eva Farley corresponded with Jessica Farnsworth, and there had been European hints of an understanding between Vincent and Ardea. Coupling this with young Gordon's ostentatious devotion, Nan's appearance, and Tom's sudden determination to go back to college, there was the groundwork for a very pretty story which sufficiently accounted for Miss Dabney's changed looks and for her growing reluctance to be included in the country colony's social divagations. She was engaged to one man and in love with another, who was clearly ineligible--this was the Mountain View Avenue summing-up of the matter; and some condemned and some pitied, and all were careful not to step within the barrier of aloofness with which Miss Dabney had of late surrounded herself.

On this Sunday morning of weather portents it chanced to be Ardea's turn to entertain the young minister, or rather to give him his breakfast after the service; and she waited for him in the vestibule after the others had gone. The outer doors were open, and she could see the gray cloud ma.s.s feathering on its under side and creeping lower on the slopes of Lebanon in every stormy gust of the chill wind.

"It was prudent to bring your overcoat this morning, Mr. Morelock," she said, when her guest emerged from the vesting-room with his ca.s.sock in a neat bundle under his arm. "If I'd had any idea it would turn cold so fast, I should have had the carriage come for us."

"Indeed, my dear Miss Dabney, if you could walk to church, I'm sure I can walk home with you," was the ready response; nevertheless, the rather fragile-looking young man shuddered a little in sympathy with the rawness of the wind. He was from well-sheltered New England, and he had not yet acquired the native Southron's indifference to weather discomforts; would never acquire them this side of a consumptive's grave, it was to be feared.

"The attendance was pretty good for such a disagreeable morning, don't you think?" Ardea ventured, trying to make talk as they breasted the gusts together on the Deer Trace side of the pike.

The young missioner shook his head rather despondently. "There are English churchmen among the English and Welsh miners at Gordonia,--quite a number of them," he rejoined. "Not one of them was present."

It was the clear-sighted inner Ardea that smiled. There was little in the stately service and luxurious appointments of the country colony's church to attract the working-men, and much to repel them. She wondered that Mr. Morelock, young as he was, did not understand this.

"The mission of St. John's is hardly to the working people of Gordonia, is it?" she said, more in exculpation than in criticism.

"Oh, my dear young lady! the church knows no cla.s.s distinctions!"

protested the zealous one warmly. "Her call is to rich and poor, gentle and simple, young and old alike; and it is imperative. I must make a round of visitation among these miners at the very first opportunity."

Ardea bent low to the buffet of a stronger blast and fought for a moment with her clinging skirts. When she had breath to say it, she said: "Will you really do that? Then let me tell you how. Come out here some week-day in your roughest clothes, and make your round among the men while they are at work in the mine. They will listen to you then."

"Bless me! what an idea!" he gasped.

"It is not original with me," was the gentle reply. "You will remember that the example was set a good many hundred years ago among the fishermen of Galilee. And, after all, Mr. Morelock, it is the only way.

You can not reach down to a living soul on this earth--that is worth saving."

It had begun to rain in spiteful little dashes and squalls, and the clergyman was turning up the collar of his overcoat and b.u.t.toning it about his throat. Moreover, the wind had risen to half a gale, and talking was difficult when it was not wholly impossible. But when they reached the Deer Trace gates and the shelter of the driveway evergreens, he had a defensive word ready.

"I can't fully agree with you, you know, Miss Ardea," he said. "Of course, we must not reach down in the Pharisaical sense. But neither must we lower the dignity of the sacred calling."

Her smile was neither disloyal nor cynical; it was merely pitying. She was thinking in her heart of hearts how much this zealous young apostle had yet to learn.

"Do you call it undignified to be a man among men?" she asked; adding quickly: "But I know you don't. And what other way is open to the true brother-helper?"