LOVE
If Tom Gordon could have known how slightly the Dabney's European plans coincided with those of the Farleys, he might have had fewer heartburnings in those intervals when the harassing struggle for industrial existence gave him time to think of Ardea.
As a strict matter of fact, the voyage across, and some little guide-book touring of England, were the sum total of coincidence. On leaving London the Farleys set out on the grand tour which was to land them in Naples for the winter, while the Dabneys went directly to Paris and to a modest pension in the Rue Cambon to spend the European holiday in a manner better befitting the purse of a country gentleman.
So it befell that by the time Miss Eva Farley was rhapsodizing over the Rhine castles in twenty-page letters, boring Ardea a little, if the truth must be told, the Dabneys had settled down to their quiet life in the French capital. Ardea was anxious to do something with her music under a Parisian master—and was doing it. The Major found melancholy pleasure in reviewing at large the city of his son's long exile; and Miss Euphrasia came and went with one or the other of her cousins, as the exigencies of chaperonage or companionship constrained her.
In such moderate pleasuring the French summer began for the Major and his charges; so it continued, and so it ended; and late in September they began to talk about going home.
"We really mean it this time," wrote Ardea in a letter to Martha Gordon. "I confess we are all a little homesick for America, and Paradise, and dear old Deer Trace Manor. The Farleys are settled for the remainder of the year or longer in a fine old palazzo on the Bay of Naples, and we have a very pressing invitation to go and help them inhabit it. But thus far we have not been tempted beyond our strength. Major Grandpa is talking more and more pointedly about the Morgan mares, and is growing a habit of comparison-drawing in which America profits at the expense of Europe; so I suppose by the time you are reading this we shall have made our sailing arrangements. Nevertheless, the Naples invitation is dying hard. Eva seems to have set her heart on having us for the winter."
Ardea's figure of speech was no figure. The palazzo-sharing invitation did die hard; and when Miss Farley's letters failed, Mr. Vincent Farley made a journey to Paris for the express purpose of persuading the Dabneys to reconsider. Miss Euphrasia was neutral. The Major was homesick for a sight of his native Southland, but for Ardea's sake he generously concealed the symptoms—or thought he did. So the decision was finally left to Ardea.
She said no, and adhered to it, partly because she knew her grandfather was pining for Paradise, and partly on her own account. Ardea at twenty was a young woman who might have made King Solomon pause with suspended pen when he was writing that saying about his inability to find one woman among a thousand. She was not beautiful beyond compare, as the Southern young woman is so likely to be under the pencil of her loyal limners. She had the Dabney nose, which was not quite classical, and the Courtenay mouth, well-lined and expressive, rather than too suggestive, of feminine softness. But her eyes were beautiful, and her luxuriant masses of copper-gold hair fitted her shapely head like a glorious aureole; also, she had that indefinable adorableness called charm, and the sweet, direct, childlike frankness of speech which is its characteristic.
This was the external Ardea, known of men, and of those women who were large-minded enough not to envy her. But the inner Ardea was a being apart—high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded either by passion or the conventions. This inner Ardea knew Vincent Farley better than he knew himself: the small mind, the mask of outward correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still yields open-eyed and undeceived.
He was the most moderate of lovers, as such a man must needs be, but his anxiety to second the wishes of his father and sister was not to be misunderstood by the clear-eyed inner Ardea, whose intuition served her as a sixth sense. She knew that sometime he would ask her to marry him; and in that region where her answer should lie she found only a vast indecision. He was not her ideal, but the all-seeing inner self told her that she would never find the ideal. There comes to every woman, sooner or later, the conviction that if she would marry she must take men as they are, weighing the good against the evil, choosing as she may the man whose vices may be condoned or whose virtues are great enough to overshadow them. Ardea knew that Vincent Farley was not great in either field; but the little virtues were not to be despised. If he were not, in the best sense of the word, well-bred, he had at least been well nurtured, well schooled in the conventions. Ardea sighed. It was in her to be something more than the conventional wife, yet she saw no reason to believe that she would ever be called on to be anything else. By which it will be apparent that the sacred flame of love had not yet been kindled in her maiden heart.
As for Vincent Farley, the real man, Ardea's appraisal of him was not greatly at fault. He was tall, like his father, but there the resemblance paused. The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the ability always to present the same side to the same person. His attitude toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating instinct. And even lust finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them into some brief, fierce flame. At times, Farley's thought of Ardea was libertine; but oftener she figured as the woman who would grace the home of affluence, giving it charm and tone. Also, he had an affection for the Dabney manorial acres, and especially for that portion of them overlying the coal measures.
