THE UNDER-DEPTHS
The Deer Trace family and the two guests from Woodlawn were in the music-room when Tom was admitted, with Ardea at the piano playing war songs for the pleasuring of her grandfather and the ex-artilleryman. Under cover of the music, Tom slipped into the circle of listeners and went to sit beside his mother. There was a courteous hand-wave of welcome from Major Dabney, but Miss Euphrasia seemed not to see him. He saw and understood, and was obstinately impervious to the chilling east wind in that quarter. It was with Ardea that he must make his peace, and he settled himself to wait for his opportunity.
It bade fair to be a long time coming. Ardea's repertoire was apparently inexhaustible, and at the end of an added hour he began to suspect that she knew what was in store for her and was willing to postpone the afflictive moment. From the battle hymns of the Confederacy to the militant revival melodies best loved by Martha Gordon the transition was easy; and from these she drifted through a Beethoven sonata to Mozart, and from Mozart to Chopin.
Thomas Jefferson knew music as the barbarian knows it, which is to say that it lighted strange fires in him; stirred and thrilled him in certain heart or soul labyrinths locked against all other influences. As Ardea's fingers sought the changing chords he felt vaguely that she was speaking to him, now scorning, now rebuking, now pleading, but always in a tongue that he only half comprehended. He stole a glance at his watch, impatient to come to hand-grips with her and have it over. The suspense could not last much longer. It was past ten; the Major was dozing peacefully in his great arm-chair, and Miss Euphrasia yawned decorously behind her hand.
Ardea lingered lovingly on the closing harmonies of the nocturne, and when the final chord was struck her hands lingered on the keys until the sweet voices of the strings had sung themselves afar into the higher sound heaven. Then she turned quickly and surprised her anesthetized audience.
"You poor things!" she laughed. "In another five minutes the last one of you would have succumbed. Why didn't somebody stop me?"
The iron-master said something about the heavy work of the day, and helped his wife to her feet. The Major came awake with a start and bestirred himself hospitably, and Miss Euphrasia rose to speed the parting guests—or rather the two of them who had been invited. In the drift down the wide hall Ardea fell behind with Tom, whom Cousin Euphrasia continued to ignore.
"I came to tell you," he said in a low tone, snatching his opportunity. "I can't sleep until I have fought it out with you."
"You don't deserve a hearing, even from your best friend," was her discouraging reply; but when they were at the door she gave him a formal reprieve. "I shall walk for a few minutes on the portico to rest my nerves," she said. "If you want to come back—"
He thanked her gravely, and went obediently when his mother called to him from the steps. But on the Woodlawn veranda he excused himself to smoke a cigar in the open; and when the door closed behind the two in-going, he swiftly recrossed the lawns to pay the penalty.
The front door of the manor-house was shut and the broad, pillared portico was untenanted. He sat down in one of the rustic chairs and searched absently in his pockets for a cigar. Before he could find it the door opened and closed and Ardea stood before him. She had thrown a wrap over her shoulders, and the light from the music-room windows illuminated her. There was cool scorn in the slate-blue eyes, but in Tom's thought she had never appeared more unutterably beautiful and desirable—and unattainable.
"I have come," she said, in a tone that cut him to the heart for its very indifference. "What have you to say for yourself?"
He rose quickly and offered her the chair; and when she would not take it, he put his back to the wall and stood with her.
"I'm afraid I haven't left myself much to say," he began penitently. "I was born foolish, and it seems that I haven't outgrown it. But, really, if you could know—"
"Unhappily, I do know," she interrupted. "If I did not, I might listen to you with better patience."
"It did look pretty bad," he confessed. "And that's what I wanted to say; it looked a great deal worse than it was, you know."
"I don't know," she retorted.
"You are tangling me," he said, gaining something in self-possession under the flick of the whip. "First you say you know, and then you say you don't know. Which is which?"
"If you are flippant I shall go in," she threatened. "There are things that not even the most loyal friendship can condone."
