The Quickening Part 32

The incident turned on the fact of his walking home. Ordinarily he struck work when the furnace whistle blew, riding home with his father behind old Longfellow; but on this particular evening Kinderling, the architect, missed his South Tredegar train, and Tom spent an extra hour with him, discussing further and future possibilities of expansion.

Kinderling got away on a later train, and Tom closed his office and took the long mile up the pike afoot in the dusk of the autumn evening, thinking pointedly of many things mechanical and industrial, and never by any chance forereaching to the epoch-marking event that was awaiting him at the Woodlawn gate.

His hand was upon the latch of the ornamental side wicket opening on the home foot-path when a woman, crouching in the shadow of the great-gate pillar, rose suddenly and stood before him. He did not recognize her at first; it was nearly dark, and her head was snooded in a shawl. Then she spoke, and he saw that it was Nancy Bryerson--a Nan sadly and terribly changed, but with much of the wild-creature beauty of face and form still remaining.

"You done forgot me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked; and then, at his start of recognition: "I allow I have changed some."

"Surely I haven't forgotten you, Nan. But you took me by surprise; and I can't see in the dark any better than most people. What are you doing down here in the valley so late in the evening?" He tried to say it superiorly, paternally, as an older man might have said it--and was not altogether successful. The mere sight of her set his blood aswing in the old throbbing ebb and flow, though, if he had known it, it was pity now rather than pa.s.sion that gave the impetus.

"You allow it ain't fittin' for me to be out alone after night?" she said, with a hard little laugh. "I reckon it ain't goin' to hurt me none; anyways, I had to come. Paw's been red-eyed for a week, and he's huntin' for you, Tom-Jeff."

Then Tom recalled j.a.pheth's word of the morning.

"Hunting for me? Well, I'm not very hard to find," he said, unconsciously repeating the answer he had made to the horse-trader's warning.

"Couldn't you make out to go off somewheres for a little spell?" she asked half-pleadingly.

"Run away, you mean? Hardly; I'm too busy just at present. Besides, I haven't any quarrel with your father. What's he making trouble about now?"

She put her face in her hands, and though she was silent, he could see that sobs were shaking her. Being neither more nor less than a man, her tears made him foolish. He put his arm around her and was trying to find the comforting word, when the heavens fell.

How Ardea and Miss Euphrasia, going the round-about way from one house to the other to avoid the dew-wet gra.s.s of the lawns, came fairly within arm's-reach before he saw or heard them, remained a thing inexplicable.

But when he looked up they were there, Miss Euphrasia straightening herself aloof in virtuous disapproval, and Ardea looking as if some one had suddenly shown her the head of Medusa.

Tom separated himself from Nan in hot-hearted confusion and stood as a culprit taken in the act. Nan hid her face again and turned away. It was Miss Dabney the younger who found words to break the smarting silence.

"Don't mind us, Mr. Gordon," she said icily. "We were going to Woodlawn to see if your father and mother could come over after dinner."

Tom smote himself alive and made haste to open the foot-path gate for them. There was nothing more said, or to be said; but when they were gone and he was once more alone with Nan, he was fighting desperately with a very manlike desire to smash something; to relieve the wrathful pressure by hurting somebody. Let it be written down to his credit that he did not wreak his vengeance on the defenseless. Thomas Jefferson, the boy, would not have hesitated.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Tom made haste to open the foot-path gate for them.]

"You were going to tell me about your father," he said, striving to hold the interruption as if it had not been, and yet tingling in every nerve to be free. "Did you come all the way down the mountain to warn me?"

She nodded, adding: "But that didn't make no differ'; I had to come anyway. He run me out, paw did."

"Heavens!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Tom, p.r.i.c.kling now with a new sensation. "And you haven't any place to stay?"

She shook her head.

"No. I was allowin' maybe your paw'd let me sleep where you-uns keep the hawsses--jest for a little spell till I could make out what-all I'm goin' to do."

He was too rageful to be quite clear-sighted. Yet he conceived that he had a duty laid on him. Once in the foolish, infatuated long-ago he had told her he would take care of her; he remembered it; doubtless she was remembering it, too. But her suggestion was not to be considered for a moment.

"I can't let you go to the stables," he objected. "The horse-boys sleep there. But I'll put a roof over you, some way. Wait here a minute till I come back."

His thought was to go to his mother and ask her help; but half-way to the house his courage failed him. Since the breach in spiritual confidence he had been better able to see the lovable side of his mother's faith; but he could not be blind to that quality of hardness in it which, even in such chastened souls as Martha Gordon's, finds expression in woman's inhumanity to woman. Besides, Ardea and her cousin were still in the way.

He swung on his heel undecided. On the hillside back of the new foundry there was a one-roomed cabin built on the Gordon land years before by a hermit watchman of the Chiawa.s.see plant. It was vacant, and Tom remembered that the few bits of furniture had not been removed when the old watchman died. Would the miserable shack do for a temporary refuge for the outcast? He concluded it would have to do; and, making a wide circuit of the house, he went around to the stables to harness Longfellow to the buggy. Luckily, the negroes were all in the detached kitchen, eating their supper, so he was able to go and come undetected.

