The Quickening Part 37

"There is the church and its ministrations," he began, but she broke in.

"To get the drowning man ash.o.r.e you have first to go down into the water and lay hold of him, Mr. Morelock. That means personal contact, personal a.s.sociation."

The young man was clearly bewildered. His experience thus far had not been enriched by many intimacies with clear-eyed young women who calmly defined the larger humanities for him.

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand your point of view," he demurred.

"Don't you? I'm not sure that I can explain just what I mean. But it seems to me that really to help any one, you must know that one; not superficially, as people meet in ordinary ways, but intimately. And you can't hope to do that if you hold aloof; if you--if you--pose as a minister all the time." The word was not flattering, but she could lay hold of no other.

"Oh, I hope I don't do that!" he laughed. "But to creep around underground in a sooty coal-mine, a laughing-stock to those who know how to do it--er--professionally--"

"The men have to do it as breadwinners, Mr. Morelock, and the most ribald one of them wouldn't laugh at you. I wouldn't be afraid to promise that you could fill St. John's, forbidding as its atmosphere is to the average working-man, the very next Sunday after such a visitation."

Now this young zealot was a man of imagination, hidebound only in his traditions. Also, he was not above taking ideas where he found them.

"Really, Miss Dabney, I'm not sure but you have hold of the matter at the practical end," he conceded. "I--I'd like to talk with you further about it, when we have time. Do you suppose I could get permission to go into the mines during working-hours?"

"Certainly you could--for the mere asking. We can speak to Mr. Caleb Gordon about it after breakfast, if you wish. My! doesn't that rain sting! I'm glad we are at home."

"Yes; and it is freezing as it falls. At home in New England we should say it was too cold to rain."

"It is never too cold or too anything to rain here," she said; and she let him take her arm to help her up the slippery stone steps to the stately portico.

A moment later the hospitable door of the manor house yawned for them, and the warmth of the Major's welcome, the light and glow of the crackling wood fires, and the solid comfort of surrounding stone walls soon banished the memory of the small struggle with the elements.

"Oh, my deah suh! you are not going back to town this mo'ning!"

protested the warm-hearted Major Caspar, as the quartet was rising from the breakfast-table an hour later. "Why, bless youh soul! I wouldn't think of letting you go from undeh my roof in such weatheh as this! Tell him it's his duty to stay, Ardea, my deah; persuade him that he'll neveh have a betteh oppo'tunity to wrestle with the wickedest old sinner in Paradise Valley."

Young Mr. Morelock objected, zealously at first, but less strenuously when Ardea drew the sash curtain and showed him the ice crust already an inch thick, coating tree trunk and twig, gra.s.s blade and graveled driveway.

"I doubt very much if the horses could keep their footing; and it is quite out of the question for you to walk to Gordonia," she decided. "We have the long-distance, and you can explain matters to Doctor Channing."

The young man called up St. Michael's rectory and explained first, and smoked companionably with the Major in the library afterward. Further along, there was a one-sided discussion polemical, it being meat and drink to Major Caspar to ensnare a young theologian to his discomfiture in the unaxiomatic field of religion. Ardea was in and out of the library frequently while the discussion was in progress, but she had little to say; indeed, there was scant room for a third when the Major was once well warmed to his favorite relaxation. But Morelock remarked as he might, in the few breathing-s.p.a.ces allowed him by his host, that Miss Dabney seemed restless and anxious about something, and that she spent much of the time at the windows watching the steady growth of the ice sheet.

After luncheon they all gathered in the deep-recessed window of the music-room which commanded a view of the groved pasture with its background of mountain slope and precipice. The rain was still falling, and the temperature remained at the freezing-point, but the wind had gone down and the slow, measured swaying of the trees under the weight of the thickening armor of ice was portentous of disaster, if the weather conditions should continue unchanged.

But as yet the storm was only in the magnificent stage. Far and near, the outdoor world was a world of cold, white crystal, gleaming pure and unsullied under the gray skies. Even the blackened tree trunks had their shining panoply of silver; and from the eaves of the projecting window a fringe of huge icicles was lengthening drop by drop.

Miss Euphrasia thought of her roses, already in leaf, and refused to be enthusiastic over the supernal beauty of the crystalline stage settings.

Major Caspar was anxious about the pasturing stock, and was relieved when j.a.pheth Pettigra.s.s came in sight, leading a slipping, sliding cavalcade of terrified horses to shelter in the great stables. The young clergyman's thoughts were with the ill-housed poor of the South Tredegar parish; and Ardea's--?

Young Mr. Morelock put his private anxieties aside in deference to the growing terror in the eyes of his young hostess. He had known her but a short time, meeting her only as his St. John's-in-Paradise duties gave him opportunity; but from the first she had stood to him as a type of womanly serenity and fort.i.tude. Yet now she was visibly terrified and distressed, and the clergyman wondered. She had never before given him the impression that she belonged to the storm-fearing group of women.

