Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Ancient Law
The next instant the image faded and was replaced by Emily as she had looked at him on that last evening with her soft, comforting gaze. The weakness of self pity came over him, and he asked himself in the coward's luxury of hopeless questioning, what Emily would have done had she stood to him in Lydia's place? He saw her parting from him with her bright courage at the prison doors; he saw her meeting him with her smile of welcome and of forgiveness when he came out. As once before he had risen to the vision of service, so now in the agony of his humiliation he was blessed at last with the understanding of love.
For many minutes he knelt there motionless by the open window, beyond which he could see the dimly lighted town on which a few drops of rain had begun to fall. The faint perfume of lilies came up to him from the walk below, where the broken sprays swept from the house were fading under the slow, soft rain. With the fragrance the image of Emily dissolved as in a mist to reappear the minute afterwards in a more torturing and human shape. He saw her now with her bright dark hair blown into little curls on her temples, with her radiant brown eyes that penetrated him with their soft, yet animated glance. The vigorous grace of her figure, as he had seen it outlined in her scant blue cotton gown against the background of cedars, remained motionless in his thoughts, bathed in a clear golden light that tormented his senses.
Rising from his knees with an effort, he struck a match and raised the green shade from the lamp on the table. Then while the little blue flame flickered out in his hand, he felt that he was seized by a frantic, an irresistible impulse of flight. Gathering his clothes from the bed in the darkness, he pushed them hurriedly back into the bag he had emptied, and with a last glance at the room which had become unendurable to him, opened the door and went with a rapid step down the great staircase and into the hall below. The direction of his journey, as well as the purpose of it, was obscure in his mind. Yesterday he had told himself that he could not remain in Tappahannock, and to-day he knew that it was impossible for him to live on in his father's house. To pass the hall door meant release – escape to him; beyond that there lay only the distance and the unknown.
The lights burned dimly on the staircase, and when he reached the bottom he could see on the carpet the thin reddish stream which issued from the closed door of the library. As he was about to pass by, a short sob fell on his ear, arresting him as authoritatively as if it had been the sound of his own name. While he stood there listening the sobs ceased and then broke out more loudly, now violent, now smothered, now followed by quick, furious steps across the floor within. Alice was shut in the room alone and suffering! With the realisation the bag fell from his hand, and turning the knob softly, he opened the door and paused for an instant upon the threshold.
At the noise of the opening door the girl made a single step forward, and as she raised her hands to conceal her distorted features, her handkerchief, torn into shreds, fell to the carpet at her feet. Around her the room showed other signs of an outbreak of anger – the chairs were pushed hurriedly out of place, the books from the centre table were lying with opened backs on the floor, and a vase of dahlias lay overturned and scattered upon the mantel.
"I don't care – I don't care," she repeated, convulsively. "Why do they always interfere with me? What right has Dick or Uncle Richard to say whom I shall see or whom I shall not? I hate them all. Mamma is always against me – so is Uncle Richard – so is everybody. They side with Dick – always – always."
A single wave of her dark hair had fallen low on her forehead, and this, with the violent colour of her mouth, gave her a look that was almost barbaric. The splendid possibilities in her beauty caused him, in the midst of his pity, a sensation of dread.
"Alice," he said softly, almost in a whisper, and closing the door after him, he came to the middle of the room and stood near her, though still without touching her quivering body.
"They side with Dick always," she repeated furiously, "and you will side with him, too – you will side with him, too!"
For a long pause he looked at her in silence, waiting until the convulsive tremors of her limbs should cease.
"I shall never side against my daughter," he said very slowly. "Alice, my child, my darling, are you not really mine?"
A last quivering sob shook through her and she grew suddenly still. "They will tell you things about me and you will believe them," she answered sternly.
"Against you, Alice? Against you?"
"You will blame me as they do."
"I love you," he returned, almost as sternly as she had spoken.
An emotional change, so swift that it startled him, broke in her look, and he saw the bright red of her mouth tremble and open like a flower in her glowing face. At the sight a sharp joy took possession of him – a joy that he could measure only by the depth of the agony out of which he had come. Without moving from his place, he stretched out his arms and stood waiting.
"Alice, I love you," he said.
Then his arms closed over her, for with the straight flight of a bird she had flown to his breast.
CHAPTER IV
The Letter and the Spirit
AWAKING before dawn, he realised with his first conscious thought that his life had been irrevocably settled while he slept. His place was here; he could not break away from it without leaving a ragged edge; and while he had believed himself to be deciding his future actions, that greater Destiny, of which his will was only a part, had arranged them for him during the dim pause of the night. He could feel still on his arm, as if it had persisted there through his sleep, the firm, almost viselike pressure of Alice's hands, and his whole sensitive nature thrilled in response to this mute appeal to his fatherhood. Yes, his purpose, his mission, and his happiness were here in his father's house.