When he drove down to the gate he found Nan waiting where he had left her; but now she had a bundle in her arms. As he got out to swing the driveway grille, the house door opened; a flood of light from the hall lamp banded the lawn, and there were voices and footsteps on the veranda. He flung a nervous glance over his shoulder; Ardea and her cousin were returning down the foot-path. Wherefore he made haste, meaning not to be caught again, if he could help it. But the fates were against him. Longfellow, s.n.a.t.c.hed ruthlessly from his half-emptied oat box, made equine protest, yawing and veering and earning himself a savage cut of the whip before he consented to place the buggy at the stone mounting-step.

"Quick!" said Tom, flinging the reins on the dashboard. "Chuck your bundle under the seat and climb in!"

But Nan was provokingly slow, and when she tried to get in with the bundle still in her arms, the buggy hood was in the way. Tom had to help her, was in the act of lifting her to the step, when the wicket latch, clicked and Ardea and Miss Euphrasia came out. They pa.s.sed on without comment, but Tom could feel the electric shock of righteous scorn through the back of his head. That was why he drove half-way to the lower end of the pike before he turned on Nan to say:

"What's in that bundle you're so careful of? Why don't you put it under the seat?"

She looked around at him, and dark as it was, he saw that the great black eyes were shining with a strange light--strange to him.

"I reckon you wouldn't want me to do that, Tom-Jeff," she answered simply. "Hit's my baby--my little Tom."

He was struck dumb. It often happens that in the fiercest storm of gossip the one most nearly concerned goes his way without so much as suspecting that the sun is hidden. But Tom had not been exposed to the violence of the storm. Nan's shame was old, and the gossip tongues had wagged themselves weary two years before, when the child was born. So Tom was quite free to think only of his companion. A great anger rose and swelled in his heart. What scoundrel had taken advantage of an ignorance so profound as to be the blood sister of innocence? He would have given much to know; and yet the true delicacy of a manly soul made him hold his peace.

Thus it befell that they drove in silence to the deserted cabin on the hillside; and Tom went down to the foundry office and brought a lamp for light. The cabin was a mere shelter; but when he would have made excuses, Nan stopped him.

"Hit's as good as I been usen to, as you know mighty well, Tom-Jeff. I on'y wisht--"

He was on his knees at the hearth, kindling a fire, and he looked up to see why she did not finish. She was sitting on the edge of the old watchman's rude bed, bowed low over the sleeping child, and again sobs were shaking her like an ague fit. There was something heartrending in this silent, wordless anguish; but there was nothing to be said, and Tom went on making the fire. After a little she sat up and continued monotonously:

"_He_ was liken to me thataway, too; the Man 'at I heard your Uncle Silas tellin' about one night when I sot on the doorstep at Little Zoar--He hadn't no place to lay His'n head; not so much as the red foxes 'r the birds ... and I hain't."

The blaze was racing up the chimney now with a cheerful roar, and Tom rose to his feet, every good emotion in him stirring to its awakening.

"Such as it is, Nan, this place is yours, for as long as you want to stay," he said soberly. And then: "You straighten things around here to suit you, and I'll be back in a little while."

He was gone less than half an hour, but in that short interval he lighted another fire: a blaze of curiosity and comment to tingle the ears and loosen the tongues of the circle of loungers in Hargis's store in Gordonia. He ignored the stove-hugging contingent pointedly while he was giving his curt orders to the storekeeper; and the contingent avenged itself when he was out of hearing.

"Te-he!" chuckled Simeon Cantrell the elder, pursing his lips around the stem of his corn-cob pipe; "looks like Tom-Jeff was goin' to house-keepin' right late in the evenin'."

"By gol, I wonder what's doin'?" said another. "Reckon he's done tuk up with Nan Bryerson, afte' all's been said an' done?"

Bastrop Clegg, whose distinction was that of being the oldest loafer in the circle, spat accurately into the drafthole of the stove, sat back and tilted his hat over his eyes.

"Well, boys, I reckon hit's erbout time, ain't hit?" he moralized.

"Leetle Tom must be a-goin' awn two year old; and I don't recommember ez Tom 'r his pappy has ever done a livin' thing for Nan."

Whereupon one member of the group got up and addressed himself to the door. It was j.a.pheth Pettigra.s.s; and what he said was said to the starlit night outside.

"My Lord! that ther' boy _was_ lyin' to me, after all! I didn't believe hit that night when he r'ared and took on so to me and 'lowed to chunk me with a rock, and I don't want to believe hit now. But Lordy gracious!

hit do look mighty bad, with him a-buyin' all that outfit and loadin'

hit in his pappy's buggy; hit do, for sh.o.r.e!"

A half-hour later, Brother j.a.pheth, trudging back to Deer Trace on the pike, saw the light in the long-deserted cabin back of the new foundry plant; saw this and was overtaken at the Woodlawn gates by Thomas Jefferson with Longfellow and the buggy. And he could not well help observing that the buggy had been lightened of its burden of household supplies.

Tom turned the horse over to William Henry Harrison and went in to his belated dinner somberly reflective. He was not sorry to find that his mother and father had gone over to the manor-house. Solitude was grateful at the moment; he was glad of the chance to try to think himself uninterruptedly out of the snarl of misunderstanding in which his impulsiveness had entangled him.

The pointing of the thought was to see Ardea and have it out with her at once. Reconsidered, it appeared the part of prudence to wait a little.

The muddiest pool will settle if time and freedom from ill-judged disturbance be given it. But we, who have known Thomas Jefferson from his beginnings, may be sure that it was the action-thought that triumphed. _They also serve who only stand and wait_, was meaningless comfort to him; and when he had finished his solitary dinner and had changed his clothes, he strode across the double lawns and rang the manor-house bell.