Chapter XXXV: A Soul in Shackles 378 (3)

"Oh, I don't know; just because you are. If you knew French I could explain it better that way."

"I don't know anybody by that name, and I don't care," said Thomas Jefferson doggedly; and went back to his fishing.

Followed another interval of silence, in which two more worms were fed to the insatiable sucker at the bottom of the pool. Then came the volcanic outburst.

"I think you are mean, mean!" she sobbed, with an angry stamp of her foot. "I--I want to go ho-ome!"

"Well, I reckon there ain't anybody holdin' you," said Thomas Jefferson brutally. He was intent on fixing the sixth worm on the hook in such fashion as permanently to discourage the bait thief, and was coming to his own in the matter of self-possession with grateful facility. It was going to be notably easy to bully her--another point of difference between her and Nan Bryerson.

"I know there isn't anybody holding me, but--but I can't find the way."

That any one could be lost within an easy mile of the manor-house was ridiculously incredible to Thomas Jefferson. Yet there was no telling, in the case of a girl.

"You want me to show you the way?" he asked, putting all the ungraciousness he could muster into the query.

"You might tell me, I should think! I've walked and walked!"

"I reckon I'd better take you; you might get lost again," he said, with gloomy sarcasm. Then he consumed all the time he could for the methodical disposal of his fishing-tackle. It would be good for her to learn that she must wait on his motions.

She waited patiently, sitting on the ground with one arm around the neck of the Great Dane; and when Thomas Jefferson stole a glance at her to see how she was taking it, she looked so tired and thin and woebegone that he almost let the better part of him get the upper hand. That made him surlier than ever when he finally recovered his string of fish from the stream and said: "Well, come on, if you're comin'."

He told himself, hypocritically, that it was only to show her what hardships she would have to face if she should try to tag him, that he dragged her such a weary round over the hills and through the worst brier patches and across and across the creek, doubling and circling until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones. But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had a helplessly pliable subject.

The better she kept up, the more determined he became to break her down; but at the very last, when she stumbled and fell in an old leaf bed and cried for sheer weariness, he relented enough to say: "I reckon you'll know better than to go projectin' round in the woods the next time. Come on--we're 'most there, now."

But Ardea's troubles were not yet at an end. She stopped crying and got up to follow him blindly over more hills and through other brier tangles; and when they finally emerged in the cleared lands, they were still on the wrong side of the creek.

"It's only about up to your chin; reckon you can wade it?" asked Thomas Jefferson, in a sudden access of heart-hardening. But it softened him a little to see her gather her torn frock and stumble down to the water's edge without a word, and he added: "Hold on; maybe we can find a log, somewhere."

There was a foot log just around the next bend above, as he very well knew, and thither he led the way. The dog made the crossing first, and stood wagging his tail encouragingly on the bank of safety. Then Thomas Jefferson passed his trembling victim out on the log.

"You go first," he directed; "so 't I can catch you if you slip."

For the first time she humbled herself to beg a boon.

"Oh, you please go first, so I won't have to look down at the water!"

"No; I'm coming behind--then I can catch you if you get dizzy and go to fall," he said stubbornly.

"Will you walk right up close, so I can know you are there?"

Thomas Jefferson's smile was cruelly misleading, as were his words. "All you'll have to do will be to reach your hand back and grab me," he assured her; and thereupon she began to inch her way out over the swirling pool.

When he saw that she could by no possibility turn to look back, Thomas Jefferson deliberately sat down on the bank to watch her. There had never been anything in his life so tigerishly delightful as this game of playing on the feelings and fears of the girl whose coming had spoiled the solitudes.

For the first few feet Ardea went steadily forward, keeping her eyes fixed on the Great Dane sitting motionless at the farther end of the bridge of peril. Then, suddenly the dog grew impatient and began to leap and bark like a foolish puppy. It was too much for Ardea to have her eye-anchor thus transformed into a dizzying whirlwind of gray monsters. She reached backward for the reassuring hand: it was not there, and the next instant the hungry pool rose up to engulf her.

In all his years Thomas Jefferson had never had such a stab as that which an instantly awakened conscience gave him when she slipped and fell. Now he was her murderer, beyond any hope of future mercies. For a moment the horror of it held him vise-like. Then the sight of the Great Dane plunging to the rescue freed him.

"Good dog!" he screamed, diving headlong from his own side of the pool; and between them Ardea was dragged ashore, a limp little heap of saturation, conscious, but with her teeth chattering and great, dark circles around the big blue eyes.

Thomas Jefferson's first word was masculinely selfish.

"I'm awful sorry!" he stammered. "If you can't make out to forgive me, I'm going to have a miser'ble time of it after I get home. God will whip me worse for this than He did for the other."

It was here, again, that she gave him the feeling that she was older than he.

"It will serve you quite right. Now you'd better get me home as quick as ever you can. I expect I'll be sick again, after this."

He held his peace and walked her as fast as he could across the fields and out on the pike. But at the Dabney gates he paused. It was not in human courage to face the Major under existing conditions.

"I reckon you'll go and tell your gran'paw on me," he said hopelessly.

She turned on him with anger ablaze.

"Why should I not tell him? And I never want to see you or hear of you again, you cruel, hateful boy!"

