WHOSE YESTERDAYS LOOK BACKWARD
"Tom, isn't this the same foot-log you made me walk that day when you were trying to convince me that you were the meanest boy that ever breathed?" asked Ardea, gathering her skirts preparatory to the stream crossing.
"It is. But you didn't walk it, as you may remember: you fell off. Wait a second and give me those azaleas. I'll go first and take your hand."
Tom Gordon, lately home from a full half-year spent in the unfettered solitudes of the Carriso iron fields, to be married first, and afterward to start up—with Caleb for superintendent—the idle Chiawassee plant as a test and experimental shop for American Aqueduct, was indemnifying himself for the long exile.
On this Saturday evening in the lovers' month of June he had walked Ardea around and about through the fragrant summer wood of the upper creek valley, retracing, in part, the footsteps of the boy whose fishing had been spoiled and the little girl who was to be bullied into submission; and so rambling they had come at length to the old moss-grown foot-log which had been a newly-felled tree in the former time. Tom went first across the rustic bridge, holding the hand of ecstatic thrillings, and pausing in mid-passage that he might have excuse for holding it the longer. Ah me! we were all young once; and some of us are still young,—God grant,—in heart if not in years.
It was during the mid-passage pause, and while she was looking down on the swirling waters sometime of terrifying, that Miss Dabney said:
"How deep is it, Tom? Would I really have drowned if you and Hector had not pulled me out?"
He laughed.
"It's a thankless thing to spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You could have waded out."
She made the adorable little grimace which was one of the survivals of the yesterdays, and suffered him to lead her across.
"And I have always believed that I owed my life to you—and Hector!" she said reproachfully.
"You owe me much more than that," he affirmed broadly, when they had sat down to rest—they had often to do this, lest the way should prove shorter than the happy afternoon—on the end of the bridge log.
"Money?"—flippantly.
"No; love. If it hadn't been for me, you might never have known what love is."
His saying it was only an upbubbling of love's audacity, but she chose to take it seriously. She was gazing afar into the depths of the fresh-green forest darkening softly to the sunset, with her hands clasped around the tangle of late-blooming white azaleas in her lap.
"It is a high gift," she said soberly; "the highest of all for a woman. Once I thought I should live and die without knowing it, as many women do. I wish I might give you something as great."
"I am already overpaid," he asserted. "For a man there is nothing so great, no influence so nearly omnipotent, as the love of a good woman. It is the lever that moves the world—what little it does move—up the hill to the high planes."
"A lever?" she mused; "yes, perhaps. But levers are only links in the chain binding cause to effect."
His smile was lovingly tolerant.
"Is that what your religion has brought you to, Ardea—a full-grown belief in a Providence that takes cognizance of our little ant-wanderings up and down the human runways?"
"Yes, I think so," she said; but she said it without hesitancy or a shadow of doubt.
"I'm glad; glad you have attained," he rejoined quite unaffectedly.
"It was hardly attainment, in my case," she qualified; and, after a momentary pause, she added: "any more than it was in yours."
"You think I, too, have attained?" he smiled. "I am not so sure of that. Sometimes I think I am like my father, who is like Mahomet's coffin; hanging somewhere between Heaven and earth, unable to climb to one or to fall to the other. But I'm not as brash as I was a year or so ago; at least, I'm not so cock-sure that I know it all. That evening in the music-room at Deer Trace changed me—changed my point of view. You haven't heard me rail once at the world, or at the hypocrites in it, since I came home, have you?"
"No."
"Well, I don't feel like railing. I reckon the old world is good enough to live in—to work in; and certainly there are men in it who are better than I'm ever likely to be. I met one of them last winter out in the Carriso cow country; a 'Protestant' priest, he called himself, of your persuasion. He was the most hopeless bigot I've ever known, and by long odds the nearest masculine approach to true, gritty saintliness. There was nothing he wouldn't do, no hardship he wouldn't cheerfully undergo, to brother a man who was down, and the wickedest devil in all that God-forsaken country swore by him. Yet he would argue with me by the hour, splitting hairs over Apostolic Succession, or something of that sort."
She smiled in her turn. "Did he regard you as a heretic?" she asked.
"Oh, sure! though he admitted that I might escape at the last by virtue of my 'invincible ignorance.' Then I would laugh at him, telling him he was a lot better than his bigotry. But he got the best of me in other ways. I owned the one buckboard in the northern half of Apache County, and my broncos were harness-broken and fast. So, when there was a shoot-up at the Arroyo dance-hall, or any other job of swift brothering to be done, I had to drive Father Philip."
She was musing again. "You used to write me that you were on the edge of things out there: it was a mistake, Tom; you were in the very heart of them."
He shook his head.
"No; the heart of them was back yonder in the music-room. There were chaos and thick darkness to go before that day of days; and it was your woman's love that changed the world for me."
"No," she denied; "that was only an incident. When chaos and darkness fled away, it was God who said, 'Let there be light.' The dawn had come for you before our day of days, Tom."
He stretched himself luxuriously on the sward at her feet.
"You may put it that way if you please. But I shall go on revering you as my torch-bearer," he asserted.
"Tell me," she said quickly; "was it for my sake that you spared Vincent Farley when all you had to do was to turn your back and go away?"
He took time to consider, and his answer put love under the foot of truth.
