The Quickening Part 52

He measured the country colonists justly. They might have forgiven the moral lapse, though that was not the side they had turned toward him.

Yet he fancied that when the business failure should be super-added, the Farley sins would become too mult.i.tudinous for the broadest mantle of charity to cover.

"Which brings on more talk," he mused, pulling thoughtfully at the pipe.

"They can't start in the new diggings without money. Anyway, Vincent's no moneymaker; and if the look on a man's face counts for anything, old Colonel Duxbury has made his last flight from the promoting perch. O Lord!"--rising with a cavernous yawn and a mighty stretching of his arms overhead,--"I reckon it's up to me to go on doing all the things I don't want to do; that I didn't in the least mean to do. Somebody ought to write a book and call it _Saints Inveterate_. It would have simplified things a whole lot if I could have left him to be cremated after all."

Mr. Vancourt Henniker was not greatly surprised when Tom Gordon asked for a private interview on the morning following the final closing down of all the industries at Gordonia.

Without being in Gordon's confidence, or in that of American Aqueduct, the banker had been shrewdly putting two and two together and applying the result as a healing plaster to the stock he had taken as security for the final loan to Colonel Duxbury.

"I thought, perhaps, you might wish to buy this stock, Mr. Gordon," he said, when Tom had stated his business. "Of course, it can be arranged, with Mr. Farley's consent to our antic.i.p.ating the maturity of his notes.

But"--with a genial smile and a glance over his eye-gla.s.ses--"I'm not sure that we care to part with it. Perhaps some of us would like to hold it and bid it in."

Tom's smile matched the genial expansiveness of the president's.

"I reckon you don't want it, Mr. Henniker. You'll understand that it isn't worth the paper it is printed on when I tell you that I have sold my pipe-pit patents to American Aqueduct."

"Heavens and earth! Then the plant doesn't carry the patents? You've kept this mighty quiet, among you!"

"Haven't we!" said Tom fatuously. "I know just how you feel--like a man who has been looking over the edge of the bottomless pit without knowing it. You'll let me have the stock for the face of the loan, won't you?"

But the president was already pressing the b.u.t.ton of the electric bell that summoned the cas.h.i.+er. There was no time like the present when the fate of a considerable bank a.s.set hung on the notion of a smiling young man whose mind might change in the winking of an eye.

With the Farley stock in his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled skein of Chiawa.s.see affairs. Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement were vanquished, one by one.

When it was all over, Tom began to draw checks on the small fortune realized from the sale of the patents. One was to Major Dabney, redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawa.s.see Limited at par. Another was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a valuation based on the prosperous period before the crash of '93. With this check in his pocket he went home--for the first time in two weeks.

It was well beyond the Woodlawn dinner-hour before he could muster up the courage to cross the lawns to Deer Trace. No word had pa.s.sed between him and Ardea since the September afternoon when he had overtaken her at the church door,--counting as nothing the effort she had made to speak to him on the night of vengeance.

How would she receive him? Not too coldly, he hoped. It was known that Vincent's a.s.sailant in the furnace yard was a stranger; a man who had taken service as a guard: also that Mr. Gordon--they gave him his courtesy t.i.tle now--had saved Vincent from a terrible death. Tom thought the rescue should count for something with Ardea.

It did. She was sitting at the piano in the otherwise deserted music-room when he entered; and she broke a chord in the middle to give him both of her hands, and to say, with eyes s.h.i.+ning, as if the rescue were a thing of yesterday:

"O Tom! I _knew_ you had it in you! It was fine!"

"Hold on," he said, a bit unsteadily. "There must be no more misunderstandings. What happened that night three weeks ago, had to happen; and five minutes before it happened I was wondering if I could aim straight enough in the light from the slag-pot to hit him. And I fully meant to do it."

She shuddered.

"I--I was afraid," she faltered. "I knew, you know--j.a.pheth had told me, in--in justice to you. That was why I ran across the lawn and called to you."

The sweet beauty of her laid hold on him and he felt his grip going.

Another word and he would be trespa.s.sing again. To keep from saying it he crossed to the recessed window and sat down in the sleepy-hollow chair which was the Major's peculiar possession in the music-room.

After a little he said: "Play something, won't you?--something that will make me a little less sorry that I didn't kill him."

"The idea!" she said. But when he settled himself in the big easy-chair as a listener, lying back with his eyes closed and his hands locked over one knee, she turned to the piano and humored him. When the final chord of the _Wanderlied_ had sung itself asleep, he sat up and nodded approvingly.

"I wonder if you appreciate your gift as you should?--to be able to make a man over in the moral part of him with the tips of your fingers? The devil is exorcised, for the moment, and I can tell you all about it now, if you care to know."

"Of course I care," she a.s.sented.

"Well, to begin with, I'm no better than I have been; a little less despicable than you've been thinking me, perhaps, but more wicked. I've hated these two men ever since I was old enough to know how; and to get square with them, I haven't scrupled to sink to their level. The smash at Gordonia is my smash, I'm responsible for everything that has happened."

"I know it," she said. "Mr. Norman has told me."

"Looking it all over, I don't see that there is much to choose between me and the men I've been hunting down. They went after the things they needed, without much compunction for other people; and so did I. On the night of the--on the night when you called to me and I wouldn't answer, I was going down to rub it in; to tell them they were in the hole and that I had put them there. I met a man at the gate who told me what j.a.pheth told you. It made a devil of me, Ardea. I took the man's gun and followed Vincent around the yard. I meant to kill him."

She nodded complete intelligence.

"The provocation was very great," she said evenly. "Why didn't you do it, Tom?"

"Now you've cornered me: I don't know why I didn't. I had only to walk away and let him alone when the time came. The slag-spilling would have settled him. But I couldn't do it."

"Of course you couldn't," she agreed convincingly. "G.o.d wouldn't let you."

"He lets other men commit murder; one a day, or such a matter."

"Not one of those who have named His name, Tom--as you have."

He shook his head slowly. "I wish that appealed to me, as it ought. But it doesn't. Where is the proof?"

She rose from the piano seat and went to stand before him.

"Can you ask that, soberly and in earnest, after the wonderful experience you have had?"

"I have asked it," he insisted stubbornly. "You mustn't take anything for granted. Just at that moment I couldn't kill a man; but that is all the difference. I've done what I meant to do, or most of it."

She was holding him steadily with her eyes. "Are you glad, or sorry, Tom?"

He frowned up at her.

"I don't know. Now that it's all over, the taste of it is like sawdust in the mouth; I'll admit that much. I'm free; 'free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,' as David put it when he had sounded all the depths. Is that being sorry?"

"No--I don't know," she confessed.

He was smiling now.

"You think I ought to go back to first principles: get down on my knees and agonize over it? Sometimes I wish I could be a boy long enough to do just that thing, Ardea. But I can't. The mill won't grind with the water that has pa.s.sed."

"But the stream isn't dry," she a.s.serted, taking up his figure. "What will you do now? That is the question: the only one that is ever worth asking."

He was frowning thoughtfully again, and the words came as an unconscious voicing of vague under-depths.

"They took to the woods, the waste places, the deserts--those men of old who didn't understand. Some of them went blind and crazy and died there; and some of them had their eyes opened and came back to make the world a little better for their having lived in it. I'm minded to try it."

She caught her breath in a little gasp which she was careful not to let him see.