Thomas Jefferson hung about the gate while she went stumbling up the driveway, leaning heavily on the great dog. When she had safely reached the house he went slowly homeward, wading in trouble even as he waded in the white dust of the pike. For when one drinks too deeply of the cup of tyranny the lees are apt to be like the little book the Revelator ate--sweet as honey in the mouth and bitter in the belly.

That evening at the supper-table he had one nerve-racking fear dispelled and another confirmed by his mother's reply to a question put by his father.

"Yes; the Major sent for me again this afternoon. That child is back in bed again with a high fever. It seems she was out playing with that great dog of hers and fell into the creek. I wanted to tell the Major he is just tempting Providence, the way he makes over her and indulges her, but I didn't dare to."

And again Thomas Jefferson knew that he was the one who had tempted Providence.

IX

THE RACE TO THE SWIFT

From the grave and thoughtful vantage-ground of thirteen, Thomas Jefferson could look back on the second illness of Ardea Dabney as the closing incident of his childhood.

The industrial changes which were then beginning, not only for the city beyond the mountain, but for all the region round about, had rushed swiftly on Paradise; and the old listless life of the unhasting period soon receded quickly into a far-away past, rememberable only when one made an effort to recall it.

First had come the completion of the Great Southwestern. Diverted by the untiring opposition of Major Dabney from its chosen path through the valley, it skirted the westward hills, passing within a few hundred yards of the Gordon furnace. Since business knows no animosities, the part which Caleb Gordon and his gun crew had played in the right-of-way conflict was ignored. The way-station at the creek crossing was named Gordonia, and it was the railway traffic manager himself who suggested to the iron-master the taking of a partner with capital, the opening of the vein of coking coal on Mount Lebanon, the installation of coking-ovens, and the modernizing and enlarging of the furnace and foundry plant--hints all pointing to increased traffic for the road.

With the coming of Mr. Duxbury Farley to Paradise, Thomas Jefferson lost, not only the simple life, but the desire to live it. This Mr. Farley, whom we have seen and heard, momentarily, on the station platform in South Tredegar, the expanded, hailed from Cleveland, Ohio; was, as he was fond of saying pompously, a citizen of no mean city. His business in the reawakening South was that of an intermediary between cause and effect; the cause being the capital of confiding investors in the North, and the effect the dissipation of the same in various and sundry development schemes in the new iron field.

To Paradise, in the course of his goings to and fro, came this purger of other men's purses, and he saw the fortuitous grouping of the possibilities at a glance: abundant iron of good quality; an accessible vein of coal, second only to Pocahontas for coking; land cheap, water free, and a persuadable subject in straightforward, simple-hearted Caleb Gordon.

Farley had no capital, but he had that which counts for more in the promoter's field; namely, the ability to reap where others had sown. His plan, outlined to Caleb in a sweeping cavalry-dash of enthusiasm, was simplicity itself. Caleb should contribute the raw material--land, water and the ore quarry--and it should also be his part to secure a lease of the coal land from Major Dabney. In the meantime he, Farley, would undertake to float the enterprise in the North, forming a company and selling stock to provide the development capital.

The iron-master demurred a little at first. There were difficulties, and he pointed them out.

"I don't know, Colonel Farley. It appears like I'm givin' all I've got for a handout at the kitchen door of the big company. Then, again, there's the Major. He's pizon against all these improvements. You don't know the Major."

"On the contrary, my dear Mr. Gordon, it is because I do know him, or know of him, that I am turning him over to you. You are the one person in the world to obtain that coal lease. I confess I couldn't touch the Major with a ten-foot pole, any more than you could go North and get the cash. But you are his neighbor, and he likes you. What you recommend, he'll do." Thus the enthusiast.

"Well, I don't know," said Caleb doubtfully; "I reckon I can try. He can't any more 'n fire me, like he did the Southwestern right-o'-way man. But then, about t'other part of it: I've got a little charcoal furnace here that don't amount to much, maybe, but it's all mine, and I'm the boss. When this other thing goes through, the men who are putting up the money will own it and me. I'll be just about as much account as the tag on a shoe-string."

This part of the conference was held on the slab-floored porch of the oak-shingled house, with Thomas Jefferson as a negligible listener. Since he was listening with both eyes and ears, he saw something in Mr. Duxbury Farley's face that carried him swiftly back to the South Tredegar railway station and to that first antipathetic impression. But again the suave tongue quickly turned the page.

"Don't let that trouble you for a moment, Mr. Gordon," was the reassuring rejoinder. "I shall see that your apportionment of stock in the company is as large as the flotation scheme will stand; and as I, too, shall be a minority stock-holder, I shall share your risk. But there will be no risk. If the Lord prospers us, we shall both come out of this rich men, Mr. Gordon."

The slow smile that Thomas Jefferson knew so well came and went like a flitting shadow.

"I reckon the Lord don't make n'r meddle much with these here little child's playhouses of our'n," said Caleb; and then he gave his consent to the promoter's plan.

Singularly or not, as we choose to view it, the difficulties effaced themselves at the first onset. Though tact was no part of Caleb Gordon's equipment, his presentation of the matter to Major Dabney became so nearly a personal asking--with Mr. Duxbury Farley and the Northern capitalists distantly backgrounding--that the Major granted the lease of the coal lands on purely personal grounds; would, indeed, have waived the matter of consideration entirely, if Caleb had not insisted. Had not the iron-master been raised to the high degree of fellowship by the hand that signed the lease?

