Deering said good-bye to Finch, quickly, quietly, he had time for little explanation. Finch said nothing, but died of despair within.
On the way down the corridor Tony passed Kit, a generous word was on his lips, their eyes met for a second, but Kit looked quickly away, and Tony passed on. The opportunity for a reconciliation was gone. Morris drove in to Monday Port with the boy and saw him off on the way-train for Coventry. With persistent tact, he continued to treat the parting as only a temporary one, and refused himself the melancholy pleasure of saying much to his young friend that was in his heart and that Tony might have been glad to hear. It was better so, thought Morris. The kind things could be written, if the need came.
There was a quick, short, strong grip of their hands at last, and Tony climbed into the train. He stowed his things in the empty car, and then went and stood on the rear platform and waved his hand to Morris as the train pulled out of the little station, and strained his eyes to see the last of the master’s patient, kindly friendly figure until darkness blotted out the vision. The train was rushing through the outskirts of the little town. Beyond the limits it ascended a steep grade and ran along a high level plateau for a way, and thence Tony caught a glimpse of the lights of the school shining brightly from the far-away hill, wafting him, it seemed, a friendly good-bye across the dark. Suddenly the train plunged into a narrow cut in a hill and Deering could see the lights of Deal no more.
At Coventry he had a dreary wait for half-an-hour until the midnight express for the south lumbered in and stopped on signal. As soon as he had boarded the through train, he got into his berth, for he was worn out with the wearisome journey from Monday Port and with the excitement of the last seven hours. But he could not sleep for a long time. When at last he did fall into a fitful slumber, constantly disturbed by the jolts and jars of the rushing train, it was to dream bad dreams. Once it seemed to him, in the dazed state between sleeping and waking, that he was lying in his little bed at Low Deering, that he was still a little boy of fourteen, and that the last four years at Deal had been only a dream....
At Low Deering Tony found things almost as bad as he had feared. His father, a genial, charming, irresponsible creature—the unaccountable wild olive that grows now and then on the stock of the good olive tree—had rather more deeply than usual—for the same sort of thing had happened before—plunged his family into distress. He had ventured all his available capital and more that he had borrowed, on the security of his extravagant hopes and good intentions, from his wife; staked it in a case where he stood to win twenty-fold or quite overwhelmingly lose; and, as not unfrequently happens, had lost. Then had followed, as Tony could remember the horror of it all at an earlier period of his boyhood, a trying disappearance and a return in a mood of black melancholy and idle remorse.
But the worst was over by the time he reached home. Victor Deering, thanks to his father’s stern but tender patience and his wife’s unfailing much-tried devotion, was slowly recovering his normal health, his irrepressible spirits, his habitual weaving of futile plans and nursing of quixotic hopes. But the process this time had cost his family a good deal more than its meager income could pay for and had sacrificed Mrs. Deering’s health to worry and distress. For weeks she had been lying in a state of nervous exhaustion, from which the physician at last thought she might be rallied if her wish were granted and Tony, her only child, might be with her. And so he had been sent for.
During those two hot months of the southern spring Tony devoted himself to his mother, a devotion that was only relaxed when later, the old general having scraped together enough for the purpose, the family removed for the summer to the cooler climate of a resort in the North Carolina mountains. The mother grieved not a little for her boy’s interrupted school days—she guessed at the sacrifice Tony’s cheerfulness hid,—but Tony and the General knew that his return had saved her health if not her life.
Tony had been separated a great deal from his family since he had gone north to school, so that, after the first homesickness for Deal was over, he began to be deeply interested again in the old scenes and familiar friends of his early boyhood: the easy-going, ill-managed old plantation with its extensive sugar industry bringing in such income as they had; the little hill on which stood the house of Low Deering, low, white and great galleried; the sleepy bayou that stretched away below to the wild and beautiful jungle, a marshy live-oak forest, picturesquely hung with the heavy lace of the gray Spanish moss and the delicate purple of the wild wistaria; the inky black darkies, relics of ante-bellum days; the few families of similar decaying plantations in the neighborhood.
Later in the summer at Bald Rock in North Carolina, at the hotel to which their diminutive cottage was attached, there were young people again—boys to play baseball and climb the near by mountains with, girls with whom to dance at the Saturday night hops on the great gallery of the hotel. Then too there was his father. Despite an inner disapproval that Tony could not help feeling for his father’s irresponsible doings, for the trouble he now and then brought so deeply, perhaps unwittingly, upon them all, Tony enjoyed his father immensely. If he himself had inherited his strong sense of honor and his manly grip on life from his grandfather, and the inner patient tenderness we have sometimes noted in him from his mother, it was from his father that his charm, his quick and ready sympathy, his genial grace had come.
After the terrible six months he had given them, Victor Deering could not have done more to atone than he was whole-heartedly trying to do. It was characteristic of him, for he deeply appreciated what Deal School had done for Tony, that his repentance should have caused him to suggest to the old general that his own patrimony, hoarded by the head of the house against a rainy day, should be made over to Tony at once, and the income, the capital if necessary, be applied to completing his education at Deal and later on at Kingsbridge. General Deering took his son at his word. Victor was only too eager to promise from then on steadfast attention to the plantation, which, better managed, was capable still of recouping their fortunes and furnishing them with a living. So it began to look bright, as Tony wrote to Jimmie Lawrence, for his return to school, and without any question of taking advantage of scholarships or such aid as the Head had so kindly offered. That offer rankled, unjustly as he knew, in the old aristocrat’s mind. He was determined Tony should have no such humiliation to face.