"Can't we have a little music, Miss Ardea?" he asked, after a while, hoping to suggest a comforting diversion.

"You will have to excuse me," she said, in a low voice. "I--I think I am not quite well."

Cousin Euphrasia overheard the admission and recommended the quiet of up stairs, drawn curtains and possets. But Ardea let the suggestion fall to the ground, and a little while afterward Morelock surprised her at her forenoon occupation of going from window to window, with the look of distress rising to sharp agony when the overladen trees began to groan and crack under the crushing ice burden.

"What is it, Miss Dabney?" he said, out of the heart of sympathy, when he came on her alone in the library. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Yes," she rejoined quickly. "The moment the storm subsides even a little, I must go out. My excuse will be a desire to see, a thirst for fresh air--anything; and you must abet me if there is any opposition."

"But I thought you were afraid of the storm," he interposed.

"I? I should be out in it this minute if I thought grandfather wouldn't be tempted to lock me in my room for proposing such a thing. And I _must_ go before dark, whatever happens."

The young man from New England was a gentleman born. He neither asked questions nor raised objections.

"Of course, you may command me utterly," he said warmly. "I'll help; and I'll go with you, if you will let me."

"That is what I want," she said frankly. "Will you propose it? I--I can't explain, even to my cousin."

"Certainly," he agreed; and a little later, when the temperature dropped the necessary three degrees and the rain stopped, he calmly announced his intention of taking Miss Ardea out to see the devastation which, by this time, was beginning to be apparent on all sides.

There was a protest, as a matter of course, quite shrill on the part of Miss Euphrasia, but not absolutely prohibitory on the Major's. Morelock saw to it that his charge was well wrapped; in her haste and agitation Ardea would have overlooked the common precautions. They used the side door for a sally-port, and were soon slipping and sliding almost helplessly across the lawn. Walking was next to impossible, and the crashes of falling branches and trees came like the detonations of quick-firing guns. The minister locked arms with the determined young woman at his side and picked the way for her as he could.

"This is something awful for you," he said, when they had covered half the distance to the nearest pasture wall. "Does the necessity warrant it?"

"It does," she rejoined; and they pressed on in awe-inspired silence to the gate which opened on the pasture grove.

The quarter of a mile intervening between the gate and that side of the inclosure bounded by the lower slope of the mountain was truly a pa.s.sage perilous. A dozen times in the crossing Ardea fell, and so far from being able to save her, Morelock could do no more than fall with her.

Once a great limb of a spreading oak split off with a clashing of ice and came sweeping down to give them the narrowest of escapes; and after that they kept the open where they might.

At a rude rock stile over the limestone boundary wall at the mountain's foot they paused to take breath.

"Is there much more of it?" asked the escort, regretting for the first time in his life, perhaps, that he had so studiously ignored the athletic side of his seminary training.

"The distance is nothing," she panted. "But we must take the path for a little way up the mountain. No, don't tell me it can't be done; it _must_ be done,"--this in answer to his dubious scanning of the gla.s.sy ascent.

Again his good breeding a.s.serted itself.

"Certainly it can be done, if you so desire." And he picked up a stone and patiently hammered the ice from the steps of the stile so she could cross in safety.

It was no more than a three-hundred-yard dash up the slope to the dog-keeper's cabin in the little glen, but it was a fight for inches.

Every stone, every hand-hold of bush or shrub or tuft of dried gra.s.s was an icy treachery. Ardea knew the mountain and the path, and was less helpless than she would otherwise have been; yet she was willing to confess that she could never have done it alone. With all their care and caution they were exhausted and breathless when they topped the acclivity and Morelock saw the cabin in the pocket cove, with the great tulip-tree in the dooryard bending and distorted and groaning like a living thing in agony.

"Isn't it terrible!" he said; but Ardea's glance had gone beyond the tortured tree to the shuttered windows and smokeless chimney of the cabin.

"Oh, let us hurry!" she gasped; but at the gate of the tiny dooryard she stopped in sudden embarra.s.sment. "I can't take you into the house, Mr.

Morelock. Will you wait for me here--just a moment?"

He said "Certainly," as he had been saying it from the first. But it was quite without prejudice to a healthy and growing curiosity. The small adventure was taking on an air of mystery which thickened momently, demanding insistently a complete rearrangement of his preconceived notions of Miss Ardea Dabney.

She left him at once and made her way cautiously to the ice-encrusted door-stone. What she saw, when she lifted the wooden latch and entered, was what she had been praying she might not see.

On the small hearth was a heap of white ashes, dead and cold, and the tomb-like chill of the tightly-closed room was benumbing. Asleep in the fireplace corner, his little knees drawn up to his chin and his face streaked with the dried tears, was the three-year-old baby who bore Tom Gordon's name. And on the bed in the recess at the back of the room, her hands clenched and her pa.s.sionate face a mask of long-continued agony, lay the mother.