Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Ancient Law
Ordway's gaze passed beyond him to rest upon Baxter and Major Leary, who sat close together, genial, elated, rather thirsty. At the moment he felt sorry for Baxter – not for himself.
"No," he answered with a smile which threw a humorous light upon the question, "I cannot – can you prove yours?"
The little man cleared his throat with a sniffling sound, and when he spoke again it was in a high nasal voice, as if he had become suddenly very excited or very angry.
"Is your name Daniel Smith?" he asked, with a short laugh.
The question was out at last and the silence in which Ordway stood was like the suspension between thought and thought. All at once he found himself wondering why he had lived in hourly terror of this instant, for now that it was upon him, he saw that it was no more tragic, no less commonplace, than the most ordinary instant of his life. As in the past his courage had revived in him with the first need of decisive action, so he felt it revive now, and lifting his head, he looked straight into the angry, little eyes of the man who waited, under the yellow gaslight, on the platform before him.
"My name," he answered, still smiling, "is Daniel Ordway."
There was no confusion in his mind, no anxiety, no resentment. Instead the wonderful brightness of a moment ago still shone in his thoughts, and while he appeared to rest his sparkling gaze on the face of his questioner, he was seeing, in reality, the road by which he had come to Tappahannock, and at the beginning of the road the prison, and beyond the prison the whole of his past life.
"Did you serve a term in prison before you came here?"
"Yes."
"Were you tried and convicted in New York?"
"Yes."
"Were you guilty?"
Looking over the head of the little man, Ordway's gaze travelled slowly across the upturned faces upon the floor of the house. Hardly a man passed under his look whom he had not assisted once at least in the hour of his need. "I saved that one from drink," he thought almost joyfully, "that one from beggary – I stood side by side with that other in the hour of his shame – "
"Were you guilty?" repeated the high nasal voice in his ear.
His gaze came quickly back, and as it passed over the head of Baxter, he was conscious again of a throb of pity.
"Yes," he answered for the last time. Then, while the silence lasted, he turned from the platform and went out of the hall into the night.
CHAPTER XI
Between Man And Woman
HE walked rapidly to the end of the street, and then slackened his pace almost unconsciously as he turned into the country road. The night had closed in a thick black curtain over the landscape, and the windows of the Negroes' cabins burned like little still red flames along the horizon. Straight ahead the road was visible as a pale, curving streak across the darkness.
A farmer, carrying a lantern, came down the path leading from the fields, and hearing Ordway's footsteps in the road, flashed the light suddenly into his face. Upon recognition there followed a cheerful "good-night!" and the offer of the use of the lantern to Cedar Hill. "It's a black night and you'll likely have trouble in keeping straight. I've been to look after a sick cow, but I can feel my way up to the house in two minutes."
"Thank you," returned Ordway, smiling as the light shone full in his face, "but my feet are accustomed to the road."
He passed on, while the farmer turned at the gate by the roadside, to shout cheerfully after him: "Well, good-night – Mayor!"
The gate closed quickly, and the ray of the lantern darted like a pale yellow moth across the grass.
As Ordway went on it seemed to him that the darkness became tangible, enveloping – that he had to fight his way through it presently as through water. The little red flames danced along the horizon until he wondered if they were burning only in his imagination. He felt tired and dazed as if his body had been beaten into insensibility, but the hour through which he had just passed appeared to have left merely a fading impression upon his brain. Not only had he ceased to care, he had ceased to think of it. When he tried now to recall the manager of the cotton mills, it was to remember, with aversion, his angry little eyes, his high nasal voice, and the wart upon the end of his long nose. At the instant these physical details were the only associations which the man's name presented to his thoughts. The rest was something so insignificant that it had escaped his memory. He felt in a vague way that he was sorry for Baxter, yet this very feeling of sympathy bored and annoyed him. It was plainly ridiculous to be sorry for a person as rich, as fat, as well fed as his employer. Wherever he looked the little red flames flickered and waved in the fields, and when he lifted his eyes to the dark sky, he saw them come and go in short, scintillant flashes, like fire struck from an anvil. They were in his brain, he supposed, after all, and so was this tangible darkness, and so, too, was this indescribable delicacy and lightness with which he moved. Everything was in his brain, even his ridiculous pity for Baxter and the angry-eyed little manager with the wart on his long nose. He could see these things distinctly, though he had forgotten everything that had been so clear to him while he stood on the stage of the town hall. His past life and the prison and even the illumination in which he had remembered them so vividly were obscured now as if they, too, had been received into the tangible darkness.
