Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Ancient Law
CHAPTER V
The Will of Alice
WHEN he reached home the servant who helped him out of his overcoat, informed him at the same time that his uncle awaited him in the library. With the news a strange chill came over him as if he had left something warm and bright in the November sunset outside. For an instant it seemed to him that he must turn back – that he could not go forward. Then with a gesture of assent, he crossed the hall and entered the library, where he found Lydia and the children as well as Richard Ordway.
The lamps were unlit, and the mellow light of the sunset fell through the interlacing half-bared boughs of the golden poplar beyond the window. This light, so rich, so vivid, steeped the old mahogany furniture and the faded family portraits in a glow which seemed to Daniel to release, for the first time, some latent romantic spirit that had dwelt in the room. In the midst of this glamor of historic atmosphere, the four figures, gathered so closely together against the clear space of the window, with its network of poplar leaves beyond the panes, borrowed for the moment a strange effectiveness of pose, a singular intensity of outline. Not only the figures, but the very objects by which they were surrounded appeared to vibrate in response to a tragic impulse.
Richard Ordway was standing upon the hearthrug, his fine head and profile limned sharply against the pale brown wall at his side. His right hand was on Lydia's shoulder, who sat motionless, as if she had fallen there, with her gentle, flower-like head lying upon the arm of her son. Before them, as before her judges, Alice was drawn to her full height, her girlish body held tense and quivering, her splendid hair loosened about her forehead, her trembling mouth making a violent contrast to the intense pallor of her face.
Right or wrong Ordway saw only that she was standing alone, and as he crossed the threshold, he turned toward her and held out his hand.
"Alice," he said softly, as if the others were not present. Without raising her eyes, she shrank from him in the direction of Richard Ordway, as if shielding herself behind the iron fortitude of the man whom she so bitterly disliked.
"Alice has been out driving alone with Geoffrey Heath all the afternoon," said Lydia in her clear, calm voice. "We had forbidden it, but she says that you knew of it and did not object to her going."
With the knowledge of the lie, Ordway grew red with humiliation, while his gaze remained fastened on the figure in the carpet at Alice's feet. He could not look at her, for he felt that her shame was scorching him like a hot wind. To look at her at the moment meant to convict her, and this his heart told him he could never do. He was conscious of the loud ticking of the clock, of the regular tapping of Richard's fingers upon the marble mantel-piece, of the fading light on the poplar leaves beyond the window, and presently of the rapid roll of a carriage that went by in the street. Each of these sounds produced in him a curious irritation like a physical smart, and he felt again something of the dumb resentment with which he had entered his wife's dressing-room on the morning of his arrest. Then a smothered sob reached his ear, and Alice began to tremble from head to foot at his side. Lifting his eyes at last, he made a step forward and drew her into his arms.
"Was it so very wrong? I am sorry," he said to Lydia over the bowed head of their child. Until the words were uttered, and he felt Alice's tense body relax in his arms, he had not realised that in taking sides with her, he was not only making himself responsible for her fault, he was, in truth, actually sharing in the lie that she had spoken. The choice was an unconscious one, yet he knew even in the ensuing moment of his clearer judgment that it had been inevitable – that from the first instant, when he had paused speechless upon the threshold, there had been open to him no other course.
"I am sorry if it was wrong," he repeated, turning his glance now upon Richard Ordway.
"Do you know anything of Geoffrey Heath? Have you heard him spoken of by decent people since you have been in Botetourt?" asked the old man sternly.
"I have heard little of him," answered Daniel, "and that little was far from good. We are sorry, Alice, are we not? It must not happen again if we can help it."
"It has happened before," said Lydia, lifting her head from Dick's arm, where it had lain. "It was then that I forbade her to see him alone."
"I did not know," responded Daniel, "but she will do as you wish hereafter. Will you not, Alice?"
"How does it concern them? What have they to do with me?" demanded Alice, turning in his arms to face her mother with a defiant and angry look, "they have never cared for me – they have always preferred Dick – always, even when I was a little child."
He saw Lydia grow white and hide her drooping face again on Dick's shoulder. "You are unjust to your mother, Alice," he said gravely, "she has loved you always, and I have loved you."
