ON JORDAN'S BANK
Ardea saw cause for increasing satisfaction in Thomas Jefferson the next morning, when they sat together in section nine to give the porter a chance to rehabilitate ten and twelve.
He had grown so much surer of himself in the two years, and his manners were gratefully improved. Also, she was constrained to admit—frank glances of the slate-blue eyes appraising him—that he was developing hopefully in the matter of good looks. The dust-colored hair of boyhood had become a sort of viking yellow, and the gray eyes, so they should not be overcast by trouble shadows, were honest and fearless.
Then, too, the Gordon jaw was beginning to assert itself—square in the angle and broad at the point of the chin, with a deep cleft to mark its center. Ardea thought it would not be well, later on, for those who should find that jaw and chin opposing them. There would certainly be stubborn and aggressive resistance—and none too much mercy when the fight should end.
The improved manners were pleasantly apparent when the train reached South Tredegar. There were twenty minutes for breakfast, and Tom bestirred himself manfully, and as if the awkward day at Crestcliffe Inn had never been; helping Ardea with her coat, steering her masterfully through the crowd, choosing the fortunate seats at the most convenient table, and commanding the readiest service in spite of the hurry and bustle.
Ardea marked it all with a little thrill of vicarious triumph, which was straightway followed by a little pang personal. What had wrought the change in him? Was it merely the natural chivalry of the coming man breaking through the crust of boyish indifference to the social conventions? Or was it one of the effects of the late plunge into rebellious wickedness?
She hoped it was the chivalry, but she had a vague fear that it was the wickedness. There was a young woman among the seniors in Carroll College who was old in a certain brilliant hardness of mind—a young woman with a cynical outlook on life, and who was not always regardful of her seed-sowing in fresher hearts. Ardea remembered a saying of hers, flung out one evening in the college parlors when the talk of her group had turned on the goodness of good boys: "Why can't you be sincere with yourselves? Not one of you has any use for the truly good boy until after he has learned how to respect you by being a bad boy. You haven't been saying it in so many words, perhaps, but that is the crude fact." Was this the secret of Tom's new acceptability? Ardea hoped it was not—and feared lest it might be.
When they were once more in the train, and the mile-long labyrinth of the factory chimneys had been threaded and left behind, Thomas Jefferson gave proof of another and still more gratifying change.
"Say, Ardea," he began, "you said last night that you'd stand by me in what I've got to face this morning. That's all right; and I reckon I'll never live long enough to even it up with you. But, of course, you know I'm not going to let you do it."
"Why not?" she asked.
"Because I'm not mean enough, or coward enough. After a while, if you get a chance to sort of make it easier for mother—"
"I'll do that, if I can," she promised quickly. "But I hope you are not going to break her heart, Tom."
"You can be mighty sure I'm not; if anything I can do now will help it. But—but, say, Ardea, I can't go back and begin all over again. I should be the meanest, low-down thing in all this world—and that's a hypocrite."
"Oh!" said Ardea, catching her breath. Her religion was very much a matter of fact to her, and the thought of Tom—Martha Gordon's son—stumbling in the plain path of belief was dismaying. "Why would you have to be a hypocrite? Do you mean that you are not sure you ought to be a minister?"
"I mean that I don't know any more what I believe and what I don't believe. I feel as if I'd just like to let myself alone on that side for a while, and make everybody else let me alone. It seems—but you don't know; a girl can't know."
She smiled up at him, and the smile effaced some of the trouble furrows between his eyes.
"Last night you were telling me that I seemed ages older than you; what is it that I can't know?"
"Stumpings like mine,—a man's stumpings," he said, with a touch of the old self-assurance. "You've swallowed your religion whole; it's the best thing for a girl to do, I reckon. But I've got to have whys and wherefores; I've always had to have them. And there are no wherefores in religion; just none whatever."
She was plainly shocked. "O Tom!" she urged; "think of your mother!"