From the road behind him the sound of footsteps reached him suddenly, and he quickened his pace with an impulse, rather than a determination of flight. But the faster he walked the faster came the even beat of the footsteps, now rising, now falling with a rhythmic regularity in the dust of the road. Once he glanced back, but he could see nothing because of the encompassing blackness, and in the instant of his delay it seemed to him that the pursuit gained steadily upon him, still moving with the regular muffled beat of the footsteps in the thick dust. A horror of recognition had come over him, and as he walked on breathlessly, now almost running, it occurred to him, like an inspiration, that he might drop aside into the fields and so let his pursuer pass on ahead. The next instant he realised that the darkness could not conceal the abrupt pause of his flight – that as those approaching footsteps fell on his ears, so must the sound of his fall on the ears of the man behind him. Then a voice called his name, and he stopped short, and stood, trembling from head to foot, by the side of the road.
"Smith!" cried the voice, "if it's you, Smith, for God's sake stop a minute!"
"Yes, it's I," he answered, waiting, and a moment afterward the hand of Banks reached out of the night and clasped his arm.
"Hold on," said Banks, breathing hard, "I'm all blown."
His laboured breath came with a struggling violence that died gradually away, but while it lasted the strain of the meeting, the awkwardness of the emotional crisis, seemed suddenly put off – suspended. Now in the silence the tension became so great that, drawing slightly away from the detaining hold, Ordway was about to resume his walk. At his first movement, however, Banks clung the more firmly to his arm. "Oh, damn it, Smith!" he burst out, and with the exclamation Ordway felt that the touch of flesh and blood had reached to the terrible loneliness in which he stood. In a single oath Banks had uttered the unutterable spirit of prayer.
"You followed me?" asked Ordway quietly, while the illusions of the flight, the physical delicacy and lightness, the tangible darkness, the little red flames in the fields, departed from him. With the first hand that was laid on his own, his nature swung back into balance, and he felt that he possessed at the moment a sanity that was almost sublime.
"As soon as I could get out I came. There was such a crush," said Banks, "I thought I'd catch up with you at once, but it was so black I couldn't see my hand before me. In a little while I heard footsteps, so I kept straight on."
"I wish you hadn't, Banks."
"But I had to." His usually cheerful voice sounded hoarse and throaty. "I ain't much of a chap at words, Smith, you know that, but I want just to say that you're the best friend I ever had, and I haven't forgot it – I haven't forgot it," he repeated, and blew his nose. "Nothing that that darn fool of a manager said to-night can come between you and me," he went on laboriously after a minute. "If you ever want my help, by thunder, I'll go to hell and back again for you without a word."
Stretching out his free hand Ordway laid it upon his friend's shoulder.
"You're a first-rate chap, Banks," he said cheerfully, at which a loud sob burst from Banks, who sought to disguise it the instant afterward in a violent cough.
"You're a first-rate chap," repeated Ordway gently, "and I'm glad, in spite of what I said, that you came after me just now. I'm going away to-morrow, you know, and it's probable that I shan't see you again."
"But won't you stay on in Tappahannock? In two weeks all this will blow over and things will be just what they were before."
Ordway shook his head, a movement which Banks felt, though he did not see it.
"No, I'll go away, it's best," he answered, and though his voice had dropped to a dull level there was still a cheerful sound to it, "I'll go away and begin again in a new place."