"Oh, you are different – I would die for you!" she exclaimed passionately, as she wept on his breast.
While he stood there holding her in his arms, it seemed to him that he could feel like an electric current the wave of feeling which had swept Alice and himself together. The inheritance which was his had descended to her also with its keen joys and its sharp anguish. Even the road which he had travelled so lately in weariness was the one upon which her brave young feet were now set. Not his alone, but his child's also, was this mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion.
"If you will leave me alone with her, I think I can make her understand what you wish," he said, lifting his eyes from the dark head on his breast to Lydia, who had risen and was standing before him with her pensive, inquiring gaze fixed on his face. "She is like me," he added abruptly, "in so many ways."
"Yes, she is like you, I have always thought so," returned Lydia, quietly.
"And for that reason, perhaps, you have never quite understood her," he responded.
She bowed her head as if too polite or too indifferent to dissent from his words; and then slipping her hand through Richard Ordway's arm, she stood waiting patiently while the old man delivered his last bit of remonstrance.
"Try to curb her impulses, Daniel, or you will regret it."
He went out, still holding Lydia's hand, and a moment afterwards, when Daniel looked up at the sound of the hall door closing quickly, he saw that Dick also had vanished, and that he was alone in the library with Alice, who still sobbed on his breast.
A few moments before it had seemed to him that he needed only to be alone with her to make all perfectly clear between them. But when the others had passed out, and the door had closed at last on the empty silence in which they stood, he found that the words which he had meant to utter had vanished hopelessly from his mind. He had said to Lydia that Alice was like himself, but there had never been an hour in his life when his hatred of a lie had not been as intense, as uncompromising, as it was to-day. And this lie which she had spoken appeared to divide them now like a drawn sword.
"Alice," he said, breaking with an effort through the embarrassment which had held him speechless, "will you give me your word of honour that you will never tell me a falsehood again?"
She stirred slightly in his arms, and he felt her body grow soft and yielding. "I didn't to you," she answered, "oh, I wouldn't to you."
"Not to the others then. Will you promise?"
Her warm young arm tightened about his neck. "I didn't mean to – I didn't mean to," she protested between her sobs, "but they forced me to do it. It was more than half their fault – they are so – so hateful! I tried to think of something else, but there was nothing to say, and I knew you would stand by me – "
"You have almost broken my heart," he answered, "for you have lied, Alice, you have lied."
She lifted her head and the next instant he felt her mouth on his cheek, "I wish I were dead! I have hurt you and I wish I were dead!" she cried.
"It is not hurting me that I mind – you may do that and welcome. It is hurting yourself, my child, my Alice," he answered; and pressing her upturned face back on his arm, he bent over her in an ecstasy of emotion, calling her his daughter, his darling, the one joy of his life. The iron in his nature had melted beneath her warm touch, and he felt again the thrill, half agony, half rapture, with which he had received her into his arms on the day of her birth. That day was nearer to him now than was the minute in which he stood, and he could trace still the soft, babyish curves in the face which nestled so penitently on his arm. His very fear for her moved him into a deeper tenderness, and the appeal she made to him now was one with the appeal of her infancy, for its power lay in her weakness, not in her strength.
"Be truthful with me, Alice," he said, "and remember that nothing can separate me from you."
An hour later when he parted from her and went upstairs, he heard Lydia's voice calling to him through her half open door, and turning obediently, he entered her bedroom for the first time since the night of his return. Now as then the luxury, the softness, of his wife's surroundings produced in him a curious depression, an enervation of body; and he stood for an instant vainly striving to close his nostrils against the delicious perfume which floated from her lace-trimmed dressing-table.
Lydia, still in her light mourning gown, was standing, when he entered, before a little marquetry desk in one corner, her eyes on an open letter which she appeared to have left partially unread.
"I wanted to tell you, Daniel," she began at once, approaching the point with a directness which left him no time to wonder as to the purpose of her summons, "that Alice's intimacy with Geoffrey Heath has already been commented upon in Botetourt. Cousin Paulina has actually written to me for an explanation."
