The Quickening Part 29

As a strict matter of fact, the voyage across, and some little guide-book touring of England, were the sum total of coincidence. On leaving London the Farleys set out on the grand tour which was to land them in Naples for the winter, while the Dabneys went directly to Paris and to a modest pension in the Rue Cambon to spend the European holiday in a manner better befitting the purse of a country gentleman.

So it befell that by the time Miss Eva Farley was rhapsodizing over the Rhine castles in twenty-page letters, boring Ardea a little, if the truth must be told, the Dabneys had settled down to their quiet life in the French capital. Ardea was anxious to do something with her music under a Parisian master--and was doing it. The Major found melancholy pleasure in reviewing at large the city of his son's long exile; and Miss Euphrasia came and went with one or the other of her cousins, as the exigencies of chaperonage or companionship constrained her.

In such moderate pleasuring the French summer began for the Major and his charges; so it continued, and so it ended; and late in September they began to talk about going home.

"We really mean it this time," wrote Ardea in a letter to Martha Gordon.

"I confess we are all a little homesick for America, and Paradise, and dear old Deer Trace Manor. The Farleys are settled for the remainder of the year or longer in a fine old palazzo on the Bay of Naples, and we have a very pressing invitation to go and help them inhabit it. But thus far we have not been tempted beyond our strength. Major Grandpa is talking more and more pointedly about the Morgan mares, and is growing a habit of comparison-drawing in which America profits at the expense of Europe; so I suppose by the time you are reading this we shall have made our sailing arrangements. Nevertheless, the Naples invitation is dying hard. Eva seems to have set her heart on having us for the winter."

Ardea's figure of speech was no figure. The palazzo-sharing invitation did die hard; and when Miss Farley's letters failed, Mr. Vincent Farley made a journey to Paris for the express purpose of persuading the Dabneys to reconsider. Miss Euphrasia was neutral. The Major was homesick for a sight of his native Southland, but for Ardea's sake he generously concealed the symptoms--or thought he did. So the decision was finally left to Ardea.

She said no, and adhered to it, partly because she knew her grandfather was pining for Paradise, and partly on her own account. Ardea at twenty was a young woman who might have made King Solomon pause with suspended pen when he was writing that saying about his inability to find one woman among a thousand. She was not beautiful beyond compare, as the Southern young woman is so likely to be under the pencil of her loyal limners. She had the Dabney nose, which was not quite cla.s.sical, and the Courtenay mouth, well-lined and expressive, rather than too suggestive, of feminine softness. But her eyes were beautiful, and her luxuriant ma.s.ses of copper-gold hair fitted her shapely head like a glorious aureole; also, she had that indefinable adorableness called charm, and the sweet, direct, childlike frankness of speech which is its characteristic.

This was the external Ardea, known of men, and of those women who were large-minded enough not to envy her. But the inner Ardea was a being apart--high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded either by pa.s.sion or the conventions. This inner Ardea knew Vincent Farley better than he knew himself: the small mind, the mask of outward correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still yields open-eyed and undeceived.

He was the most moderate of lovers, as such a man must needs be, but his anxiety to second the wishes of his father and sister was not to be misunderstood by the clear-eyed inner Ardea, whose intuition served her as a sixth sense. She knew that sometime he would ask her to marry him; and in that region where her answer should lie she found only a vast indecision. He was not her ideal, but the all-seeing inner self told her that she would never find the ideal. There comes to every woman, sooner or later, the conviction that if she would marry she must take men as they are, weighing the good against the evil, choosing as she may the man whose vices may be condoned or whose virtues are great enough to overshadow them. Ardea knew that Vincent Farley was not great in either field; but the little virtues were not to be despised. If he were not, in the best sense of the word, well-bred, he had at least been well nurtured, well schooled in the conventions. Ardea sighed. It was in her to be something more than the conventional wife, yet she saw no reason to believe that she would ever be called on to be anything else. By which it will be apparent that the sacred flame of love had not yet been kindled in her maiden heart.

