Francis Lynde

“ The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the ability always to present the same side to the same person. His attitude toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating instinct. ”

“ Men spoke of Paradise as "the valley," though it was rather a sheltered cove with Mount Lebanon for its background and a semicircular range of oak-grown hills for its other rampart. Splitting it endwise ran the white streak of the pike, macadamized from the hill quarry which, a full quarter of a century before the Civil War, had furnished the stone for the Dabney manor-house; and paralleling the road unevenly lay a ribbon of silver, known to less poetic souls than Thomas Jefferson's as Turkey Creek, but loved best by him under its almost forgotten Indian name of Chiawassee. ”

“ Tom stood up, beating the air softly with the hunting-crop.
"The man has spoiled your life, Nan; and, incidentally, he has muddied the spring for me—robbed me of the love and respect of the one woman in the world," he said, quite without heat. "If I find him, I think I shall blot him out—like that." A bumblebee was bobbing and swaying on a head of red clover, and the sudden swish of the hunting-crop left it a little disorganized mass of black and yellow down and broken wing-filaments. ”

“ More than once since their meeting at the steps of the Pullman car he had felt obliged to reassure himself by saying, "This is Tom; this is my son." There were so many and such marked changes: the quick, curt speech, caught in the Northland; the nervous, sure-footed stride, and the athletic swing of the shoulders; the easy manner and confident air, not of college-boy conceit, but of the assurance of young manhood; and, lastly, this blunt right-about-face in matters of religion. Caleb was not quite sure that this latter change was entirely welcome. ”

“ Gordon—I am tempted to forget the boy-and-girl anchorings in the past. Have you no sense of the fitness of things—no shame?"
"Not very much of either, I guess," he said quite calmly. "Love hasn't any shame; and it doesn't concern itself much about the fitness of anything but its object."
And then he bade her good night and went his way with a lilting song of triumph in his heart which not even the chilling rebuff of the leave-taking was sufficient to silence.
"She loves me! She would still love me if she were ten times Vincent Farley's wife!" ”

“ There were three of you: a hardened, degraded boy, a woman no less wicked and abandoned, and the devil who tempted you."
The flood-gates of passion would hold no longer.
"It's a lie!" he denied hotly. "I just happened to meet Nan Bryerson at the spring under the big rock, and—"
"Well, go on," said the inexorable voice.
Tom choked in a sudden fit of rage and helplessness. He saw how incredible the simple truth would sound; how like a clumsy equivocation it must appear to one who already believed the worst of him. ”

“ When the sweeping extent of the business coup de grâce was measured, Woodlawn was left, and there were a few thousands in bank; these and the three hundred and fifty shares of the reorganization stock which the Farleys might render worthless at will.
Tom's heart burned within him, and the race thirst—for vengeance that could be touched and seen and handled—parched his lips and swelled the veins in his forehead. Vincent Farley had it all: the business, the good repute, the love of the one woman. ”

“ Ardea remembered a saying of hers, flung out one evening in the college parlors when the talk of her group had turned on the goodness of good boys: "Why can't you be sincere with yourselves? Not one of you has any use for the truly good boy until after he has learned how to respect you by being a bad boy. You haven't been saying it in so many words, perhaps, but that is the crude fact." Was this the secret of Tom's new acceptability? Ardea hoped it was not—and feared lest it might be. ”

“ Many foolish things have been said and written about the wax-like quality of a child's mind; how each new impression effaces the old, and how character in permanence is not to be looked for until the bones have stopped growing. Yet who has not known criminals at twelve, and saints and angels, and wise men and women—in fine, the entire gamut of humanity—in short frocks or knee-breeches?
Ardea, child of adversity and the Paris ateliers, brought one lasting memory up out of those early Deer Trace Manor years: she was always immeasurably older than such infants as Mammy Juliet and Uncle Scipio. ”

“ What an insufferable animal Farley was, to be sure!—with the love of a woman like Ardea Dabney failing to keep him on the hither side of common decency! Would Ardea break with him, now that she knew the truth? Tom shook his head. Not she; she would stand by him all the more stoutly, if not for love, then for pride's sake. That was the fine thing in her loyalty.
That thought led to another. When they were married, there would have to be a beginning in a new field. Chiawassee was gone, and the Farley fortune with it; and the new field would be a bald necessity. ”

“ Was this smooth-spoken, oracular prince of the market-place a predetermined hypocrite, shaping his words to fit the money-gathering end without regard to their demoralizing effect? Or was he only a subconscious Pharisee, self-deceived and complacent? Tom's thought ran lightning-like over the long list of the Vancourt Hennikers: men of the business world successful to the Croesus mark, large and liberal benefactors, founders of colleges, libraries and hospitals, gift-givers to their fellow men, irreproachable in private life, and yet apparently stone blind on the side of the larger equities. ”

