Ardea was white to the lips and trembling when she retreated to the door-stone and beckoned to her companion.
"Can you find the way back to Deer Trace alone?" she faltered. "There is trouble here, as I feared there might be--terrible trouble and suffering. Say to my cousin that I must have Aunt Eliza, if she has to crawl here on her hands and knees. Then telephone for Doctor Williams, at Gordonia. He"ll come if you tell him the message is from me. Oh, please go, quickly!"
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Oh, please go quickly!"]
He was waiting only for her to finish.
"Is it quite safe for you here?" he asked.
"Quite; but I shall die of impatience if you don"t hurry!" Then her good blood made its protest heard. "Oh, please forgive me! I don"t forget that you are my guest, but--"
"Not a word, Miss Dabney. Shall I come back here with the woman or the doctor?"
"No; I"ll send for you if--if there is no hope. Otherwise you could do nothing."
He lifted his hat and was gone, and she turned and reentered the house of trouble, bravely facing that which had to be faced.
An hour later, when Doctor Williams, with Mammy Juliet"s Pete chopping the way for him up the hazardous path, reached the end of his journey of mercy, there was a bright fire crackling on the hearth, and Miss Dabney was sitting before it, holding little Tom, who was still sleeping. Aunt Eliza, a deft middle-aged negress who had succeeded Mammy Juliet as housekeeper at Deer Trace, was bending over the bed, and the physician went quickly to stand beside her, shaking his head dubiously. A moment afterward he turned short on Ardea.
"You must go home, my dear--at once--and take the child with you. Pete is outside to help you, and my buggy is just at the foot of the path. I can"t have you here."
"Can"t I be of some use if I stay?" she pleaded.
"No; you"d only hinder. You are much too sympathetic. Don"t delay; the minutes may count for lives," and the physician began to unbuckle the straps of the canvas-covered case he had brought with him.
Ardea wrapped the child hastily and gave him to Pete to carry, following as quickly as she could down the path made possible by the coachman"s choppings. Happily, the doctor"s horse was freshly shod, and the quarter-mile to the manor-house was measured in safety. Ardea left little Tom with Mammy Juliet at her cabin in the old quarters, and went up to the great house to wait anxiously for news. It was drawing on to the early dusk of the cloudy evening when she saw from the window of the music-room the m.u.f.fled figure of Pete opening the pasture gate for the doctor to drive through. Instantly she flew to the door and out on the steps.
"Go in, child; go in," was the fatherly command. "I"ve got to stop to take Morelock in. I promised to carry him to the station."
"But Nancy?" she questioned anxiously.
"She will live," said the doctor briefly. And then he added with a frown: "But the child may not--which would doubtless be the best thing possible for all concerned. I"m afraid the woman is incorrigible." Then the professional part of him came to its own again: "You"ll have to send somebody up there to relieve Eliza. Care is all that is needed now, but it mustn"t be stinted."
There were tears standing in the slate-blue eyes of the listener, but Doctor Williams did not see them. If he had, he would not have understood; neither would he have plumbed the depths of misery in that whispered saying of Ardea"s as she turned and fled to her room: "O Tom!
how could you! how could you!"
XXVII
SWEPT AND GARNISHED
Thomas Jefferson Gordon, Bachelor of Science, and one of the six prize-men in his cla.s.s, was expected home on the first day of July; and it was remarked as a coincidence by the curious that Deer Trace manor-house was closed for the summer no more than a week before the return of the Gordon black sheep.
That Tom was a black sheep, a hopeless and incorrigible social iconoclast, was no longer a matter of doubt in the minds of any.
Something may be forgiven a promising young man who has been unhappy enough, or imprudent enough, to begin to make history for himself in the irresponsible "teens; but also the act of oblivion may be repealed. When it became noised about that there were two children instead of one in the old dog-keeper"s cabin in the glen, Mountain View Avenue was justly indignant, and even the lenient Gordonians scowled and shook their heads at the mention of the young boss"s name. All the world loves a lover, as in just measure it despises a libertine; and there were fathers of daughters among the miner and foundry folk of the town.
On the lips of the transplanted urbanites of the hill houses comment was less elemental, but no less condemnatory. It was no wonder the Dabneys had closed their house and had gone to Crestcliffe Inn to save Ardea the humiliation of having to meet Tom before she was safely married to Vincent Farley. It was what any self-respecting young woman would wish under like trying conditions. The country colony approved; likewise, it commended Miss Dabney"s foresight and prudence in causing the Bryerson woman and her two children to disappear from the cabin in the glen; though Mrs. Vancourt Henniker, in secret session over the tea-cups with the elder Miss Harrison, voiced her surprise that Ardea could continue to be charitable in that quarter.
"It is quite beyond me," was the matron"s thin-lipped phrasing of it.
