Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Ancient Law
CHAPTER XI
Bullfinch's Hollow
AT five o'clock Ordway followed the uneven board walk to the end of the main street, and then turning into a little footpath which skirted the railroad track, he came presently to the abandoned field known in Tappahannock as Bullfinch's Hollow. Beyond a disorderly row of negro hovels, he found a small frame cottage, which he recognised as the house to which he had brought Kit Berry on the night when he had dragged him bodily from Kelly's saloon. In response to his knock the door was opened by the same weeping woman – a small withered person, with snapping black eyes and sparse gray hair brushed fiercely against her scalp, where it clung so closely that it outlined the bones beneath. At sight of Ordway a smile curved her sunken mouth; and she led the way through the kitchen to the door of a dimly lighted room at the back, where a boy of eighteen years tossed deliriously on a pallet in one corner. It was poverty in its direst, its most abject, results, Ordway saw at once as his eyes travelled around the smoke stained, unplastered walls and rested upon the few sticks of furniture and the scant remains of a meal on the kitchen table. Then he looked into Mrs. Berry's face and saw that she must have lived once amid surroundings far less wretched than these.
"Kit was taken bad with fever three days ago," she said, "an' the doctor told me this mornin' that the po' boy's in for a long spell of typhoid. He's clean out of his head most of the time, but whenever he comes to himself he begs and prays me to send for you. Something's on his mind, but I can't make out what it is."
"May I see him now?" asked Ordway.
"I think he's wanderin', but I'll find out in a minute."
She went to the pallet and bending over the young man, whispered a few words in his ear, while her knotted hand stroked back the hair from his forehead. As Ordway's eyes rested on her thin shoulders under the ragged, half soiled calico dress she wore, he forgot the son in the presence of the older and more poignant tragedy of the mother's life. Yet all that he knew of her history was that she had married a drunkard and had brought a second drunkard into the world.
"He wants to speak to you, sir – he's come to," she said, returning to the doorway, and fixing her small black eyes upon Ordway's face. "You are the gentleman, ain't you, who got him to sign the pledge?"
Ordway nodded. "Did he keep it?"
Her sharp eyes filled with tears.
"He hasn't touched a drop for going on six weeks, sir, but he hadn't the strength to hold up without it, so the fever came on and wore him down." Swallowing a sob with a gulp, she wiped her eyes fiercely on the back of her hand. "He ain't much to look at now," she finished, divided between her present grief and her reminiscent pride, "but, oh, Mr. Smith, if you could have seen him as a baby! When he was a week old he was far and away the prettiest thing you ever laid your eyes on – not red, sir, like other children, but white as milk, with dimples at his knees and elbows. I've still got some of his little things – a dress he wore and a pair of knitted shoes – and it's them that make me cry, sir. I ain't grievin' for the po' boy in there that's drunk himself to death, but for that baby that used to be."
Still crying softly, she slunk out into the kitchen, while Ordway, crossing to the bed, stood looking down upon the dissipated features of the boy who lay there, with his matted hair tossed over his flushed forehead.
"I'm sorry to see you down, Kit. Can I do anything to help you?" he asked.
Kit opened his eyes with a start of recognition, and reaching out, gripped Ordway's wrist with his burning hand, while he threw off the ragged patchwork quilt upon the bed.
"I've something on my mind, and I want to get it off," he answered. "When it's once off I'll be better and get back my wits."
"Then get it off. I'm waiting."
"Do you remember the night in the bar-room?" demanded the boy in a whisper, "the time you came in through the window and took me home?"
"Go on," said Ordway.
"Well, I'd walked up the street behind you that afternoon when you left Baxter's, and I got drunk that night on a dollar I stole from you."
"But I didn't speak to you. I didn't even see you."
"Of course you didn't. If you had I couldn't have stolen it, but Baxter had just paid you and when you put your hand into your pocket to get out something, a dollar bill dropped on the walk."
"Go on."
"I picked it up and got drunk on it, there's nothing else. It was a pretty hard drunk, but before I got through you came in and dragged me home. Twenty cents were left in my pockets. Mother found the money and bought a fish for breakfast.
