THE BUBBLE, REPUTATION
It was not until late in the afternoon of Christmas Day that Ardea was able to slip away from her guests long enough to run over to apprise herself of the condition of things at the Gordon house.
Tom opened the door for her, and he made her come to the fire before he would answer her questions. Even then he sat glowering at the cheerful blaze as if he had forgotten her presence; and she was womanly enough, or amiable enough, to let him take his own time. When he began, it was seemingly at a great distance from matters present and pressing.
"Say, Ardea; do you believe in miracles?" he asked abruptly.
It was a large question to be answered offhand, but she broke the back of it with a simple, "Yes."
"How do you account for them? Did God make His laws so they could be taken apart and put together again when some little human ant loses its way on a grass stalk or drops its grain of sugar?"
"I don't know," she confessed frankly. "I am not sure that I ever tried to account for them; I suppose I have swallowed them whole, as you say I have swallowed my religion."
"Well, you believe in them, anyway," he said, "and that makes it easier to hit what I'm aiming at. Do you reckon they stopped short in the Apostles' time?"
"I don't know that, either," she admitted.
"You ought to know it, if you're consistent," he said, bluntly dogmatic. "Any answer to any prayer would be a miracle."
"Would it? I never happened to think of it that way."
"It certainly would. You chop a tree in two and it falls; that's cause and effect. If you ask God to make it stand up after it's cut in two, and it does stand, that's a miracle."
"You are the queerest boy," she commented. "I ran over here just for a minute to ask how your mother is, and you won't tell me."
"I'm coming to that," he rejoined gravely. "But I wanted to get this other thing straightened out first. Now tell me this: did you pray for my mother last night, like you said you would?"
Once again he was offending the guardian of the inner shrines, and her heightened color was not all the reflection of the ruddy firelight.
"You can be so barbarously personal when you try, Tom," she protested. And then she added: "But I did."
"Well, the miracle was wrought. Early this morning mother came to herself and asked for something to eat. Doctor Williams has been here, and now he tells us all the things he wouldn't tell us before. It was some little clot in one of the veins or arteries of the brain, and nine times out of ten there is no hope."
"O Tom!—and she will get well again?"
"She has more chances to-day of getting well than she had last night of dying—so the doctor says. But it's a miracle, just the same."
"I'm so glad! And now I really must go home." And she got up.
"No, sit down; I'm not through with you yet. I want to know what you think about promises."
She smiled and pushed her chair back from the soft-coal blaze in the fireplace.
"Don't you know you are a perfect 'old man of the sea,' Tom?"
"That's all right; but tell me: is a bad promise better broken or kept?"
"I am sure I couldn't say without knowing the circumstances. Tell me all about it," and she resigned herself to listen.
"It was at daybreak this morning. I was alone with mother, looking at her lying there so still and helpless—dead, all but the little flicker of breath that seemed just about ready to go out. It came over me all of a sudden that I couldn't disappoint her, living or dead; that I'd have to go on and be what she has always wanted me to be. And I promised her."
"But she couldn't hear you?"
"No; it was before she came to herself. Nobody heard me but God; and I reckon He wasn't paying much attention to anything I said."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because—well, because it wasn't the kind of a promise that makes the angels glad. I said I'd go on and do it, if I had to be a hypocrite all the rest of my life."
"O Tom! would you have to be?"
"That's the way it looks to me now. I told you the other day that I didn't know what I believed and what I didn't believe. But I do know some of the don'ts. For instance: if there is a hell—and I'm not anyways convinced that there is—I don't believe—but what's the use of cataloguing it? They'd ask me a string of questions when I was ordained, and I'd have to lie like Ananias."
She rose and met his gloomy eyes fairly.
"Tom Gordon, if you should do that, you would be the wickedest thing alive—the basest thing that ever breathed!"
"That's about the way it strikes me," he said coolly. "So you see it comes down to a case of big wicked or little wicked; it's been that way all along. Did you know that one time I asked God to kill you?"
She looked horrified, as was her undoubted right.
"Why, of all things!" she gasped.
"It's so. I took a notion that I'd be mad because your grandfather brought you here to Paradise. And when you took sick—well, I reckon there isn't any hell deeper or hotter than the one I frizzled in for about four days that summer."
It was too deep in the past to be tragic, and she laughed.
"I used to think then that you were the worst, as well as the queerest, boy I had ever seen."
"And now you know it," he said. Then: "What's your rush? I'm not trying to get rid of you now."
"I positively must go back. We have company, and I ran away without saying a word."
"Anybody I know?" inquired Tom.
"Three somebodies whom you know, or ought to know, very well: Mr. Duxbury Farley, Mr. Vincent Farley, Miss Eva Farley."
His eyes darkened suddenly.
