The Quickening Part 6

VII

THE PRAYER OF THE RIGHTEOUS

Having come thus far with Thomas Jefferson on the road to whatever goal he will reach, it is high time we were looking a little more closely into this matter of his grudge against Major Dabney.

Primarily, it based itself upon the dominant quality in a masterful character; namely, a desire to possess the earth and its fullness without partners.h.i.+p enc.u.mbrances.

From a time back of which memory refused to run, the woods and the fields of Paradise Valley, the rampart hills and the backgrounding mountain side, had belonged to Thomas Jefferson by the right of discovery. The Bates boys and the Cantrells lived over in the great valley of the Tennessee, and when they planned a fis.h.i.+ng excursion up Turkey Creek, they recognized Thomas Jefferson's suzerainty by announcing that they were coming over to _his_ house. In like manner, the Pendrys and the Lumpkins and the Hardwicks were scattered at farm-width intervals down the pike, and the rampart hills marked the boundary of their domain on that side.

Now from possession which is recognized unquestioningly by one's compeers to fancied possession in fee simple is but a step; and from that to the putting up of "No Trespa.s.s" signs the interval can be read only on a micrometer scale. Wherefore, Thomas Jefferson had developed a huge disgust on hearing that Major Dabney was going to upset the natural order of things by bringing his granddaughter to Deer Trace Manor. If Ardea--the very name of her had a heathenish sound in his Scripturally-trained ear--had been a boy, the matter would have simplified itself. Thomas Jefferson had a sincere respect for his own prowess, and a boy might have been mauled into subjection. But a girl!

His lip curled stiffly at the thought of a girl, a town girl and therefore a thing without legs, or at best with legs only half useful and totally unfit for running or climbing trees, dividing the sovereignty of the fields and the forest, the swimming-hole and the perch pools in the creek, with him! She would do it, or try to do it. A girl would not have any more sense than to come prying around into all the quiet places to say, "This is my grandfather's land. What are _you_ doing here?"

At such thoughts as these a queer p.r.i.c.kling sensation like a hot s.h.i.+ver would run over him from neck to heel, and his eyes would gloom sullenly.

There would be another word to put with that; a word of his own choosing. No matter if her grandfather, the terrifying Major, did own the fields and the wood and the stream: G.o.d was greater than Major Dabney, and had he not often heard his mother say on her knees that the fervent, effectual prayer of the righteous availeth much? If it should avail even a little, there would be no catastrophe, no disputed sovereignty of the woods, the fields and the creek.

It was in the middle of a sultry afternoon in the hotter half of August, two weeks or such a matter after the Great Southwestern Railway had given up the fight for Paradise Valley to run its line around the encompa.s.sing hills, that Thomas Jefferson was cast alive into the pit of burnings.

He made sure he should always remember his latest glimpse of the pleasant, homely earth. He was sitting idly on the porch step, letting his gaze go adrift over the nearer green-clad hills to the purple deeps of the western mountain, already steeped in shadow. The pike was deserted, and the shrill hum of the house-flies played an insistent tune in which the low-pitched boom of a b.u.mblebee tumbling awkwardly among the clover heads served for an intermittent ba.s.s.

Suddenly into the hot silence came the quick _cloppity-clop_ of galloping hoofs. Thomas Jefferson's heart was tender on that side of it which was turned toward the dumb creatures, and his thought was instantly pitiful and indignant. Who would be cruel enough to gallop a horse in such weltering weather?

The unspoken query had its answer when Major Dabney's fleet saddle stallion thundered up to the gate in a white nimbus of dust, and the Major flung himself from the saddle and called loudly for Mistress Gordon. Thomas Jefferson sprang up hastily to forward the cry, fear clutching at his heart; but the Major was before him in the wide pa.s.sage opening upon the porch.

"My deah Mistress Gordon! We are in a world of trouble at the manor-house! Little Ardea, my grand-daughteh, was taken sick last night, and to-day she's out of huh head--think of it, _out of huh head!_ I'm riding hotfoot for Doctah Williams, but Lord of Heaven! it'll be nigh sundown befo' I can hope to get back with him. Could you, my deah madam, faveh us--"

Thomas Jefferson heard no more; would stay to hear no more. The forest, always his refuge in time of trial, reached a long finger of scattering oaks down to the opposite side of the creek, and thither he fled, cold to the marrow of his bones, though the sun-heated stone coping of the dam on which he crossed the stream went near to blistering his bare feet as he ran.

