Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Ancient Law
CHAPTER VII
Shows That Politeness, Like Charity, Is An Elastic Mantle
WHEN Ordway entered the room, he turned and closed the door carefully behind him, before he advanced to where Wherry stood awaiting him with outstretched hand.
"I can't begin to tell you how I appreciate the honour, Mr. Smith. I didn't expect it – upon my word, I didn't," exclaimed Wherry, with the effusive amiability which made Ordway bite his lip in anger.
"I don't know that I mean it for an honour, but I hope we can get straight to business," returned Ordway shortly.
"Ah, then there's business?" repeated the other, as if in surprise. "I had hoped that you were paying me merely a friendly call. To tell the truth I've the very worst head in the world for business, you know, and I always manage to dodge it whenever I get half a chance."
"Well, you can't dodge it this time, so we may as well have it out."
"Then since you insist upon that awful word 'business,' I suppose you mean that you've come formally to ratify the treaty?" asked Wherry, smiling.
"The treaty? I made no treaty," returned Ordway gravely.
Laughing pleasantly, Wherry invited his visitor to be seated. Then turning away for an instant, he flung himself into a chair beside a little marble topped table upon which stood a half-emptied bottle of rye whiskey and a pitcher of iced water on a metal tray.
"Do you mean to tell me you've forgotten our conversation in that beastly road?" he demanded, "and the prodigal? Surely you haven't forgotten the prodigal? Why, I never heard anything in my life that impressed me more."
"You told me then distinctly that you had no intention of remaining in Tappahannock."
"I'll tell you so again if you'd like to hear it. Will you have a drink?"
Ordway shook his head with an angry gesture.
"What I want to know," he insisted bluntly, "is why you are here at all?"
Wherry poured out a drink of whiskey, and adding a dash of iced water, tossed it down at a swallow.
"I thought I told you then," he answered, "that I have a little private business in the town. As it's purely personal I hope you'll have no objection to my transacting it."
"You said that afternoon that your presence was, in some way, connected with Jasper Trend's cotton mills."
Wherry gave a low whistle. "Did I?" he asked politely, "well, perhaps, I did. I can't remember."
"I was fool enough to believe that you wanted an honest job," said Ordway; "it did not enter my head that your designs were upon Trend's daughter."
"Didn't it?" inquired Wherry with a smile in which his white teeth flashed brilliantly. "Well, it might have, for I was honest enough about it. Didn't I tell you that a woman was at the bottom of every mess I was ever in?"
"Where is your wife?" asked Ordway.
"Dead," replied Wherry, in a solemn voice.
"If I am not mistaken, you had not less than three at the time of your trial."
"All dead," rejoined Wherry in the same solemn tone, while he drew out his pocket handkerchief and wiped his eyes with a flourish, "there ain't many men that have supported such a treble affliction on the same day."
"I may as well inform you that I don't believe a word you utter."
"It's true all the same. I'll take my oath on the biggest Bible you can find in town."
"Your oath? Pshaw!"
"Well, I always said my word was better," observed Wherry, without the slightest appearance of offence. He wore a pink shirt which set off his fine colouring to advantage, and as he turned aside to pour out a second drink of whiskey, Ordway noticed that his fair hair was brushed carefully across the bald spot in the centre of his head.
"Whether they are dead or alive," responded Ordway, "I want you to understand plainly that you are to give up your designs upon Milly Trend or her money."
"So you've had your eye on her yourself?" exclaimed Wherry. "I declare I'm deuced sorry. Why, in thunder, didn't you tell me so last June?"
A mental nausea that was almost like a physical spasm seized Ordway suddenly, and crossing to the window, he stood looking through the half-closed shutters down into the street below, where a covered wagon rolled slowly downhill, the driver following on foot as he offered a bunch of fowls to the shop-keepers upon the sidewalk. Then the hot, stale, tobacco impregnated air came up to his nostrils, and he turned away with a sensation of disgust.
"If you'd only warned me in time – hang it – I'd have cut out and given you the field," declared Wherry in such apparent sincerity that Ordway resisted an impulse to kick him out into the hall. "That's my way. I always like to play fair and square when I get the chance."
"Well, you've got the chance now, and what's more you've got to make it good."
"And leave you the open?"
"And leave me Tappahannock – yes."