"Cousin Paulina?" he repeated vaguely, and remembered immediately that the lady in question was his wife's one rich relation – an elderly female who was greatly respected for her fortune, which she spent entirely in gratifying her personal passion for trinkets. "Oh, yes," he added flippantly, "the old lady who used to look like a heathen idol got up for the sacrifice."
He felt that his levity was out of place, yet he went on rashly because he knew that he was doomed forever to appear at a disadvantage in Lydia's presence. She would never believe in him – his best motives would wear always to her the covering of hypocrisy; and the very hopelessness of ever convincing her goaded him at times into the reckless folly of despair.
"She writes me that people are talking of it," she resumed, sweetly, as if his untimely mirth had returned still-born into the vacancy from which it emerged.
"Who is this Geoffrey Heath you speak of so incessantly?" he demanded. "There was a Heath, I remember, who had a place near us in the country, and kept a barroom or a butcher's shop or something in town."
"That was the father," replied Lydia, with a shudder which deepened the slightly scornful curve of her lip. "He was a respectable old man, I believe, and made his fortune quite honestly, however it was. It was only after his son began to grow up that he became socially ambitious – "
"And is that all you have against him?"
"Oh, there's nothing against the old man – nothing at least except the glaring bad taste he showed in that monstrous house he built in Henry Street. He's dead now, you know."
"Then the son has all the money and the house, too, hasn't he?"
"All he hasn't wasted, yes."
As she spoke she subsided into a chair, with a graceful, eddying motion of her black chiffon draperies, and continued the conversation with an expression of smiling weariness. All her attitudes were effective, and he was struck, while he stood, embarrassed and awkward, before her, by the plaintive grace that she introduced into her smallest gesture. Though he was aware that he saw her now too clearly for passion, the appeal of her delicate fairness went suddenly to his head.
"Then there's not much to be said for the chap, I suppose?" he asked abruptly, fearing the prolonged strain of the silence.
"Very little for him, but a good deal about him, according to Cousin Paulina. It seems that three years ago he was sent away from the University for something disgraceful – cheating at cards, I believe; and since then he has been conspicuous chiefly because of his low associations. How Alice met him, I could never understand – I can't understand now."
"And do you think she cares for him – that she even imagines that she does?" he demanded, while his terror rose in his throat and choked back his words.
"She will not confess it – how could she?" replied Lydia wearily, "I believe it is only wildness, recklessness, lack of discipline that prompts her. Yet he is good-looking – in a vulgar way," she added in disgust, "and Alice has always seemed to like vulgar things."
Her eyes rested on him, not directly, but as if they merely included him in their general pensive survey of the world; yet he read the accusation in her gentle avoidance of his gaze as plainly as she had uttered in it her clear, flute-like tones.
"It is very important," she went on, "that she should be curbed in her impulses, in her extravagance. Already her bills are larger than mine and yet she is never satisfied with the amount of her allowance. We can do nothing with her, Uncle Richard and I, but she seems to yield, in a measure, to your influence, and we thought – we hoped – "
"I will – I will," he answered. "I will give my life to help her if need be. But Lydia," he broke out more earnestly, "you must stand by and aid me for her sake, for the sake of our child, we must work together – "
Half rising in her chair, she looked at him fixedly a moment, while he saw her pupils dilate almost as if she were in physical fear.
"But what can I do? I have done all I could," she protested, with an injured look. By this look, without so much as a gesture, she put the space of the whole room between them. The corners of her mouth quivered and drooped, and he watched the pathos creep back into her light blue eyes. "I have given up my whole life to the children since – since – "
She broke off in a frightened whisper, but the unfinished sentence was more expressive than a volley of reproaches would have been. There was something in her thoughts too horrible to put into words, and this something of which she could not bring herself to speak, would have had no place in her existence except for him. He felt cowed suddenly, as if he had been physically beaten and thrust aside.