"I'd like to know how under the sun they managed to get on your grandfather's good side!" he grumbled.
Ardea Dabney's expressive face mirrored dawning displeasure.
"Why do you say that?" she retorted. "Eva was my classmate for years at Miss De Valle's."
He made a boyish face of disapproval, saying bluntly: "I don't care if she was. You shouldn't make friends of them. They are not fit for you to wipe your shoes on."
For the second time since his home-coming, Tom saw the Dabney imperiousness flash out; saw and felt it.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Gordon! Less than an hour ago, we were speaking of you, and of what happened at Beersheba. Mr. Farley and his son both stood up for you."
"And you took the other side, I reckon," he broke out, quite unreasonably. It had not as yet come to blows between him and his father's business associates, but it made him immeasurably dissatisfied to find them on social terms at Deer Trace Manor.
"Perhaps I did, and perhaps I did not," she answered, matching his tartness.
"Well, you can tell them both that I'm much obliged to them for nothing," he said, rising and going to the door with her. "They would be mighty glad to see it patched up again and me back in the Beersheba school."
"Of course they would; so would all of your friends."
"But they are not my friends. They have fooled my father, and they'll fool your grandfather, if he doesn't watch out. But they can't fool me."
He had opened the outer door for her, and she drew herself up till she could face him squarely, slate-blue eyes flashing scornfully into sullen gray.
"That is the first downright cowardly thing I have ever known you to say!" she declared. "And I wish you to know, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Gordon, that Mr. Duxbury Farley and Mr. Vincent Farley and Miss Eva Farley are my guests and my friends!" And with that for her leave-taking, she turned her back on him and went swiftly across the two lawns to the great gray house on the opposite knoll.
For the first fortnight of his mother's convalescence Tom slept badly, and his days were as the days of the accused whose sentence has been suspended; jail days, these, with chains to clank when he thought of the promise made in the gray Christmas dawn; with whips to flog him when the respite grew shorter and the time drew near when his continued stay at home must be explained to his mother.
Ardea had gone back to Carroll the Saturday before New Year's, and there was no one to talk to. But for that matter, he had cut himself out of her confidence by his assault on the Farleys. Every morning for a week after the Christmas-day clash, Scipio came over with the compliments of "Mawsteh Majah," Miss Euphrasia, and Miss Dabney, and kindly inquiries touching the progress of the invalid. But after New Year's, Tom remarked that there were only the Major and Miss Euphrasia to send compliments, and despair set in. For out of his boyhood he had brought up undiminished the longing for sympathy, or rather for a burden-bearer on whom he might unload his troubles, and Ardea had begun to promise well.
It was on a crisp morning in the second week of January when the prolonged agony of suspense drove him to the mountain. His mother was sitting up, and was rapidly recovering her strength. His father had gone back to his work in the iron plant, and his uncle was preparing to return to his charge in South Tredegar. With Uncle Silas and the nurse both gone, Tom knew that the evil hour must come speedily; and it was with some half-cowardly hope that his uncle would break the ice for him that he ran away on the crisp morning of happenings.
With no particular destination in view, it was only natural that his feet should find the familiar path leading up to the great boulder under the cedars. He had not visited the rock of the spring since the summer day when he and Nan Bryerson had taken refuge from the shower in the hollow heart of it, nor had he seen Nan since their parting at the door of her father's cabin under the cliff. Rumor in Gordonia had it that Tike Bryerson had been hunted out by the revenue officers; and, for reasons which he would have found it difficult to declare in words, Tom had been shy about making inquiries.
For this cause an apparition could scarcely have startled him more than did the sight of Nan filling her bucket at the trickling barrel-spring under the cliff face of the great rock. He came on her suddenly at the end of the long climb up the wooded slopes, at a moment when—semi-tropical growth having had two full seasons in which to change the natural aspect of things—he was half-bewildered with the unwonted look of the place. But there was no doubt about it; it was Nan in the flesh, a little fuller in the figure, something less childish in the face, but with all the fascinating, wild-creature beauty of the child-time promise to dazzle the eye and breed riot in the brain of the boy-man.
When she stood up with a little cry of pleased surprise, the dark eyes lighting quick joy-fires, and the welcoming blush mounting swiftly to neck and cheek, Tom thought she was the most alluring thing he had ever looked on. Yet the bottom stone in the wall of recrudescent admiration was the certainty that he had found a sympathetic ear.
"Did you know I was coming? Were you waiting for me, Nan?" he bubbled, gazing into the great black eyes as eagerly as a freed dog plunges into the first pool that offers.
"How could I be knowin' to it?" she asked, taking him seriously, or appearing to. "I nev' knowed school let out this time o' year."