On his part, Mr. Duxbury Farley was equally successful. A company was formed, the charter was obtained, and the golden stream began to flow into the treasury; into it and out again in the raceway channels of development. Thomas Jefferson stood aghast when an army of workmen swept down on Paradise and began to change the very face of nature. But that was only the beginning.

For a time Chiawassee Coal and Iron figured buoyantly in the market quotations, and delegations of stock-holders, both present and prospective, were personally conducted to the scene of activities by enthusiastic Vice-President Farley. But when these had served their purpose a thing happened. One fine morning it was whispered on 'Change that Chiawassee iron would not Bessemer, and that Chiawassee coke had been rejected by the Southern Association of Iron Smelters.

Followed a crash which was never very clearly understood by the simple-hearted soldier iron-master, though it was merely a repetition of a lesson well conned by the earlier investors in Southern coal and iron fields. Caleb's craft was the making of iron; not the financing of top-heavy corporations. So, when he was told that the company had failed, and that he and Farley had been appointed receivers, he took it as a financial matter, of course, somewhat beyond his ken, and went about his daily task of supervision with a mind as undisturbed as it would have been distraught had he known something of the subterranean mechanism by which the failure and the receivership had been brought to pass.

Why Mr. Duxbury Farley spared the iron-master in the freezing-out process was an unsolved riddle to many. But there were reasons. For one, there was the lease of the coal lands, renewable year by year--this was Caleb's own honest provision inserted in the contract for the Major's protection--and renewable only by the Major's friend. Further, a practical man at the practical end of an industry is a sheer necessity; and by contriving to have honest Caleb associated with himself in the receivership, a fine color of uprightness was imparted to the promoter's far-reaching plan of aggrandizement.

So, later, when the reorganization was effected; when the troublesome, dividend-hungry stock-holders of the original company were eliminated by due process of law, Caleb's name appeared on the Farley slate with the title of general manager of the new company--for the same good and sufficient reasons.

It was during the fervid six months of Chiawassee Coal and Iron development that Thomas Jefferson had passed from the old life to the new--from childhood to boyhood.

Simultaneously, there were the coal-mines opening under the cliffs of Mount Lebanon, the long, double row of coking-ovens building on the flat below the furnace, and the furnace itself taking on undreamed-of magnitudes under the hands of the army of workmen. Thomas Jefferson did his best to keep the pace, being driven by a new and eager thirst for knowledge mechanical, and by a gripping desire to be present at all the assemblings of all the complicated parts of the threefold machine. And when he found it impossible to be in three places at one and the same moment, it distressed him to tears.

Of the home life during that strenuous interval there was little more than the eating and sleeping for one whose time for the absorbent process was all too limited. Also, the perplexing questions reaching down into the under-soul of things were silent. Also, again--mark of a change so radical that none but a Thomas Jefferson may read and understand--an awe-inspiring Major Dabney had ceased to be the first citizen of the world, that pinnacle being now occupied by a tall, sallow, smooth-faced gentleman, persuasive of speech and superhuman in accomplishment, who was the life and soul of the activities, and whom his father and mother always addressed respectfully as "Colonel" Farley.

One day, in the very heat of the battle, this commanding personage, at whose word the entire world of Paradise was in travail, had deigned to speak directly to him--Thomas Jefferson. It was at the mine on the mountain. The workmen were bolting into place the final trestle of the inclined railway which was to convey the coal in descending carloads to the bins at the coke-ovens, and Thomas Jefferson was absorbing the details as a dry sponge soaks water.

"Making sure that they do it just right, are you, my boy?" said the great man, patting him approvingly on the shoulder. "That's good. I like to see a boy anxious to get to the bottom of things. Going to be an iron-master, like your father, are you?"

"N-no," stammered the boy. "I wisht I was!"

"Well, what's to prevent? We are going to have the completest plant in the country right here, and it will be a fine chance for your father's son; the finest in the world."

"'Tain't goin' to do me any good," said Thomas Jefferson dejectedly. "I got to be a preacher."

Mr. Duxbury Farley looked down at him curiously. He was a religious person himself, coming to be known as a pillar in St. Michael's Church at South Tredegar, a liberal contributor, and a prime mover in a plan to tear down the old building and to erect a new one more in keeping with the times and South Tredegar's prosperity. Yet he was careful to draw the line between religion as a means of grace and business as a means of making money.

"That is your mother's wish, I suppose: and it's a worthy one; very worthy. Yet, unless you have a special vocation--but there; your mother doubtless knows best. I am only anxious to see your father's son succeed in whatever he undertakes."

After that, Thomas Jefferson secretly made Success his god, and was alertly ready to fetch and carry for the high priest in its temple, only the opportunities were infrequent.

For, wide as the Paradise field seemed to be growing from Thomas Jefferson's point of view, it was altogether too narrow for Duxbury Farley. The principal offices of Chiawassee Coal and Iron were in South Tredegar, and there the first vice-president was building a hewn-stone mansion, and had become a charter member of the city's first club; was domiciled in due form, and was already beginning to soften his final "r's," and to speak of himself as a Southerner--by adoption.