"I don't want Tappahannock. To tell the truth I'm not particularly struck by its attractions."
"In that case you've no objection to leaving immediately, I suppose?"
"I've no objection on earth if you'll allow me a pretty woman to keep me company. I'm a deuced lonely bird, and I can't get on by myself – it's not in my nature."
Ordway placed his hand upon the table with a force which started the glasses rattling on the metal tray.
"I repeat for the last time that you are to leave Milly Trend alone," he said. "Do you understand me?"
"I'm not sure I do," rejoined Wherry, still pleasantly enough. "Would you mind saying that over again in a lower tone?"
"What I want to make plain is that you are not to marry Milly Trend – or any other women in this town," returned Ordway angrily.
"So there are others!" commented Wherry jauntily with his eye on the ceiling.
The pose of his handsome head was so remarkably effective, that Ordway felt his rage increased by the mere external advantages of the man.
"What I intend you to do is to leave Tappahannock for good and all this very evening," he resumed, drawing a sharp breath.
The words appeared to afford Wherry unspeakable amusement.
"I can't," he responded, after a minute in which he had enjoyed his humour to the full, "the train leaves at seven-ten and I've an engagement at eight o'clock."
"You'll break it, that's all."
"But it wouldn't be polite – it's with a lady."
"Then I'll break it for you," returned Ordway, starting toward the door, "for I may presume, I suppose, that the lady is Miss Trend?"
"Oh, come back, I say. Hang it all, don't get into a fury," protested Wherry, clutching the other by the arm, and closing the door which he had half opened. "Here, hold on a minute and let's talk things over quietly. I told you, didn't I? that I wanted to be obliging."
"Then you will go?" asked Ordway, in a milder tone.
"Well, I'll think about it. I've a quick enough wit for little things, but on serious matters my brain works slowly. In the first place now didn't we promise each other that we'd play fair?"
"But you haven't – that's why I came here."
"You're dead wrong. I'm doing it this very minute. I'll keep my mouth shut about you till Judgment Day if you'll just hold off and not pull me back when I'm trying to live honest."
"Honest!" exclaimed Ordway, and turned on his heel.
"Well, I'd like to know what you call it, for if it isn't honesty, it certainly isn't pleasure. My wife's dead, I swear it's a fact, and I swear again that I don't mean the girl any harm. I was never so much gone on a woman in my life, though a number of 'em have been pretty soft on me. So you keep off and manage your election – or whatever it is – while I go about my business. Great Scott! after all it ain't as if a woman were a bank note, is it?"
"The first question was mine. Will you leave to-day or will you not?"
"And if I will not what are you going to do about it?"
"As soon as I hear your decision, I shall let you know."
"Well, say I won't. What is your next move then?"
"In that case I shall go straight to the girl's father after I leave this room."
"By Jove you will! And what will you do when you get there?"
"I shall tell him that to the best of my belief you have a wife – possibly several – now living."
"Then you'll lie," said Wherry, dropping for the first time his persuasive tone.
"That remains to be proved," rejoined Ordway shortly. "At any rate if he needs to be convinced I shall tell him as much as I know about you."
"And how much," demanded Wherry insolently, "does that happen to be?"
"Enough to stop the marriage, that is all I want."
"And suppose he asks you – as he probably will – how in the devil it came to be any business of yours?"
For a moment Ordway looked over the whiskey bottle and through the open window into the street below.
"I don't think that will happen," he answered slowly, "but if it does I shall tell him the whole truth as I know it – about myself as well as about you."
"The deuce you will!" exclaimed Wherry. "It appears that you want to take the whole job out of my hands now, doesn't it?"
The flush from the whiskey had overspread his face, and in the midst of the general redness his eyes and teeth flashed brilliantly in an angry laugh. An imaginative sympathy for the man moved Ordway almost in spite of himself, and he wondered, in the long pause, what Wherry's early life had been and if his chance in the world were really a fair one?
"I don't want to be hard on you," said Ordway at last; "it's out of the question that you should have Milly Trend, but if you'll give up that idea and go away I'll do what I can to help you – I'll send you half my salary for the next six months until you are able to find a job."
Wherry looked at him with a deliberate wink.
"So you'd like to save your own skin, after all, wouldn't you?" he inquired.