"Well, I did that much good at least," observed Ordway with a smile, "have you finished, Kit?"
"It's been on my mind," repeated Kit deliriously, "and I wanted to get it off."
"It's off now, my boy," said Ordway, picking up the ragged quilt from the floor and laying it across the other's feet, "and on the whole I'm glad you told me. You've done the straight thing, Kit, and I am proud of you."
"Proud of me?" repeated Kit, and fell to crying like a baby.
In a minute he grew delirious again, and Ordway, after bathing the boy's face and hands from a basin of water on a chair at the bedside, went into the kitchen in search of Mrs. Berry, whom he found weeping over a pair of baby's knitted shoes. The pathos of her grief bordered so closely upon the ridiculous that while he watched her he forced back the laugh upon his lips.
"Kit is worse again," he said. "Do you give him any medicine?"
Mrs. Berry struggled with difficulty to her feet, while her sobs changed into a low whimpering sound.
"Did you sit up with him last night?" asked Ordway, following her to the door.
"I've been up for three nights, sir. He has to have his face and hands bathed every hour."
"What about medicine and food?"
"The doctor gives him his medicine free, every drop of it, an' they let me have a can of milk every day from Cedar Hill. I used to live there as a girl, you know, my father was overseer in old Mr. Brooke's time – before he married Miss Emily's mother – "
Ordway cut short her reminiscences.
"Well, you must sleep to-night," he said authoritatively, "I'll come back in an hour and sit up with Kit. Where is your room?"
She pointed to a rickety flight of stairs which led to the attic above.
"Kit slept up there until he was taken ill," she answered. "He's been a hard son to me, sir, as his father was a hard husband because of drink, but to save the life of me I can't forgit how good he used to be when he warn't more'n a week old. Never fretted or got into tempers like other babies – "
Again Ordway broke in drily upon her wandering recollections.
"Now I'll go for an hour," he said abruptly, "and by the way, have you had supper or shall I bring you some groceries when I come?"
"There was a little milk left in the pitcher and I had a piece of cornbread, but – oh, Mr. Smith," her small black eyes snapped fiercely into his, "there are times when my mouth waters for a cup of coffee jest as po' Kit's does for whiskey."
"Then put the kettle on," returned Ordway, smiling, as he left the room.
It was past sunset when he returned, and he found Kit sleeping quietly under the effect of the medicine the doctor had just given him. Mrs. Berry had recovered sufficient spirit, not only to put the kettle on the stove, but to draw the kitchen table into the square of faint light which entered over the doorstep. The preparations for her supper had been made, he saw, with evident eagerness, and as he placed his packages upon the table, she fell upon them with an excited, childish curiosity. A few moments later the aroma of boiling coffee floated past him where he sat on the doorstep smoking his last pipe before going into the sick-room for the night. Turning presently he watched the old woman in amazement while she sat smacking her thin lips and jerking her shrivelled little hands over her fried bacon; and as he looked into her ecstatic face, he realised something of the intensity which enters into the scant enjoyments of the poor. The memory of his night in the Brookes' barn returned to him with the aroma of the coffee, and he understood for the first time that it is possible to associate a rapture with meat and drink. Then, in spite of his resolve to keep his face turned toward his future, he found himself contrasting the squalid shanty at his back with the luxurious surroundings amid which he had last watched all night by a sick-bed. He could see the rich amber-coloured curtains, the bowls of violets on the inlaid table between the open windows, the exquisite embroidered coverlet upon the bed, and the long pale braid of Lydia's hair lying across the lace ruffles upon her nightgown. Before his eyes was the sunken field filled with Negro hovels and refuse heaps in which lean dogs prowled snarling in search of bones; but his inward vision dwelt, in a luminous mist, on the bright room, scented with violets, where Lydia had slept with her baby cradled within her arm. He could see her arm still under the falling lace, round and lovely, with delicate blue veins showing beneath the inside curve.
In the midst of his radiant memory the acrid voice of Mrs. Berry broke with a shock, and turning quickly he found that his dream took instant flight before the aggressive actuality which she presented.
"I declare I believe I'd clean forgot how good things tasted," she remarked in the cheerful tones of one who is full again after having been empty.