As for Vincent Farley, the real man, Ardea's appraisal of him was not greatly at fault. He was tall, like his father, but there the resemblance paused. The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the ability always to present the same side to the same person. His att.i.tude toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating instinct. And even l.u.s.t finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them into some brief, fierce flame. At times, Farley's thought of Ardea was libertine; but oftener she figured as the woman who would grace the home of affluence, giving it charm and tone. Also, he had an affection for the Dabney manorial acres, and especially for that portion of them overlying the coal measures.

The pose-facet was at the precisely effective angle when he came to Paris as his sister's messenger and pictured, with what warmth there was in him, the delights in the prospect of a Neapolitan winter. But Ardea, shrinking from a six months' guesting with any one, said no, and told her grandfather she was ready to go home.

The start was from Havre, and Vincent, with time on his hands, was her companion on the railway journey, her _courrier du place_ in the embarkation, and her faithful shadow up to the instant when the warning cry for the sh.o.r.e-goers rang through the ship. It was scarcely a moment for sentimental pa.s.sages, and under the most favoring conditions, Vincent Farley was something less than sentimental. Yet he found time to declare himself in conventional fashion, modestly asking only for the right to hope.

Ardea was not ready to give an answer, even to the tentative question; yet she did it--was, in a manner, surprised into doing it. For the young woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities. At the very crucial moment the clear-sighted inner self was a.s.suring her that this cold-eyed young man, who walked in the paths of righteousness because he found them easier and pleasanter than the way of the transgressor, was at best only a mildly exciting apotheosis of the negative virtues. But the negative virtues, failing to score brilliantly, nevertheless have the advantage of continuous innings.

Ardea was turned twenty in the year of the European holiday, and she had--or believed she had--her heritage of the Dabney impetuosity well in hand. Vincent's self-restraint was admirable, and his gentle deference, conventional as it was, rose almost to the height of sentiment. So she gave him his answer; gave him her hand at parting, and stood dutifully fluttering her handkerchief for him while the liner drew out of its slip and pointed its prow toward the headlands.

With rough weather on the homeward pa.s.sage, she had s.p.a.ce and opportunity to consider the consequences. Being the only good sailor in the trio, she had her own self-communings for company during the greater part of the six days, and the incident sentimental took on an aspect of finality which was rather dismaying. It was quite in vain that she sought comfort in the reflection that she was committed to nothing conclusive. Vincent Farley had not taken that view of it. True, he had asked for nothing more than a favorable att.i.tude on her part; but she thought he would be less than a man if he had not seen his final answer foreshadowed in her acquiescence.

The finality admitted, a query arose. Was Vincent Farley the man who, giving her his best, could call out the best there was in her? It annoyed her to admit the query, or rather the doubt which fathered it; it distressed her when the doubt appeared to grow with the lengthening leagues of distance.

Now vacillation was not a Dabney failing; and the aftermath of these storm-tossed musings made for Vincent Farley's cause. Romance also, in the eternal feminine, is a constant quant.i.ty, and if it be denied the Romeo-and-Juliet form of expression, will find another. Vincent Farley, as man or as lover, presented obstacles to any idealizing process, but Ardea set herself resolutely to overcome them. Distance and time have other potentialities besides the obliterative: they may breed halos.

When the French liner reached its New York slip, Ardea was remembering only the studied kindnesses, the conventional refinements, the correctnesses which, if they did seem artificial at times, were so many guarantees of self-respect: when the Great Southwestern train had roared around the cliffs of Lebanon with the returning exiles, and the locomotive whistle was sounding for Gordonia, some other of the negative virtues had become definitely positive, and the halo was beginning to be distinctly visible.

How Tom Gordon had informed himself of the precise day and train of their home-coming, Ardea did not think to inquire. But he was on the platform when the train drew in, and was the first to welcome them.

