The Quickening Part 45

x.x.xI

THE NET OF THE FOWLER

Which of the Cynic Fathers was it who defined virtue as an att.i.tude of the mind toward externals? One may not always recall a pat quotation on the spur of the moment, but it sounds like Demonax or another of the later school, when the philosophy of cynicism had sunk to the level of a sneer at poor human nature.

To say that Mr. Duxbury Farley, returning to find Chiawa.s.see Consolidated in some sense at the mercy of the new pipe plant, regarded himself as a benefactor whose confidence had been grossly abused, is only to take him at his word. What, pray tell us, was Caleb Gordon in the crude beginning of things?--a village blacksmith or little more, dabbling childishly in the back-wash of the great wave of industry and living poverty-stricken between four log walls. To whom did he owe the brick mansion on the Woodlawn knoll, the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, the higher education of his son?

In Mr. Farley's Index Anathema, ingrat.i.tude ranked with crime. He had trusted these Gordons, and in return they had despoiled him; crippled a great and growing industry by segregating the profitable half of it; cast doubt on the good name of its founder by reversing his business methods. Chiawa.s.see had been making iron by the hundreds of tons: where were the profits? The query answered itself. They were in the credit account of Gordon and Gordon, every dollar of which justly belonged to the parent company. Was not the pipe-making invention perfected by a Chiawa.s.see stock-holder, who was also a Chiawa.s.see employee, on Chiawa.s.see time, and with Chiawa.s.see materials? Then why, in the name of justice, was it not to be considered a legitimate Chiawa.s.see a.s.set?

Mr. Duxbury Farley asked these questions pathetically and insistently; at the Cupola Club, in the Manufacturers' a.s.sociation, in season and out of season, wherever there was a willing ear to hear or the smallest current of public sentiment to be diverted into the channel so patiently dug for it. Was his virtuous indignation merely the mental att.i.tude of all the Duxbury Farleys toward things external? That bubble is too huge for this pen to p.r.i.c.k; besides, its bursting might devastate a world.

But if we may not probe too deeply into primal causes, we may still be regardful of the effects. Mr. Farley's bid for public sympathy was not without results. True, there were those who hinted that the veteran promoter was only paving the way for a _coup de grace_ which should obliterate the Gordons, root and branch; but when the days and weeks pa.s.sed, and Mr. Farley had done nothing more revolutionary than to reelect himself president of Chiawa.s.see Consolidated, and to resume, with Dyckman as his lieutenant, the direction of its affairs, these prophets of evil were discredited.

It was observed also that Caleb remained general manager at Gordonia, and still received the patronizing friends.h.i.+p of former times; and to Tom the full width of the pike was given--a distance which he kept scrupulously. But as for the younger Gordon, he knew it was the lull before the storm, and he was watching the horizon for the signs of its coming--when he was not searching for clues or brooding behind the closed door of his private office with the devil of homicide for a closet companion.

During this reproachful period Vincent Farley gave himself unreservedly, as it would seem, to the sentimental requirements, spending much time on the mountain top and linking his days to Ardea's in a way to give her a sinking of the heart at the thought that this was an earnest of all time to come.

Mountain View Avenue had understood that the wedding was to be in September; but as late as the final week in August the cards were not out, and Miss Euphrasia, the source and fountainhead of the Avenue's information, could only say that she supposed the young people were making up for the time lost by separation and absence, and were willing to prolong the delights sentimental of an acknowledged engagement.

But at the risk of cutting sentiment to the very bone, it must be admitted that, after the first ardent attempt to commit Ardea to a certain and early day, the delay was of Vincent's own making; and the motive was basely commercial. Through Major Dabney, who was not proof against Colonel Duxbury's blandishments at short range, however much he might distrust them at a distance, Tom's plan of reorganization, with the suggestion of the trustees.h.i.+p for Ardea's third, had become known to the Farleys. Thereupon ensued a conference of two held in Vincent's room in the hotel, and sentence of extinction was pa.s.sed on Tom and Caleb.

"The ungrateful cub!" was Colonel Duxbury's indignant comment. "To use his influence over Major Dabney to sequestrate, absolutely sequestrate, a full third of our property!"

"Forewarned is forearmed," said the son coolly. "It's up to us to break the slate."

"We'll do it, never fear. Just give me a little more time in which to win public sentiment over to our side, and don't press Ardea to name the exact day until I give the word," was the promoter's parting injunction to his son; and Vincent trimmed his sails accordingly, as we have seen.

Planting the good seed, which was a little later to yield an abundant harvest of public approbation sanctioning anything he might see fit to do to the Gordons, was a congenial task to Mr. Farley; but in the midst it was rather rudely interrupted by a belated unburdening on the part of his first lieutenant in the South Tredegar offices.

Dyckman held his peace as long as he dared; in point of fact he did not speak until he saw his superiors rus.h.i.+ng blindly into the pit digged for their feet by the astute young tyrant of the pipe foundry. If they could have fallen without carrying him with them, it is conceivable that the bookkeeper might have remained dumb. But their immunity was doubly his, and the end of it was a bad quarter of an hour for him, two of them, to be precise: the first, in which he told the president and the treasurer the story of the missing cash-book and ledger pages and the extorted confession, and the other, during which he sat under a scathing fire of abuse poured on him by the younger of his two listeners. After it was over, he escaped to the welcome refuge of his own office while father and son took counsel together against this new and unsuspected peril.

"Anybody but an idiot like Dyckman would have found out long ago if those papers were burned in Gordon's safe," snapped Vincent, when the danger had been duly weighed and measured.

The president shook his head mournfully.

"Anybody but Dyckman would have burned them himself, you'd think. It was criminally careless in him not to do so."

"They are the key to the lock," summed up the younger man. "We've got to have them."