"You have been very brave – I know – I appreciate it all," he said, and while he spoke he drew away from her until he stood with his back against one of the amber satin curtains. Instinctively he put out his hand for support, and as it closed over the heavy draperies, he felt that the hard silken texture made his flesh creep. The physical sensation, brief as it was, recalled in some strange way the effect upon him of Lydia's smooth and shining surface when he had knelt before her on the night of his homecoming. Yet it was with difficulty even now that he could free himself from the conviction that her emotional apathy was but one aspect of innocence. Would he admit to-day that what he had once worshipped as purity of soul was but the frost of an unnatural coldness of nature? All at once, as he looked at her, he found himself reminded by her calm forehead, her classic features, of the sculptured front of a marble tomb which he had seen in some foreign gallery. Was there death, after all, not life hidden for him in her plaintive beauty? The next instant, as he watched her, he told himself that such questions belonged to the evil promptings of his own nature.
"I realise all that you have been, all that you have suffered," he said at last, aware that his words sounded hysterical in the icy constraint which surrounded them.
When his speech was out, his embarrassment became so great that he found himself presently measuring the distance which divided him from the closed door. With a last effort of will, he went toward her and stretched out his hand in a gesture that was almost one of entreaty.
"Lydia," he asked, "is it too painful for you to have me here? Would it be any better for you if I went away?"
As he moved toward her she bent over with a nervous, mechanical movement to arrange her train, and before replying to his question, she laid each separate fold in place. "Why, by no means," she answered, looking up with her conventional smile. "It would only mean – wouldn't it? – that people would begin to wonder all over again?"
CHAPTER VI
The Iron Bars
AS the days went on it seemed to him that his nature, repressed in so many other directions, was concentrated at last in a single channel of feeling. The one outlet was his passion for Alice, and nothing that concerned her was too remote or too trivial to engross him – her clothes, her friendships, the particular chocolate creams for which she had once expressed a preference. To fill her life with amusements that would withdraw her erring impulses from Geoffrey Heath became for a time his absorbing purpose.
At first he told himself in a kind of rapture that success was apparent in his earliest and slightest efforts. For weeks Alice appeared to find interest and animation in his presence. She flattered, scolded, caressed and tyrannised, but with each day, each hour, she grew nearer his heart and became more firmly interwoven into his life.
Then suddenly a change came over her, and one day when she had been kissing him with "butterfly kisses" on his forehead, he felt her suddenly grow restless and draw back impatiently as if seeking a fresh diversion. A bored look had come into her eyes and he saw the three little wrinkles gather between her eyebrows.
"Alice," he said, alarmed by the swift alteration, "are you tired of the house? Shall we ride together?"
She shook her head, half pettishly, half playfully, "I can't – I've an engagement," she responded.
"An engagement?" he repeated inquiringly. "Why, I thought we were always to ride when it was fair."
"I promised one of the girls to go to tea with her," she repeated, after a minute. "It isn't a real tea, but she wanted to talk to me, so I said I would go."
"Well, I'm glad you did – don't give up the girls," he answered, relieved at once by the explanation.
In the evening when she returned, shortly after dark, "one of the girls" as she called laughingly from the library, had come home for the night with her. Ordway heard them chatting gayly together, but, when he went in for a moment before going upstairs to dress, they lapsed immediately into an embarrassed silence. Alice's visitor was a pretty, gray-eyed, flaxen-haired young woman named Jenny Lane, who smiled in a frightened way and answered "Yes – no," when he spoke to her, as if she offered him the choice of his favourite monosyllable from her lips. Clearly the subject which animated them was one in which, even as Alice's father, he could have no share.
For weeks after this it seemed to him that a silence fell gradually between them – that silence of the heart which is so much more oppressive than the mere outward silence of the lips. It was not, he told himself again and again, that there had come a perceptible change in her manner. She still met him at breakfast with her flower and her caress, still flung herself into his arms at unexpected moments, still coaxed and upbraided in her passionate, childish voice. Nevertheless, the difference was there, and he recognised it with a pang even while he demanded of himself in what breathless suspension of feeling it could consist? Her caresses were as frequent, but the fervour, the responsiveness, had gone out of them; and he was brought at last face to face with the knowledge that her first vivid delight in him had departed forever. The thing which absorbed her now was a thing in which he had no share, no recognition; and true to her temperament, her whole impulsive being had directed itself into this new channel. "She is young and it is only natural that she should wish to have her school friends about her," he thought with a smile.