So sped the winter and the spring succeeding Thomas Jefferson's thirteenth birthday, and for the first time in his life he saw the opening buds of the ironwood and the tender, fresh greens of the herald poplars, and smelled the sweet, keen fragrance of awakening nature, without being moved thereby.

Ardea he saw only now and then, as old Scipio drove her back and forth between the manor-house and the railway station, morning and evening. He had heard that she was going to school in the city, and as yet there were no stirrings of adolescence in him to make him wish to know more.

As for Nan Bryerson, he saw her not at all. For one thing, he climbed no more to the spring-sheltering altar rock among the cedars; and for another, among all the wild creatures of the mountain, your moonshiner is the shyest, being an anachronism in a world of progress. One bit of news, however, floated in on the gossip at Little Zoar. It related that Nan's mother was dead, and that the body had lain two days unburied while Tike was drowning his sorrow in a sea of his own "pine-top."

In the new life, as in the old, summer followed quickly on the heels of spring, and when the hepaticas and the violets were gone, and the laurel and the rhododendron were decking the cliffs of Lebanon in their summer robes of pink and white and magenta, another door was opened for Thomas Jefferson.

Vaguely it had been understood in the Gordon household that Mr. Duxbury Parley was a widower with two children: a boy, some two years older than Thomas Jefferson, at school in New England, and a girl younger, name and place of sojourn unknown. The boy was coming South for the long vacation, and the affairs of Chiawassee Coal and Iron--already reaching out subterraneously toward the future receivership--would call the first vice-president North for the better portion of July. Would Mrs. Martha take pity on a motherless lad, whose health was none of the best, and open her home to Vincent?

Mrs. Martha would and did; not ungrudgingly on the vice-president's account, but with many misgivings on Thomas Jefferson's. She was finding the surcharged industrial atmosphere of the new era inimical at every point to the development of the spiritual passion she had striven to arouse in her son; to paving the way for the realizing of that ideal which had first taken form when she had written "Reverend Thomas Jefferson Gordon" on the margin of the letter to her brother Silas.

As it fell out, the worst happened that could happen, considering the apparent harmlessness of the exciting cause. Vincent Farley proved to be an anemic stripling, cold, reserved, with no surface indications of moral depravity, and with at least a veneer of good breeding. But in Thomas Jefferson's heart he planted the seed of discontent with his surroundings, with the homely old house on the pike, unchanged as yet by the rising tide of prosperity, and more than all, with the prospect of becoming a chosen vessel.

It was of no use to hark back to the revival and the heart-quaking experiences of a year agone. Thomas Jefferson tried, but all that seemed to belong to another world and another life. What he craved now was to be like this envied and enviable son of good fortune, who wore his Sunday suit every day, carried a beautiful gold watch, and was coolly and complacently at ease, even with Major Dabney and a foreign-born and traveled Ardea.

Later in the summer the envy died down and Thomas Jefferson developed a pronounced case of hero-worship, something to the disgust of the colder-hearted, older boy. It did not last very long, nor did it leave any permanent scars; but before Thomas Jefferson was fully convalescent the subtle flattery of his adulation warmed the subject of it into something like companionship, and there were bragging stories of boarding-school life and of the world at large to add fresh fuel to the fire of discontent.

Though Thomas Jefferson did not know it, his deliverance on that side was nigh. It had been decided in the family council of two--with a preacher-uncle for a casting-vote third--that he was to be sent away to school, Chiawassee Coal and Iron promising handsomely to warrant the expense; and the decision hung only on the choice of courses to be pursued.

Caleb had marked the growing hunger for technical knowledge in the boy, and had secretly gloried in it. Here, at least, was a strong stream of his own craftsman's blood flowing in the veins of his son.

"It'd be a thousand pities to spoil a good iron man and engineer to make a poor preacher, Martha," he objected; this for the twentieth time, and when the approach of autumn was forcing the conclusion.

"I know, Caleb; but you don't understand," was the invariable rejoinder. "You know that side of him, because it's your side. But he is my son, too; and--and Caleb, the Lord has called him!"

Gordon's smile was lenient, tolerant, as it always was in such discussions.

"Not out loud, I reckon, little woman; leastwise, Buddy don't act as if he'd heard it. As I've said, there's plenty of time. He's only a little shaver yet. Let him try the school in the city for a year 'r so, goin' and comin' on the railroads, nights and mornin's, like the Major's gran'daughter. After that, we might see."

But now Martha Gordon was fighting the last great battle in the war of spiritual repression which had been going on ever since the day when that text, _Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers_, had been turned into a whip of scorpions to chasten her, and she fought as those who will not be denied the victory. Caleb yielded finally, but with some such hand-washing as Pilate did when he gave way to the pressure from without.

"I aim to do what's for the best, Martha, but I own I hain't got your courage. You've been shovin' that boy up the steps o' the pulpit ever since he let on like he could understand what you was sayin' to him, and maybe it's all right. I've never been over on your side o' that fence, and I don't know how things look over there. But if it was my doin's, I'd be prayin' mighty hard to whatever God I believed in not to let me make a hypocrite out'n o' Buddy. I would _so_."

