"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 Chiawa.s.see plant as a test and experimental shop for American Aqueduct, was indemnifying himself for the long exile.
On this Sat.u.r.day 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-pa.s.sage that he might have excuse for holding it the longer. Ah me! we were all young once; and some of us are still young,--G.o.d grant,--in heart if not in years.
It was during the mid-pa.s.sage 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 a.s.serted. "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 c.o.c.k-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 G.o.d-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 G.o.d 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 a.s.serted.
"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 rest.i.tution 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 a.s.severated. "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.