"No, it wasn't. If you make me confess the bald fact, I was not thinking of you at all, just at that one moment."
"I know it," she rejoined. "And I am big enough to be glad. Neither was it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil by redeeming the Farleys' stock just before they left for Colorado, or that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for their losses during the strike."
But again he was shaking his head dubiously.
"I'm not so sure about that. It's in any man to play high when the good opinion of the one woman is the stake. I'm a poseur, like all the others."
She smiled down on him and the slate-blue eyes were reading him to the latest-indited heart-line.
"You are posing now," she asseverated. "Don't I know?—don't I always and always know?" And, after a reflective moment: "It is a great comfort to be able to love the poses, and a still greater to be permitted to discern the true man under them."
"I am glad to believe that you don't see quite to the bottom of that well, Ardea, girl," he said with sudden gravity. "I get only occasional glimpses, myself, and they make me seasick. I don't believe any man alive could endure it to look long into the inner abysses of himself."
"'The heart knoweth his own bitterness,'" she quoted, speaking softly; and then—O rarest of women!—she did not enlarge on it. Instead—
Silence while she was gathering the sweet-smelling tangle in her lap into some more portable arrangement. And afterward, when they were drifting slowly homeward in the lengthening shadows, a small asking.
"Mr. Morelock is coming out to-morrow to hold service in St. John's, and I shall go to play for him. Will you go with me, Tom?"
He smiled out of the gold and sapphire depths of a lover's reverie.
"One week from the day after the day after to-morrow—and it will be the longest week-and-two-days of my life, dearest—your grandfather will take you to church, and I shall bring you away. Won't that be enough?"
She took him quite seriously.
"I shall never be a Felicita Young-Dickson, and drag you," she promised. "But, O Tom! I wish—"
"I know," he said gently. "You are thinking of the days to come; when the paths may diverge—yours and mine—ever so little; when there may be children to choose between their mother's faith and their father's indifference. But I am not indifferent. So far from it, I am only anxious now to prove what I was once so bent on disproving."
"You yourself are the strongest proof," she interposed. "You will see it, some day."
"Shall I? I hope so; and that is an honest hope. And really and truly, I think I have come up a bit—out of the wilderness, you know. I am willing to admit that this is the best of all possible worlds; and I want to do my part in making it a little better because I have lived in it. Also, I'd like to believe in something bigger and better than protoplasm."
Her smile was of the kind which stands half-way in the path to tears, but she spoke bravely to the doubt in his reply.
"You do believe, Tom, dear; you have never seen the moment when you did not. It was the doubt that was unreal. When the supreme test came, it was God's hand that restrained you; you know it now—you knew it at the time. And afterward it was His grace that enabled you to do what was just and right. Haven't you admitted all this to yourself?"
They had crossed the white pike to the manor-house gates and were turning aside from the driveway into the winding lawn path when he said:
"To myself, and to one other." Then, very softly: "I sat at my mother's knee last night, Ardea, and told her all there was to tell."
Ardea's eyes were shining. "What did she say, Tom, dear—or is it more than I should ask?"
"There is nothing you may not ask. She said—it wasn't altogether true, I'm afraid—but she put her arms around my neck and cried and said: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."
She slipped her arm in his, and there was a little sob of pure joy at the catching of her breath. The moon was just rising above the Lebanon cliff-line, and the beauty of the glorious night-dawn possessed her utterly. Ah, it was a good world and a generous, bringing rich gifts to the steadfast! Instinctively she felt that Tom's little confession did not require an answer; that he was battling his way to the heights which must be taken alone.
So they came in the sacred hush of the young night to a great tulip-tree on the lawn, and where a curiously water-worn limestone boulder served as a rustic seat wide enough for two whose hearts are one they sat down together, still in the companionship that needs no speech. It was Tom who first broke the silence.
"I have been trying ever since that night last winter to feel my way out," he said slowly. "But what is to come of it? I can't go back to the boyhood yesterdays; in a way I have hopelessly outgrown them. Let us admit that religion has become real again; but Ardea, girl, it isn't Uncle Silas's religion, or—or my mother's, or even yours. And I don't know any other."
She laid a hand on one of his.
"It is all right, dear; there is only the one religion in all Christendom—perhaps in all the world, or in God's part of it. The difference is in people."
"But this thing that has been slowly happening to me—this thing I am trying to call convincement: shall I wake up some day and find it gone, with all the old doubts in the saddle again?" he asked it almost wistfully.
"Who can tell?" she said gently. "But it will make no difference; the immutable fact will be there just the same, whether you are asleep or waking. We can't always stand on the Mount of Certainty, any of us; and to some, perhaps, it is never given. But when one saves his enemy's life and forgives and forgets—O Tom, dear! don't you understand?"
But now his eyes are love-blinded, and the white-gowned figure beside him fills all horizons.
"I can't see past you, Ardea. Nevertheless, I'm going to believe that I feel the good old pike solid underfoot ... and they say that the House Beautiful is somewhere at the mountain end of it. If you will hold my hand, I believe I can make out to walk in it; blindfolded, if I have to—and without thinking too much of the yesterdays."
"Ah, the yesterdays!" she said tenderly. "They are precious, too; for out of them, out of their hindrances no less than their helpings, comes to-day. Kiss me, twice, Tom; and then I must go in and read to Major Grandpa."
THE END