The Quickening Part 44

"Let up on that," said Tom, stiffening again. "If you had been where you could have used your ears as you did your eyes back yonder at Pine k.n.o.b, you'd know more than you seem to know now."

There was silence between them from this on until the horses were footing it cautiously down the bridle-path connecting the cart track with the Paradise pike. Then Pettigra.s.s said:

"Allowin' ther' might be another man, Tom-Jeff, jest for the sake of argyment, what-all was you aimin' to do if you found him?"

It was drawing on to dusk, and the electric lights of Mountain View Avenue and the colonial houses were twinkling starlike in the blue-gray haze of the valley. They had reach the junction of the steep bridle-path with the wood road which edged the Dabney horse pasture and led directly to the Deer Trace paddocks, and when j.a.pheth pulled his horse aside into the short cut, Tom drew rein to answer.

"It's n.o.body's business but mine, j.a.phe; but I'd just as soon tell you: it runs in my head that he needs killing mighty badly, and I've thought about it till I've come to the conclusion that I'm the appointed instrument. You turn off here? Well, so long."

Brother j.a.pheth made the gesture of leave-taking with his riding-switch, and sent his mount at an easy amble down the wood road, apostrophizing great nature, as his habit was. "Lawzee! _how_ we pore sinners do tempt the good Lord at every crook and elbow in the big road, _toe_ be sh.o.r.e!

Now ther's Tom-Jeff, braggin' how he'll be the one to kill the pappy o'

Nan's chillern: he's a-ridin' a mighty sh.o.r.e-footed hawss, but hit do look like he'd be skeered the Lord might take him at his word and make that hawss stumble. Hit do, for a fact!"

x.x.x

THROUGH A GLa.s.s DARKLY

On the night of the fire, Ardea had remained on the cliff's edge until the blaze died down and disappeared, which was some little time, she decided, before Tom could possibly have reached the foot of the mountain.

When there was nothing more to be seen she went back to the hotel and called up the Young-d.i.c.ksons, whose cottage commanded a short-range view of the Gordon plant. It was Mrs. Young-d.i.c.kson who answered the telephone. Yes; the fire was one of the foundry buildings--the office, she believed. Mr. Young-d.i.c.kson had gone over, and she would have him call up when he should return, if Miss Dabney wished.

Ardea said it did not matter, and having exhausted this small vein of distraction she returned to the music-room and the Bach fugue, as one, who has had a fall, rises and tries to go on as before, ignoring the shock and the bruisings. But the shock had been too severe. Tom Gordon had proved himself a wretch, beyond the power of speech to portray, and--she loved him! Not all the majestic harmonies of the inspired _Kapellmeister_ could drown that terrible discord.

The next day it was worse. There was a goodly number of South Tredegar people summering at the Inn, and hence no lack of companionship. But the social distractions were powerless in the field where Bach and the piano had failed, and after luncheon Ardea shut herself in her room, desperately determined to try what solitude would do.

That failed, too, more pathetically than the other expedients. It was to no purpose that she went bravely into the torture chamber of opprobrium and did penance for the sudden lapse into the elemental. It was the pa.s.sion of the base-born, she cried bitterly. He was unworthy, unworthy!

Why had he come? Why had she not refused to see him--to speak to him?

Such agonizing questions flung themselves madly on the spear points of fact and were slain. He had come; she had spoken. Never would she forget the look in his eyes when he had said, "Good night, and--good-by;" nor could she pa.s.s over the half-threat in the words that had gone before the leave-taking. To what deeper depth despicable could he plunge, having already sounded the deepest of them all--that of unfaith, of infidelity alike to the woman he had wronged and to the woman he professed to love?

At dinner-time she sent word to her grandfather and her cousin that she was not feeling well, which was a mild paraphrasing of the truth, and had a piece of toast and a cup of tea sent to her room. The bare thought of going down to the great dining-room and sitting through the hour-long dinner was insupportable. She made sure every eye would see the shame in her face.

With the toast and tea the servant brought the evening paper, sent up by a doting Major Caspar, thoughtful always for her comfort. A marked item in the social gossip transfixed her as if it had been an arrow. The Farleys had sailed from Southampton, and the house renovators were already busy at Warwick Lodge.

After that the toast proved too dry to be eaten and the tea took on the taste of bitter herbs. Vincent Farley was returning, coming to claim the fulfilment of her promise. She had never loved him; she knew it as she had not known it before; and that was dreadful enough. But now there were a thousand added pangs to go with the conviction. For in the interval love had been found--found and lost in the same moment--and the solid earth was still reeling at the shock.

Ardea of the strong heart and the calm inner vision had always had a feeling bordering on contempt for women of the hysterical type; yet now she felt herself trembling and slipping on the brink of the pit she had derided.

The third day brought surcease of a certain sort. In the Gallic blood there is ever a trace of fatalism; the shrug is its expression. It was generations back to the D'Aubignes, yet now and then some remote ancestor would reach up out of the shadowy past to lay a compelling finger on the latest daughter of his race. Her word was pa.s.sed, beyond honorable recall. Somewhere and in some way she would find the courage to tell Vincent that she did not love him as the wife should love the husband; and if he should still exact the price, she would pay it. After all, it would be a refuge, of a kind.