Taking up his hat from the table, Ordway turned toward the door and laid his hand upon the knob before he spoke.
"Is it decided then that I shall go to Jasper Trend?" he asked.
"Well, I wouldn't if I were you," said Wherry, "but that's your affair. On the whole I think that you'll pay more than your share of the price."
"It's natural, I suppose, that you should want your revenge," returned Ordway, without resentment, "but all the same I shall tell him as little as possible about your past. What I shall say is that I have reason to believe that your wife is still living."
"One or more?" enquired Wherry, with a sneer.
"One, I think, will prove quite sufficient for my purpose."
"Well, go ahead," rejoined Wherry, angrily, "but before you strike you'd better be pretty sure you see a snake in the grass. I'd advise you for your own sake to ask Milly Trend first if she expects to marry me."
"What?" cried Ordway, wheeling round, "do you mean she has refused you?"
"Oh, ask her – ask her," retorted Wherry airily, as he turned back to the whiskey bottle.
In the street, a moment later, Ordway passed under the red flag, which, inflated by the wind, swelled triumphantly above his head. From the opposite sidewalk a man spoke to him; and then, turning, waved his slouch hat enthusiastically toward the flag. "If he only knew," thought Ordway, looking after him; and the words brought to his imagination what disgrace in Tappahannock would mean in his life. As he passed the dim vacancy of the warehouse he threw toward it a look which was almost one of entreaty. "No, no, it can't be," he insisted, as if to reassure himself, "it is impossible. How could it happen?" And seized by a sudden rage against circumstances, he remembered the windy afternoon upon which he had come for the first time to Tappahannock – the wide stretches of broomsedge; the pale red road, which appeared to lead nowhere; his violent hunger; and the Negro woman who had given him the cornbread at the door of her cabin. A hundred years seemed to have passed since then – no, not a hundred years as men count them, but a dissolution and a resurrection. It was as if his personality – his whole inner structure had dissolved and renewed itself again; and when he thought now of that March afternoon it was with the visual distinctness that belongs to an observer rather than to an actor. His point of view was detached, almost remote. He saw himself from the outside alone – his clothes, his face, even his gestures; and these things were as vivid to him as were the Negro cabin, the red clay road, and the covered wagon that threw its shadow on the path as it crawled by. In no way could he associate his immediate personality either with the scene or with the man who had sat on the pine bench ravenously eating the coarse food. At the moment it seemed to him that he was released, not only from any spiritual bondage to the past, but even from any physical connection with the man he had been then. "What have I to do with Gus Wherry or with Daniel Ordway?" he demanded. "Above all, what in heaven have I to do with Milly Trend?" As he asked the question he flushed with resentment against the girl for whom he was about to sacrifice all that he valued in his life. He thought with disgust of her vanity, her shallowness, her insincerity; and the course that he had planned showed in this sudden light as utterly unreasonable. It struck him on the instant that in going to Wherry he had been a fool. "Yes, I should have thought of that before. I have been too hasty, for what, after all, have I to do with Milly Trend?"
With an effort he put the question aside, and in the emotional reaction which followed, he felt that his spirit soared into the blue October sky. Emily, looking at him at dinner, thought that she had never seen him so animated, so light-hearted, so boyishly unreserved. When his game of dominoes with Beverly was over, he followed the children out into the orchard, where they were gathering apples into great straw hampers; and as he stood under the fragrant clustering boughs, with the childish laughter in his ears, he felt that his perplexities, his troubles, even his memories had dissolved and vanished into air. An irresponsible happiness swelled in his heart while he watched the golden orchard grass blown like a fringe upon the circular outline of the hill.
But when night fell the joy of the sunshine went from him, and it was almost with a feeling of heaviness that he lit his lamp and sat down in the chintz-covered chair under the faded sampler worked by Margaret, aged nine. Without apparent cause or outward disturbance he had passed from the exhilaration of the afternoon into a pensive, almost a melancholy mood. The past, which had been so remote for several hours, had leaped suddenly to life again – not only in his memory, but in every fibre of his body as well as in every breath he drew. "No, I cannot escape it, for is it not a part of me – it is I myself," he thought; and he knew that he could no more free himself from his duty to Milly Trend than he could tear the knowledge of her existence from his brain. "After all, it is not Milly Trend," he added, "it is something larger, stronger, far more vital than she."
