The Quickening Part 16

"I wish you'd ask Him to let my mother live!" he said brokenly. "I've tried and tried, and the words just die in my mouth."

There is a Mother of Sorrows in every womanly heart, to whom the appeal of the stricken is never made in vain. Ardea saw only a boy-brother crying out in his pain, and she dropped on her knees and put her arms around his neck and wept over him in a pure transport of sisterly sympathy.

"Indeed and indeed I will help, Tom! And you mustn't let it drive you out into the dark. You poor boy! I know just how it hurts, and I'm so sorry for you!"

He freed himself gently from the comforting arms, got up rather unsteadily, and lifted her to her feet. Then the manly bigness of him sent the hot blood to her cheeks and she was ashamed.

"O Tom!" she faltered; "what must you think of me!"

He turned to gather up the scattered holly.

"I think G.o.d made you--and that was one time when His hand didn't tremble," he said gravely.

They had picked their way down the leaf-slippery mountain side and he was giving her the bunch of holly at the Dabney orchard gate before he spoke again. But at the moment of leave-taking he said:

"How did you know what I needed more than anything else in all the world, Ardea?"

She blushed painfully and the blue eyes were downcast.

"You must never speak of that again. I didn't stop to think. It's a Dabney failing, I'm afraid--to do things first and consider them afterward. It was as if we were little again, and you had fallen down and hurt yourself."

"I know," he acquiesced, with the same manly gentleness that had made her ashamed. "I won't speak of it any more--and I'll never forget it the longest day I live. Good-by."

And he went the back way to his own orchard gate, plunging through the leaf beds with his head down and his hands in his pockets, struggling as he could to stem the swift current which was whirling him out beyond all the old landmarks. For now he was made to know that boyhood was gone, and youth was going, and for one intoxicating moment he had looked over the mountain top into the Promised Land of manhood.

XV

NOeL

The night was far spent and the Christmas dawn was graying in the remotest east when Tom, sleeping in his clothes on a lounge before the fire in the lower hall, roused himself and went noiselessly up stairs to beg his father to go and lie down for a little while.

There was a trained nurse from South Tredegar in charge of the sick-room; but from the beginning the three--husband, brother and son--had kept watch at the bedside of the stricken one. There was little to be done; nothing, in fact; and the nurse would have spared them the nights. Yet no one of the three would surrender his privilege.

His father relieved, Tom mended the fire in the grate; and when he found the nurse dozing in her chair, he woke her and persuaded her to go and rest in the adjoining room, promising to call her instantly if she were needed.

Left alone with his mother, he tiptoed to the bedside and stood for many minutes looking with sorrow-blurred eyes at the still, rigid face on the pillow. It was terribly like death; so like, that more than once he laid his hand softly on the bed-covering to make sure that she still breathed. When he could bear it no longer, he crossed the room to the western window, drawing the draperies and standing between them to stare miserably out into the calm, starlit void. While he looked, a meteor burned its way across the inverted bowl of the heavens, and its pa.s.sing kindled the embers of the inextinguishable fire.

_And, lo, the star ... came and stood over where the young child was._ The curtains of the void were parted by invisible hands, and down the long vista of the centuries he saw the familiar scene of the Nativity, dwelt on so often and so faithfully in his childhood training that it seemed almost like a part of the material scheme of the universe: the Babe in the manger; the shepherds watching their flocks; the heavenly host singing the triumphant anthem of the ages, _Glory to G.o.d in the highest, and on earth, peace_; the star of Bethlehem shining serenely above a world lying in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Was it all true? or was it only a beautiful myth? If it were true, where was the proof? Not in history, for this, the most wonderful and miraculous thing in all the story of mankind, stands unrecorded save by the pens of those who were themselves under the spell of it. In subsequent marvels and wonder-workings?--he shook his head mournfully.

If any such there had been, those impartial witnesses who must have known and should have spoken were silent, and now all the earth was silent: storms rose in their fury and were calmed for no man's _Peace, be still_; earthquakes engulfed pagan and Christian believer alike; all nature was cruel, relentless, mechanical.

Was there nothing then to reach down the ages from that Christmas morning so long ago to make the beautiful first-century myth a latter-day reality? Tom cast about him hopelessly. There was the Church--one and indivisible, if the myth were true. The slow Gordon smile gathered at the corners of his eyes. He remembered a thing his mother had said to him long ago, when, in a moment of boyish confidence, he had told her of the climb to Crestcliffe Inn and its purpose.