Now it is human nature to a.s.sume finalities and to base conduct on the a.s.sumption. Conversely, it is not in human nature to tighten one knot without loosening another. Having firmly resolved to be unflinchingly just to a Vincent Farley, one could afford to be humanely interested in the struggles sh.o.r.eward or seaward of a poor swimmer in the welter of the tideway. She did not put it thus baldly, even in her secret thought.

But the thing did itself.

The opportunities for marking the struggles of the poor swimmer were limited; but where is the woman who can not find the way when desire drives? Ardea had something more than a speaking acquaintance with Mr.

Frederic Norman who, as acting-manager of the foundry plant in Tom's absence, had generously thrown one of the buildings open for a series of Sunday services for the workmen, promoted by Miss Dabney and the Reverend Francis Morelock. Since the warm nights had come, Norman had taken a room at the Inn, climbing the mountain from the Paradise side in time for dinner, and going down in the cool of the morning after an early breakfast.

Being first and last a man of business, he knew, or seemed to know, nothing of the valley gossip, or of the social sentence pa.s.sed on his chief by the Mountain View Avenue court. When Ardea had a.s.sured herself of this, she utilized Norman freely as a source of information.

"You've known the boss a long time, haven't you, Miss Dabney?" asked the manager, one evening when Ardea had made room for him in a quiet corner of the veranda between the Major's chair and her own.

"Mr. Gordon? Oh, yes; a very long time, indeed. We were children together, you know."

"Well, I'd like to ask you one thing," said Frederic, the unfettered.

"Did you ever get to know him well enough to guess what he'd do next? I thought I'd been pretty close to him, but once in a while he runs me up a tree so far that I get dizzy."

"As for example?" prompted Miss Ardea, leaving the personal question in the air.

"I mean his way of breaking out in a new spot every now and then. Last winter was one of the times, when he made up his mind between two minutes to chuck the pipe-making and go back to college. And now he's got another streak."

Miss Dabney made the necessary show of interest.

"What is it this time--too much business, or not enough?"

Norman rose and went to the edge of the veranda to flick his cigar ash into the flower border. When he came back he took a chair on that side of Miss Dabney farthest from the Major, who was dozing peacefully in a great flat-armed rocker.

"I declare I don't know, Miss Dabney; he's got me guessing harder than ever," he said, lowering his voice. "Since the night when the office burned he's been miles beyond me. While the carpenters were knocking together the shack we're in now, he put in the time wandering around the plant and looking as if he had lost something and forgotten what it was.

Now that we've got into the new office, he shuts himself up for hours on end; won't see anybody--won't talk--scamps his meals half the time, and has actually got old Captain Caleb scared stiff."

"How singular!" said Ardea; but in her heart there was a great pity.

"Do you suppose it was his loss in the fire?" she asked.

The manager shook his head.

"No; that was next to nothing, and we're doing a good business. It was something else; something that happened about the same time. If I can't find out what it is, I'll have to quit. He's freezing me out."

Ardea was inconsistent enough to oppose the alternative.

"No," she objected. "You mustn't do that, Mr. Norman. It is a friend's part to stand by at such times, don't you think?"

"Oh, I'm willing," was the generous reply. "Only I'm a little lonesome; that's all."

At another time Norman told her of the mysterious walking delegate, who was admitted to the private office when an anxious and zealous business manager was excluded. Later still, he made a half-confidence. Caleb, in despair at the latest transformation in his son, had finally unfolded his doubts and fears, business-wise, to the manager. The Farleys were returning; a legal notice of a called meeting of the Chiawa.s.see Consolidated had been published; and it was evident that Colonel Duxbury meant to take hold with his hands. And Tom seemed to have forgotten that there was a battle to be fought.

Norman's recounting of this to Miss Dabney was the merest unburdening of an overloaded soul, and he was careful to garble it so that the prospective daughter-in-law of Colonel Duxbury might not be hurt. But Ardea read between the lines. Could it be possible that Tom's lifelong enmity for the Farleys, father and son, had even a little justification in fact? She put the thought away, resolutely setting herself the task of disbelieving. Yet, in the conversation which followed, Mr. Frederic Norman was very thoroughly cross-questioned without his suspecting it.

Ardea meant to cultivate the open mind, and she did not dream that it was the newly-discovered love which was prompting her to master the intricacies of the business affair.

Two days later the Farleys came home, and since Vincent went promptly into residence at Crestcliffe, the evenings with Norman were interrupted. But they had served their purpose; and when Vincent began to press for the naming of an early day in September for the wedding, Ardea found it quite feasible to be calmly indefinite. You see, she had still to tell him that it had become purely a matter of promise-keeping with her--a task easy only for the heartless.

It was in the third week in August, a full month, earlier than their original plans contemplated, that the Dabneys returned to Paradise and Deer Trace. Miss Euphrasia was led to believe that the Major had tired of the hotel and the mountain; and the Major thought the suggestion came first from Miss Euphrasia.

But the real reason for the sudden return lay in a brief note signed "Norman," and conveyed privately to Ardea's hands by a grimy-faced boy from the foundry.

"Mr. Tom was waylaid by two footpads at the Woodlawn gates Sat.u.r.day night and half killed," it read. "He is delirious and asks continually for you. Could you come?"