Thomas Jefferson was told what was in store for him only a short time before his outsetting for the sectarian home school in a neighboring state, which was the joint selection of his mother and Uncle Silas. He took it with outward calm, as he would have taken anything from a prize to a whipping. But there was dumb rebellion within when his mother read him the letter he was to carry to the principal--a letter written by Brother Crafts to one of like precious faith, commending the lamb of the flock, and definitely committing that lamb as a chosen vessel. It was unfair, he cried inwardly, in a hot upflash of antagonism. He might choose to be a preacher; he had always meant to be one, for his mother's sake. But to be pushed and driven--

He took his last afternoon for a ramble in the fields and woods beyond the manor-house, in that part of the valley as yet unfurrowed by the industrial plow. It was not the old love of the solitudes that called him; it was rather a sore-hearted desire to go apart and give place to all the hard thoughts that were bubbling and boiling within.

A long circuit over the boundary hills brought him at length to the little glade with the pool in its center where he had been fishing for perch on that day when Ardea and the great dog had come to make him back-slide. He wondered if she had ever forgiven him. Most likely she had not. She never seemed to think him greatly worth while when they happened to meet.

He was sitting on the overhanging bank, just where he had sat that other day, when suddenly history repeated itself. There was a rustling in the bushes; the Great Dane bounded out, though not as before to stand menacing; and when he turned his head she was there near him.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" she said coolly; and then she called to the dog and made as if she would go away. But Thomas Jefferson's heart was full, and full hearts are soft.

"You needn't run," he hazarded. "I reckon I ain't going to bite you. I don't feel much like biting anybody to-day."

"You did bite me once, though," she said airily.

"And you've never forgiven me for it," he asserted, in deepest self-pity.

"Oh, yes, I have; the Dabneys always forgive--but they never forget. And me, I am a Dabney."

"That's just as bad. You wouldn't be so awful mean to me if you knew. I--I'm going away."

She came a little nearer at that and sat down beside him on the yellow grass with an arm around the dog's neck.

"Does it hurt?" she asked. "Because, if it does, I'm sorry; and I'll promise to forget."

"It does hurt some," he confessed. "Because, you see, I'm going to be a preacher."

"You?" she said, with the frank and unsympathetic surprise of childhood. Then politeness came to the rescue and she added: "I'm sorry for that, too, if you are wanting me to be. Only I should think it would be fine to wear a long black robe and a pretty white surplice, and to learn to sing the prayers beautifully, and all that."

Thomas Jefferson was honestly horrified, and he looked it.

"I'd like to know what in the world you're talking about," he said.

"About your being a minister, of course. Only in France, they call them priests of the church."

The boy's lips went together in a fine straight line. Not for nothing did the blood of many generations of Protestants flow in his veins. "Priest" was a Popish word.

"The Pope of Rome is antichrist!" he declared authoritatively.

She seemed only politely interested.

"Is he? I didn't know." Then, with a tactfulness worthy of graver years, she drew away from the dangerous topic. "When are you going?"

"To-morrow."

"Is it far?"

"Yes; it's an awful long ways."

"Never mind; you'll be coming back after a while, and then we'll be friends--if you want to."

Surely Thomas Jefferson's heart was as wax before the fire that day.

"I'm mighty glad," he said. Then he got up. "Will you let me show you the way home again?--the short, easy way, this time?"

She hesitated a moment, and then stood up and gave him her hand.

"I'm not afraid of you now; _we_ don't hate him any more, do we, Hector?"

And so they went together through the yellowing aisles of the September wood and across the fields to the manor-house gates.

X

THE SHADOW OF THE ROCK

Tom Gordon--Thomas Jefferson now only in his mother's letters--was fifteen past, and his voice was in the transition stage which made him blushingly self-conscious when he ran up the window-shade in the Pullman to watch for the earliest morning outlining of old Lebanon on the southern horizon.

There had been no home-going for him at the close of his first year in the sectarian school. The principal had reported him somewhat backward in his studies for his age,--which was true enough,--and had intimated that a summer spent with the preceptor who had the vacation charge of the school buildings would be invaluable to a boy of such excellent natural parts. So Tom had gone into semi-solitary confinement for three months with a man who thought in the dead languages and spoke in terms of ancient history, studying with sullen resentment in his heart, and charging his imprisonment to his preacher-uncle, who was, indeed, chiefly responsible.

He had mourned that loss of liberty all through his second year, and was conscious the while that it would prove the parent of a still greater loss. It is the exile's anchorage in a shifting world to think of the home haven as unchanged and unchanging; as a place where by and by the thread of life as it was may be knotted up with that of life as it shall be. But Tom remembered that he had left Paradise in the midst of convulsive upheavals, and was correspondingly fearful.

The sickening sense of unfamiliarity seized him when the train stopped for breakfast in the city which had once been the village of the single muddy street. The genius of progress had transformed it so completely that there was nothing but the huge, backgrounding mass of Lebanon, visible from the windows of the station breakfast-room, to identify the grave of the old and the birthplace of the new.

The boy laid desperate eye-holds on the comforting solidity of the background, and would not loose them when the train sped away southward again through mile-long yards with their boundaries picked out by black-vomiting factory chimneys. The mountain, at least, was unchanged, and there might be hope for the country beyond.