"a.s.suredly--if they are in existence."

"You needn't try to squeeze comfort out of that. I tell you, they went through the fire all right, and Tom has them."

"I am afraid you are right, Vincent; afraid, also, that Dyckman so far forgot himself as to set fire to Gordon's office in the hope of retrieving his own neglect. But how are we to regain them?" Mr. Farley's weapons were two, only: first persuasion, and when that failed, corruption.

Vincent's cold blue eyes were darkening. The little virtues interpose but a slight barrier to a sharp attack of the large vices.

"The fight has fallen into halves," he said briefly. "You go on with your part as if nothing had happened, and I'll do mine. Has the old iron-melter been taken in on it, do you think?"

"No; I don't believe Caleb knows."

"That's better. Are you going up the mountain to-night?"

"Yes, I had thought of it. Eva wants me to take her."

"All right; you go, and get Major Dabney to yourself for a quiet half-hour. Tell him we are all ready to close the deal, and we're only waiting on the Gordons. I'll be up to dinner, and if anybody asks for me later, let it be understood that I have gone to my room to write letters."

This bomb-hurling of Dyckman's occurred on the Wednesday. That night, between the hours of nine and eleven, the new steel safe in Tom Gordon's private office was broken open and ransacked, though nothing was taken.

On Thursday afternoon, while Martha Gordon was over at Deer Trace training the new growth on Ardea's roses, Tom's room at Woodlawn was thoroughly and systematically pillaged: drawers were pulled out and emptied on the floor, the closets were stripped of their contents, and even the bed mattresses were ripped open and destroyed.

Mrs. Martha was terrified, as so bold a daylight housebreaking gave her a right to be; and Caleb was for sending to the county workhouse for the bloodhounds. But Tom was apparently unmoved.

"It won't happen again," he said; and it did not. But on the Sat.u.r.day evening, just before the late dinner-hour at Woodlawn, j.a.pheth Pettigra.s.s, who had been trying to halter a shy filly running loose in the field across the pike, saw a stirring little drama enacted at the Woodlawn gates; saw it, and played some small part in it.

It centered on Tom, who was late getting home. He never rode with his father now if he could avoid it, and j.a.pheth saw him swinging along up the pike, with his head down and his hands in the pockets of his short coat. The Woodlawn entrance was a walled semicircle giving back from the roadway, with the carriage gates hinged to great stone pillars in the center, and a light iron grille at the side for foot-pa.s.sengers. Tom's hand was on the latch of the little gate when two men darted from the shadow of the nearest pillar and flung themselves on him.

j.a.pheth saw them first and gave a great yell of warning. Tom turned at the cry, and so was not taken entirely unawares. But the two had beaten him down and were busily searching him when j.a.pheth dashed across the pike, shouting as he ran. The footpads persisted until the horse-trader came near enough to see that they were black men, or rather white men with blackened faces and hands. Then they sprang up and vanished in the gathering dusk.

Tom was conscious when Pettigra.s.s got him on his feet and hastily bound a handkerchief over the ugly wound in his head. He was still conscious when j.a.pheth walked him slowly up the path to the house, and was sanely concerned lest his mother should be frightened.

But after they got him to bed he sank into an inert sleep out of which he awoke the next morning wildly delirious. Ardea's name was oftenest on his lips in his ravings, and while his strength remained, his calling for her was monotonously insistent. He seemed to think she was at the great house across the lawns, and it took the united efforts of j.a.pheth and Norman to hold him when he tried to get to the window to shout across for her.

Norman stood it until late Monday afternoon. Then, when Caleb had relieved him at Tom's bedside, he drove down to Gordonia and wrote the note to Miss Dabney, sending it up the mountain by one of the Helgerson boys with strict injunctions to give it to Miss Ardea herself.

The Dabneys came down from the mountain Tuesday morning, and Ardea was so far from disregarding her summons that she stopped the carriage at the Woodlawn gates and went directly to comfort Mrs. Martha and to offer her services in the sick-room. Tom was in one of his stubbornest paroxysms when she entered, but at the touch of her hand he became quiet, and a little later fell into a deep sleep, the first since the Sat.u.r.day night of coma and stertorous breathings.

That same afternoon Crestcliffe Inn lost another guest, and the smoking-room at Warwick Lodge was lighted far into the night. Two men talked in low tones behind the carefully-shaded windows, one of them, the younger, lounging in the depths of an easy-chair, and the other pacing the floor in deepest abstraction.

"I only know what Ardea tells me," said the lounger, answering the final question put by the floor pacer. "He's out of his head--and out of the way, temporarily, at least. Now is your time to strike."

Mr. Duxbury Farley nodded his head slowly.

"It was providential for us, Vincent, this a.s.sault just at the critical moment. I have struck. I had an interview with Caleb this evening and made him an offer for the pipe plant. He is to give us his answer to-morrow morning."

Silence fell for a little time, and then the younger man in the wicker chair smote his palms together.

"Curse him!" he gritted vengefully, transferring his thought from Caleb Gordon to Caleb Gordon's son. "I hope he'll die!"

The elder man paused in his walk. "Why, Vincent, my son! What has come over you? It is merely a matter of business, and we mustn't be vindictive."

"Business be d.a.m.ned!" snarled the younger man. "Can't you see? She has promised to marry me--and she loves _him_. Are you going to bed? Well, I'm not. I've got something else to do first."

A few minutes later he let himself noiselessly out at the side door of the Lodge, and turned down the avenue in the direction of Deer Trace.

But after crossing the bridge over the creek, he took a diagonal course through the stubble-fields and bore to the right. And when he finally reached and climbed the wall into the pike, it was at a point directly opposite the forking of the rough wood road which led off to the Pine k.n.o.b settlement.