"Then I'll go, too," said Banks.
"What! and leave Milly? No, you won't come. Banks, you'll stay here."
"But I'll see you sometimes, shan't I?"
"Perhaps? – that's likely, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's likely," repeated Banks, and fell silent from sheer weight of sorrow. "At least you'll let me go with you to the station?" he said at last, after a long pause in which he had been visited by one of those acute flashes of sympathy which are to the heart what intuition is to the intellect.
"Why, of course," responded Ordway, more touched by the simple request than he had been even by the greater loyalty. "You may do that, Banks, and I'll thank you for it. And now go back to Tappahannock," he added, "I must take the midday train and there are a few preparations I've still to make."
"But where will you go?" demanded Banks, swinging round again after he had turned from him.
"Where?" repeated Ordway blankly, and he added indifferently, "I hadn't thought."
"The midday train goes west," said Banks.
"Then, I'll go west. It doesn't matter."
Banks had already started off, when turning back suddenly, he caught Ordway's hand and wrung it in a grip that hurt. Then without speaking again, he hurried breathlessly in the direction from which he had come.
A few steps beyond the cross-roads Ordway saw through the heavy foliage the light in the dining-room at Cedar Hill. Then as he entered the avenue, he lost sight of it again, until he had rounded the curve that swept up to the front porch. At his knock Emily opened the door, with a lamp held in her hand, and he saw her face, surrounded by dim waves of hair, shining pale and transparent in the glimmering circle of light. As he followed her into the dining-room, he realised that after the family had gone upstairs to bed, she had sat at her sewing under the lamp and waited for his knock. At the knowledge a sense of comfort, of homeliness came over him, and he felt all at once that his misery was not so great as he had believed it to be a moment ago.
"May I get you something?" she asked, placing the lamp upon the table and lowering the wick that the flame might not shine on his pallid and haggard face.
He shook his head; then as she turned from him toward the hearth, he followed her and stood looking down at the smouldering remains of a wood fire. Her work-basket and a pile of white ruffles which she had been hemming were on the table, but moved by a feeling of their utter triviality in the midst of a tragedy she vaguely understood, she swept them hurriedly into a chair, and came over to lay her hand upon his arm.
"What can I do? Oh, what can I do?" she asked. Taking her hand from his sleeve, he held it for an instant in his grasp, as if the pressure of her throbbing palm against his revived some living current under the outer deadness that enveloped him.
"I am going away from Tappahannock to-morrow, Emily," he said.
"To-morrow?" she repeated, and laid her free hand upon his shoulder with a soothing, motherly gesture – a gesture which changed their spiritual relations to those of a woman and a child.
"A man asked me three questions to-night," he went on quietly, yet in a voice which seemed to feel a pang in every word it uttered. "He asked me if my name was Daniel Smith, and I answered – no."
As he hesitated, she lifted her face and smiled at him, with a smile which he knew to be the one expression of love, of comprehension, that she could offer. It was a smile which a mother might have bent upon a child that was about to pass under the surgeon's knife, and it differed from tears only in that it offered courage and not weakness.
"He asked me if I had been in prison before I came to Tappahannock – and I answered – yes."
His voice broke, rather than ceased, and lifting his gaze from her hands he looked straight into her wide-open eyes. The smile which she had turned to him a moment before was still on her lips, frozen there in the cold pallor of her face. Her eyes were the only things about her which seemed alive, and they appeared to him now not as eyes but as thoughts made visible. Bending her head quickly she kissed the hand which enclosed her own.
"I still believe," she said, and looked into his face.
"But it is true," he replied slowly.
"But it is not the whole truth," she answered, "and for that reason it is half a lie."
"Yes, it is not the whole truth," he repeated, in his effort to catch something of her bright courage.
"Why should they judge you by that and by nothing else?" she demanded with passion. "If that was true, is not your life in Tappahannock true also?"