"That's the difference between friendship and love," he asserted. "I believe I'd enjoy a little more real confidence and a little less of the dutiful kind of loyalty."
"You ask too much," she said, quite coolly. "Forgiveness implies penitence and continued good behavior."
"No, it doesn't, anything of the kind," he denied, matching her tone. "That is the purely pagan point of view, and you are barred from taking it. You are bound to consider the motive."
"I am bound to believe what I see with my own eyes," she rejoined. "Perhaps you can make it appear that seeing is not believing."
"Of course I can't, if you take that attitude," he complained. And then he said irritably: "You talk about friendship! You don't know the meaning of the word!"
"If I didn't, I should hardly be here at this moment," she suggested. "You don't seem to apprehend to what degrading depths you have sunk."
His sins in the business field rose before him accusingly and prompted his reply.
"Yes, I do; but that is another matter. We were speaking of what you saw this evening. Will you let me try to explain?"
"Yes, if you will tell the plain truth."
"Lacking imagination, I can't do anything else. Nan has had a falling-out with the old scamp of a moonshiner who calls himself her father. She came to me for help, and broke down in the midst of telling me about it. I can't stand a woman's crying any better than other men."
The slate-blue eyes were transfixing him.
"And that was all—absolutely all, Tom?"
"I don't lie—to you," he said briefly.
She gave him her hand with an impulsive return to the old comradeship. "I believe you, Tom, in the face of all the—the unlikelinesses. But please don't try me again. After what has happened—" she stopped in deference to something in his eyes, half anger, half bewilderment, or a most skilful simulation of both.
"Go on," he said; "tell me what has happened. I seem to have missed something."
"No," she said, with sudden gravity. "I don't want to be your accuser or your confessor; and if you should try to prevaricate, I should hate you!"
"There is nothing for me to confess to you, Ardea," he said soberly, still holding the hand she had given him. "You have known the worst of me, always and all along, I think."
"Yes, I have known," she replied, freeing the imprisoned hand and turning from him. "And I have been sorry, sorry; not less for you than for poor Nancy Bryerson. You know now what I thought—what I had to think—when I saw you with her this evening."
It was slowly beating its way into his brain. Little things, atoms of suggestion, were separating themselves from the mass of things disregarded to cluster thickly on this nucleus of revealment: the old story of his companying with Nan on the mountain; his uncle's and Japheth's accusation at the time; and now the old moonshiner's enmity, Japheth's meaning look and distrustful silence, Nan's appearance with a child bearing his own name, the glances askance in Hargis's store when he was buying the little stock of necessaries for the poor outcast. It was all plain enough. For reasons best known to herself, Nan had not revealed the name of her betrayer, and all Gordonia, and all Paradise, believed him to be the man. Even Ardea ...
She had moved aside out of the square of window light, and he followed her.
"Tell me," he said thickly; "you heard this: you have believed it. Have I been misjudging you?"
"Not more than I misjudged you, perhaps. But that is all over, now: I am trusting you again, Tom. Only, as I said before, you mustn't try me too hard."
"Let me understand," he went on, still in the same strained tone. "Knowing this, or believing it, you could still find a place in your heart for me—you could still forgive me, Ardea?"
"I could still be your friend; yes," she replied. "I believed—others believed—that your punishment would be great enough; there are all the coming years for you to be sorry in, Tom. But in the fullness of time I meant to remind you of your duty. The time has come; you must play the man's part now. What have you done with her?"
"Wait a moment. I must know one other thing," he insisted. "You heard this before you went to Europe?"
"Long before."
"And it didn't make any difference in the way you felt toward me?"
"It did; it made the vastest difference." They were pacing slowly up and down the portico, and she waited until they had made the turn at the Woodlawn end before she went on. "I thought I knew you when we were boy and girl together, and, girl-like, I suppose I had idealized you in some ways. I thought I knew your wickednesses, and that they were not weaknesses; so—so it was a miserable shock. But it was not for me to judge you—only as you might rise or sink from that desperate starting point. When I came home I was sure that you had risen; I have been sure of it ever since until—until these few wretched hours to-night. They are past, and now I'm going to be sure of it some more, Tom."
