AS WITH A MANTLE
The month of March in the great, southward-reaching bight of the Tennessee River is the pattern and form of fickleness climatic. Normally it is the time of starting sap and swelling buds and steaming leaf beds odorous of spring; the month when the migratory crows wing their flight northward, and Nature, lightest of winter sleepers in the azurine latitudes, stirs to her vernal awakening. None the less, in the Tennessee March the orchardist, watching the high-blown clouds in skies of the softest blue, is glad if the peach buds are slow in responding to the touch of the wooing airs, or, chewing a black birch twig as he makes the leisurely round of his line fence, warns his gardening neighbor that it is too early to plant beans. True, the poplars may be showing a tinge of green, and the buds of the hickory may have lighted their tiny candle flames on the winter-bared boughs; but the "blackberry winter" is yet to come, and there are rigorous possibilities still lingering in the high-flying clouds and the sudden-shifting winds.
It was on the fourth Sunday in the month that Ardea rose early and went fasting to the communion service at St. John's-in-Paradise. Primarily, St. John's was merely the religious factor in Mr. Duxbury Farley's scheme of country-colony promotion, and for the greater part of the year its silver-toned bell was silent and its appeal was mainly to the artistic eye. But latterly St. Michael's, the mother church in South Tredegar, had attained a new assistant rector whose zeal was not yet dulled by apathetic unresponsiveness on the part of the to-be-helped. Hence St. Michael's various missions flourished for the time, and once a month, if not oftener, the bell of St. John's sent its note abroad on the still morning air of Paradise.
On this particular Sunday morning Ardea was early at the church, and she was glad she had decided to wear her cloth gown. It had turned cooler in the night and the azure March sky was hidden behind a gray cloud mass which hung low on the slopes of the mountain. There was no fire in the church heater; and the few worshipers—the Vancourt Henniker girls, the two Misses Harrison, John Young-Dickson, of The Dell, dragged out at the chilly hour by his new wife, and Mrs. Schuyler Farnsworth and her daughter, all of the country-house colony beyond the creek—sat or knelt, and shivered through the service in decorous discomfort.
Miss Dabney was not looking quite as well as usual, as Miss Betsy Harrison remarked to her sister, Miss Willie, in a church whisper. She had grown thinner during the winter, and though the slate-blue eyes were as clear and steadfast as before, there was a strained look in them like that in the eyes of the spent runner. Mountain View Avenue, rurally alert for something to talk about, decided it was trouble rather than ill health. Miss Eva Farley corresponded with Jessica Farnsworth, and there had been European hints of an understanding between Vincent and Ardea. Coupling this with young Gordon's ostentatious devotion, Nan's appearance, and Tom's sudden determination to go back to college, there was the groundwork for a very pretty story which sufficiently accounted for Miss Dabney's changed looks and for her growing reluctance to be included in the country colony's social divagations. She was engaged to one man and in love with another, who was clearly ineligible—this was the Mountain View Avenue summing-up of the matter; and some condemned and some pitied, and all were careful not to step within the barrier of aloofness with which Miss Dabney had of late surrounded herself.
On this Sunday morning of weather portents it chanced to be Ardea's turn to entertain the young minister, or rather to give him his breakfast after the service; and she waited for him in the vestibule after the others had gone. The outer doors were open, and she could see the gray cloud mass feathering on its under side and creeping lower on the slopes of Lebanon in every stormy gust of the chill wind.
"It was prudent to bring your overcoat this morning, Mr. Morelock," she said, when her guest emerged from the vesting-room with his cassock in a neat bundle under his arm. "If I'd had any idea it would turn cold so fast, I should have had the carriage come for us."
"Indeed, my dear Miss Dabney, if you could walk to church, I'm sure I can walk home with you," was the ready response; nevertheless, the rather fragile-looking young man shuddered a little in sympathy with the rawness of the wind. He was from well-sheltered New England, and he had not yet acquired the native Southron's indifference to weather discomforts; would never acquire them this side of a consumptive's grave, it was to be feared.
"The attendance was pretty good for such a disagreeable morning, don't you think?" Ardea ventured, trying to make talk as they breasted the gusts together on the Deer Trace side of the pike.
The young missioner shook his head rather despondently. "There are English churchmen among the English and Welsh miners at Gordonia,—quite a number of them," he rejoined. "Not one of them was present."
It was the clear-sighted inner Ardea that smiled. There was little in the stately service and luxurious appointments of the country colony's church to attract the working-men, and much to repel them. She wondered that Mr. Morelock, young as he was, did not understand this.
"The mission of St. John's is hardly to the working people of Gordonia, is it?" she said, more in exculpation than in criticism.
"Oh, my dear young lady! the church knows no class distinctions!" protested the zealous one warmly. "Her call is to rich and poor, gentle and simple, young and old alike; and it is imperative. I must make a round of visitation among these miners at the very first opportunity."