She was quick to see and appreciate the changes wrought in him, by time, by the Boston sojourn, by the summer's struggle with adverse men and things--though of this last she knew nothing as yet. It seemed scarcely credible that the big, handsome young fellow who was shaking hands with her grandfather, helping Miss Euphrasia with her multifarious belongings, and making himself generally useful and hospitable, could be a later reincarnation of the abashed school-boy who had sweated through the trying luncheon at Crestcliffe Inn.

"Not a word for me, Tom?" she said, when the last of Cousin Euphrasia's treasures had been rescued from the impatient train porter and added to the heap on the platform.

"All the words are for you--or they shall be presently," he laughed.

"Just let me get your luggage out of p.a.w.n and started Deer-Traceward, and I'll talk you to a finish."

She stood by and looked on while he did it. Surely, he had grown and matured in the three broadening years! There was conscious manhood, effectiveness, in every movement; in the very bigness of him. She had a little attack of patriotism, saying to herself that they did not fashion such young men in the Old World--could not, perhaps.

Mammy Juliet's grandson, Pete, was down with the family carriage, and he took his orders from Tom touching the bestowal of the luggage as he would have taken them from Major Dabney. Ardea marked this, too, and being Southern bred, wrote the Gordon name still a little higher on the scroll of esteem. Pete's respectful obedience was, in its way, a patent of n.o.bility. The negro house-servant, to the manner born, draws the line sharply between gentle and simple and is swift to resent interlopings.

When Pete had done his office with the European gatherings of the party the ancient carriage looked like a van, and there was scant room inside for three pa.s.sengers.

"That means us for old Longfellow and the buggy," said Tom to Ardea.

"Do you mind? Longfellow is fearfully and wonderfully slow, same as ever, but he's reasonably sure."

"Any way," said Ardea; so he put her into the buggy and they drew in behind the carriage. Before they were half-way to the iron-works they had the pike to themselves, and Tom was not urging the leisurely horse.

"My land! but it's good for tired eyes to have another sight of you!" he declared, applying the remedy till she laughed and blushed a little.

Then: "It has been a full month of Sundays. Do you realize that?"

"Since we saw each other? It has been much longer than that, hasn't it?"

"Not so very much. I saw you in New York the day you sailed."

"You did! Where was I?"

"You had just come down in the elevator at the hotel with your grandfather and Miss Euphrasia."

"And you wouldn't stop to speak to us? I think that was simply barbarous!"

"Wasn't it?" he laughed. "But the time was horribly unpropitious."

"Why?"

He looked at her quizzically.

"I'm wondering whether I'd better lie out of it; say I knew you were on your way to breakfast, and that I hoped to have a later opportunity, and all that. Shall I do it?"

She did not reply at once. The undeceived inner self was telling her that here lay the parting of the ways; that on her answer would be built the structure, formal or confidential, of their future intercourse.

Loyalty to the halo demanded self-restraint; but every other fiber of her was reaching out for a reestablishment of the old boy-and-girl openness of heart and mind. Her hesitation was only momentary.

"You are just as rude and Gothic as you used to be, aren't you, Tom?

Don't you know, I'm childishly glad of it; I was afraid you might be changed in that way, too,--and I don't want to find anything changed.

You needn't be polite at the expense of truth--not with me."

He looked at her with love in his eyes.

"This time, you mean--or all the time."

"All the time, if you like."

"I do like; there has got to be some one person in this world to whom I can talk straight, Ardea."

She laughed a little laugh of half-constraint.

"You speak as if there had been a vacancy."

"There has been--for just about three years. I remember you told me once that I'd find two kinds of friends: those who would refuse to believe anything bad of me, and those who would size me up and still stick to me. You are the only one of that second lot I have discovered thus far."

"We are getting miles away from the Fifth Avenue Hotel," she reminded him.

"No; we are just now approaching it from the proper direction. I had my war paint on that morning, and I wasn't fit to talk to you."

"Business?" she queried.