"Thinking of her isn't going to change the value of pi any," he rejoined soberly. "I suppose I've thought of her, and of what she wants me to be, ever since the first day I went to Beersheba. The first two years I tried, honestly tried. But it's no use. It appears like we've got so far away from taw that we can't even see what-all we're aiming at. I've been grinding theology till I'm fairly sick of the word, and I've learned just one thing, Ardea, and that is that you can't prove a single theorem in it."
"But there are some things that don't appear to need any proof; one seems to have been born knowing them. Don't you feel that way?"
He shook his head slowly.
"I used to think I did; but now I'm afraid I don't. I can't remember the time when I wasn't asking why. Don't they teach you to ask why at Carroll?"
"Not in matters of—of conscience."
"Well, they don't at Beersheba, when you come right down to it. And when you do ask, they put you off with a text out of the Bible that, just as like as not, doesn't come within a row of apple-trees of hitting the mark. I remember one time I said something about the 'why' to Doctor Tollivar. He sniffled—he does sniffle, Ardea—and said: 'Mr. Gordon, I recommend that you read what Paul says to the Romans, fourteen and twenty-three: "He that doubteth is damned." And you will note the verb in the original—is damned, present tense.' Do you happen to remember the verse?"
Ardea confessed ignorance, and he went on, with a lip-curl of contempt.
"Well, the whole chapter is about being careful for the weak brother. The Romans used to eat the flesh of the animals offered in the sacrifices to the gods, and some of the Christian Romans didn't seem to be strong enough or sensible enough to eat it as just plain, every-day meat. They tangled it up with the idol worship. So Paul, or whoever it was that wrote the chapter, said: 'He that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith,' that is, the Christian faith, I suppose, which would teach him that the meat wasn't any the worse for having been offered to a block of wood or stone called a god. Now, honestly, Ardea, what would you think of a teacher who would deliberately cut a verse in two in the middle and make his half of it mean something else, just to put a fellow down?"
"It doesn't seem quite honest," she could not help admitting.
"Honest! It's low-down trickery. And they all do it. Last year when I was going up to Beersheba I happened to sit in the same seat with a Catholic priest. We got to talking, I don't remember just how, and I said something about doubting the Pope's infallibility. Out pops the same old text: 'My son, hear the words of the holy Apostle, Saint Paul—" He that doubteth is damned!"' He was old enough to be my father, but I couldn't help slapping the other half of the verse at him, and saying that we'd most luckily escape because there wasn't any dinner-stop for our train."
The flippant tone of all this disheartened Thomas Jefferson's listener, and a silence succeeded which lasted until the train had stormed around the nose of Lebanon and the whistle was blowing for Gordonia. Then Tom said: "I didn't mean to hurt you; but now you see why I can't go back and begin all over again." And she nodded assent.
There was no one at the station to meet the disgraced one, news of the disaster at Beersheba being as yet only on the way. Thomas Jefferson was rather glad of it; especially glad that there was no one from Woodlawn—this was the name of the new home—to recognize him and ask discomforting questions. But Ardea was expected, and the Dabney carriage, with old Scipio on the box, was drawn up beside the platform.
Tom put Ardea into the carriage and was giving her hand luggage to Scipio when she called to him.
"Isn't there any one here to meet you, Tom?"
"They don't know I'm coming," he explained. Whereupon she quickly made room for him, holding the door open. But he hung back.
"I reckon I'd better ride on the box with Unc' Scipio," he suggested.
"I am sure I don't know why you should," she objected.
He told her straight; or at least gave her his own view of it.
"By to-morrow morning everybody in Gordonia and Paradise Valley will know that I'm home in disgrace. It won't hurt Unc' Scipio any if I'm seen riding with him."
It was the first time that he had been given to see the Dabney imperiousness shining star-like in Miss Ardea's slate-blue eyes.