But the homesickness returned with renewed qualms when the train had doubled the nose of Lebanon and threaded its way among the hills to the Paradise portal. Gordonia, of the single side-track, had grown into a small iron town, with the Chiawassee plant flanking a good half-mile of the railway; with a cindery street or two, and a scummy wave of operatives' cottages and laborers' shacks spreading up the hillsides which were stripped bare of their trees and undergrowth.

Tom's eyes filled, and he was wondering faintly if the desolating tide of progress had topped the hills to pour over into the home valley beyond, when his father accosted him. There was a little shock at the sight of the grizzled hair and beard turned so much grayer; but the welcoming was like a grateful draft of cool water in a parched wilderness.

"Well, now then! How are ye, Buddy, boy? Great land o' Canaan! but you've shot up and thickened out mightily in two years, son."

Tom was painfully conscious of his size. Also of the fact that he was clumsily in his own way, particularly as to hands and feet. The sectarian school dwelt lightly on athletics and such purely mundane trivialities as physical fitness and the harmonious education of the growing body and limbs.

"Yes; I'm so big it makes me right tired," he said gravely, and his voice cracked provokingly in the middle of it. Then he asked about his mother.

"She's tolerable--only tolerable, Buddy. She allows she don't have enough to keep her doin' in the new--" Caleb pulled himself up abruptly and changed the subject with a ponderous attempt at levity. "What-all have you done with your trunk check, son? Now I'll bet a hen worth fifty dollars ye've gone and lost it."

But Tom had not; and when the luggage was found there was another innovation to buffet him. The old buggy with its high seat had vanished, and in its room there was a modern surrey with a negro driver. Tom looked askance at the new equipage.

"Can't we make out to walk, pappy?" he asked, dropping unconsciously into the child-time phrase.

"Oh, yes; I reckon we could. You're not too young, and I'm not so terr'ble old. But--get in, Buddy, get in; there'll be trampin' enough for ye, all summer long."

The limestone pike was the same, and the creek was still rushing noisily over the stones in its bed, as Tom remarked gratefully. But the heaviest of the buffets came when the barrier hills were passed and the surrey horses made no motion to turn in at the gate of the old oak-shingled house beyond the iron-works.

"Hold on!" said Tom. "Doesn't the driver know where we live?"

The old-time, gentle smile wrinkled about the iron-master's eyes.

"That's the sup'rintendent's office and lab'ratory now, son. It was getting to be tolerable noisy down here for your mammy, so nigh to the plant. And we allowed to s'prise you. We've been buildin' us a new house up on the knoll just this side o' Major Dabney's."

It was the cruelest of the changes--the one hardest to bear; and it drove the boy back into the dumb reticence which was a part of his birthright. Had they left him nothing by which to remember the old days--days which were already beginning to take on the glamour of unutterable happiness past?

Nevertheless, he could not help looking curiously for the new home--the old being irretrievably sacked and ruined; but there were more shocks to come between. One of Mr. Duxbury Farley's side issues had been a real estate boom for Paradise Valley proper. South Tredegar being prosperous, the time had seemed propitious for the engrafting of the country-house idea. By some means, marvelous to those who knew Major Dabney's tenacious land-grip, the promoter had bought in the wooded hillsides facing the mountain, cut them into ten-acre residence plots, run a graveled drive on the western side of the creek to front them, and presto! the thing was done.

Tom saw well-kept lawns, park-like groves and pretentious country villas where he had once trailed Nance Jane through the "dark woods," and his father told him the names and circumstance of the owners as they drove up the pike. There was Rockwood, the summer home of the Stanleys, and The Dell, owned, and inhabited at intervals, by Mr. Young-Dickson, of the South Tredegar potteries. Farther along there was Fairmount, whose owner was a wealthy cotton-seed buyer; Rook Hill, which Tom remembered as the ancient roosting ground of the migratory winter crows; and Farnsworth Park, ruralizing the name of its builder. On the most commanding of the hillsides was a pile of rough-cut Tennessee marble with turrets and many gables, rejoicing in the classic name of Warwick Lodge. This, Tom was told, was the country home of Mr. Farley himself, and the house alone had cost a fortune.

At the turn in the pike where you lost sight finally of the iron-works, there was a new church, a miniature in native stone of good old Stephen Hawker's church of Morwenstow. Tom gasped at the sight of it, and scowled when he saw the gilded cross on the tower.

"Catholic!" he said. "And right here in our valley!"

"No," said the father; "it's 'Piscopalian. Colonel Farley is one o' the vestries, or whatever you call 'em, of St. Michael's yonder in town. I reckon he wanted to get his own kind o' people round him out here, so he built this church, and they run it as a sort of side-show to the big church. Your mammy always looks the other way when we come by."

Tom looked the other way, too, watching anxiously for the first sight of the new home. They reached it in good time, by a graveled driveway leading up from the white pike between rows of forest trees; and there was a second negro waiting to take the team, when they alighted at the veranda steps.

The new house was a two-storied brick, ornate and palpably assertive, with no suggestion of the homely country comfort of the old. Yet, when his mother had wept over him in the wide hall, and there was time to go about, taking it all in like a cat exploring a strange garret, it was not so bad.