It was his turn to be silent, and they had measured twice the length of the pillared floor when at last he said:
"What if I should tell you that you are mistaken—that all of them are mistaken?"
"Don't," she said softly. "That would only be smashing what is left of the ideal. I think I couldn't bear that."
"God in Heaven!" he said, under his breath. "And you've been calling this friendship! Ardea, girl, it's love!"
She shook her head slowly.
"No," she rejoined gravely. "At one time I thought—I was afraid—that it might be. But now I know it isn't."
"How do you know it?"
"Because love, as I think of it, is stronger than the traditions, stronger than anything else in the world. And the traditions are still with me. I admit the existence of the social pale, and as long as I live within it I have a right to demand certain things of the man who marries me."
"And love doesn't demand anything," he said, putting the remainder of the thought into words for her. "You are right. If I could clear myself with a word, I should not say it."
"Why?"
"Because your—loyalty, let us call it, is too precious to be exchanged for anything else you could give me in place of it—esteem, respect, and all the other well-behaved and virtuous bestowals."
"But the loyalty is based on the belief that you are trying to earn the well-behaved approvals," she continued.
"No, it isn't. It exists 'in spite of' everything, and not 'because of' anything. The traditions may try to make you stand it on the other leg, it's a way they have; but the fact remains."
She shook her head in deprecation.
"The 'traditions,' are about to send me into the house, and the principal problem is yet untouched. What have you done with Nancy?"
He told her briefly and exactly, adding nothing and omitting nothing; and her word for it was "impossible."
"Don't you understand?" she objected. "I may choose to believe that this home making for poor Nan and her waif is merely a bit of tardy justice on your part and honor you for it. But nobody else will take that view of it. If you keep her in that little cabin of yours, Mountain View Avenue will have a fit—and very properly."
"I don't see why it should," he protested densely.
"Don't you? That's because you are still so hopelessly primeval. People won't give you credit for the good motive; they will quote that Scripture about the dog and the sow. You must think of some other way."
"Supposing I say I don't care a hang?"
"Oh, but you do. You have your father and mother and—and me to consider, however reckless you may be for yourself and Nancy. You mustn't leave her where she is for a single day."
"I can leave her there if I like. I've told her she may stay as long as she wants to."
They had paused in front of the great door, and Ardea's hand was on the knob.
"No," she said decisively, "you will have a perfect hornets' nest about your ears. Every move you make will be watched and commented on. Don't you see that you are playing the part of the headstrong, obstinate boy again?"
"Yet you think I ought to provide for Nan, in some way; how am I going to do it unless I ignore the hornets?"
"Now you are more reasonable," she said approvingly. "I shall ride to-morrow morning, and if you should happen to overtake me, we might think up something."
The door was opening gently under the pressure of her hand, but he was loath to go.
"I wouldn't take five added years of life for what I've learned to-night, Ardea;" he said passionately. And then: "Have you fully made up your mind to marry Vincent Farley?"
In the twinkling of an eye she was another woman—cold, unapproachable, with pride kindling as if she had received a mortal affront.
"Sometimes—and they are bad times for you, Mr. Gordon—I am tempted to forget the boy-and-girl anchorings in the past. Have you no sense of the fitness of things—no shame?"
"Not very much of either, I guess," he said quite calmly. "Love hasn't any shame; and it doesn't concern itself much about the fitness of anything but its object."
And then he bade her good night and went his way with a lilting song of triumph in his heart which not even the chilling rebuff of the leave-taking was sufficient to silence.
"She loves me! She would still love me if she were ten times Vincent Farley's wife!" he said, over and over to himself; the words were on his lips when he fell asleep, and they were still ringing in his ears the next morning at dawn-break when he rose and made ready to go to ride with her.