THE SHADOW OF THE ROCK
Tom Gordon—Thomas Jefferson now only in his mother's letters—was fifteen past, and his voice was in the transition stage which made him blushingly self-conscious when he ran up the window-shade in the Pullman to watch for the earliest morning outlining of old Lebanon on the southern horizon.
There had been no home-going for him at the close of his first year in the sectarian school. The principal had reported him somewhat backward in his studies for his age,—which was true enough,—and had intimated that a summer spent with the preceptor who had the vacation charge of the school buildings would be invaluable to a boy of such excellent natural parts. So Tom had gone into semi-solitary confinement for three months with a man who thought in the dead languages and spoke in terms of ancient history, studying with sullen resentment in his heart, and charging his imprisonment to his preacher-uncle, who was, indeed, chiefly responsible.
He had mourned that loss of liberty all through his second year, and was conscious the while that it would prove the parent of a still greater loss. It is the exile's anchorage in a shifting world to think of the home haven as unchanged and unchanging; as a place where by and by the thread of life as it was may be knotted up with that of life as it shall be. But Tom remembered that he had left Paradise in the midst of convulsive upheavals, and was correspondingly fearful.
The sickening sense of unfamiliarity seized him when the train stopped for breakfast in the city which had once been the village of the single muddy street. The genius of progress had transformed it so completely that there was nothing but the huge, backgrounding mass of Lebanon, visible from the windows of the station breakfast-room, to identify the grave of the old and the birthplace of the new.
The boy laid desperate eye-holds on the comforting solidity of the background, and would not loose them when the train sped away southward again through mile-long yards with their boundaries picked out by black-vomiting factory chimneys. The mountain, at least, was unchanged, and there might be hope for the country beyond.
But the homesickness returned with renewed qualms when the train had doubled the nose of Lebanon and threaded its way among the hills to the Paradise portal. Gordonia, of the single side-track, had grown into a small iron town, with the Chiawassee plant flanking a good half-mile of the railway; with a cindery street or two, and a scummy wave of operatives' cottages and laborers' shacks spreading up the hillsides which were stripped bare of their trees and undergrowth.
Tom's eyes filled, and he was wondering faintly if the desolating tide of progress had topped the hills to pour over into the home valley beyond, when his father accosted him. There was a little shock at the sight of the grizzled hair and beard turned so much grayer; but the welcoming was like a grateful draft of cool water in a parched wilderness.
"Well, now then! How are ye, Buddy, boy? Great land o' Canaan! but you've shot up and thickened out mightily in two years, son."
Tom was painfully conscious of his size. Also of the fact that he was clumsily in his own way, particularly as to hands and feet. The sectarian school dwelt lightly on athletics and such purely mundane trivialities as physical fitness and the harmonious education of the growing body and limbs.
"Yes; I'm so big it makes me right tired," he said gravely, and his voice cracked provokingly in the middle of it. Then he asked about his mother.
"She's tolerable—only tolerable, Buddy. She allows she don't have enough to keep her doin' in the new—" Caleb pulled himself up abruptly and changed the subject with a ponderous attempt at levity. "What-all have you done with your trunk check, son? Now I'll bet a hen worth fifty dollars ye've gone and lost it."
But Tom had not; and when the luggage was found there was another innovation to buffet him. The old buggy with its high seat had vanished, and in its room there was a modern surrey with a negro driver. Tom looked askance at the new equipage.
"Can't we make out to walk, pappy?" he asked, dropping unconsciously into the child-time phrase.
"Oh, yes; I reckon we could. You're not too young, and I'm not so terr'ble old. But—get in, Buddy, get in; there'll be trampin' enough for ye, all summer long."
The limestone pike was the same, and the creek was still rushing noisily over the stones in its bed, as Tom remarked gratefully. But the heaviest of the buffets came when the barrier hills were passed and the surrey horses made no motion to turn in at the gate of the old oak-shingled house beyond the iron-works.
"Hold on!" said Tom. "Doesn't the driver know where we live?"
The old-time, gentle smile wrinkled about the iron-master's eyes.
"That's the sup'rintendent's office and lab'ratory now, son. It was getting to be tolerable noisy down here for your mammy, so nigh to the plant. And we allowed to s'prise you. We've been buildin' us a new house up on the knoll just this side o' Major Dabney's."
It was the cruelest of the changes—the one hardest to bear; and it drove the boy back into the dumb reticence which was a part of his birthright. Had they left him nothing by which to remember the old days—days which were already beginning to take on the glamour of unutterable happiness past?
Nevertheless, he could not help looking curiously for the new home—the old being irretrievably sacked and ruined; but there were more shocks to come between. One of Mr. Duxbury Farley's side issues had been a real estate boom for Paradise Valley proper. South Tredegar being prosperous, the time had seemed propitious for the engrafting of the country-house idea. By some means, marvelous to those who knew Major Dabney's tenacious land-grip, the promoter had bought in the wooded hillsides facing the mountain, cut them into ten-acre residence plots, run a graveled drive on the western side of the creek to front them, and presto! the thing was done.