The pose-facet was at the precisely effective angle when he came to Paris as his sister's messenger and pictured, with what warmth there was in him, the delights in the prospect of a Neapolitan winter. But Ardea, shrinking from a six months' guesting with any one, said no, and told her grandfather she was ready to go home.
The start was from Havre, and Vincent, with time on his hands, was her companion on the railway journey, her courrier du place in the embarkation, and her faithful shadow up to the instant when the warning cry for the shore-goers rang through the ship. It was scarcely a moment for sentimental passages, and under the most favoring conditions, Vincent Farley was something less than sentimental. Yet he found time to declare himself in conventional fashion, modestly asking only for the right to hope.
Ardea was not ready to give an answer, even to the tentative question; yet she did it—was, in a manner, surprised into doing it. For the young woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities. At the very crucial moment the clear-sighted inner self was assuring her that this cold-eyed young man, who walked in the paths of righteousness because he found them easier and pleasanter than the way of the transgressor, was at best only a mildly exciting apotheosis of the negative virtues. But the negative virtues, failing to score brilliantly, nevertheless have the advantage of continuous innings. Ardea was turned twenty in the year of the European holiday, and she had—or believed she had—her heritage of the Dabney impetuosity well in hand. Vincent's self-restraint was admirable, and his gentle deference, conventional as it was, rose almost to the height of sentiment. So she gave him his answer; gave him her hand at parting, and stood dutifully fluttering her handkerchief for him while the liner drew out of its slip and pointed its prow toward the headlands.
With rough weather on the homeward passage, she had space and opportunity to consider the consequences. Being the only good sailor in the trio, she had her own self-communings for company during the greater part of the six days, and the incident sentimental took on an aspect of finality which was rather dismaying. It was quite in vain that she sought comfort in the reflection that she was committed to nothing conclusive. Vincent Farley had not taken that view of it. True, he had asked for nothing more than a favorable attitude on her part; but she thought he would be less than a man if he had not seen his final answer foreshadowed in her acquiescence.
The finality admitted, a query arose. Was Vincent Farley the man who, giving her his best, could call out the best there was in her? It annoyed her to admit the query, or rather the doubt which fathered it; it distressed her when the doubt appeared to grow with the lengthening leagues of distance.
Now vacillation was not a Dabney failing; and the aftermath of these storm-tossed musings made for Vincent Farley's cause. Romance also, in the eternal feminine, is a constant quantity, and if it be denied the Romeo-and-Juliet form of expression, will find another. Vincent Farley, as man or as lover, presented obstacles to any idealizing process, but Ardea set herself resolutely to overcome them. Distance and time have other potentialities besides the obliterative: they may breed halos. When the French liner reached its New York slip, Ardea was remembering only the studied kindnesses, the conventional refinements, the correctnesses which, if they did seem artificial at times, were so many guarantees of self-respect: when the Great Southwestern train had roared around the cliffs of Lebanon with the returning exiles, and the locomotive whistle was sounding for Gordonia, some other of the negative virtues had become definitely positive, and the halo was beginning to be distinctly visible.
How Tom Gordon had informed himself of the precise day and train of their home-coming, Ardea did not think to inquire. But he was on the platform when the train drew in, and was the first to welcome them.
She was quick to see and appreciate the changes wrought in him, by time, by the Boston sojourn, by the summer's struggle with adverse men and things—though of this last she knew nothing as yet. It seemed scarcely credible that the big, handsome young fellow who was shaking hands with her grandfather, helping Miss Euphrasia with her multifarious belongings, and making himself generally useful and hospitable, could be a later reincarnation of the abashed school-boy who had sweated through the trying luncheon at Crestcliffe Inn.
"Not a word for me, Tom?" she said, when the last of Cousin Euphrasia's treasures had been rescued from the impatient train porter and added to the heap on the platform.
"All the words are for you—or they shall be presently," he laughed. "Just let me get your luggage out of pawn and started Deer-Traceward, and I'll talk you to a finish."
She stood by and looked on while he did it. Surely, he had grown and matured in the three broadening years! There was conscious manhood, effectiveness, in every movement; in the very bigness of him. She had a little attack of patriotism, saying to herself that they did not fashion such young men in the Old World—could not, perhaps.
Mammy Juliet's grandson, Pete, was down with the family carriage, and he took his orders from Tom touching the bestowal of the luggage as he would have taken them from Major Dabney. Ardea marked this, too, and being Southern bred, wrote the Gordon name still a little higher on the scroll of esteem. Pete's respectful obedience was, in its way, a patent of nobility. The negro house-servant, to the manner born, draws the line sharply between gentle and simple and is swift to resent interlopings.