"It's let out for me, Nan," he said meaningly. "I came home—for good—nearly three weeks ago. My mother has been sick. Didn't you hear of it?"
She shook her head gravely.
"I hain't been as far as Paradise sence paw and me moved back from Pine Knob, two months ago. I don't hear nothin' any more."
In times long past, Tom, valley-born and of superior clay, used to be scornful of the mountain dialect. Now, on Nan's lips, it charmed him. It was blessedly reminiscent of the care-free days of yore.
"Say, Nan; I hope you haven't got to hurry home," he interposed, when she stooped to lift the overflowing bucket. "I want to talk to you—to tell you something."
She looked up quickly, and there were scrolls unreadable in the black eyes.
"Air you a man now, Tom-Jeff, or on'y a boy like you used to be?" she asked.
Tom squared his broad shoulders and laughed.
"I'm big enough to be in my own way a good deal of the time. I believe I could muddy Sim Cantrell's back for him now, at arm-holts."
But there was still a question in the black eyes.
"Where's your preacher's coat, Tom-Jeff? I was allowin' you'd be wearin' it nex' time we met up."
"I reckon there isn't going to be any preacher's coat for me, Nan; that's one of the things I want to talk to you about. Let's go over yonder and sit down in the sun."
The place he chose for her was a flat stone half embedded in the up-climbing slope beyond the great boulder. She sat facing the path and the spring, listening, while Tom, stretched luxuriously on a bed of dry leaves at her feet, told her what had befallen; how he had been turned out of Beersheba, and what for; how, all the former things having passed away, he was torn and distracted in the struggle to find a footing in the new order.
In the midst of it he had a feeling that she was only dimly apprehending; that some of his keenest pains—most of them, perhaps—did not appeal to her. But there was comfort in her bodily presence, in the listening ear. It was a shifting of the burden in some sort, and there be times when the humblest pack animal may lighten a king's load.
His fears touching her understanding, or her lack of it, were confirmed when he had reached a stopping-place.
"They-all up yonder in that school where you was at hain't got much sense, it looks like to me," was her comment. "You're a man growed now, Tom-Jeff, and if you want to play cards or drink whisky, what-all business is it o' their'n?"
He smiled at her elemental point of view; laughed outright when the significance of it struck him fairly. But it betokened allegiance of a kind to gladden the heart of the masculine tyrant, and he rolled the declaration of fealty as a sweet morsel under his tongue.
"You stand by your friends, right or wrong, don't you, girl?" he said, in sheerest self-gratulation. "That's what I like in you. You asked me a little while back if I was a man or a boy; I believe you could make a man of me, Nan, if you'd try."
He was looking up into her face as he said it and the change that came over her lighted a strange fire in his blood. The black eyes kindled it, and the red lips, half parted, blew it into a blaze. His face flushed and he broke the eye-hold and looked down. In their primal state, when Nature mothered the race, the man was less daring than the woman.
"If you'd said that two year ago," she began, in a half-whisper that melted the marrow in his bones. "But you was on'y a boy then; and now I reckon it's too late."
"You mean that you don't care for me any more, Nan? I know better than that. You'd back me if I had come up here to tell you that I'd killed somebody. Wouldn't you, now?"
He waited overlong for his answer. There were sounds in the air: a metallic tapping like the intermittent drumming of a woodpecker mingled with a rustling as of some small animal scurrying back and forth over the dead leaves. The girl leaned forward, listening intently. Then three men appeared in the farther crooking of the spring path, and at the first glimpse of them she slipped from the flat stone to cower behind Tom, trembling, shaking with terror.
"Hide me, Tom-Jeff! Oh, for God's sake, hide me, quick!" she panted. "Lookee there!"
He looked and saw the three men walking slowly up the pipe-line which drained the barrel-spring. They were too far away to be recognizable to him, and since they were stopping momently to examine the pipe, there was good hope of an escape unseen.
Tom waited breathless for the propitious instant when the tapping of the pipe-men's hammers should drown the noise of a dash for effacement. When it came, he flung himself backward, whipped Nan over his head and out of the line of sight as if she had been feather-light, and rolled swiftly after her.
Before she could rise he had picked her up and was dragging her to the climbing point under the lip of the boulder cave.
"Up with you!" he commanded, making a step of his hand. "Give me your foot and then climb to my shoulder—quick!" But she drew back.
"Oh, I can't!" she gasped. "I—I'm too skeered!"
Tom's brows went together in the Gordon frown. Bone-meltings and blood-firings apart, he was neither a fool nor a dastard, and he was older now than on that day when the storm had driven them to take refuge in the heart of the great rock. And since he had decided that the cavern was only big enough for one, he had meant to put Nan up, going himself to meet the intruders to make sure that they should not discover her. But her trembling fit—a new and curious thing in the girl who used to make his flesh creep with her reckless daring—spoiled the plan.