Or rather, let us say, there were compensations. The love of luxury is only dormant in the heart of the hardiest barbarian; and the polished floors and soft-piled rugs, the bath-room with its great china dish, and the carpeted stair with the old grandfather clock ticking bravely on the landing, presently began to thrum the tuneful chord of pride. Perhaps Ardea Dabney would not laugh and say, "What a funny, _funny_ old place!" as she had once said when the Major had brought her to the log-walled homestead on the lower pike.

Still, there were incongruities--hopeless janglings of things married by increasing prosperity, but never meant to be bedfellows in the harmonious course of nature. One was the unblushing effrontery of the new brick pairing itself brazenly with the venerable gray stone manor-house on the adjoining knoll--impudence perceivable even to a hobbledehoy fresh from the school desk and the dormitory. Another was the total lack of sympathy between the housing and the housed.

This last was painfully evident in all the waking hours of the household. Tom observed that his father escaped early in the morning, and lived and moved and had his being in the industries at the lower end of the valley, as of old. But his mother's occupation was quite gone. And the summer evenings, sat out decorously on the ornate veranda, were full of constraint and awkward silences, having no part nor lot with those evenings of the older time on the slab-floored porch of the old homestead on the pike.

But there were compensations again, even for Martha Gordon, and Tom discovered one of them on the first Wednesday evening after his arrival. The new home was within easy walking distance of Little Zoar, and he went with his mother to the prayer-meeting.

The upper end of the pike was unchanged, and the little, weather-beaten church stood in its groving of pines, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Better still, the congregation, the small Wednesday-night gathering at least, held the familiar faces of the country folk. The minister was a young missionary, zealously earnest, and lacking as yet the quality of hardness and doctrinal precision which had been the boy's daily bread and meat at the sectarian school. What wonder, then, that when the call for testimony was made, the old pounding and heart-hammering set in, and duty, _duty_, duty, wrote itself in flaming letters on the dingy walls?

Tom set his teeth and swallowed hard, and let a dozen of the others rise and speak and sit again. He could feel the beating of his mother's heart, and he knew she was praying silently for him, praying that he would not deny his Master. For her sake, then ... but not yet; there was still time enough--after the next hymn--after the next testimony--when the minister should give another invitation. He was chained to the bench and could not rise; his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth and his lips were like dry leaves. The silences grew longer; all, or nearly all, had spoken. He was stifling.

"_Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven._" It was the solemn voice of the young minister, and Tom staggered to his feet with the lamps whirling in giddy circles.

"I feel to say that the Lord is precious to my soul to-night. Pray for me, that I may ever be found faithful."

He struggled through the words of the familiar form gaspingly and sat down. A burst of triumphant song arose,

"O happy day, that fixed my choice
On Thee, my Saviour and my God!"

and the ecstatic aftermath came. Truly, it was better to be a doorkeeper in the house of God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. What bliss was there to be compared with this heart-melting, soul-lifting blessing for duty done?

It went with him a good part of the way home, and Martha Gordon respected his silence, knowing well what heights and depths were engulfing the young spirit.

But afterward--alas and alas! that there should always be an "afterward"! When Tom had kissed his mother good night and was alone in his upper room, the reaction set in. What had he done? Were the words the outpouring of a full heart? Did they really mean anything to him, or to those who heard them? He grasped despairingly at the fast-fading glories of the vision, dropping on his knees at the bedside. "O God, let me see Thee and touch Thee, and be sure, _sure_!" he prayed, over and over again; and so finally sleep found him still on his knees with his face buried in the bed-clothes.

XI

THE TRUMPET-CALL

For the first few vacation days Tom rose with the sun and lived with the industries, marking all the later expansive strides and sorrowing keenly that he had not been present to see them taken in detail.

But this was a passing phase. When the mechanical hunger was sated; when he had started and stopped every engine in the big plant, had handled the levers of the great steam-hoist that shot the coal-cars from the mine to the coke-yard bins, and had prevailed on the engineer of the dinkey engine to let him haul out and dump a pot of slag, he had a sharp relapse into the primitive, and went roaming afield in search of his lost boyhood.

It was not to be found in any of the valley haunts, these having been transformed by the country-house colony. The old water-wheel below the dam hung motionless, being supplanted by the huge, modern, blowing-engines; and the black wash from the coal-mines had driven the perch from the pools and spoiled the swimming-holes in the creek. In the farther forests of the rampart hills the chopper's ax had been busy; and the blackberry patches in all the open spaces were sacked daily by chattering swarms of the work-people's children, white and black.

On the third morning Tom turned his steps despairingly toward the slopes of the mountain. He was at a pass when he would have given worlds to find one of the sacred places undesecrated. And there remained now only the high altar under the cedars of Lebanon to be visited.

It comforted him not a little to find that he had the old-time, burning thirst when he came within earshot of the dripping spring under the great rock. But when he would have knelt to drink from his palms like Gideon's men, there was no pool in the rocky basin. A barrel had been sunk in the sand-filled crevice, and a greedy pipe-line sucked up the water as fast as it trickled from the rock, to pass it on to one of the thirsty mechanisms in the iron plant a thousand feet below.