When Pete had done his office with the European gatherings of the party the ancient carriage looked like a van, and there was scant room inside for three passengers.
"That means us for old Longfellow and the buggy," said Tom to Ardea. "Do you mind? Longfellow is fearfully and wonderfully slow, same as ever, but he's reasonably sure."
"Any way," said Ardea; so he put her into the buggy and they drew in behind the carriage. Before they were half-way to the iron-works they had the pike to themselves, and Tom was not urging the leisurely horse.
"My land! but it's good for tired eyes to have another sight of you!" he declared, applying the remedy till she laughed and blushed a little. Then: "It has been a full month of Sundays. Do you realize that?"
"Since we saw each other? It has been much longer than that, hasn't it?"
"Not so very much. I saw you in New York the day you sailed."
"You did! Where was I?"
"You had just come down in the elevator at the hotel with your grandfather and Miss Euphrasia."
"And you wouldn't stop to speak to us? I think that was simply barbarous!"
"Wasn't it?" he laughed. "But the time was horribly unpropitious."
"Why?"
He looked at her quizzically.
"I'm wondering whether I'd better lie out of it; say I knew you were on your way to breakfast, and that I hoped to have a later opportunity, and all that. Shall I do it?"
She did not reply at once. The undeceived inner self was telling her that here lay the parting of the ways; that on her answer would be built the structure, formal or confidential, of their future intercourse. Loyalty to the halo demanded self-restraint; but every other fiber of her was reaching out for a reëstablishment of the old boy-and-girl openness of heart and mind. Her hesitation was only momentary.
"You are just as rude and Gothic as you used to be, aren't you, Tom? Don't you know, I'm childishly glad of it; I was afraid you might be changed in that way, too,—and I don't want to find anything changed. You needn't be polite at the expense of truth—not with me."
He looked at her with love in his eyes.
"This time, you mean—or all the time."
"All the time, if you like."
"I do like; there has got to be some one person in this world to whom I can talk straight, Ardea."
She laughed a little laugh of half-constraint.
"You speak as if there had been a vacancy."
"There has been—for just about three years. I remember you told me once that I'd find two kinds of friends: those who would refuse to believe anything bad of me, and those who would size me up and still stick to me. You are the only one of that second lot I have discovered thus far."
"We are getting miles away from the Fifth Avenue Hotel," she reminded him.
"No; we are just now approaching it from the proper direction. I had my war paint on that morning, and I wasn't fit to talk to you."
"Business?" she queried.
"Yes. Didn't the Major tell you about it?"
"Not a word. I hope you didn't quarrel with him, too?"
He marked the adverb of addition and wondered if Vincent Farley had been less reticent than Major Dabney.
"No; I didn't quarrel with your grandfather."
"But you did quarrel with Mr. Farley?—or was it with Vincent?"
He smiled and shook his head.
"We can't do it, Ardea—go back to the old way, you know. You see there's a stump in the road, the very first thing."
"I shan't admit it," she said half-defiantly. "I am going to make you like the Farleys."
He shook his head again. "You'll have to make a Christian of me first, and teach me how to love my enemies."
"Don't you do that now?"
"No; not unless you are my enemy; I love you."
She looked up at him appealingly.
"Don't make fun of such things, Tom. Love is sacred."
"I was never further from making fun of things in my life. I mean it with every drop of blood in me. You said you didn't want to find me changed; I'm not changed in that, at least."
"You ridiculous boy!" she said; but that was only a stop-gap, and Longfellow added another by coming to a stand opposite a vast obstruction of building material half damming the white road. "What are you doing here—building more additions?" she asked.
"No," said Tom. "It is a new plant—a pipe foundry."
"Don't tell me we are going to have more neighbors in Paradise," she said in mock concern.
"I'll tell you something that may shock you worse than that: the owner of this new plant has camped down right next door to Deer Trace."
"How dreadful! You don't mean that!"
"Oh, but I do. He's a young man, of poor but honest parentage, with a large eye for the main chance. I shouldn't be surprised if he took every opportunity to make love to you."
"How absurd you can be, Tom! Who is he?"
"He is Mr. Caleb Gordon's son. I think you think you know him, but you don't; nobody does."
"Really, Tom? Have you gone into business for yourself? I thought you had another year at Boston."