"To you – to you," he answered, "but to-morrow everything will be forgotten about me except the fact that because I had been in prison, I have lived a lie."
"You are wrong – oh, believe me, you are wrong," she said softly, while her tears broke forth and streamed down her white face.
"No," he returned patiently, as if weighing her words in his thoughts, "I am right, and my life here is wasted now from the day I came. All that I do from this moment will be useless. I must go away."
"But where?" she questioned passionately, as Banks had questioned before her.
"Where?" he echoed, "I don't know – anywhere. The midday train goes west."
"And what will you do in the new place?" she asked through her tears.
He shook his head as if the question hardly concerned him.
"I shall begin again," he answered indifferently at last.
She was turning hopelessly from him, when her eyes fell upon a slip of yellow paper which Beverly had placed under a vase on the mantel, and drawing it out, she glanced at the address before giving it into Ordway's hands.
"This must have come for you in the afternoon," she said, "I did not see it."
Taking the telegram from her, he opened it slowly, and read the words twice over.
"Your father died last night. Will you come home?"Richard Ordway."
BOOK THIRD
THE LARGER PRISON
CHAPTER I
The Return To Life
AS the train rounded the long curve, Ordway leaned from the window and saw spread before him the smiling battlefields that encircled Botetourt. From the shadow and sunlight of the distance a wind blew in his face, and he felt suddenly younger, fresher, as if the burden of the years had been lifted from him. The Botetourt to which he was returning was the place of his happiest memories; and closing his eyes to the landscape, he saw Lydia standing under the sparrows that flew out from the ivied walls of the old church. He met her pensive gaze; he watched her faint smile under the long black feather in her hat.
"His death was unexpected," said a strange voice in his ear, "but for the past five years I've seen that he was a failing man."
The next instant his thoughts had scattered like startled birds, and without turning his head, he sat straining his ears to follow the conversation that went on, above the roar of the train, in the seat behind him.
"Had a son, didn't he?" inquired the man who had not spoken. "What's become of him, I'd like to know? I mean the chap who went to smash somewhere in the North."
"Oh, he misappropriated trust funds and got found out and sent to prison. When he came out, he went West, I heard, and struck a gold mine, but, all the same, he left his wife and children for the old man to look after. Ever seen his wife? Well, she's a downright saint, if there ever lived one."
"And yet he went wrong, the more's the pity."
"It's a funny thing," commented the first speaker, who was evidently of a philosophic bent, "but I've often noticed that a good wife is apt to make a bad husband. It looks somehow as if male human nature, like the Irish members, is obliged to sit on the Opposition bench. The only example that ever counts with it, is an example that urges the other way."
"Well, what about this particular instance? I hope at least that she has come into the old man's money?"
"Nobody can tell, but it's generally believed that the two children will get the most of it. The son left a boy and a girl when he went to prison, you know."
"Ah, that's rather a pity, isn't it?"
"Well, I can't say – they've got good blood as well as bad, when it comes to that. My daughter went to school with the girl, and she was said to be, by long odds, the most popular member of her class. She graduated last spring, and people tell me that she has turned out to be the handsomest young woman in Botetourt."
"Like the mother?"
"No, dark and tall, with those snapping blue eyes of her grandmother's – "
So Alice was no longer the little girl in short white skirts, outstanding like a ballet dancer's! There was a pang for him in the thought, and he tried in vain to accustom himself to the knowledge that she would meet him to-night as a woman, not as a child. He remembered the morning when she had run out, as he passed up the staircase, to beg him to come in to listen to her music lesson; and with the sound of the stumbling scales in his ears, he felt again that terrible throbbing of his pulses and the dull weight of anguish which had escaped at last in an outburst of bitterness.
