FREE AMONG THE DEAD
The skirmish-line rivulets of melted slag had crept to within a few feet of the two at the toe of the dump when the men of the engine crew ran with water to drench them.
Tom recovered consciousness under the dashing of the water, and was one of the bearers who carried Vincent Farley on a hastily improvised stretcher to the surrey waiting at the office gate.
Afterward, he went for Doctor Williams, deriding himself Homerically for playing the second act in the drama of the Good Samaritan, but playing it, none the less. And not to quit before he was quite through, he drove with the physician to Warwick Lodge, and sat in the buggy till the other Good Samaritan had performed his office.
"Nothing very serious, is it, Doctor?" he asked, when the old physician took the reins to drive his horse-holder home.
"H'm; he'll be rather badly scarred, and there is a chance that he will lose the sight of one eye," was the reply. Then: "It's none of my quarrel, Tom, but you hammered him pretty cruelly—with a stone, too, I should say."
"Did I?" grinned Tom. He was willing to bear the blame until Kincaid should have ample time to disappear.
"Yes; and with all due allowance for your provocation, it was a good bit beneath you, my boy."
The younger man laughed grimly. "Wait till you know the full size of the provocation, Doctor. I'm not half as bad as I might be. Another man would have left him to burn—here and hereafter."
The doctor said no more. It was not his province to make or meddle in the quarrel between the Gordons and the Farleys. And Tom also was silent, having many things to render him reflective.
When he was put down at Woodlawn it was after one o'clock. Yet he sat for an hour or more on the veranda, smoking many pipes and trying as he could to prefigure the future in the light of the night's happenings.
What an insufferable animal Farley was, to be sure!—with the love of a woman like Ardea Dabney failing to keep him on the hither side of common decency! Would Ardea break with him, now that she knew the truth? Tom shook his head. Not she; she would stand by him all the more stoutly, if not for love, then for pride's sake. That was the fine thing in her loyalty.
That thought led to another. When they were married, there would have to be a beginning in a new field. Chiawassee was gone, and the Farley fortune with it; and the new field would be a bald necessity. Tom decided that not even Ardea's pride and fortitude could face the looks askance of the Mountain View Avenue folk.
He measured the country colonists justly. They might have forgiven the moral lapse, though that was not the side they had turned toward him. Yet he fancied that when the business failure should be super-added, the Farley sins would become too multitudinous for the broadest mantle of charity to cover.
"Which brings on more talk," he mused, pulling thoughtfully at the pipe. "They can't start in the new diggings without money. Anyway, Vincent's no moneymaker; and if the look on a man's face counts for anything, old Colonel Duxbury has made his last flight from the promoting perch. O Lord!"—rising with a cavernous yawn and a mighty stretching of his arms overhead,—"I reckon it's up to me to go on doing all the things I don't want to do; that I didn't in the least mean to do. Somebody ought to write a book and call it Saints Inveterate. It would have simplified things a whole lot if I could have left him to be cremated after all."
Mr. Vancourt Henniker was not greatly surprised when Tom Gordon asked for a private interview on the morning following the final closing down of all the industries at Gordonia.
Without being in Gordon's confidence, or in that of American Aqueduct, the banker had been shrewdly putting two and two together and applying the result as a healing plaster to the stock he had taken as security for the final loan to Colonel Duxbury.
"I thought, perhaps, you might wish to buy this stock, Mr. Gordon," he said, when Tom had stated his business. "Of course, it can be arranged, with Mr. Farley's consent to our anticipating the maturity of his notes. But"—with a genial smile and a glance over his eye-glasses—"I'm not sure that we care to part with it. Perhaps some of us would like to hold it and bid it in."
Tom's smile matched the genial expansiveness of the president's.
"I reckon you don't want it, Mr. Henniker. You'll understand that it isn't worth the paper it is printed on when I tell you that I have sold my pipe-pit patents to American Aqueduct."
"Heavens and earth! Then the plant doesn't carry the patents? You've kept this mighty quiet, among you!"
"Haven't we!" said Tom fatuously. "I know just how you feel—like a man who has been looking over the edge of the bottomless pit without knowing it. You'll let me have the stock for the face of the loan, won't you?"
But the president was already pressing the button of the electric bell that summoned the cashier. There was no time like the present when the fate of a considerable bank asset hung on the notion of a smiling young man whose mind might change in the winking of an eye.
With the Farley stock in his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled skein of Chiawassee affairs. Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement were vanquished, one by one.
When it was all over, Tom began to draw checks on the small fortune realized from the sale of the patents. One was to Major Dabney, redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawassee Limited at par. Another was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a valuation based on the prosperous period before the crash of '93. With this check in his pocket he went home—for the first time in two weeks.