In the beginning it had been an easy matter to efface his personality and stand out of the way of Alice's life, but as the weeks drew on into months and the months into a year, he found that he had been left aside not only by his daughter, but by the rest of the household as well. In his home he felt himself to exist presently in an ignored, yet obvious way like a familiar piece of household furniture, which is neither commented upon nor wilfully overlooked. It would have occasioned, he supposed, some vague exclamations of surprise had he failed to appear in his proper place at the breakfast table, but as long as his accustomed seat was occupied all further use for his existence seemed at an end. He was not necessary, he was not even enjoyed, but he was tolerated.
Before this passive indifference, which was worse to him than direct hostility, he found that his sympathies, his impulses, and even his personality, were invaded by an apathy that paralysed the very sources of his will. He beheld himself as the cause of the gloom, the suspicion, the sadness, that surrounded him, and as the cause, too, of Alice's wildness and of the pathetic loneliness in which Lydia lived. But for him, he told himself, there would have been no shadow upon the household; and his wife's pensive smile was like a knife in his heart whenever he looked up from his place at the table and met it unawares. At Tappahannock he had sometimes believed that his past was a skeleton which he had left behind; here he had grown, as the years went by, to think of it as a coffin which had shut over him and from which there was no escape. And with the realisation of this, a blighting remorse, a painful humbleness awoke in his soul, and was revealed outwardly in his face, in his walk, in his embarrassed movements. As he passed up and down the staircase, he went softly lest the heavy sound of his footsteps should become an annoyance to Lydia's sensitive ears. His manner lost its boyish freedom and grew awkward and nervous, and when he gave an order to the servants it seemed to him that a dreadful timidity sounded in his voice. He began to grow old suddenly in a year, before middle age had as yet had time to soften the way.
Looking in the glass one morning, when he had been less than three years in Botetourt, he discovered that the dark locks upon his forehead had turned almost white, and that his shoulders were losing gradually their youthful erectness of carriage. And it seemed to him that the courage with which he might have once broken away and begun anew had departed from him in this new and paralysing humility, which was like the humility of a helpless and burdensome old age.
After a day of peculiar loneliness, he was returning from Richard's office on this same afternoon, when a voice called to him from beneath the fringed linen cover of a little phaeton which had driven up to the crossing. Turning in surprise he found Aunt Lucy holding the reins over a fat pony, while she sat very erect, with her trim, soldierly figure emerging from a mountain of brown-paper parcels.
"This is the very chance I've been looking for, Daniel Ordway!" she exclaimed, in her emphatic voice. "Do you know, sir, that you have not entered my house once in the last three years?"
"Yes," he replied, "I know – but the fact is that I have hardly been anywhere since I came back."
"And why is that?" she demanded sharply.
He shook his head, "I don't know. Perhaps you can tell me."
"Yes, I can tell you," she snapped back, with a rudeness which, in some singular way, seemed to him kinder than the studied politeness that he had met. "It's because, in spite of all you've gone through, you are still more than half a fool, Daniel Ordway."
"Oh, you're right, I dare say," he acknowledged bitterly.
With a frown, which struck him curiously as the wrong side of a smile, she nodded her head while she made room for him among the brown-paper parcels on the low linen covered seat of the phaeton. "Come in here, I want to talk to you," she said, "there's a little matter about which I should like your help."
"My help?" he repeated in astonishment, as a sensation of pleasure shot through his heart. It was so seldom that anybody asked his help in Botetourt. "Is the second green parrot dead, and do you want me to dig the grave?" he inquired, checking his unseemly derision as he met her warning glance.
"Polly is perfectly well," she returned, rapping him smartly upon the knee with her little tightly closed black fan which she carried as if it were a baton, "but I do not like Richard Ordway."
The suddenness of her announcement, following so inappropriately her comment upon the health of the green parrot, caused him to start from his seat in the amazement with which he faced her. Then he broke into an echo of his old boyish merriment. "You don't?" he retorted flippantly. "Well, Lydia does."