"I wish you to get your hand-bag and ride in here with me," she said, with the air of one whose wish was law. But when he was sitting opposite and the carriage door was shut, she smiled companionably across at him and added: "You foolish boy!"
"It wasn't foolish," he maintained doggedly. "I know what I ought to do—and I'm not doing it. Everybody around here knows both of us, and—"
"Hush!" she commanded. "I refuse to hear another word. I said you were a foolish boy, and it will be inexcusably impolite in you to prove that you are not."
Tom was glad enough to be silent; and it came to him, after a little, that she was giving him a chance to pull himself together to meet the ordeal that was before him. In all the misery of the moment—the misery which belongs to those who ride to the block, the gallows or other mortal finalities—he marveled that she could be a girl and still be so thoughtful and far-seeing; and once again it made him feel young and inadequate and awkwardly her inferior.
At the Woodlawn gates she pulled the old-fashioned, check-strap signal, and Scipio reined in his horses.
"Are you quite sure you don't want me to go in with you?" she asked, while Tom was fumbling the door-latch.
He nodded and said: "There'll be trouble enough to go around among as many as can crowd in, all right. But I can't let you."
"Still, you won't say you don't want me?"
"No; lying isn't one of the things I was expelled for. When I stand up to my mother to tell her what I've got to tell her, I'd be glad if there was a little fise-dog sniffling around to back me up. But I'm not going to call in the neighbors—you, least of all."
"You are disappointing me right along—and I'm rather glad," she said. And then, almost wistfully: "You are going to be good, aren't you, Tom?"
His look was so sober that it was well-nigh sullen. "I'm going to say what I've got to say, and then hold my tongue if I have to bite it," he answered. "Good-by; and—and a Merry Christmas, and—thank you."
He shut the carriage door and gave Scipio the word to go on; and afterward stood at the gate looking after the great lumbering ark on wheels until it turned in at the Deer Trace driveway and was lost in the winding avenue of thick-set evergreens. Then he let himself in at the home gate, walking leaden-footed toward the ornate house at the top of the knoll and wishing the distance were ten times as great.
When he reached the house there was an ominous air of quiet about it, and a horse and buggy, with a black boy holding the reins, stood before the door. Tom's heart came into his mouth. The turnout was Doctor Williams's.
"Who's sick?" he asked of the boy who was holding the doctor's horse, and his tongue was thick with a nameless fear.
The black boy did not know; and Tom crept up the steps and let himself in as one enters a house of mourning, breaking down completely when he saw his father sitting bowed on the hall seat.
"You, Buddy?—I'm mighty glad," said the man; and when he held out his arms the boy flung himself on his knees beside the seat and buried his face in the cushions.
"Is she—is she going to die?" he asked; when the dreadful words could be found and spoken.
"We're hoping for the best, Buddy, son. It's some sort of a stroke, the doctor says; it took her yesterday morning, and she hasn't been herself since. Did somebody telegraph to you?"
Tom rocked his head on the cushion. How could he add to the blackness of darkness by telling his miserable story of disgrace? Yet it had to be done, and surely no hapless penitent in the confessional ever emptied his soul with more heartfelt contrition or more bitter remorse.
Caleb Gordon listened, with what inward condemnings one could only guess from his silence. It was terrible! If his father would strike him, curse him, drive him out of the house, it would be easier to bear than the stifling silence. But when the words came finally they were as balm poured into an angry wound.
"There, there, Buddy; don't take on so. You're might' nigh a man, now, and the sun's still risin' and settin' just the same as it did before you tripped up and fell down. And it'll go on risin' and settin', too, long after you and me and all of us have quit goin' to bed and gettin' up by it. If it wasn't for your poor mammy—"
"That's it—that's just it," groaned Tom. "It would kill her, even if she was well."
"Nev' mind; you're here now, and I reckon that's the main thing. If she gets up again, of course she'll have to know; but we won't cross that bridge till we come to it. And Buddy, son, whatever happens, your old pappy ain't goin' to believe that you'll be the first Gordon to die in the gutter. You've got better blood in you than what that calls for."