It was well beyond the Woodlawn dinner-hour before he could muster up the courage to cross the lawns to Deer Trace. No word had passed between him and Ardea since the September afternoon when he had overtaken her at the church door,—counting as nothing the effort she had made to speak to him on the night of vengeance.
How would she receive him? Not too coldly, he hoped. It was known that Vincent's assailant in the furnace yard was a stranger; a man who had taken service as a guard: also that Mr. Gordon—they gave him his courtesy title now—had saved Vincent from a terrible death. Tom thought the rescue should count for something with Ardea.
It did. She was sitting at the piano in the otherwise deserted music-room when he entered; and she broke a chord in the middle to give him both of her hands, and to say, with eyes shining, as if the rescue were a thing of yesterday:
"O Tom! I knew you had it in you! It was fine!"
"Hold on," he said, a bit unsteadily. "There must be no more misunderstandings. What happened that night three weeks ago, had to happen; and five minutes before it happened I was wondering if I could aim straight enough in the light from the slag-pot to hit him. And I fully meant to do it."
She shuddered.
"I—I was afraid," she faltered. "I knew, you know—Japheth had told me, in—in justice to you. That was why I ran across the lawn and called to you."
The sweet beauty of her laid hold on him and he felt his grip going. Another word and he would be trespassing again. To keep from saying it he crossed to the recessed window and sat down in the sleepy-hollow chair which was the Major's peculiar possession in the music-room.
After a little he said: "Play something, won't you?—something that will make me a little less sorry that I didn't kill him."
"The idea!" she said. But when he settled himself in the big easy-chair as a listener, lying back with his eyes closed and his hands locked over one knee, she turned to the piano and humored him. When the final chord of the Wanderlied had sung itself asleep, he sat up and nodded approvingly.
"I wonder if you appreciate your gift as you should?—to be able to make a man over in the moral part of him with the tips of your fingers? The devil is exorcised, for the moment, and I can tell you all about it now, if you care to know."
"Of course I care," she assented.
"Well, to begin with, I'm no better than I have been; a little less despicable than you've been thinking me, perhaps, but more wicked. I've hated these two men ever since I was old enough to know how; and to get square with them, I haven't scrupled to sink to their level. The smash at Gordonia is my smash, I'm responsible for everything that has happened."
"I know it," she said. "Mr. Norman has told me."
"Looking it all over, I don't see that there is much to choose between me and the men I've been hunting down. They went after the things they needed, without much compunction for other people; and so did I. On the night of the—on the night when you called to me and I wouldn't answer, I was going down to rub it in; to tell them they were in the hole and that I had put them there. I met a man at the gate who told me what Japheth told you. It made a devil of me, Ardea. I took the man's gun and followed Vincent around the yard. I meant to kill him."
She nodded complete intelligence.
"The provocation was very great," she said evenly. "Why didn't you do it, Tom?"
"Now you've cornered me: I don't know why I didn't. I had only to walk away and let him alone when the time came. The slag-spilling would have settled him. But I couldn't do it."
"Of course you couldn't," she agreed convincingly. "God wouldn't let you."
"He lets other men commit murder; one a day, or such a matter."
"Not one of those who have named His name, Tom—as you have."
He shook his head slowly. "I wish that appealed to me, as it ought. But it doesn't. Where is the proof?"
She rose from the piano seat and went to stand before him.
"Can you ask that, soberly and in earnest, after the wonderful experience you have had?"
"I have asked it," he insisted stubbornly. "You mustn't take anything for granted. Just at that moment I couldn't kill a man; but that is all the difference. I've done what I meant to do, or most of it."
She was holding him steadily with her eyes. "Are you glad, or sorry, Tom?"
He frowned up at her.
"I don't know. Now that it's all over, the taste of it is like sawdust in the mouth; I'll admit that much. I'm free; 'free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,' as David put it when he had sounded all the depths. Is that being sorry?"
"No—I don't know," she confessed.
He was smiling now.
"You think I ought to go back to first principles: get down on my knees and agonize over it? Sometimes I wish I could be a boy long enough to do just that thing, Ardea. But I can't. The mill won't grind with the water that has passed."
"But the stream isn't dry," she asserted, taking up his figure. "What will you do now? That is the question: the only one that is ever worth asking."
He was frowning thoughtfully again, and the words came as an unconscious voicing of vague under-depths.
"They took to the woods, the waste places, the deserts—those men of old who didn't understand. Some of them went blind and crazy and died there; and some of them had their eyes opened and came back to make the world a little better for their having lived in it. I'm minded to try it."
She caught her breath in a little gasp which she was careful not to let him see.
"You are going away?" she asked.
"Yes; out to the 'beyond' in northern Arizona. There is a new iron field out there to be prospected, and Mr. Clarkson wants me to go and report on it. And that brings us back to business. May I talk business—cold money business—to you for a minute or two?"
"If you like," she permitted. "Only I think the other kind of talk is more profitable."