Her eyes blinked rapidly in the midst of her wrinkled little face, and bending over she flicked the back of the fat pony gently with the end of the whip. "Oh, I'm not sure I like Lydia," she responded, "though, of course, Lydia is a saint."
"Yes, Lydia is a saint," he affirmed.
"Well, I'm not talking about Lydia," she resumed presently, "though there's something I've always had a burning curiosity to find out." For an instant she held back, and then made her charge with a kind of desperate courage. "Is she really a saint?" she questioned, "or is it only the way that she wears her hair?"
Her question was so like the spoken sound of his own dreadful suspicion that it took away his breath completely, while he stared at her with a gasp that was evenly divided between a laugh and a groan.
"Oh, she's a saint, there's no doubt of that," he insisted loyally.
"Then I'll let her rest," she replied, "and I'm glad, heaven knows, to have my doubts at an end. But where do you imagine that I am taking you?"
"For a drive, I hope," he answered, smiling.
"It's not," she rejoined grimly, "it's for a visit."
"A visit?" he repeated, starting up with the impulse to jump over the moving wheel, "but I never visit."
She reached out her wiry little fingers, which clung like a bird's claw, and drew him by force back upon the seat.
"I am taking you to see Adam Crowley," she explained, "do you remember him?"
"Crowley?" he repeated the name as he searched his memory. "Why, yes, he was my father's clerk for forty years, wasn't he? I asked when I came home what had become of him. So he is still living?"
"He was paralysed in one arm some years ago, and it seems he has lost all his savings in some investment your father had advised him to make. Of course, there was no legal question of a debt to him, but until the day your father died he had always made ample provision for the old man's support. Crowley had always believed that the allowance would be continued – that there would be a mention made of him in the will."
"And there was none?"
"It was an oversight, Crowley is still convinced, for he says he had a distinct promise."
"Then surely my uncle will fulfil the trust? He is an honourable man."
She shook her head. "I don't know that he is so much 'honourable' as he is 'lawful.' The written obligation is the one which binds him like steel, but I don't think he cares whether a thing is right or wrong, just or unjust, as long as it is the law. The letter holds him, but I doubt if he has ever even felt the motion of the spirit. If he ever felt it," she concluded with grim humour, "he would probably try to drive it out with quinine."
"Are we going there now – to see Crowley, I mean?"
"If you don't mind. Of course there may be nothing that you can do – but I thought that you might, perhaps, speak to Richard about it."
He shook his head, "No, I can't speak to my uncle, though I think you are unjust to him," he answered, after a pause in which the full joy of her appeal had swept through his heart, "but I have an income of my own, you know, and out of this, I can help Crowley."
For an instant she did not reply, and he felt her thin, upright little figure grow rigid at his side. Then turning with a start, she laid her hand, in its black lace mitten, upon his knee.
"O my boy, you are your mother all over again!" she said.
After this they drove on in silence down one of the shaded streets, where rows of neat little houses, packed together like pasteboard boxes, were divided from the unpaved sidewalks by low whitewashed fences. At one of these doors the phaeton presently drew up, and dropping the reins on the pony's back, Aunt Lucy alighted with a bound between the wheels, and began with Ordway's help, to remove the paper parcels from the seat. When their arms were full, she pushed open the gate, and led him up the short walk to the door where an old man, wearing a knitted shawl, sat in an invalid's chair beyond the threshold. At the sound of their footsteps Crowley turned on them a cheerful wrinkled face which was brightened by a pair of twinkling black eyes that gave him an innocent and merry look.
"I knew you'd come around," he said, smiling with his toothless mouth like an amiable infant. "Matildy has been complaining that the coffee gave out at breakfast, but I said 'twas only a sign that you were coming. Everything bad is the sign of something good, that's what I say."
"I've brought something better than coffee to-day, Adam," replied Aunt Lucy, seating herself upon the doorstep. "This is Daniel Ordway – do you remember him?"
The old man bent forward, without moving his withered hand, which lay outstretched on the cushioned arm of the chair, and it seemed to Ordway that the smiling black eyes pierced to his heart. "Oh, I remember him, I remember him," said Crowley, "poor boy – poor boy."