Tom felt the lightening of his burden to some extent; but beyond was the alternative of suffering, or causing suffering. He had never realized until now how much he loved his mother; how large a place she had filled in his life, and what a vast void there would be when she was gone. He was yet too young and too self-centered to know that this is the mother-cross: to live for love and to be crowned and enthroned oftenest in memory.
For days,—days which brought back the boyhood agony of the time when he had believed himself to be Ardea's murderer,—he went softly about the house, sharing, with his father and his uncle, the watch in the sick-room; doing what little there was to be done in dumb hopelessness, and beating at times on the brazen gates of Heaven in sheer despair. There was no answer to his prayers; in his inmost soul he knew there would not be; but even in this the eternal query assailed him. Was it for lack of faith that no whisper of reply came from the unseen world beyond the veil? Or was it only because there was no ear to hear, no voice to answer? He could not tell. He made sure he was doomed to live and die, buffeting with these submerging waves of doubt—doubt of himself on one hand, and of God on the other.
In that time of sore trial, his Uncle Silas's forbearance wiped out many a score of boyish resentment. There was no word of reproach, still less the harsh arraignment and condemnation to which he began to look forward on the day when Doctor Tollivar had announced his purpose of writing the facts to his brother in the faith. But Tom remarked that in the daily morning and evening prayers his uncle spoke of him as a soul in peril, and he wondered that this pointed reference, which once would have stirred the pool of bitterness to its bottom, now left him unmoved and immovable. Later, he knew it was because there was now no pool of bitterness to be stirred; the spiritual well-springs had failed and there was no water in them—either for healing or for penitential cleansing.
The fifth day after his home-coming was Christmas Eve. Late in the afternoon, when the doctor had made his second visit and had gone away, leaving no word of encouragement for the watchers, Tom left the house and took the path that led up through the young orchard to the foot of Lebanon.
He was deep within the winter-stripped forest on the mountain side, plunging upward through the beds of dry leaves in the little hollows, when he met Ardea. She was coming down with her arms full of holly, and for the moment he forgot his troubles in the keen pleasure of looking at her. It had not occurred to him sooner to think of her as other than the girl of his boyhood days, grown somewhat, as he himself had grown. But now he saw that she was very beautiful.
None the less, his greeting was a brotherly reproof.
"I'd like to know what you're thinking of, tramping around on the mountain alone," he said, frowning at her.
"I have been thinking of you, most of the time, and wishing you could be with me," she answered, so artlessly as to mollify him instantly.
"I have been wishing you could be with me"
"I ought to row you like smoke, but when you say things like that, I can't. Don't you know you oughtn't to go projecting around in the woods all alone?"
"I have always done it, haven't I? And Hector was with me till a few minutes ago, when he took it into his foolish old head to run after a rabbit. Is your mother any better this afternoon?"
"Sit down," he commanded abruptly. "I want to talk to you."
She hung the bunch of holly on the twigged limb of a small oak and sat down on a moss-covered rock. Tom sprawled at her feet in the dry leaves, and for a little while he was silent.
"You haven't told me yet how your mother is," she reminded him.
"She is just the same; lying there so still that you have to look close to see whether she is breathing. The doctor says that if there isn't a change pretty soon, she'll die."
"O Tom!"
He looked up at her with the old boyish frown pulling his eyebrows together.
"She's been good to God all her life; what do you reckon He's letting her die this way for?"
It was a terrible question, made more terrible by the savage hardihood that lay behind it. Ardea could not reason with him; and she felt intuitively that at this crisis only reason would appeal to him. Yet she could not turn him away empty-handed in his hour of need.
"How can we tell?" she said, and there were tears in her voice. "We only know that He does everything for the best."
"Yes; that is what they tell us. But how are we going to know?" he demanded.
The girl's faith was as simple and confiding as it was defenseless under any fire of argument.