Picking up a chip from the ground, Ordway began scraping carelessly at the red clay on his boots. "It smells rather nice anyway," he rejoined good-humouredly, and rising from the doorstep, he crossed the kitchen and sat down in the sagging split-bottomed chair beside the pallet.
At sunrise he left Kit, sleeping peacefully after a delirious night, and going out of doors for a breath of fresh air, stood looking wearily on the dismal prospect of Bullfinch's Hollow. The disorderly road, the dried herbage of the field, the Negro hovels, with pig pens for backyards, and the refuse heaps piled with tin cans, old rags and vegetable rinds, appeared to him now to possess a sordid horror which had escaped him under the merciful obscurity of the twilight. Even the sun, he thought, looked lean and shrunken, as it rose over the slovenly landscape.
With the first long breath he drew there was only dejection in his mental outlook; then he remembered the enraptured face of Mrs. Berry as she poured out her coffee, and he told himself that there were pleasures hardy enough to thrive and expand even in the atmosphere of Bullfinch's Hollow.
As there was no wood in the kitchen, he shouldered an old axe which he found leaning in one corner, and going to a wood-pile beyond the doorstep, split up the single rotting log lying upon a heap of mould. Returning with his armful of wood, he knelt on the hearth and attempted to kindle a blaze before the old woman should make her appearance from the attic. The sticks had just caught fire, when a shadow falling over him from the open door caused him to start suddenly to his feet.
"I beg your pardon," said a voice, "but I've brought some milk for Mrs. Berry."
At the words his face reddened as if from shame, and drawing himself to his full height, he stood, embarrassed and silent, in the centre of the room, while Emily Brooke crossed the floor and placed the can of milk she had brought upon the table.
"I didn't mean to interrupt you," she added cheerfully, "but there was no one else to come, so I had to ride over before breakfast. Is Kit better?"
"Yes," said Ordway, and to his annoyance he felt himself flush painfully at the sound of his own voice.
"You spent last night with him?" she inquired in her energetic tones.
"Yes."
As he stood there in his cheap clothes, with his dishevelled hair and his unwashed hands, she was struck by some distinction of personality, before which these surface roughnesses appeared as mere incidental things. Was it in his spare, weather-beaten face? Or was it in the peculiar contrast between his gray hair and his young blue eyes? Then her gaze fell on his badly made working clothes, worn threadbare in places, on his clean striped shirt, frayed slightly at the collar and cuffs, on his broken fingernails, and on the red clay still adhering to his country boots.
"I wonder why you do these things?" she asked so softly that the words hardly reached him. "I wonder why?"
Though she had expected no response to her question, to her surprise he answered almost impulsively as he stooped to pick up a bit of charred wood from the floor.
"Well, one must fill one's life, you know," he said. "I tried the other thing once but it didn't count – it was hardly better than this, when all is said."
"What 'other thing' do you mean?"
"When I spoke I was thinking of what people have got to call 'pleasure,'" he responded, "getting what one wants in life, or trying to get it and failing in the end."
"And did you fail?" she asked, with a simplicity which saved the blunt directness of the question.
He laughed. "Do you think if I had succeeded, I'd be splitting wood in Bullfinch's Hollow?"
"And you care nothing for Kit Berry?"
"Oh, I like him – he's an under dog."
"Then you are for the under dog, right or wrong, as I am?" she responded with a radiant look.
"Well, I don't know about that," he answered, "but I have at least a fellow feeling for him. I'm an under dog myself, you see."
"But you won't stay one long?"
"That's the danger. When I come out on top I'll doubtless stop splitting wood and do something worse."
"I don't believe it," she rejoined decisively. "You have never had a chance at the real thing before."
"You're right there," he admitted, "I had never seen the real thing in my life until I came to Tappahannock."
"Do you mind telling me," she asked, after an instant's hesitation, "why you came to Tappahannock? I can't understand why anyone should ever come here."
"I don't know about the others, but I came because my road led here. I followed my road."
"Not knowing where it would end?"
He laughed again. "Not caring where it would end."
Her charming boyish smile rippled across her lips.
"It isn't necessary that I should understand to be glad that you kept straight on," she said.