At breakfast he found a white rosebud on his plate, and as he took it up, Alice rushed in from the garden and threw herself into his arms.
"I thought you were never, never coming down!" she exclaimed, choking with laughter, and utterly forgetful of the shadow of death which still lay over the house. "At first I was afraid you might have gone away in the night – just as you went that awful day eight years ago. Then I peeped out and saw your boots, so I went back to bed again and fell asleep. Oh, I'm so glad you've come! Why did you stay away such an age? Now, at last, I'll have somebody to take my side against mamma and Dick and Uncle Richard – "
"But why against them, Alice? Surely they love you just as I do?"
Biting her lips sharply, she bent her heavy brows in a stern and frowning expression. "Oh, they're horrid," she said angrily, "they want me to live just as mamma does – shut up all day in a hot room on a hateful sofa. She reads novels all the time, and I despise books. I want to go away and see things and to have plenty of clothes and all the fun I choose. They let Dick do just as he pleases because he's a boy, but they try to make me dull and stupid and foolish all because I'm a girl. I won't have it like that and it makes them angry – "
"Oh, well, we'll have fun together, you and I," returned Ordway, with a sinking heart, "but you must wait a bit till I catch up with you. Don't be in a precious hurry, if you please."
"Shall we have a good time, then? Shall we?" she persisted, delighted, kissing him with her warm mouth until he was dazzled by her beauty, her fascination, her ardent vitality. "And you will do just what I wish, won't you?" she whispered in his ear as she hung on his shoulder, "you will be good and kind always? and you will make them leave me alone about Geoffrey Heath?"
"About Geoffrey Heath?" he repeated, and grew suddenly serious.
"Oh, he's rich and he's fun, too," she responded irritably. "He has asked me to ride one of his horses – the most beautiful chestnut mare in the world – but mamma scolds me about it because she says he's not nice and that he did something once years ago about cards. As if I cared about cards!"
By the fear that had gripped him he could judge the strength of her hold on his heart. "Alice, be careful – promise me to be careful!" he entreated.
At his words he felt her arms relax from their embrace, and she seemed instantly to turn to marble upon his breast. "Oh, you're just like the others now. I knew you would be!" she exclaimed, as she drew away from him.
Before the coldness of her withdrawal he felt that his will went out of him; and in one despairing flight of imagination he saw what the loss of her affection would mean now in his life. An emotion which he knew to be weakness pervaded not only his heart, but his soul and his senses and the remotest fibre of his physical being. "Whatever comes I shall always stand by you, Alice," he said.
Though she appeared to be mollified by his subjection, the thin almost imperceptible furrows caused by the moment's anger, were still visible between her eyebrows. There was a certain fascination, he found, in watching these marks of age or of experience come and go on her fresh, childlike forehead, with its lustrous pallor, from which her splendid dark hair rolled back, touched with light, like a moonlit cloud. It was a singular characteristic of her beauty that its appeal was rather to the imagination than to the eye, and the moments, perhaps, when she dazzled least were those in which she conquered most through her enigmatical charm.
"You will buy some clothes, first of all, will you not?" she said, when, having finished his breakfast, he rose from the table and went out into the hall.
He met her eyes laughing, filled with happiness at the playful authority she assumed, and yet fearful still lest some incautious word of his should bring out those fine nervous wrinkles upon her forehead.
"Give me a week and I'll promise you a fashion plate," he responded gaily, kissing his hand to her as he went down the steps, and, under the trailing rose creepers at the gate, out into the street.
Rain had fallen in the night, and the ground was covered with shining puddles beneath which a few autumn leaves showed drenched and beaten. From the golden and red maples above a damp odour was wafted down into his face by the October wind, which now rose and now died away with a gentle sound. In the pale sunshine, which had not yet drained the moisture from the bricks, a wonderful freshness seemed to emanate from the sky and the earth and the white-pillared houses.
As he approached the corner, he heard his name called in a clear emphatic voice from the opposite sidewalk, and turning his head, he saw hastening toward him, a little elderly lady in a black silk gown trimmed heavily with bugles. As she neared him, followed by a young Negro maid bearing a market basket filled with vegetables, he recognised her as an intimate friend of his mother's, whom he had known familiarly in his childhood as "Aunt Lucy." It seemed so long now since his mother's death that he was attacked by a ghostly sensation, as if he were dreaming over his past life, while he stood face to face with the old lady's small soldierly figure and listened to the crisp, emphatic tones in which she welcomed him back to Botetourt. He remembered his frequent visits to her solemn old house, which she kept so dark that he had always stumbled over the two embroidered ottomans on the parlour hearth. He recalled the smell of spices which had hung about her storeroom, and the raspberry preserves which she had never failed to give him out of a blue china jar.