With a jolting motion the train drew up into the little station, and following the crowd that pressed through the door of the car, he emerged presently into the noisy throng of Negro drivers gathered before the rusty vehicles which were waiting beside the narrow pavement. Pushing aside the gaily decorated whips which encircled him at his approach, he turned, after a moment's hesitation, into one of the heavily shaded streets, which seemed to his awakened memory to have remained unaltered since the afternoon upon which he had left the town almost twenty years ago. The same red and gold maples stirred gently above his head; the same silent, green-shuttered houses were withdrawn behind glossy clusters of microphylla rose-creepers. Even the same shafts of sunshine slanted across the roughly paved streets, which were strewn thickly with yellowed leaves. It was to Ordway as if a pleasant dream had descended upon the place, and had kept unchanged the particular golden stillness of that autumn afternoon when he had last seen it. All at once he realised that what Tappahannock needed was not progress, but age; and he saw for the first time that the mellowed charm of Botetourt was relieved against the splendour of an historic background. Not the distinction of the present, but the enchantment of the past, produced this quality of atmosphere into which the thought of Tappahannock entered like a vulgar discord. The dead, not the living, had built these walls, had paved these streets, had loved and fought and starved beneath these maples; and it was the memory of such solemn things that steeped the little town in its softening haze of sentiment. A thrill of pleasure, more intense than any he had known for months, shot through his heart, and the next instant he acknowledged with a sensation of shame that he was returning, not only to his people, but to his class. Was this all that experience, that humiliation, could do for one – that he should still find satisfaction in the refinements of habit, in the mere external pleasantness of life? As he passed the old church he saw that the sparrows still fluttered in and out of the ivy, which was full of twittering cries like a gigantic bird's nest, and he had suddenly a ghostly feeling as if he were a moving shadow under shadowy trees and unreal shafts of sunlight. A moment later he almost held his breath lest the dark old church and the dreamy little town should vanish before his eyes and leave him alone in the outer space of shadows.
Coming presently under a row of poplars to the street in which stood his father's house – a square red brick building with white Doric columns to the portico – he saw with a shock of surprise that the funeral carriages were standing in a solemn train for many blocks. Until that moment it had not occurred to him that he might come in time to look on the dead face of the man who had not forgiven him while he was alive; and at first he shivered and shrank back as if hesitating to enter the door that had been so lately closed against him. An old Negro driver, who sat on the curbing, wiping the broad black band on his battered silk hat with a red bandanna handkerchief, turned to speak to him with mingled sympathy and curiosity.
"Ef'n you don' hurry up, you'll miss de bes' er hit, marster," he remarked. "Dey's been gwine on a pow'ful long time, but I'se been a-lisenin' wid all my years en I ain' hyearn nairy a sh'ut come thoo' de do'. Lawd! Lawd! dey ain' mo'n like I mo'n, caze w'en dey buried my Salviny I set up sech a sh'uttin' dat I bu'st two er my spar ribs clean ter pieces."
Still muttering to himself he fell to polishing his old top hat more vigorously, while Ordway quickened his steps with an effort, and entering the gate, ascended the brick walk to the white steps of the portico. A wide black streamer hung from the bell handle, so pushing open the door, which gave noiselessly before him, he entered softly into the heavy perfume of flowers. From the room on his right, which he remembered dimly as the formal drawing-room in the days of his earliest childhood, he heard a low voice speaking as if in prayer; and looking across the threshold, he saw a group of black robed persons kneeling in the faint light which fell through the chinks in the green shutters. The intense odour of lilies awoke in him a sharp anguish, which had no association in his thoughts with his father's death, and which he could not explain until the incidents of his mother's funeral crowded, one by one, into his memory. The scent of lilies was the scent of death in his nostrils, and he saw again the cool, high-ceiled room in the midst of which her coffin had stood, and through the open windows the wide green fields in which spring was just putting forth. That was nearly thirty years ago, yet the emotion he felt at this instant was less for his father who had died yesterday than for his mother whom he had lost while he was still a child.