A big white moth flew in from the dusk, and fluttered blindly in the circle of light which the lamp threw on the ceiling. He heard the soft whirring of its wings against the plaster, and gradually the sound entered into his thoughts and became a part of his reflections. "Will the moth fall into the flame or will it escape?" he asked, feeling himself powerless to avert the creature's fate. In some strange way his own destiny seemed to be whirling dizzily in that narrow circle of light; and in the pitiless illumination that surrounded it, he saw not only all that was passed, but all that was present as well as all that was yet to come. At the same instant he saw his mother's face as she lay dead with her look of joyous surprise frozen upon her lips; and the face of Lydia when she had lowered a black veil at their last parting; and the face of Alice, his daughter; and of the girl downstairs as he had seen her through the gray twilight; and the face of the epileptic little preacher, who had preached in the prison chapel. And as these faces looked back at him he knew that the illumination in which his soul had struggled so blindly was the light of love. "Yes, it is love," he thought, "and that is the meaning of the circle of light into which I have come out of the darkness."
He looked up startled, for the white moth, after one last delirious whirl of ecstasy, had dropped from the ceiling into the flame of the lamp.
CHAPTER VIII
The Turn Of The Wheel
AT eight o'clock the next morning Ordway entered Jasper Trend's gate, and passed up the gravelled walk between borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums. In a window on his right a canary was singing loudly in a gilt cage; and a moment later, the maid invited him into a room which seemed, as he entered it, to be filled with a jubilant burst of music. As he waited here for the man he had come to see, he felt that, in spite of his terrible purpose, he had found no place in Tappahannock so cheerful as this long room flooded with sunshine, in the midst of which the canary swung back and forth in his wire cage. The furniture was crude enough, the colours of the rugs were unharmonious, the imitation lace of the curtains was offensive to his eyes. Yet the room was made almost attractive by the large windows which gave on the piazza, the borders of chrysanthemums and the smoothly shaven plot of lawn.
His back was turned toward the door when it opened and shut quickly, and Jasper Trend came in, hastily swallowing his last mouthful of breakfast.
"You wanted to see me, Mr. Smith, I understand," he said at once, showing in his manner a mixture of curiosity and resentment. It was evident at the first glance that even in his own house he was unable to overcome the political antagonism of the man of little stature. The smallest social amenity he would probably have regarded as a kind of moral subterfuge.
"I must ask you to overlook the intimate nature of my question," began Ordway, in a voice which was so repressed that it sounded dull and lifeless, "but I have heard that your daughter intends to marry Horatio Brown. Is this true?"
At the words Jasper, who had prepared himself for a political onslaught, fell back a step or two and stood in the merciless sunlight, blinking at his questioner with his little, watery, pale gray eyes. Each dull red vein in his long nose became suddenly prominent.
"Horatio Brown?" he repeated, "why, I thought you'd come about nothing less than the nomination. What in the devil do you want anyway with Horatio Brown. He can't vote in Tappahannock, can he?"
"I'll answer that in time," replied Ordway, "my motive is more serious than you can possibly realise – it is a question which involves your daughter's happiness – perhaps her life."
"Good Lord, is that so?" exclaimed Jasper, "I don't reckon you're sweet on her yourself, are you?"
Ordway's only reply was an impatient groan which sent the other stumbling back against a jar of goldfish on the centre table. Though he had come fully prepared for the ultimate sacrifice, he was unable to control the repulsion aroused in him by the bleared eyes and sunken mouth of the man before him.
"Well, if you ain't," resumed Jasper presently, with a fresh outburst of hilarity, "you're about the only male critter in Tappahannock that don't turn his eyes sooner or later toward my door."
"I've barely a speaking acquaintance with your daughter," returned Ordway shortly, "but her reputation as a beauty is certainly very well deserved."
Mollified by the compliment, Jasper unbent so far as to make an abrupt, jerky motion in the direction of a chair; but shaking his head, Ordway put again bluntly the question he had asked upon the other's entrance.
"Am I to understand seriously that she means to marry Brown?" he demanded.