"Why, my dear, blessed child, it's such a pleasure to have you back!" she exclaimed now with an effusion which he felt to be the outward veil of some hidden embarrassment. "You must come sometimes and let me talk to you about your mother. I knew your mother so well – I was one of her bridesmaids."
Seizing his arm in her little firm, clawlike hands, she assured him with animation of her delight at his return, alluding in a shaking voice to his mother, and urging him to come to sit with her whenever he could stand the gloom of her empty house.
"And you will give me raspberry preserves out of the blue china jar?" he asked, laughing, "and let me feed crackers to the green parrot?"
"What a boy! What a boy!" she returned. "You remember everything. The parrot is dead – my poor Polly! – but there is a second."
Her effusiveness, her volubility, which seemed to him to be the result of concealed embarrassment, produced in him presently a feeling of distrust, almost of resentment, and he remembered the next instant that, in his childhood, she had been looked upon as a creature of uncontrolled charitable impulses. Upon the occasion of his last meeting with her was she not hastening upon some ministering errand to the city gaol? At the casual recollection an unreasoning bitterness awoke in his mind; her reiterated raptures fell with a strange effect of irritation upon his ears; and he knew now that he could never bring himself to enter her house again, that he could never accept her preserved raspberries out of the blue china jar. Her reception of him, he saw, was but a part of the general reception of Botetourt. Like her the town would be voluble, unnatural, overdone in its kindness, hiding within itself a furtive constraint as if it addressed its speeches to the sensitive sufferer from some incurable malady. The very tenderness, the exaggerated sympathy in its manner would hardly have been different, he understood, if he had been recently discharged as harmless, yet half-distraught, from an asylum for the insane.
As the days went on this idea, instead of dissolving, became unalterably lodged in his brain. Gradually he retreated further and further into himself, until the spiritual isolation in which he lived appeared to him more and more like the isolation of the prison. His figure had become a familiar one in the streets of Botetourt, yet he lived bodily among the people without entering into their lives or sharing in any degree the emotions that moved their hearts. Only in periods of sorrow did he go willingly into the houses of those of his own class, though he had found a way from the beginning to reach the poor, the distressed, or the physically afflicted. His tall, slightly stooping figure, in its loose black clothes, his dark head, with the thick locks of iron gray hair upon the temples, his sparkling blue eyes, his bright, almost boyish smile, and the peculiar, unforgettable charm of his presence – these were the things which those in sickness or poverty began to recognise and to look for. In his own home he lived, except for the fitful tenderness of Alice, as much apart as he felt himself to be in the little town. They were considerate of him, but their consideration, he knew, contained an ineradicable suspicion, and in the house as outside, he was surrounded by the watchful regard that is given to the infirm or the mentally diseased. He read this in Lydia's gently averted eyes; he felt it in Richard Ordway's constrained manner; he detected it even in the silent haste with which the servants fulfilled his slightest wish.
His work in his uncle's office, he had soon found to be of the most mechanical character, a mere pretext to give him daily employment, and he told himself, in a moment of bitterness that it was convincing proof of the opinion which the older man must hold of his honesty or of his mental capacity. It became presently little more than a hopeless round to him – this morning walk through the sunny streets, past the ivied walls of the old church, to the clean, varnish scented office, where he sat, until the luncheon hour, under the hard, though not unkind, eyes of the man who reminded him at every instant of his dead father. And the bitterest part of it, after all, was that the closer he came to the character of Richard Ordway, the profounder grew his respect for his uncle's unwavering professional honour. The old man would have starved, he knew, rather than have held back a penny that was not legally his own or have owed a debt that he felt had begun to weigh, however lightly, upon his conscience. Yet this lawyer of scrupulous rectitude was the husband, his nephew suspected, of a neglected, a wretchedly unhappy wife – a small, nervous creature, whom he had married, shortly after the death of his first wife, some twenty years ago. The secret of this unhappiness Daniel had discovered almost by intuition on the day of his father's funeral, when he had looked up suddenly in the cemetery to find his uncle's wife regarding him with a pair of wonderful, pathetic eyes, which seemed to gaze at him sadly out of a blue mist. So full of sympathy and understanding was her look that the memory of it had returned to him more than a year later, and had caused him to stop at her gate one November afternoon as he was returning from his office work. After an instant's pause, and an uncertain glance at the big brick house with its clean white columns, he ascended the steps and rang the bell for the first time since his boyhood.