"But the end isn't yet," he replied, with a gaiety beneath which she saw the seriousness in his face. "It may lead me off again."
"To a better place I hope."
"Well, I suppose that would be easy to find," he admitted, as he glanced beyond the doorway, "but I like Tappahannock. It has taken me in, you know, and there's human nature even in Bullfinch's Hollow."
"Oh, I suppose it's hideous," she remarked, following his look in the direction of the town, "but I can't judge. I've seen so little else, you know – and yet my City Beautiful is laid out in my mind."
"Then you carry it with you, and that is best."
As she was about to answer the door creaked above them and Mrs. Berry came down the short flight of steps, hastily fastening her calico dress as she descended.
"Well, I declare, who'd have thought to see you at this hour, Miss Emily," she exclaimed effusively.
"I thought you might need the milk early," replied the girl, "and as Micah had an attack of rheumatism I brought it over on horseback."
While the old woman emptied the contents of the can into a cracked china pitcher, Emily held out her hand to Ordway with an impulsive gesture.
"We shall have a flourishing kitchen garden," she said, "thanks to you."
Then taking the empty can from Mrs. Berry, she crossed the threshold, and remounted from the doorstep.
CHAPTER XII
A String Of Coral
AS Emily rode slowly up from Bullfinch's Hollow, it seemed to her that the abandoned fields had borrowed an aspect which was almost one of sentiment. In the golden light of the sunrise even the Negro hovels, the refuse heaps and the dead thistles by the roadside, were transfigured until they appeared to lose their ordinary daytime ugliness; and the same golden light was shining inwardly on the swift impressions which crowded her thoughts. This strange inner illumination surrounded, she discovered now, each common fact which presented itself to her mind, and though the outward form of life was not changed, her mental vision had become suddenly enraptured. She did not stop to ask herself why the familiar events of every day appear so full of vivid interests – why the external objects at which she looked swam before her gaze in an atmosphere that was like a rainbow mist? It was sufficient to be alive to the finger tips, and to realise that everything in the great universe was alive around one – the air, the sky, the thistles along the roadside and the dust blowing before the wind, all moved, she felt, in harmony with the elemental pulse of life. On that morning she entered for the first time into the secret of immortality.
And yet – was it only the early morning hour? she asked herself, as she rode back between the stretches of dried broomsedge. Or was it, she questioned a moment later, the natural gratification she had felt in a charity so generous, so unassuming as that of the man she had seen at Mrs. Berry's?
"It's a pity he isn't a gentleman and that his clothes are so rough," she thought, and blushed the next instant with shame because she was "only a wretched snob."
"Whatever his class he is a gentleman," she began again, "and he would be quite – even very – good-looking if his face were not so drawn and thin. What strange eyes he has – they are as blue as Blair's and as young. No, he isn't exactly good-looking – not in Beverly's way, at least – but I should know his face again if I didn't see it for twenty years. It's odd that there are people one hardly knows whom one never forgets."
Her bare hands were on Major's neck, and as she looked at them a displeased frown gathered her brows. She wondered why she had never noticed before that they were ugly and unwomanly, and it occurred to her that Aunt Mehitable had once told her that "ole Miss" washed her hands in buttermilk to keep them soft and white. "They're almost as rough as Mr. Smith's," she thought, "perhaps he noticed them." The idea worried her for a minute, for she hated, she told herself, that people should not think her "nice" – but the golden light was still flooding her thoughts and these trivial disturbances scattered almost before they had managed to take shape. Nothing worried her long to-day, and as she dismounted at the steps, and ran hurriedly into the dining-room, she remembered Beverly and Amelia with an affection which she had not felt for years. It was as if the mere external friction of personalities had dissolved before the fundamental relation of soul to soul; even poor half-demented Aunt Mehitable wore in her eyes, at the minute, an immortal aspect.