From the crotch of one of the oaks--his watch-tower in other periods of stress--he saw the Major mount and continue his gallop eastward on the pike; and a little later the ancient Dabney family carriage came and went in a smother of white dust, wheeling in front of the home gate and pausing only long enough to take up his mother hastening to the rescue.

After that he was alone with the hideous tumult of his thoughts. The girl would die. He was as sure of it as if the heavens and the earth had instantly become articulate to shout the terrible sentence. G.o.d had taken him at his word! There would be no intruder to tell him that the woods and the creek belonged to her grandfather. She would be dead; slain by the breath of his mouth. And for all the years and years and ages to come, he would be roasting and grilling in that place prepared for the devil and his angels--and for murderers!

In the acutest misery of it a trembling fit seized him and the oak seemed to rock and sway as if to be rid of him. When the fit pa.s.sed he slid to the ground and flung himself face downward under the spreading branches. The gra.s.s was cool to his face, but there was no moisture in it, and he thought of Dives praying that Lazarus might come and put a drop of water on his tongue.

Then the torment took a new and more terrible form. Though he had never been inside of the gray stone manor-house, his imagination transported him thither; to the house and to a darkened room on the upper floor with a bed in it, and in the bed a girl whose face he could not see.

The girl was dying: the doctor had told his mother and the Major, and they were all waiting. Thomas Jefferson had never seen any one die, only a dog that Tike Bryerson had shot on one of his drunken home-goings. But death was death, to a dog or to a girl; and vivid imagination supplied the appalling details. Over and over again in pitiless minuteness the heartbreaking scene was repeated: the little twitchings of the bed-clothing, the tossing of the girl's arms in the last desperate struggle for breath, his mother's low sobs, and the haggard face of the old Major.

Thomas Jefferson dug his fingers and toes into the gra.s.s and bit a mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing poignancy of it. Was there no way of escape?

He turned over and sat up to try to think it out. Yes, there was a way--the way which would be taken by the boy in the Sunday-school books.

He would say he was sorry, and would have his sins washed away, and there would be rejoicing in Heaven over the one sinner who had repented.

Of course, the girl would die, just the same, and all the misery his sin had caused would remain unchanged. But _he_ would escape.

For one unworthy moment Thomas Jefferson was fiercely tempted. Then the dogged Gordon blood rea.s.serted itself. He had done the dreadful thing: he had asked G.o.d to take this girl out of his way, and now he would accept what he had coveted and would not try to sneak out of paying. It comforted him a little to think that, after all, there must eventually be some sort of end to the torment, away on in the eternities to come.

When he had suffered all he could suffer, not even G.o.d could make him suffer any more.

When he finally recrossed the creek on the dam head it was supper-time, and his mother had returned. The misery had now settled into dumb despair, both more and less agonizing than the acute remorse of the afternoon. What he needed to know was told in his mother's answer to his father's inquiry: "Yes; she is a very sick child. I'm going up again after supper to stay as long as I'm needed. It's a judgment on the Major; he has been setting the creature above the Creator."

Thomas Jefferson knew well enough that the judgment was his, and not the Major's; but he let his supper choke him in silence. Afterward, when his mother had gone back to the house of anxiety and he was alone with his father, there were some vague promptings toward confession and a cry for human sympathy. What sealed his lips was the conviction that his father would comfort him without understanding, just as his mother would understand and condemn him. Early in the evening his father went back to the furnace and his chance was lost.

For four heart-searching days Thomas Jefferson lived and endured, because living and enduring were the two unalterable conditions of the brimstone pit to which he had consigned himself. During these days his mother came and went, and prayed oftener than usual--not for the girl's life, as Thomas Jefferson noticed with deep stirrings of bitterness, but that the dispensation of Providence might inure to the lasting and eternal benefit of an impenitent and idolatrous Major Dabney.

Throughout these four days the sickening August heat remained unbroken; but on the fifth the thunderheads began to gather and a fresh breeze swept down from the slopes of the distant c.u.mberland; a wind smelling sweetly of rain and full of cooling promise.

On this fifth day, Thomas Jefferson, lying in wait at the gate of the manor-house grounds, waylaid Doctor Williams coming out, and asked the question which had hitherto had its doleful answer without the necessity of asking. If the doctor had struck him with the buggy whip the shock would not have been more real than that consequent on the snapping of mental tension strings and the surging, strangling uprush of the tidal wave of relief.