The house was one of the most charming in Botetourt, but as he followed the servant down the hall to the library, it seemed to him that all these high, imposing walls, with their fine white woodwork, enclosed but so much empty space to fill with loneliness. His uncle had no children, and the sad, fair-haired little wife appeared to be always alone and always suffering.
She was seated now in a low rocking-chair beside the window, and as she turned her head at his entrance, he could see, through the lace curtains, a few pale November leaves, which fluttered down from an elm tree beside the porch. When she looked at him he noticed that her eyes were large and beautiful and of a changeable misty colour which appeared now gray, now violet.
"It is so good of you, Daniel," she said, in a soft, grateful voice, removing her work-basket from the chair at her side so that he might come within the reach of her short-sighted gaze.
"I've wanted to come ever since I saw you for the first time after my return," he answered cheerfully. "It is strange, isn't it? – that I hardly remember you when I lived here. You were always ill, were you not?"
"Yes, ill almost always," she replied, smiling as she met his glance. "When you were married I remember I couldn't go to the wedding because I had been in bed for three months. But that's all over now," she added, fearing to produce in him a momentary depression. "I am well again, you see, so the past doesn't matter."
"The past doesn't matter," he repeated in a low voice, struck by the words as if they held more than their surface meaning for his ears.
She nodded gravely. "How can it matter if one is really happy at last."
"And you are happy at last?"
As he watched her it seemed to him that a pale flame burned in her face, tinging its sallow wanness with a golden light. "I am at peace and is that not happiness?" she asked.
"But you were sad once – that day in the cemetery? I felt it."
"That was while I was still struggling," she answered, "and it always hurts one to struggle. I wanted happiness – I kept on wanting it even after I ceased to believe in its existence. I fought very hard – oh, desperately hard – but now I have learned that the only way to get anything is to give it up. Happiness is like everything else, it is only when one gives it back to God that one really possesses it."
He had never seen a face in which the soul spoke so clearly, and her look rather than her words came to him like the touch of divine healing.
"When I saw you standing beside your father's grave, I knew that you were just where I had been for so many years – that you were still telling your self that things were too hard, that they were unendurable. I had been through it all, you see, so I understood."
"But how could you know the bitterness, the shame of feeling that it was all the result of my own mistake – of my own sin."
Taking his hand in hers, she sat for a moment in silence with her ecstatic gaze fixed on his face. "I know that in spite of your sin you are better than they are," she said at last, "because your sin was on the outside – a thing to be sloughed off and left far behind, while their self-righteousness is of their very souls – "
"Oh, hush, hush," he interrupted sternly, "they have forgiven me for what I did, that is enough."
"Sixteen years ago," she returned, dropping her voice, "my husband forgave me in the same way, and he has never forgotten it."
At his start of surprise, he felt that she clung the more closely to the hand she held. "Oh, it wasn't so big a thing," she went on, "I had been married to him for five years, and I was very unhappy when I met someone who seemed to understand and to love me. For a time I was almost insane with the wonder and delight of it – I might have gone away with him – with the other – in my first rapture, had not Richard found it all out two days before. He behaved very generously – he forgave me. I should have been happier," she added a little wistfully, "if he had not."
As she broke off trembling, he lifted her hand to his lips, kissing it with tenderness, almost with passion. "Then that was the beginning of your unhappiness – of your long illness!" he exclaimed.
She nodded smiling, while a tear ran slowly down her flushed cheek. "He forgave me sixteen years ago and he has never allowed me to forget it one hour – hardly a minute since."
"Then you understand how bitter – how intolerable it is!" he returned in an outbreak of anger.
"I thought I knew," she replied more firmly than he had ever heard her speak, "but I learned afterwards that it was a mistake. I see now that they are kind – that they are good in their way, and I love them for it. It isn't our way, I know, but the essence of charity, after all, is to learn to appreciate goodness in all its expressions, no matter how different they may be from our own. Even Richard is kind – he means everything for the best, and it is only his nature that is straightened – that is narrow – not his will. I felt bitterly once, but not now because I am so happy at last."
Beyond the pale outline of her head, he saw the elm leaves drifting slowly down, and beyond them the low roofs and the dim church spires of the quiet town. Was it possible that even here he might find peace in the heart of the storm?
"It is only since I have given my happiness back to God that it is really mine," she said, and it seemed to him again that her soul gathered brightness and shone in her face.