"Wait till you hear what I have to say in dollars and cents. That ought to interest you."
"Why should it—particularly?"
"Because you are going to marry a poor man, and—"
She turned away from him quickly and stood facing the window. But he went on with what he had to say.
"That's all right; I can say it to your back, just as well. You know, I suppose, that your—that the Farleys have lost out completely?"
"Yes,"—to the window-pane.
"Well, a curious thing has come to pass—quite a miraculous thing, in fact. Chiawassee will pay the better part of its debts and—and redeem its stock; or some of it, at least." He rose and stood beside her. "Isn't it a thousand pities that Colonel Duxbury couldn't have held on to his shares just a little longer?"
"Yes; he is an old man and a broken one, now." There was a sob in her voice, or he thought there was. But it was only the great heart of compassion that missed no object of pity.
"True; but the next best thing is to have the young woman who marries into the family bring it back with her, don't you think? Here is a check for what Mr. Farley's stock would have sold for before the troubles began. It's made payable to you because—well, for obvious reasons; as I have said, he lost out."
She turned on him, and the blue eyes read him to his innermost depths.
"You are still the headlong, impulsive boy, aren't you?" she said, not altogether approvingly. "You are paying this out of your own money."
"Well, what if I am?"
"If you are, it is either a just restitution, or it is not. In either case, I can not be your go-between."
"Now look here," he argued; "you've got to be sensible about this. There'll be four of you, and at least two incompetents; and you've got to have money to live on. I made Colonel Duxbury lose it, and—"
She stopped him with the imperious little gesture he knew so well.
"Not another word, if you please. I can't do your errand in this, and I wouldn't if I could."
"You think I ought to be generous and give it to him, anyway, do you?"
"I don't presume to say," was the cool rejoinder. "When you have come fully to your right mind, you will know what to do, and how to go about it."
He crumpled the check, thrusting it into his pocket, and made two turns about the room before he said:
"I'll see them both hanged first!"
"Very well; that is your own affair."
He fell to walking again, and for a full minute the silence was broken only by the murmur of men's voices in the library adjoining. The Major had company, it seemed.
"This is 'good-by,' Ardea; I'm going to-morrow. Can't we part friends?" he said, when the silence had begun to rankle unbearably.
"You've hurt me," she declared, turning again to the window.
"You've hurt me, more than once," he retorted, raising his voice more than he meant to; and she faced about quickly, holding up a warning finger.
"Mr. Henniker and Mr. Young-Dickson are in the library with grandpa. They will hear you."
"I don't care. I came here to-night with a heart full of what few good things there are left in me, and you—you are so wrapped up in that beggar that I didn't kill—"
"Hush!" she commanded imperatively. "Grandfather has not heard: he knows nothing, and he must nev—"
The murmur of voices in the adjoining room had suddenly become a storm, with the smooth tones of Mr. Henniker trying vainly to allay it. In the thick of it the door of communication flew open and a white-haired, fierce-mustached figure of wrath appeared on the threshold. For a moment Tom's boyish awe of the old autocrat of Deer Trace came uppermost and he was tempted to run away. But the wrath was not directed at him. Indeed, the Major seemed not to see him.
"What's all this I'm hearing now for the ve'y first time about these heah low-down, schemin' scoundrels that want to mix thei-uh white-niggeh blood with ouhs?" he roared at Ardea, quite beside himself with passion. "Wasn't it enough that they should use my name and rob my good friend Caleb? No, by heavens! That snivelin' young houn'-dog must pay his cou't to you while he was keepin' his—"
The Major's face had been growing redder, and he choked in sheer poverty of speech. Moreover, Tom had come between; had taken Ardea in his arms protectingly and was fronting the firebrand Dabney like a man.
"That's enough, Major," he said definitely. "You mustn't say things you'll be sorry for after you cool down a bit. Miss Ardea is like the king: she can do no wrong."
There was a gasping pause, the sound of a big man breathing hard, followed by the slamming of the door, and they were alone together again, Ardea crying softly, with her face hidden on the shoulder of shielding.
"Oh, isn't it terrible?" she sobbed; and Tom held her the closer.
"Never mind," he comforted. "He was crazy-mad, as he had a good right to be. You know he will be heart-broken when he comes to himself. You are his one ewe lamb, Ardea."
"I know," she faltered; "but O Tom! it was so unnecessary; so wretchedly unnecessary! It's—it's more than two whole months since—since Vincent Farley broke the engagement, and—"
He held her at arm's length to look at her, but she hid her face in her hands.
"Broke the engagement!" he exclaimed, almost roughly. "Why did he do that?"
She stood before him with her hands clasped and the clear-welled eyes meeting his bravely.
"Because I told him I could not marry him without first telling him that I loved you, Tom; that I had been loving you always and in spite of everything," she said.
And what more she said I do not know.