"Can't you climb up?" he demanded.
She shook her head despairingly, and he lost no time in trying to persuade her. Jumping to catch the lip of the cavern's mouth, he ascended cat-like, and a moment later he had drawn her up after him.
"I'd like to know what got the matter with you all at once," he said severely, when they were crowded together in the narrow rock cell; and then, without waiting for her answer: "You stay here while I drop down and keep those fellows away from this side of things."
But it was too late. The men were already at the barrel-spring, as an indistinct murmur of voices testified. The girl had another trembling fit when she heard them, and Tom's wonder was fast lapsing into contempt or something like it.
"Oh-h-h!" she shuddered. "Do you reckon they saw us, Tom-Jeff?"
"I shouldn't wonder," he whispered back unfeelingly. "We could see them plain enough."
"He'll kill me, for shore, Tom-Jeff! O God!"
Tom's lip curled. The wolf does not mate with the jackal. Not all her beauty could atone for such spiritless cringing. Love would have pitied her, but passion is not moved by qualities opposite to those which have evoked it.
"Then you know them—or one of them, at least," he said. "Who is he?"
She would not tell; and since the murmur of voices was still plainly audible, she begged in dumb-show for silence. Whereupon Tom shut his mouth and did not open it again until the sound of the voices had died away and the fainter tappings of the hammers on the pipe-line advertised the retreat of the inspection party.
"They're gone now," he said shortly. "Let's get out of here before we stifle."
But a second time ill chance intervened. Tom had a leg over the brink and was looking for a soft leaf bed to drop into, when the baying of a hound broke on the restored quiet of the mountain side. "Oh, dang it all!" said Tom heartily, and drew back into hiding.
The girl's ague fit of fear had passed, and she seemed less concerned about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is the way Tom's thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in Nan's place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the Dabneys would never run and cower and beg to be hidden at the possible cost of her good name. And Nan's word did not help matters.
"What makes you so cross to me, Tom-Jeff?" she asked, when he drew back with the impatient exclamation. "I hain't done nothin' to make you let on like you hate me, have I?"
"I don't hate you," said Tom, frowning. "If I did, I shouldn't care." Just then the hound burst out of the laurel thicket on the brow of the lower slope, running with its nose to the ground, and he added: "That's Japhe Pettigrass's dog; I hope to goodness he isn't anywhere behind it."
But the horse-trader was behind the dog; so close behind that he came out on the continuation of the pipe-line path while the hound was still nosing among the leaves where Tom had lain sunning himself and telling his tale of woe.
"Good dog—seek him! What is it, old boy?" Pettigrass came up, patted the hound, and sat down on the flat stone to look on curiously while the dog coursed back and forth among the dead leaves. "Find him, Cæsar; find him, boy!" encouraged Japheth; and finally the hound pointed a sensitive nose toward the rift in the side of the great boulder and yelped conclusively.
"D'ye reckon he climm up thar', Cæsar?" Pettigrass unfolded his long legs and stood up on the flat stone to attain an eye-level with the interior of the little cavern. Tom crushed Nan into the farthest cranny, and flattened himself lizard-like against the nearer side wall. The horse-trader looked long and hard, and they could hear him still talking to the dog.
"You're an old fool, Cæsar—that's about what you are—and Solomon allowed thar' wasn't no fool like an old one. But you needn't to swaller that whole, old boy; I've knowed some young ones in my time—sometimes gals, sometimes boys, sometimes both. But thar' ain't no 'possum up yonder, Cæsar; you've flew the track this time, for certain. Come on, old dog; let's be gettin' down the mountain."
The baying dog and the whistling man were still within hearing when Tom swung Nan lightly to the ground and dropped beside her. No word was spoken until she had emptied and refilled her bucket at the spring, then Tom said, with the bickering tang still on his tongue:
"Say, Nan, I want to know who it is that's going to kill you if he happens to find you talking to me."
She shook her head despondently. "I cayn't nev' tell you that, Tom-Jeff."
"I'd like to know why you can't."
"Because he'd shore kill me then."
"Then I'll find out some other way."
"What differ' does it make to you?" she asked; and again the dark eyes searched him till he was fain to look away from her.
"I reckon it doesn't make any difference, if you don't want it to. But one time you were willing enough to tell me your troubles, and—"
"And I'll nev' do it nare 'nother time; never, never. And let me tell you somethin' else, Tom-Jeff Gordon: if you know what's good for you, don't you nev' come anigh me again. One time we usen to be a boy and a girl together; you're nothin' but a boy yet, but I—oh, God, Tom-Jeff—I'm a woman!"
And with that saying she snatched her bucket and was gone before he could find a word wherewith to match it.