"I have another year coming to me, but I don't know when I shall get it. And I am in business for myself; though perhaps I should be modest and call it a firm—Gordon and Gordon."
"What does the firm do?"
"A number of things; among others, it buys the entire iron output of the Chiawassee Consolidated, just at present."
"Dear me!" she said; "how fine and large that sounds! If I should say anything like that you would tell me that Brag was a good dog, but—"
He grinned ecstatically. It was so like old times—the good old times—to be bandying good-tempered abuse with her.
"I do brag a lot, don't I? But have you ever noticed that I 'most always have something to brag about? This time, for instance. I built this new firm, and it is all that has kept Chiawassee from going into the sheriff's hands any time during the past six months."
Longfellow had picked his way judiciously around the obstructions and through the gap in the boundary hills, and was jogging in a vertical trot up the valley pike made clean and hard and stony-white by the sweeping and hammering of the autumn rains. The mingled clamor of the industries was left behind, but the throbbing pulsations of the big blowing-engines hung in the air like the sighings of an imprisoned giant. They were passing the miniature copy of Morwenstow Church when Ardea spoke again.
"You have been home all summer?" she asked.
"At home and on the road, trying to hypnotize somebody into buying something—anything—made out of cast-iron. Ah, girl! it's been a bitter fight!"
She was instantly sympathetic; more, there was a little thrill of vicarious triumph to go with the sympathy. She was sure he had won, or was winning, the battle.
"We read something about the hard times in the American papers," she said. "You don't know how far away anything like that seems when there is an ocean between. And I was hoping all the time that our homeland down here was escaping."
"Escaping? You came through South Tredegar a little while ago; it is dead—too dead to bury. You hear the sob of those blowing-engines?—you will travel two hundred miles in the iron belt before you will hear it again. When I came home in June we were smashed, like all the other furnaces in the South—only worse."
"How worse, Tom?"
He forgot the tacit truce for the moment.
"Duxbury Farley and his son had deliberately wrecked the company."
She laid a restraining hand on his arm.
"Let us understand each other," she said gently. "You must not say such things of Mr. Farley and—and his son to me. If you do, I can't listen."
"You don't believe what I say?"
"I believe you have convinced yourself. But you are vindictive; you know you are. And I mean to be fair and just."
He let the plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and looked at her with anger and despair glooming in his eyes.
"Tell me one thing, Ardea, and maybe it will shut my mouth. What is Vincent Parley to you—anything more than Eva's brother?"
Another young woman might have claimed her undoubted right to evade such a pointed question. But Ardea saw safety only in instant frankness.
"He has asked me to be his wife, Tom."
"And you have consented?"
"I wonder if I have," she said half-musingly.
"Don't you know?" he demanded. And then, "Ardea, I'd rather see you dead and in your coffin!"
"Just why—apart from your prejudice?"
"It's Beauty and the Beast over again. You don't know Vint Farley."
"Don't I? My opportunities have been very much better than yours," she retorted.
"That may be, but I say you don't know him. He is a whited sepulcher."
"But you can not particularize," she insisted. "And the evidence is all the other way."
Tom was silent. During the summer of strugglings he had gone pretty deeply into the history of Chiawassee Consolidated, and there was commercial sharp practice in plenty, with some nice balancings on the edge of criminality. Once, indeed, the balance had been quite lost, but it was Dyckman who had been thrust into the breach, or who had been induced to enter it by falsifying his books. Yet these were mere business matters, without standing in the present court.
"The evidence isn't all one-sided," he asserted. "If you were a man, I could convince you in two minutes that both of the Farleys are rascals and hypocrites."
"Yet they are your father's business associates," she reminded him.
He saw the hopelessness of any argument on that side, and was silent again, this time until they had passed the Deer Trace gates and he had cut the buggy before the great Greek-pillared portico of the manor-house. When he had helped her out, she thanked him and gave him her hand quite in the old way; and he held it while he asked a single blunt question.
"Tell me one thing more, Ardea: do you love Vincent Farley?"
Her swift blush answered him, and he did not wait for her word.
"That settles it; you needn't say it in so many words. Isn't it a hell of a world, Ardea? I love you—love you as this man never will, never could. And with half his chance, I could have made you love me. I—"
"Don't, Tom! please don't," she begged, trying to free her hand.
"I must, for this once; then we'll quit and go back to the former things. You said a while ago that I was vindictive; I'll show you that I am not. When the time comes for me to put my foot on Vint Farley's neck, I'm going to spare him for your sake. Then you'll know what it means to have a man's love. Good-by; I'm coming over for a few minutes this evening if you'll let me."