At his entrance no one had observed him, and while the low prayer went on, he stood with bowed head searching among the veiled figures about the coffin for the figure of his wife. Was that Lydia, he wondered, kneeling there in her mourning garments with her brow hidden in her clasped hands? And as he looked at her it seemed to him that she had never lifted the black veil which she had lowered over her face at their last parting. Though he was outwardly now among his own people, though the physical distance which divided him from his wife and children was barely a dozen steps, the loneliness which oppressed him was like the loneliness of the prison; and he understood that his real home was not here, but in Tappahannock – that his true kinship was with the labourers whose lives he had shared and whose bitter poverty he had lessened. In the presence of death he was conscious of the space, the luxury, the costly funeral wreaths that surrounded him; and these external refinements of living produced in him a sensation of shyness, as if he had no longer a rightful place in the class in which he had been born. Against his will he grew ashamed of his coarse clothes and his roughened hands; and with this burning sense of humiliation a wave of homesickness for Tappahannock swept over him – for the dusty little town, with its hot, close smells and for the blue tent of sky which was visible from his ivied window at Cedar Hill. Then he remembered, with a pang, that even from Tappahannock he had been cast out. For the second time since his release from prison, he felt cowed and beaten, like an animal that is driven to bay. The dead man in his coffin was more closely woven into his surroundings than was the living son who had returned to his inheritance.
As the grave faces looked back at him at the end of the prayer, he realised that they belonged to branches, near or distant, of the Ordway connections. With the first glimpse of his figure in the doorway there came no movement of recognition; then he observed a slight start of surprise – or was it dismay? He knew that Lydia had seen him at last, though he did not look at her. It appeared to him suddenly that his return was an insult to her as well as to the dead man who lay there, helpless yet majestic, in the centre of the room. Flight seemed to him at the instant the only amendment in his power, and he had made an impulsive start back from the threshold, when the strained hush was broken by a word that left him trembling and white as from a blow.
"Father!" cried a voice, in the first uncontrollable joy of recognition; and with an impetuous rush through the crowd that surrounded her, Alice threw herself into his arms.
A mist swam before his eyes and he lost the encircling faces in a blur of tears; but as she clung to his breast and he held her close, he was conscious of a fierce joy that throbbed, like a physical pain, in his throat. The word which she had uttered had brought his soul up from the abyss as surely as if it were lifted by the hands of angels; and with each sobbing breath of happiness she drew, he felt that her nature was knit more firmly into his. The repulse he had received the moment before was forgotten, and while he held her drawn apart in the doorway, the silence of Lydia, and even the reproach of the dead man, had ceased to affect him. In that breathless, hysterical rush to his embrace Alice saved him to-day as Emily's outstretched hand had saved him three years before.
"They did not tell me! Oh, why, did they not tell me?" cried the girl, lifting her head from his breast, and the funeral hush that shrouded the room could not keep back the ecstasy in her voice. Even when after the first awkward instant the others gathered around him, nervous, effusive, friendly, Alice still clung to his hands, kissing first one and then the other and then both together, with the exquisite joyous abandonment of a child.
Lydia had kissed him, weeping softly under her long black veil, and hiding her pale, lovely face the moment afterwards in her clasped hands. Dick, his son, had touched his cheek with his fresh young mouth; Richard Ordway, his father's brother, had shaken him by the hand; and the others, one and all, kinsmen and kinswomen, had given him their embarrassed, yet kindly, welcome. But it was on Alice that his eyes rested, while he felt his whole being impelled toward her in a recovered rapture that was almost one of worship. In her dark beauty, with her splendid hair, her blue, flashing Ordway eyes, and her lips which were too red and too full for perfection, she appeared to him the one vital thing among the mourning figures in this house of death. Her delight still ran in little tremors through her limbs, and when a moment later, she slipped her hand through his arm, and followed Lydia and Richard Ordway down the steps, and into one of the waiting carriages, he felt that her bosom quivered with the emotion which the solemn presence of his father had forced back from her lips.
