The Quickening Part 17

"Well, the miracle was wrought. Early this morning mother came to herself and asked for something to eat. Doctor Williams has been here, and now he tells us all the things he wouldn't tell us before. It was some little clot in one of the veins or arteries of the brain, and nine times out of ten there is no hope."

"O Tom!--and she will get well again?"

"She has more chances to-day of getting well than she had last night of dying--so the doctor says. But it's a miracle, just the same."

"I'm so glad! And now I really must go home." And she got up.

"No, sit down; I'm not through with you yet. I want to know what you think about promises."

She smiled and pushed her chair back from the soft-coal blaze in the fireplace.

"Don't you know you are a perfect 'old man of the sea,' Tom?"

"That's all right; but tell me: is a bad promise better broken or kept?"

"I am sure I couldn't say without knowing the circ.u.mstances. Tell me all about it," and she resigned herself to listen.

"It was at daybreak this morning. I was alone with mother, looking at her lying there so still and helpless--dead, all but the little flicker of breath that seemed just about ready to go out. It came over me all of a sudden that I couldn't disappoint her, living or dead; that I'd have to go on and be what she has always wanted me to be. And I promised her."

"But she couldn't hear you?"

"No; it was before she came to herself. n.o.body heard me but G.o.d; and I reckon He wasn't paying much attention to anything I said."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because--well, because it wasn't the kind of a promise that makes the angels glad. I said I'd go on and do it, if I had to be a hypocrite all the rest of my life."

"O Tom! would you have to be?"

"That's the way it looks to me now. I told you the other day that I didn't know what I believed and what I didn't believe. But I do know some of the _don'ts_. For instance: if there is a h.e.l.l--and I'm not anyways convinced that there is--I don't believe--but what's the use of cataloguing it? They'd ask me a string of questions when I was ordained, and I'd have to lie like Ananias."

She rose and met his gloomy eyes fairly.

"Tom Gordon, if you should do that, you would be the wickedest thing alive--the basest thing that ever breathed!"

"That's about the way it strikes me," he said coolly. "So you see it comes down to a case of big wicked or little wicked; it's been that way all along. Did you know that one time I asked G.o.d to kill you?"

She looked horrified, as was her undoubted right.

"Why, of all things!" she gasped.

"It's so. I took a notion that I'd be mad because your grandfather brought you here to Paradise. And when you took sick--well, I reckon there isn't any h.e.l.l deeper or hotter than the one I frizzled in for about four days that summer."

It was too deep in the past to be tragic, and she laughed.

"I used to think then that you were the worst, as well as the queerest, boy I had ever seen."

"And now you know it," he said. Then: "What's your rush? I'm not trying to get rid of you now."

"I positively must go back. We have company, and I ran away without saying a word."

"Anybody I know?" inquired Tom.

"Three somebodies whom you know, or ought to know, very well: Mr.

Duxbury Farley, Mr. Vincent Farley, Miss Eva Farley."

His eyes darkened suddenly.

"I'd like to know how under the sun they managed to get on your grandfather's good side!" he grumbled.

Ardea Dabney's expressive face mirrored dawning displeasure.

"Why do you say that?" she retorted. "Eva was my cla.s.smate for years at Miss De Valle's."

He made a boyish face of disapproval, saying bluntly: "I don't care if she was. You shouldn't make friends of them. They are not fit for you to wipe your shoes on."

For the second time since his home-coming, Tom saw the Dabney imperiousness flash out; saw and felt it.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Gordon! Less than an hour ago, we were speaking of you, and of what happened at Beersheba. Mr. Farley and his son both stood up for you."

"And you took the other side, I reckon," he broke out, quite unreasonably. It had not as yet come to blows between him and his father's business a.s.sociates, but it made him immeasurably dissatisfied to find them on social terms at Deer Trace Manor.

"Perhaps I did, and perhaps I did not," she answered, matching his tartness.

"Well, you can tell them both that I'm much obliged to them for nothing," he said, rising and going to the door with her. "They would be mighty glad to see it patched up again and me back in the Beersheba school."

"Of course they would; so would all of your friends."

"But they are not my friends. They have fooled my father, and they'll fool your grandfather, if he doesn't watch out. But they can't fool me."

He had opened the outer door for her, and she drew herself up till she could face him squarely, slate-blue eyes flas.h.i.+ng scornfully into sullen gray.

"That is the first downright cowardly thing I have ever known you to say!" she declared. "And I wish you to know, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Gordon, that Mr. Duxbury Farley and Mr. Vincent Farley and Miss Eva Farley are my guests and my friends!" And with that for her leave-taking, she turned her back on him and went swiftly across the two lawns to the great gray house on the opposite knoll.

For the first fortnight of his mother's convalescence Tom slept badly, and his days were as the days of the accused whose sentence has been suspended; jail days, these, with chains to clank when he thought of the promise made in the gray Christmas dawn; with whips to flog him when the respite grew shorter and the time drew near when his continued stay at home must be explained to his mother.

Ardea had gone back to Carroll the Sat.u.r.day before New Year's, and there was no one to talk to. But for that matter, he had cut himself out of her confidence by his a.s.sault on the Farleys. Every morning for a week after the Christmas-day clash, Scipio came over with the compliments of "Mawsteh Majah," Miss Euphrasia, and Miss Dabney, and kindly inquiries touching the progress of the invalid. But after New Year's, Tom remarked that there were only the Major and Miss Euphrasia to send compliments, and despair set in. For out of his boyhood he had brought up undiminished the longing for sympathy, or rather for a burden-bearer on whom he might unload his troubles, and Ardea had begun to promise well.

It was on a crisp morning in the second week of January when the prolonged agony of suspense drove him to the mountain. His mother was sitting up, and was rapidly recovering her strength. His father had gone back to his work in the iron plant, and his uncle was preparing to return to his charge in South Tredegar. With Uncle Silas and the nurse both gone, Tom knew that the evil hour must come speedily; and it was with some half-cowardly hope that his uncle would break the ice for him that he ran away on the crisp morning of happenings.

With no particular destination in view, it was only natural that his feet should find the familiar path leading up to the great boulder under the cedars. He had not visited the rock of the spring since the summer day when he and Nan Bryerson had taken refuge from the shower in the hollow heart of it, nor had he seen Nan since their parting at the door of her father's cabin under the cliff. Rumor in Gordonia had it that Tike Bryerson had been hunted out by the revenue officers; and, for reasons which he would have found it difficult to declare in words, Tom had been shy about making inquiries.

For this cause an apparition could scarcely have startled him more than did the sight of Nan filling her bucket at the trickling barrel-spring under the cliff face of the great rock. He came on her suddenly at the end of the long climb up the wooded slopes, at a moment when--semi-tropical growth having had two full seasons in which to change the natural aspect of things--he was half-bewildered with the unwonted look of the place. But there was no doubt about it; it was Nan in the flesh, a little fuller in the figure, something less childish in the face, but with all the fascinating, wild-creature beauty of the child-time promise to dazzle the eye and breed riot in the brain of the boy-man.

When she stood up with a little cry of pleased surprise, the dark eyes lighting quick joy-fires, and the welcoming blush mounting swiftly to neck and cheek, Tom thought she was the most alluring thing he had ever looked on. Yet the bottom stone in the wall of recrudescent admiration was the certainty that he had found a sympathetic ear.

"Did you know I was coming? Were you waiting for me, Nan?" he bubbled, gazing into the great black eyes as eagerly as a freed dog plunges into the first pool that offers.