"Little Ardea?" said the doctor. "Oh, she'll do well enough now, I hope.

The fever is broken and she's asleep."

Thomas Jefferson shut the gate mechanically when the doctor had driven out; but when there was nothing more to hold him, he scrambled over the stone wall on the opposite side of the pike and ran for the hills like one demented.

The girl would live! h.e.l.l had yawned and cast him up once more on the pleasant, homely earth; and now the gentle rain of penitence, which could never water the dry places for a soul in torment, drenched him like the real rain which was falling to slake the thirst of the parched fields and the brittle-leaved, rustling forest.

For a long time he lay on his face on the first bit of tree-sheltered gra.s.s he had come to, caring nothing for the storm which was driving all the wild creatures of the wood to cover. G.o.d had not been so pitiless, after all. There was yet a balm in Gilead.

And for the future? O just Heavens! how straitly and circ.u.mspectly he would walk all the days of his life! Never again should Satan, going about like a roaring lion, take him unawares. He would even learn to love the girl, as one should love an enemy; and when she should come and tell him that all the sacred places were hers by her grandfather's right, he would smile reproachfully, like the boy being led forth to the stake in the _Book of Martyrs_, and say--

But the time was not yet fully come for self-pityings; and when Thomas Jefferson went home after the shower, not even the soggy chill of his wet clothes could depress the spirit which had made good its footing on the high mount of humility.

VIII

THE BACKSLIDER

It was late in September before the dreaded invasion of the sacred places, foreboded by Thomas Jefferson's prophetic soul, became one of the things to be looked back on; and the interval had sufficed for another change of heart, or, more correctly, for a descent to the valley of things as they are from the top of that high mountain of spiritual humility.

Thomas Jefferson did not a.n.a.lyze the reactionary process. But the milestones along the backward way were familiar.

In a little while he found that he was once more able to say his prayers at bedtime with the old glibness, and with the comfortable feeling that he had done his whole duty if he remained on his knees for sixty full ticks of the heirloom grandfather clock. It was an accomplishment on which he prided himself, this knack of saying his prayers and counting the clock ticks at the same time. Stub Helgerson, whose mother was a Lutheran and said her prayers out of a book, could not do it. Thomas Jefferson had asked him.

A little farther along he came to the still more familiar milestone of the doubtful questionings. Did G.o.d really trouble Himself about the millions of things people asked Him to do? It seemed highly incredible, not to say impossible, in the very nature of it. And if He did, would He make one person sick for the sake of making another person sorry? These questions were answerless, like so many of the others; but after the perplexity had been pushed aside, the doubt remained.

Coming down by such successive steps from the mount of penitent thanksgivings, it was but a short time before he found himself back on the old camping-ground of sullen resentment.

When the girl got well enough to go about, she would find him out and warn him off; or perhaps she might do even worse, and tag him. In either case he should hate her, and there was a sort of ferocious joy in the thought that she would doubtless be a long time getting well, and would probably not be able to find him if he kept far enough out of her way.

Acting on this wise conclusion, he carefully avoided the manor-house and its neighborhood, making a wide circuit when he went fis.h.i.+ng in the upper pools. And once, when his father had sent him with a message to the Major, he did violence to his own sense of exact obedience by transferring the word at the house gate to Mammy Juliet's grandson, Pete.

But when one's evil star is in the ascendent, precautions are like the vain strugglings of the fly in the web. The day of reckoning may be postponed, but it will by no means be effaced from the calendar. One purple and russet afternoon, when all the silent forest world was steeped in the deep peace of early autumn, Thomas Jefferson was fis.h.i.+ng luxuriously in the most distant of the upper pools. There were three fat perch gill-strung on a forked withe under the overhanging bank, and a fourth was rising to the bait, when the peaceful stillness was rudely rent by a cras.h.i.+ng in the undergrowth, and a great dog, of a breed hitherto unknown to Paradise, bounded into the little glade to stand glaring at the fisherman, his teeth bared and his back hairs bristling.

Now Thomas Jefferson in his thirteenth year was as well able to defend himself as any clawed and toothed creature of the wood, and fear, the fear of anything he could face and grapple with, was a thing unknown.

Propping his fis.h.i.+ng pole so that no chance of a nibble might be lost in the impending struggle, he got on his knees and picked out the exact spot in the dog's neck where he would drive the bait knife home when hostilities actual should begin.