Ardea bent low to the buffet of a stronger blast and fought for a moment with her clinging skirts. When she had breath to say it, she said: "Will you really do that? Then let me tell you how. Come out here some week-day in your roughest clothes, and make your round among the men while they are at work in the mine. They will listen to you then."
"Bless me! what an idea!" he gasped.
"It is not original with me," was the gentle reply. "You will remember that the example was set a good many hundred years ago among the fishermen of Galilee. And, after all, Mr. Morelock, it is the only way. You can not reach down to a living soul on this earth—that is worth saving."
It had begun to rain in spiteful little dashes and squalls, and the clergyman was turning up the collar of his overcoat and buttoning it about his throat. Moreover, the wind had risen to half a gale, and talking was difficult when it was not wholly impossible. But when they reached the Deer Trace gates and the shelter of the driveway evergreens, he had a defensive word ready.
"I can't fully agree with you, you know, Miss Ardea," he said. "Of course, we must not reach down in the Pharisaical sense. But neither must we lower the dignity of the sacred calling."
Her smile was neither disloyal nor cynical; it was merely pitying. She was thinking in her heart of hearts how much this zealous young apostle had yet to learn.
"Do you call it undignified to be a man among men?" she asked; adding quickly: "But I know you don't. And what other way is open to the true brother-helper?"
"There is the church and its ministrations," he began, but she broke in.
"To get the drowning man ashore you have first to go down into the water and lay hold of him, Mr. Morelock. That means personal contact, personal association."
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, grass 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-spaces 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 Japheth Pettigrass 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 fortitude. 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 passage 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 glassy ascent.
Again his good breeding asserted 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 grass 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 embarrassment. "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 passionate face a mask of long-continued agony, lay the mother.
Ardea was white to the lips and trembling when she retreated to the door-stone and beckoned to her companion.
"Can you find the way back to Deer Trace alone?" she faltered. "There is trouble here, as I feared there might be—terrible trouble and suffering. Say to my cousin that I must have Aunt Eliza, if she has to crawl here on her hands and knees. Then telephone for Doctor Williams, at Gordonia. He'll come if you tell him the message is from me. Oh, please go, quickly!"
"Oh, please go quickly!"
He was waiting only for her to finish.
"Is it quite safe for you here?" he asked.
"Quite; but I shall die of impatience if you don't hurry!" Then her good blood made its protest heard. "Oh, please forgive me! I don't forget that you are my guest, but—"
"Not a word, Miss Dabney. Shall I come back here with the woman or the doctor?"
"No; I'll send for you if—if there is no hope. Otherwise you could do nothing."
He lifted his hat and was gone, and she turned and reëntered the house of trouble, bravely facing that which had to be faced.
An hour later, when Doctor Williams, with Mammy Juliet's Pete chopping the way for him up the hazardous path, reached the end of his journey of mercy, there was a bright fire crackling on the hearth, and Miss Dabney was sitting before it, holding little Tom, who was still sleeping. Aunt Eliza, a deft middle-aged negress who had succeeded Mammy Juliet as housekeeper at Deer Trace, was bending over the bed, and the physician went quickly to stand beside her, shaking his head dubiously. A moment afterward he turned short on Ardea.
"You must go home, my dear—at once—and take the child with you. Pete is outside to help you, and my buggy is just at the foot of the path. I can't have you here."
"Can't I be of some use if I stay?" she pleaded.
"No; you'd only hinder. You are much too sympathetic. Don't delay; the minutes may count for lives," and the physician began to unbuckle the straps of the canvas-covered case he had brought with him.
Ardea wrapped the child hastily and gave him to Pete to carry, following as quickly as she could down the path made possible by the coachman's choppings. Happily, the doctor's horse was freshly shod, and the quarter-mile to the manor-house was measured in safety. Ardea left little Tom with Mammy Juliet at her cabin in the old quarters, and went up to the great house to wait anxiously for news. It was drawing on to the early dusk of the cloudy evening when she saw from the window of the music-room the muffled figure of Pete opening the pasture gate for the doctor to drive through. Instantly she flew to the door and out on the steps.
"Go in, child; go in," was the fatherly command. "I've got to stop to take Morelock in. I promised to carry him to the station."
"But Nancy?" she questioned anxiously.
"She will live," said the doctor briefly. And then he added with a frown: "But the child may not—which would doubtless be the best thing possible for all concerned. I'm afraid the woman is incorrigible." Then the professional part of him came to its own again: "You'll have to send somebody up there to relieve Eliza. Care is all that is needed now, but it mustn't be stinted."
There were tears standing in the slate-blue eyes of the listener, but Doctor Williams did not see them. If he had, he would not have understood; neither would he have plumbed the depths of misery in that whispered saying of Ardea's as she turned and fled to her room: "O Tom! how could you! how could you!"