"When one remembers that this wretched mountain girl has been Ardea"s understudy from the very beginning--faugh! it is simply disgusting! I should think Ardea would never want to see or hear of her again."
To such an atmosphere of potential social ostracism Tom returned after the final scholastic triumph in Boston; and for the first few days he escaped asphyxiation chiefly because the affairs of Gordon and Gordon and the Chiawa.s.see Consolidated gave him no time to test its quality.
But after the first week he began to breathe it unmistakably. One evening he called on the Farnsworths; the ladies were not at home to him. The next night he saddled Saladin and rode over to Fairmont; the Misses Harrison were also unable to see him, and the butler conveyed a deftly-worded intimation pointing to future invisibilities on the part of his mistresses. The evening being still young, Tom tried Rockwood and the Dell, suspicion settling into conviction when the trim maidservant at the Stanley villa went near to shutting the door in his face. At the Dell he fared a little better. The Young-d.i.c.ksons were going out for an after-dinner call on one of the neighbors, and Tom met them at the gate as he was dismounting. There were regrets apparently hearty; but in recasting the incident later, Tom remembered that it was the husband who did the talking, and that Mrs. Young-d.i.c.kson stood in the shadow of the gate tree, frigidly silent and with her face averted.
"Once more, old boy, and then we"ll quit," he said to Saladin at the remounting, and the final rein-drawing was at the stone-pillared gates of Rook Hill. Again the ladies were not at home, but Mr. Vancourt Henniker came out and smoked a cigar with his customer on the piazza.
The talk was pointedly of business, and the banker was urbanely gracious--and mildly inquisitive. Would there be a consolidation of the allied iron industries of Gordonia when the Farleys should return? Mr.
Henniker thought it would be undeniably profitable to all concerned, and offered his services as financiering promoter and intermediary. Would Mr. Gordon come and talk it over with him--at the bank?
Tom found his father smoking a bedtime pipe on the picturesque veranda at Woodlawn when he reached home. Whistling for William Henry Harrison to come and take his horse, he drew up one of the porch chairs and filled and lighted his own pipe. For a time there was such silence as stands for communion between men of one blood, and it was the father who first broke it.
"Been out callin", son?" he asked, marking the Tuxedo and the white expanse of shirt front.
"No, I reckon not," was the reply, punctuated by a short laugh. "The Avenue seems to be depopulated."
"So? I hadn"t heard of anybody goin" away," said Caleb the literal.
"Nor I," said Tom curtly; and the conversation paused until the iron-master had deliberately refilled and lighted his corn-cob.
"It"s a-plenty onprofitable, Buddy, don"t you reckon?" he ventured, referring to the social diversion.
There was a picric quality in Tom"s tone when he replied: "The calling act?--I have certainly found it so to-night." Then, more humanely: "But as a means of relaxation it beats sitting here in the dark and stewing over to-morrow"s furnace run--which is what you"ve been doing."
Caleb chuckled. "That"s one time you missed the whole side o" the barn, Buddy. I was settin" here wonderin" if a man ever did get over bein"
surprised at the way his children turn out."
"Meaning me?" said Tom, knocking the ash from his pipe and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.
"Yes, meanin" you, son. You"ve somehow got away from me again in these last six months "r so."
"I"m older, pappy; and I hope I"m bigger and broader. I was a good bit of a kid a year ago; tough in some spots and fearfully and wonderfully raw in others. Do you recollect how I climbed up on the fence the first dash out of the box and read off the law to you about religion and such things?"
"I reckon so," said the iron-master. "And that"s one o" the things--I ain"t heard you cuss out the hypocrites once since you got back. Have you gone back on the Dutchman and his argyment?"
"Bauer, you mean?--no; only on the nullifying part of it. Bauer"s no-religion doctrine is a doctrine of denial, and it"s pure theory. What we have to deal with in this world is the practical human fact, and a good half of that is tangled up with some sort of religious belief or sentiment. At least, that"s the way I"m finding it."
"It"s the way it _is_," said Caleb sententiously. And after a pause: "I allow it helps some, too; greases the wheels some if it don"t do anything more."
"It does much more," was the quick reply. "When you find it in a woman like Ardea Dabney, it raises her to the seventh power angelic. It is only when you find it, or some ghastly imitation of it, in such people as the Farleys...." He changed the subject abruptly. "You said the Dabneys had gone up on the mountain for the summer, didn"t you?"
"Yes. I believe they"re allowin" to come back in August, in time for the weddin"."
The younger man"s wince was purely involuntary. He had been trying latterly to train up to the degree of mental fitness which would enable him to think calmly of Ardea as another man"s wife. The effort commended itself as a part of the new broadening process, but it was not entirely successful.
"You wrote me the Farleys would be back this month, didn"t you?" he asked.