"I suppose we can't know, in your sense of the word. But we can believe."
"I can't," said Tom fiercely. "I can pretend to; I reckon I've been pretending to all my life; but now I've got to a place where I can't feel anything that I can't touch, nor hear anything that doesn't make a noise, nor see anything that everybody else can't see. From what you've said at different times, you seem to be able to do all these things. Do you really believe?"
"I hope I do," she answered, and her voice was low and very earnest. But she would be altogether honest. "Perhaps you wouldn't call it 'belief unto righteousness,' as your Uncle Silas would say. I've never thought much about such things—in the way he says we ought to think about them. They seem to me to be true, like the—well, like the stars and the universe. You don't think about the universe all the time; but you know it is there, and that you are a little, tiny fraction of it, yourself."
But these were abstractions, and Tom's need was terribly concrete.
"I suppose you mean you haven't been converted, and all that; never mind about that. What I want to know is, did you ever ask God for anything and get it?"
"Why, yes; I ask Him for things every day, and get them. Don't you?"
"No, not now. But are you sure the things you ask for are not things that you'd get anyway?" he persisted.
She was growing a little restive under the fire of relentless questions. There are modesties in religion as in morals,—inner shrines to be defended at any and all costs. In the Crafts part of Thomas Jefferson's veins ran the blood of those who had fought with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, stabling their horses overnight in the enemy's churches. Ardea rose and began to untangle the great bunch of holly.
"I think we had better be going," she said, ignoring his clenching question. "Cousin Euphrasia gets nervous about me, sometimes, as you made believe you were."
He did not look around, or make any move toward getting up. But there was a new note of hardness in his voice when he said: "I thought you'd have to dodge, just like all the others, if I could only make out to throw straight enough. 'Way down deep inside of you, you don't believe God worries Himself much about what happens to us little dry leaves in His big woods."
"Oh, but I do!—that is, I believe He cares. The things you spoke of are things I might easily be deprived of; and I choose to believe that He gives and continues them."
He was quiet for a full minute, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin and his hands tightly clasped over them. When he looked up at her his face was the face of one tormented.
"I wish you'd ask Him to let my mother live!" he said brokenly. "I've tried and tried, and the words just die in my mouth."
There is a Mother of Sorrows in every womanly heart, to whom the appeal of the stricken is never made in vain. Ardea saw only a boy-brother crying out in his pain, and she dropped on her knees and put her arms around his neck and wept over him in a pure transport of sisterly sympathy.
"Indeed and indeed I will help, Tom! And you mustn't let it drive you out into the dark. You poor boy! I know just how it hurts, and I'm so sorry for you!"
He freed himself gently from the comforting arms, got up rather unsteadily, and lifted her to her feet. Then the manly bigness of him sent the hot blood to her cheeks and she was ashamed.
"O Tom!" she faltered; "what must you think of me!"
He turned to gather up the scattered holly.
"I think God made you—and that was one time when His hand didn't tremble," he said gravely.
They had picked their way down the leaf-slippery mountain side and he was giving her the bunch of holly at the Dabney orchard gate before he spoke again. But at the moment of leave-taking he said:
"How did you know what I needed more than anything else in all the world, Ardea?"
She blushed painfully and the blue eyes were downcast.
"You must never speak of that again. I didn't stop to think. It's a Dabney failing, I'm afraid—to do things first and consider them afterward. It was as if we were little again, and you had fallen down and hurt yourself."
"I know," he acquiesced, with the same manly gentleness that had made her ashamed. "I won't speak of it any more—and I'll never forget it the longest day I live. Good-by."
And he went the back way to his own orchard gate, plunging through the leaf beds with his head down and his hands in his pockets, struggling as he could to stem the swift current which was whirling him out beyond all the old landmarks. For now he was made to know that boyhood was gone, and youth was going, and for one intoxicating moment he had looked over the mountain top into the Promised Land of manhood.