Jasper twisted his scraggy neck nervously in his loose collar. "Lord, how you do hear things!" he ejaculated. "Now, as far as I can see, thar ain't a single word of truth in all that talk. Just between you and me I don't believe my girl has had her mind on that fellow Brown more'n a minute. I'm dead against it and that'll go a long way with her, you may be sure. Why, only this morning she told me that if she had to choose between the two of 'em, she'd stick to young Banks every time."
With the words it seemed to Ordway that the sunshine became fairly dazzling as it fell through the windows, while the song of the canary went up rapturously like a pæan. Only by the relief which flooded his heart like warmth could he measure the extent of the ruin he had escaped. Even Jasper Trend's face appeared no longer hideous to him, and as he held out his hand, the exhilaration of his release lent a note that was almost one of affection to his voice.
"Don't let her do it – for God's sake don't let her do it," he said, and an instant afterward he was out on the gravelled walk between the borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums.
At the gate Milly was standing with a letter in her hand, and when he spoke to her, he watched her face change slowly to the colour of a flower. Never had she appeared softer, prettier, more enticing in his eyes, and he felt for the first time an understanding of the hopeless subjection of Banks.
"Oh, it's you, Mr. Smith!" she exclaimed, smiling and blushing as she had smiled and blushed at Wherry the day before, "I was asking Harry Banks yesterday what had become of you?"
"What had become of me?" he repeated in surprise, while he drew back quickly with his hand on the latch of the gate.
"I hadn't seen you for so long," she answered, with a laugh which bore less relation to humour than it did to pleasure. "You used to pass by five times a day, and I got so accustomed to you that I really missed you when you went away."
"Well, I've been in the country all summer, though that hardly counts, for you were out of town yourself."
"Yes, I was out of town myself." She lingered over the words, and her voice softened as she went on until it seemed to flow with the sweetness of liquid honey, "but even when I am here, you never care to see me."
"Do you think so?" he asked gaily, and the next instant he wondered why the question had passed his lips before it had entered into his thoughts, "the truth is that I know a good deal more about you than you suspect," he added; "I have the honour, you see, to be the confidant of Harry Banks."
"Oh, Harry Banks!" she exclaimed indifferently, as she turned from the gate, while Ordway opened it and passed out into the street.
For the next day or two it seemed to him that the lightness of his heart was reflected in the faces of those about him – that Baxter, Mrs. Brooke, Emily, Beverly each appeared to move in response to some hidden spring within himself. He felt no longer either Beverly's tediousness or Mrs. Brooke's melancholy, for these early October mornings contained a rapture which transfigured the people with whom he lived.
With this unlooked for renewal of hope he threw himself eagerly into the political fight for the control of Tappahannock. It was now Tuesday and on Thursday evening he was to deliver his first speech in the town hall. Already the preparations were made, already the flags were flying from the galleries, and already Baxter had been trimmed for his public appearance upon the platform.
"By George, I believe the Major's right and it's the Ten Commandment part that has done it," said the big man, settling his person with a shake in the new clothes he had purchased for the occasion. "I reckon this coat's all right, Smith, ain't it? My wife wouldn't let me come out on the platform in those old clothes I've been wearing."
"Oh, you're all right," returned Ordway, cheerfully – so cheerfully that Baxter was struck afresh by the peculiar charm which belonged less to manner than to temperament, "you're all right, old man, but it isn't your clothes that make you so."
"All the same I'll feel better when I get into my old suit again," said Baxter, "I don't know how it is, but, somehow, I seem to have left two-thirds of myself behind in those old clothes. I just wore these down to show 'em off, but I shan't put 'em on again till Thursday."
It was the closing hour at the warehouse, and after a few eager words on the subject of the approaching meeting, Ordway left the office and went out into the deserted building where the old Negro was sweeping the floor with his twig broom. A moment later he was about to pass under the archway, when a man, hurrying in from the street, ran straight into his arms and then staggered back with a laugh of mirthless apology.
"My God, Smith," said the tragic voice of Banks, "I'm half crazy and I must have a word with you alone."
Catching his arm Ordway drew him into the dim light of the warehouse, until they reached the shelter of an old wagon standing unhitched against the wall. The only sound which came to them here was the scratching noise made by the twig broom on the rough planks of the floor.
"Speak now," said Ordway, while his heart sank as he looked into the other's face, "It's quite safe – there's no one about but old Abraham."