"Ardea's a dear girl, as the children of this world go, Thomas; she's been right loving and kind to me since we've come to be such close neighbors. But"--with a note of solemn warning in her voice--"you must never forget that she's an Episcopalian, a lost soul, dead in forms and ceremonies and trespa.s.ses and sins." So his mother scoffed at Ardea's faith; and Ardea--no, she did not scoff, her contempt was too generous for that; but it was there, just the same. And the Methodists fellowshiped neither, and the Baptists excluded the Methodists, and the Catholics retorted to the Protestant charge of apostasy with the centuries-old cry of "heretics all"! Which of the scores of divisions and subdivisions was the one true indivisible body of Christ? Tom shook his head again. There was no hope of proof in the churches.

And the world? He was only now verging on manhood, and he had seen little of the world. But that little was frankly indifferent to the things which, if they were worthy of belief, should shake an unsaved world to its very foundations. Its people bought and sold, built houses and laid up stores of the things that perish, grasped, overreached, did what they listed. But for that matter, even those who professed to be followers of the Christ, who a.s.serted most loudly their belief in the unproved things, fought and struggled and sinned in common with the worldlings, as far as Tom could see.

He turned from the window and from the vision, and went to stand with his back to the flickering blaze in the grate. It was going to leave a huge rift in his life when this thing, with all its rootings and anchorings in childhood and boyhood, was torn out and cast aside. The mere thought of it was appalling. What would there be to fill the void?

As if the question had evoked them, alluring shapes began to rise out of the depths. Ambition, though he knew it not by name, was the first that beckoned. The craftsman's blood stirred to its reawakening: to know how, and to do things; to compel the iron and steel and the stubborn forces of nature. This would be worthwhile; but better still, he would learn to be a leader of men. The magic vista opened again, but this time it stretched away into the future, and he saw himself keeping step with the ever-advancing march of progress--nay, even setting the pace in his own corner of the vast field. His father was content to follow; he would learn the trick of it and lead. The Farleys were said to be rich and steadily growing richer--not out of Chiawa.s.see Iron, to be sure, but in others of their multifarious out-reachings; very good,--he would be rich, too. What a Duxbury Farley could do, he would do; on a larger scale and with a stubborner patience. He--

It was a mere turning of the head that sent the air-castles tumbling and left him choking in the dust of their dissolution. Something, he fancied it was a noise or some slight movement, made him look quickly toward the bed; and at sight of the still, white face among the pillows, boyish love--G.o.d Himself has made no stronger pa.s.sion--swept doubt, distrust, rebellion, worldly ambition, all, into the abyss of renunciation. He went softly, groping because the quick tears blinded him, to kneel at the bedside. She was his mother; for one thing she had lived and striven and prayed; living or dying she must not, she should not, be disappointed. And if his service must be of the lip and not of the heart, she should never suspect, never, never!

And so it came about that he knelt in the graying dawn of the Christmas morning, with his soul in thick darkness, lifting the prayer that in some form has shaped itself in all the ages on lips of trembling: "O G.o.d, if there be a G.o.d, have mercy on my soul, if I have a soul!"

XVI

THE BUBBLE, REPUTATION

It was not until late in the afternoon of Christmas Day that Ardea was able to slip away from her guests long enough to run over to apprise herself of the condition of things at the Gordon house.

Tom opened the door for her, and he made her come to the fire before he would answer her questions. Even then he sat glowering at the cheerful blaze as if he had forgotten her presence; and she was womanly enough, or amiable enough, to let him take his own time. When he began, it was seemingly at a great distance from matters present and pressing.

"Say, Ardea; do you believe in miracles?" he asked abruptly.

It was a large question to be answered offhand, but she broke the back of it with a simple, "Yes."

"How do you account for them? Did G.o.d make His laws so they could be taken apart and put together again when some little human ant loses its way on a gra.s.s stalk or drops its grain of sugar?"

"I don't know," she confessed frankly. "I am not sure that I ever tried to account for them; I suppose I have swallowed them whole, as you say I have swallowed my religion."

"Well, you believe in them, anyway," he said, "and that makes it easier to hit what I'm aiming at. Do you reckon they stopped short in the Apostles' time?"

"I don't know that, either," she admitted.

"You ought to know it, if you're consistent," he said, bluntly dogmatic.

"Any answer to any prayer would be a miracle."

"Would it? I never happened to think of it that way."

"It certainly would. You chop a tree in two and it falls; that's cause and effect. If you ask G.o.d to make it stand up after it's cut in two, and it does stand, that's a miracle."

"You are the queerest boy," she commented. "I ran over here just for a minute to ask how your mother is, and you won't tell me."

"I'm coming to that," he rejoined gravely. "But I wanted to get this other thing straightened out first. Now tell me this: did you pray for my mother last night, like you said you would?"

Once again he was offending the guardian of the inner shrines, and her heightened color was not all the reflection of the ruddy firelight.

"You can be so barbarously personal when you try, Tom," she protested.

And then she added: "But I did."