A little later when she rode in to the public school at Tappahannock, she discovered that the golden light irradiated even the questions in geography and arithmetic upon the blackboard; and coming out again, she found that it lay like sunshine on the newly turned vegetable rows in the garden. That afternoon for the first time she planted in a discarded pair of buck-skin gloves, and as soon as her work was over, she went upstairs to her bedroom, and regarded herself wistfully by the light from a branched candlestick which she held against the old greenish mirror. Her forehead was too high, she admitted regretfully, her mouth was too wide, her skin certainly was too brown. The blue cotton dress she wore appeared to her suddenly common and old-fashioned, and she began looking eagerly through her limited wardrobe in the hopeless quest for a gown that was softened by so much as a fall of lace about the throat. Then remembering the few precious trinkets saved from the bartered heirlooms of her dead mother, she got out the old black leather jewel case and went patiently over the family possessions. Among the mourning brooches and hair bracelets that the box contained there was a necklace of rare pink coral, which she had meant to give Bella upon her birthday – but as her gaze was arrested now by the cheerful colour, she sat for a moment wondering if she might not honestly keep the beads for her own. Still undecided she went to the bureau again and fastened the string of coral around her firm brown throat.
"I may wear it for a week or two at least," she thought. "Why not?" It seemed to her foolish, almost unfeminine that she had never cared or thought about her clothes until to-day. "I've gone just like a boy – I ought to be ashamed to show my hands," she said; and at the same instant she was conscious of the vivid interest, of the excitement even, which attached to this new discovery of the importance of one's appearance. Before going downstairs she brushed the tangles out of her thick brown hair, and spent a half hour arranging it in a becoming fashion upon her neck.
The next day Micah was well enough to carry the milk to Mrs. Berry's, but three mornings afterward, when she came from the dairy with the can, the old negro was not waiting for her on the porch, and she found, upon going to his cabin, that the attack of rheumatism had returned with violence. There was nothing for her to do but carry the milk herself, so after leading Major from his stall, she mounted and rode, almost with a feeling of shyness, in the direction of Bullfinch's Hollow.
The door was closed this morning, and in answer to her knock, Mrs. Berry appeared, rubbing her eyes, beyond the threshold.
"I declare, Miss Emily, you don't look like yourself at all," she exclaimed at the girl's entrance, "it must be them coral beads you've got on, I reckon. They always was becomin' things – I had a string once myself that I used to wear when my po' dead husband was courtin' me. Lord! Lord!" she added, bursting into sobs, "who'd have thought when I wore those beads that I'd ever have come to this? My po' ma gave 'em to me herself – they were her weddin' present from her first husband, and when she made up her mind to marry again, she kind of thought it warn't modest to go aroun' wearin' what she'd got from her first marriage. She was always powerful sensitive to decency, was po' ma. I've seen her scent vulgarity in the most harmless soundin' speech you ever heard – such as when my husband asked her one day if she was afflicted with the budges in her knee, and she told me afterward that he had made a sneakin' allusion to her leg. Ten years from that time, when all my trouble came upon me, she held that over me as a kind of warnin'. 'If you'd listened to me, Sarindy,' she used to say, 'you'd never have got into this scrape of marryin' a man who talked free befo' women. For a man who is indecent in his language can't be decent in his life,' she said."
As she talked she was pouring the milk into the cracked pitcher, and Emily breaking in at the first pause, sought to hasten the washing of the can, by bringing the old woman's rambling attention back to Kit.
"Has he had a quiet night?" she asked.
"Well, yes, miss, in a way, but then he always was what you might call a quiet sleeper from the very hour that he was born. I remember old Aunt Jemima, his monthly nurse, tellin' me that she had never in all her experience brought a more reliable sleeper into the world. He never used to stir, except to whimper now and then for his sugar rag when it slipped out of his mouth."
Hurriedly seizing the half-washed can, Emily caught up her skirt and moved toward the door.
"Did you sit up with him last night?" she asked, turning upon the step.
"That was Mr. Smith's night, miss – he's taken such a fancy to Kit that he comes every other night to watch by him – but he gets up and leaves now a little before daybreak. I heard him choppin' wood before the sun was up."
"He has been very kind about it, hasn't he?"
"Lord, miss, he's been a son and a brother as far as work goes, but I declare I can't help wishin' he wasn't quite so shut mouthed. Every blessed sound he utters I have to drag out of him like a fox out of a burrow. He's a little cranky, too, I reckon, for he is so absent-minded that sometimes when you call his name he never even turns aroun'. But the Lord will overlook his unsociable ways, I s'pose, for he reads his Bible half the night when he sets up, jest as hard as if he was paid to do it. That's as good a recommendation, I reckon, as I need to have."