"I can't speak," returned Banks, preserving with an effort a decent composure of his features, "but it's all up with me – it's worse than I imagined, and there's nothing ahead of me but death."
"I suppose it's small consolation to be told that you look unusually healthy at the minute," replied Ordway, "but don't keep me guessing, Banks. What's happened now?"
"All her indifference – all her pretence of flirting was pure deception," groaned the miserable Banks, "she wanted to throw dust, not only in my eyes, but in Jasper's, also."
"Why, he told me with his own lips that his daughter had given him to understand that she preferred you to Brown."
"And so she did give him to understand – so she did," affirmed Banks, in despair, "but it was all a blind so that he wouldn't make trouble between her and Brown. I tell you, Smith," he concluded, bringing his clenched fist down on the wheel of the wagon, from which a shower of dried mud was scattered into Ordway's face, "I tell you, I don't believe women think any more of telling a lie than we do of taking a cocktail!"
"But how do you know all this, my dear fellow? and when did you discover it?"
"That's the awful part, I'm coming to it." His voice gave out and he swallowed a lump in his throat before he could go on. "Oh, Smith, Smith, I declare, if it's the last word I speak, I believe she means to run away with Brown this very evening!"
"What?" cried Ordway, hardly raising his voice above a whisper. A burning resentment, almost a repulsion swept over him, and he felt that he could have spurned the girl's silly beauty if she had lain at his feet. What was a woman like Milly Trend worth, that she should cost him, a stranger to her, so great a price?
"Tell me all," he said sharply, turning again to his companion. "How did you hear it? Why do you believe it? Have you spoken to Jasper?"
Banks blinked hard for a minute, while a single large round teardrop trickled slowly down his freckled nose.
"I should never have suspected it," he answered, "but for Milly's old black Mammy Delphy, who has lived with her ever since she was born. Aunt Delphy came upon her this morning when she was packing her bag, and by hook or crook, heaven knows how, she managed to get at the truth. Then she came directly to me, for it seems that she hates Brown worse than the devil."
"When did she come to you?"
"A half hour ago. I left her and rushed straight to you."
Ordway drew out his watch, and stood looking at the face of it with a wondering frown.
"That must have been five o'clock," he said, "and it is now half past. Shall I catch Milly, do you think, if I start at once?"
"You?" cried Banks, "you mean that you will stop her?"
"I mean that I must stop her. There is no question."
As he spoke he had started quickly down the warehouse, scattering as he walked, a pile of trash which the old Negro had swept together in the centre of the floor. So rapid were the long strides with which he moved that Banks, in spite of his frantic haste, could barely keep in step with him as they passed into the street. Ordway's face had changed as if from a spasm of physical pain, and as Banks looked at it in the afternoon light he was startled to find that it was the face of an old man. The brows were bent, the mouth drawn, the skin sallow, and the gray hair upon the temples had become suddenly more prominent than the dark locks above.
"Then you knew Brown before?" asked Banks, with an accession of courage, as they slackened their pace with the beginning of the hill.
"I knew him before – yes," replied Ordway, shortly. His reserve had become not only a mask, but a coffin, and his companion had for a minute a sensation that was almost uncanny as he walked by his side – as if he were striving to keep pace uphill with a dead man. Banks had known him to be silent, gloomy, uncommunicative before now, but he had never until this instant seen that look of iron resolve which was too cold and still to approach the heat of passion. Had he been furious Banks might have shared his fury with him; had he shown bitterness of mood Banks might have been bitter also; had he given way even to sardonic merriment, Banks felt that it would have been possible to have feigned a mild hilarity of manner; but before this swift, implacable pursuit of something he could not comprehend, the wretched lover lost all consciousness of the part which he himself must act, well or ill, in the event to come.
At Trend's gate Ordway stopped and looked at his companion with a smile which appeared to throw an artificial light upon his drawn features.
"Will you let me speak to her alone first," he asked, "for a few minutes?"
"I'll take a turn up the street then," returned Banks eagerly, still panting from his hurried walk up the long hill. "She's in the room on the right now," he added, "I can see her feeding the canary."
Ordway nodded indifferently. "I shan't be long," he said, and going inside the gate, passed deliberately up the walk and into the room where Milly stood at the window with her mouth close against the wires of the gilt cage.