“ The inexorable one at the desk did not keep him in suspense.
"I want a written confession of just what you did, and what you did it for," was the direct reply. "You'll find Miss Ackerman's type-writer in the other room; I'll wait while you put it in type."
The bookkeeper's lips were dryer than before, and his tongue was like a stick in his mouth when he said:
"You're not giving me a show, Mr. Gordon; the poor show a common murderer would have in any court of law. You are asking me to convict myself." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Instead, she was only a pale, tired baby in a brier-torn frock; a girl whose bones showed brazenly at every angle, and whose only claim to a second glance lay in her thick mop of reddish-brown hair and in a pair of great, slate-blue eyes two sizes too large for the thin face. A double conclusion came and sat in Thomas Jefferson's mind: she was rather to be contemptuously pitied than feared; and as for looks—well, she was not to be thought of in the same day with black-eyed Nan Bryerson. ”

“ Only a man quite lost to all promptings of the grace that saves and softens could look unmoved on the burnings and riotings, the cruel wastings and the bloodlettings, one would say.
When he was not galloping Saladin afar in the country roads to the landward side of Paradise, Tom Gordon was idling purposefully in the Lebanon forests, with the fowling-piece under his arm and Japheth Pettigrass's dog trotting soberly at heel, as care-free, to all appearances, as a school-boy home for a holiday. ”

“ Tom's laugh was boyishly hearty.
"Plenty of 'em, pappy; lots of 'em! The old world is moving right along; it would be a pity if it didn't, don't you think? But about this pipe business: I want you to make over these patents to me."
"They're yours now, Tom; everything I've got will be yours in a little while," said the father; but his voice betrayed the depth of that thrust. Was the new Tom beginning so soon to grasp and reach out avariciously for the fruit of the old tree? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The iron-furnace, with its alternating smoke puff and dull red flare, struck the one jarring note in a symphony blown otherwise on great nature's organ-pipes; but to Thomas Jefferson the furnace was as much a part of the immutable scheme as the hills or the forests or the creek which furnished the motive power for its air-blast. More, it stood for him as the summary of the world's industry, as the white pike was the world's great highway, and Major Dabney its chief citizen. ”

“ Nan hid her face again and turned away. It was Miss Dabney the younger who found words to break the smarting silence.
"Don't mind us, Mr. Gordon," she said icily. "We were going to Woodlawn to see if your father and mother could come over after dinner."
Tom smote himself alive and made haste to open the foot-path gate for them. There was nothing more said, or to be said; but when they were gone and he was once more alone with Nan, he was fighting desperately with a very manlike desire to smash something; to relieve the wrathful pressure by hurting somebody. ”

“ But—but, say, Ardea, I can't go back and begin all over again. I should be the meanest, low-down thing in all this world—and that's a hypocrite."
"Oh!" said Ardea, catching her breath. Her religion was very much a matter of fact to her, and the thought of Tom—Martha Gordon's son—stumbling in the plain path of belief was dismaying. "Why would you have to be a hypocrite? Do you mean that you are not sure you ought to be a minister?" ”

“ Nearer at hand were the wooded slopes of the Dabney lands—lordly forests culled and cared for through three generations of land-lovers until now their groves of oaks and hickories, tulip-trees and sweet-and black-gums were like those the pioneers looked on when the land was young.
Thomas Jefferson had the appreciative eye and heart of one born with a deep and abiding love of the beautiful in nature, and for a time the sunset ravishment possessed him utterly. ”

“ Without vowing a vow and confirming it with an oath, he had partly turned a new life-leaf on the night of heavenly comfort when Ardea had sent him forth to tramp the pike with her kiss of sisterly love still caressing him. Beyond the needs of the moment, the recall of Norman and the determination to turn his back on the world struggle for the time being, he had not gone in that first fervor of the uplifting impulse. But later on there had been other steps: a growing hunger for success with self-respect kept whole ”

“ 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." ”

“ Tumultuously it rushed on him that he was weaponed as the men of his father's generation could not be; that his hand could be steady and his heart fearless under threatenings that might well shake the courage of the old man who had borne only the burden and the heat of the day of smaller things.
He sat long with his elbows on the study table and his chin resting on his hands. The room was small but the walls gave before the steady gaze of the gray eyes, and Tom saw afar; down a vistaed highway wherein a strong man walked, leading a boy by the hand. ”

“ But for Tom, personally, as a distinct social improvement on honest Caleb, the welcome into the charmed circle of Mountain View Avenue had been warm enough to make his sudden apparent relapse into the primitive figure as an affront to the colony. Hence, there were rods laid in pickle for the sinner, as when Mrs. Vancourt Henniker gave the footman at Rook Hill a hint that for the present the Misses Henniker were not at home to Mr. Thomas Gordon; and if Tom had known it, there were other and similar chastenings lying in wait for him behind more of the colonial doors. ”

“ If the world were not all good, neither was it all bad; at all events, it was the part of wisdom to make the magnanimous best of it, and to be thankful that the day-star of reason had at last arisen for one's self. At the close of his college course he would go home prepared to deal firmly but justly with the Farleys, prepared to show Ardea and the small world of Paradise a pattern of business rectitude, of filial devotion, of upright, honorable manhood. ”

“ But the inner Ardea was a being apart—high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded either by passion or the conventions. This inner Ardea knew Vincent Farley better than he knew himself: the small mind, the mask of outward correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still yields open-eyed and undeceived. ”