In its way this was the final straw, and Tom sat down beside the utilized spring with a lump in his throat. Afterward, he slaked his thirst as he could at the trickle from the rock's lip, and then set his face toward the higher steeps. Major Dabney,--not yet fully in tune with his new neighbors of the country-house colony,--and his granddaughter were spending the summer at Crestcliffe Inn, the new hotel on top of the mountain, and Tom felt that Ardea would understand if he could find and tell her. There are times when one must find a sympathetic ear, or be rent and torn by the pent-up things within.

In one sense the sympathy quest was a devitalizing failure. When he reached the summit of the mountain, hot and tired and dusty, the mere sight of the great hotel, with its thronged verandas and its overpowering air of grandeur and exclusiveness, quenched all desires save that which prompted a hasty retreat. The sectarian school paid as little attention to the social as to the athletic side of its youth; and Tom Gordon at fifteen past was as helpless conventionally as if he had never set foot outside of Paradise.

But at the retractive moment he ran plump into the Major, stalking grandly along the tile-paved walk and smoking a war-time cheroot of preposterous length. The despot of Paradise, despot now only by courtesy of the triumphant genius of modernity, put on his eye-glasses and stared Thomas into respectful rigidity.

"Why, bless my soul!--if it isn't Captain Gordon's boy! Well, well, you young limb! If you didn't faveh youh good fatheh in eve'y line and lineament of youh face, I should neveh have known you--you've grown so. Shake hands, suh!"

Tom did it awkwardly. It is a gift to be able to shake hands easily; a gift withheld from most girls and all boys up to the soulful age. But there was worse to follow. Ardea was somewhere on the peopled verandas, and the Major, more terrible in his hospitality than he had ever appeared in the old-time rage-fits, dragged his hapless victim up and down and around and about in search of her. "Not say 'Howdy' to Ardea? Why, you young cub, where are youh mannehs, suh?" Thus the Major, when the victim would have broken away.

It was a fiery trial for Tom--a way-picking among red-hot plowshares of embarrassment. How the well-bred folk smiled, and the grand ladies drew their immaculate skirts aside to make passing-room for his dusty feet! How one of them wondered, quite audibly, where in the world Major Dabney had unearthed that young native! Tom was conscious of every fleck of dust on his clothes and shoes; of the skilless knot in his necktie; of the school-desk droop in his shoulders; of the utter superfluousness of his big hands.

And when, at the long last, Ardea was discovered sitting beside a gorgeously-attired Queen of Sheba, who also smiled and examined him minutely through a pair of eye-glasses fastened on the end of a gold-mounted stick, the place of torment, wherever and whatever it might be, held no deeper pit for him. What he had climbed the mountain to find was a little girl in a school frock, who had sat on the yellowing grass with one arm around the neck of a great dog, looking fearlessly up at him and telling him she was sorry he was going away. What he had found was a very statuesque little lady, clad in fluffy summer white, with the other Ardea's slate-blue eyes and soft voice, to be sure, but with no other reminder of the lost avatar.

From first to last, from the moment she made room for him, dusty clothes and all, on the settee between herself and the Queen of Sheba, Tom was conscious of but one clearly-defined thought--an overmastering desire to get away--to be free at any cost. But the way of escape would not disclose itself, so he sat in stammering misery, answering Ardea's questions about the sectarian school in bluntest monosyllables, and hearing with his other ear a terrible Major tell the Queen of Sheba all about the railroad invasion, and how he--Tom Gordon--had run to find a punk match to fire a cannon in the Dabney cause.

All of which was bad enough, but the torture rack had still another turn left in its screw. After he had sat for awkward hours, as it seemed, though minutes would have measured it, there was a stir on the veranda and he became vaguely conscious of an impending catastrophe.

"Grandpa is telling you you must stay to luncheon with us," prompted Ardea. "Will you take me in?"

The Major had already given his arm to the Queen of Sheba, and there was no help for the helpless. Tom crooked his arm as stiffly as possible and said "May I?"--which was an inspiration--and they got to the great dining-room with no worse mishap than a collision at the door brought about by his stepping on the train of one of the grand ladies.

But at luncheon his troubles began afresh; or rather, a new and more agonizing set of them took the field. The fourth seat at the small table was occupied by the lady with the stick eye-glasses, and Tom was made aware that she was a Dabney cousin once removed. Thereupon, what little dexterity was left in him fled away, and the table-trial, under the smiling eyes of a Miss Euphrasia, became a chapter of horrors.

From absently picking and choosing among the forks, and trying to drink his bouillon out of the cup in which it was served, to upsetting his glass of iced tea, he stumbled on in a dream of awkwardness; and when, to cover the tea mishap, Ardea, emulating the lady hostess who broke one of her priceless tea-cups at a similar crisis, promptly overturned her own glass, he was unreasonable enough to be angry.

Taking it all in all, anger was coming to be the one constant quantity in the procession of varying emotions. By what right did this hollow, insincere, mocking world, of whose very existence he had been in utter ignorance, make him a butt for its well-bred sneers? Its fashions and fripperies and meaningless forms were not beyond learning; and, by Heaven! he would learn them, too, and put them all to shame. They should see!

And Ardea: was she laughing at him, too, in the depths of her big, beautiful eyes? No, that was too much; he would never believe that. But she was insincere, like the rest of them. It was acting a lie for her to make-believe clumsiness just to keep the others from laughing at him. She must stand with her kind.