Tom saw well-kept lawns, park-like groves and pretentious country villas where he had once trailed Nance Jane through the "dark woods," and his father told him the names and circumstance of the owners as they drove up the pike. There was Rockwood, the summer home of the Stanleys, and The Dell, owned, and inhabited at intervals, by Mr. Young-Dickson, of the South Tredegar potteries. Farther along there was Fairmount, whose owner was a wealthy cotton-seed buyer; Rook Hill, which Tom remembered as the ancient roosting ground of the migratory winter crows; and Farnsworth Park, ruralizing the name of its builder. On the most commanding of the hillsides was a pile of rough-cut Tennessee marble with turrets and many gables, rejoicing in the classic name of Warwick Lodge. This, Tom was told, was the country home of Mr. Farley himself, and the house alone had cost a fortune.
At the turn in the pike where you lost sight finally of the iron-works, there was a new church, a miniature in native stone of good old Stephen Hawker's church of Morwenstow. Tom gasped at the sight of it, and scowled when he saw the gilded cross on the tower.
"Catholic!" he said. "And right here in our valley!"
"No," said the father; "it's 'Piscopalian. Colonel Farley is one o' the vestries, or whatever you call 'em, of St. Michael's yonder in town. I reckon he wanted to get his own kind o' people round him out here, so he built this church, and they run it as a sort of side-show to the big church. Your mammy always looks the other way when we come by."
Tom looked the other way, too, watching anxiously for the first sight of the new home. They reached it in good time, by a graveled driveway leading up from the white pike between rows of forest trees; and there was a second negro waiting to take the team, when they alighted at the veranda steps.
The new house was a two-storied brick, ornate and palpably assertive, with no suggestion of the homely country comfort of the old. Yet, when his mother had wept over him in the wide hall, and there was time to go about, taking it all in like a cat exploring a strange garret, it was not so bad.
Or rather, let us say, there were compensations. The love of luxury is only dormant in the heart of the hardiest barbarian; and the polished floors and soft-piled rugs, the bath-room with its great china dish, and the carpeted stair with the old grandfather clock ticking bravely on the landing, presently began to thrum the tuneful chord of pride. Perhaps Ardea Dabney would not laugh and say, "What a funny, funny old place!" as she had once said when the Major had brought her to the log-walled homestead on the lower pike.
Still, there were incongruities—hopeless janglings of things married by increasing prosperity, but never meant to be bedfellows in the harmonious course of nature. One was the unblushing effrontery of the new brick pairing itself brazenly with the venerable gray stone manor-house on the adjoining knoll—impudence perceivable even to a hobbledehoy fresh from the school desk and the dormitory. Another was the total lack of sympathy between the housing and the housed.
This last was painfully evident in all the waking hours of the household. Tom observed that his father escaped early in the morning, and lived and moved and had his being in the industries at the lower end of the valley, as of old. But his mother's occupation was quite gone. And the summer evenings, sat out decorously on the ornate veranda, were full of constraint and awkward silences, having no part nor lot with those evenings of the older time on the slab-floored porch of the old homestead on the pike.
But there were compensations again, even for Martha Gordon, and Tom discovered one of them on the first Wednesday evening after his arrival. The new home was within easy walking distance of Little Zoar, and he went with his mother to the prayer-meeting.
The upper end of the pike was unchanged, and the little, weather-beaten church stood in its groving of pines, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Better still, the congregation, the small Wednesday-night gathering at least, held the familiar faces of the country folk. The minister was a young missionary, zealously earnest, and lacking as yet the quality of hardness and doctrinal precision which had been the boy's daily bread and meat at the sectarian school. What wonder, then, that when the call for testimony was made, the old pounding and heart-hammering set in, and duty, duty, duty, wrote itself in flaming letters on the dingy walls?
Tom set his teeth and swallowed hard, and let a dozen of the others rise and speak and sit again. He could feel the beating of his mother's heart, and he knew she was praying silently for him, praying that he would not deny his Master. For her sake, then ... but not yet; there was still time enough—after the next hymn—after the next testimony—when the minister should give another invitation. He was chained to the bench and could not rise; his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth and his lips were like dry leaves. The silences grew longer; all, or nearly all, had spoken. He was stifling.
"Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven." It was the solemn voice of the young minister, and Tom staggered to his feet with the lamps whirling in giddy circles.
"I feel to say that the Lord is precious to my soul to-night. Pray for me, that I may ever be found faithful."
He struggled through the words of the familiar form gaspingly and sat down. A burst of triumphant song arose,
"O happy day, that fixed my choice
On Thee, my Saviour and my God!"
and the ecstatic aftermath came. Truly, it was better to be a doorkeeper in the house of God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. What bliss was there to be compared with this heart-melting, soul-lifting blessing for duty done?
It went with him a good part of the way home, and Martha Gordon respected his silence, knowing well what heights and depths were engulfing the young spirit.
But afterward—alas and alas! that there should always be an "afterward"! When Tom had kissed his mother good night and was alone in his upper room, the reaction set in. What had he done? Were the words the outpouring of a full heart? Did they really mean anything to him, or to those who heard them? He grasped despairingly at the fast-fading glories of the vision, dropping on his knees at the bedside. "O God, let me see Thee and touch Thee, and be sure, sure!" he prayed, over and over again; and so finally sleep found him still on his knees with his face buried in the bed-clothes.