"I should think his charity would be a better one," rejoined Emily, with severity.
"Well, that's as it may be, Miss," returned Mrs. Berry, "I'm not ungrateful, I hope, and I'm much obliged for what he gives me – particularly for the coffee, which ain't as thin as it might be seein' it's a present. But when all's said I ain't so apt to jedge by things like that because charity is jest a kind of Saint Vitus dance with some folks – it's all in the muscles. Thank you, miss, yes, Kit is doin' very well."
Mounting from the step, Emily turned back into the Tappahannock road, aware as she passed through the deserted fields that her exaltation of the morning had given way before a despondency which seemed to change the face of nature. The day was oppressive, the road ugly, Mrs. Berry more tiresome than usual – each of these things suggested itself as a possible reason for the dissatisfaction which she could not explain. Not once during her troubled mood did the name or the face of Ordway appear as the visible cause of her disturbance. So far, indeed, was his individual aspect from her reflections, that some hours later, when she rode back to school, it was with a shock of surprise that she saw him turn the corner by the new brick church, and come rapidly toward her from the brow of the long hill. That he had not at first seen her was evident, for he walked in an abstracted reverie with his eyes on the ground, and when he looked up at last, she had drawn almost within speaking distance. At sight of his face her heart beat so quickly that she dropped the reins on Major's neck, and raised her free hand to her bosom, while she felt the blood mount joyously to her cheeks; but, to her amazement, in the first instant of recognition, he turned abruptly away and entered the shop of a harness maker which happened to be immediately on his right. The action was so sudden that even as she quickened her horse's pace, there flashed into her mind the humiliating conviction that he had sought purposely to avoid her. The throbs of her heart grew faster and then seemed to die utterly away, yet even as the warm blood turned cold in her cheeks, she told herself with spirit that it was all because she "could not bear to be disliked." "Why should he dislike me?" she questioned presently; "it is very foolish of him, and what have I done?" She searched her memory for some past rudeness of which she had been guilty, but there was nothing she could recall which would justify, however slightly, his open avoidance of a chance meeting. "Perhaps he doesn't like the colour of my hair. I've heard men were like that," she thought, "or the freckles on my face? Or the roughness of my hands?" But the instant afterward she saw how ridiculous were her surmises, and she felt angry with herself for having permitted them to appear in her mind. She remembered his blue eyes with the moonlight upon them, and she wondered why he had seemed to her more masculine than any man that she had ever known. With the memory of his eyes and his smile she smelt again the odour of the warm earth that had clung about him, and she was conscious that this and everything about him was strange and new as if she had never looked into a pair of blue eyes or smelt the odour of the soil before.
After this meeting she did not see Ordway again for several weeks, and then it was only to pass him in the road one Sunday afternoon when he had finished his sermon in the old field. As he drew back among the thistles, he spoke to her gravely, with a deference, she noticed, which had the effect of placing him apart from her as a member of the working class. Since Kit Berry's recovery she had not gone again to Bullfinch's Hollow; and she could not fail to observe that even when an opportunity appeared, Ordway made no further effort to bridge the mere casual acquaintance which divided rather than united them. If it were possible to avoid conversation with her he did so by retiring into the background; if the event forced him into notice, he addressed her with a reserve which seemed at each meeting to widen the distance between them.
Though she hardly confessed it to herself, her heart was wounded for a month or two by his frank indifference to her presence. Then one bright afternoon in May, when she had observed him turn out of his path as she rode up the hill, she saved the situation in her mind by the final triumph of her buoyant humour.
"Everybody is privileged to be a little fool," she said with a laugh, "but when there's the danger of becoming a great big one, it's time to stop short and turn round. Now, Emily, my dear, you're to stop short from this minute. I hope you understand me."
That the Emily she addressed understood her very clearly was proved a little later in the afternoon, when going upstairs to her bedroom, she unfastened the coral beads and laid them away again among the mourning brooches and the hair bracelets in the leather case.
