The Ancient Law Part 15

"Well, you see, Jasper has been a precious bad influence around here,"

pursued Baxter, engrossed in the political scheme he was unfolding. "The only thing on earth he's got to recommend him is his pretty daughter.

Now, I've a soft enough heart, as everybody knows, when the ladies come about--particularly if they're pretty--but I'm ready to stand up and say that Jasper Trend can't be allowed to run this town on the platform of pure chivalry. There's such a thing as fairness, suh, even where women are concerned, and I'll back my word with my oath that it ain't fair!"

"And I'll back your word with another that it isn't," rejoined Ordway.

"There's no doubt, I reckon," continued Baxter, "that Jasper has connived with those disorderly saloons that you've been trying to shut up, and for all his money and the men he employs in the cotton mills there's come a considerable reaction against him in public sentiment.

Now, I ain't afraid to say, Smith," he concluded with an ample flourish of his dirty hand, "that the fact that there's any public sentiment at all in Tappahannock is due to you. Until you came here there weren't six decent men you could count mixed up in the affairs of this town. Jasper had everything his own way, that's why he hates you."

"But I wasn't even aware that he did me so much honour."

"You mean he hasn't told you his feelings to your face. Well, he hasn't gone so far as to confide them to me either--but even if I ain't a woman, I can hear some things that ain't spoke out in words. He's made a dirty town and you're sweepin' it clean--do you think it likely that it makes him love you?"

"He's welcome to feel about me anyway he pleases, but do you know, Baxter," he added with his whimsical gravity, "I've a pretty strong conviction that I'd make a jolly good street sweeper."

"I reckon you're right!" roared Baxter, "and when you're done, we'll shoot off some sky-rockets over the job--so there you are, ain't you?"

"All right--but there's Jasper Trend also," retorted Ordway.

"Oh, he can afford to send off his own sky-rockets. We needn't bother about him. He won't be out of a job like Kelly, you know. Great Scott!"

he added, chuckling, "I can see your face now when you marched in here the day after you closed Kelly's saloon, and told me you had to start a man in tobacco because you'd taken him out of whiskey."

His laugh shook through his figure until Ordway saw his fat chest heave violently beneath his alpaca coat. Custom had made the younger man almost indifferent to the external details which had once annoyed him in his employer, and he hardly noticed now that Baxter's coat was turning from black to green and that the old ashes from his pipe had lodged in the crumpled bosom of his s.h.i.+rt. Baxter was--well, Baxter, and tolerance was a virtue which one acquired sooner or later in Tappahannock.

"I suppose I might as well get at Catesby and Frazier now," remarked Ordway, watching the other disinter a tattered palm leaf fan from beneath a dusty pile of old almanacs and catalogues.

"Wait a minute first," said Baxter, "there's something I want to say as soon as I get settled. I ain't made for heat, that's certain," he pursued, as he pulled off his coat, and hung it from a nail in the wall, "it sweats all my morals out of me."

Detaching the collar from his s.h.i.+rt, he placed it above his coat on the nail, and then rolling up his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, sank, with a panting breath, back into his chair.

"If I were you I'd get out of this at night anyway, Smith," he urged.

"Why don't you try boarding for the next few months over at Cedar Hill.

It would be a G.o.dsend to the family, now that Miss Emily's school has stopped."

"But I don't suppose they'd take me in," replied Ordway, staring out into the street, where the dust rose like steam in the air, and the rough-coated country horses toiled patiently up the long hill. Across the way he saw the six stale currant buns and the three bottles of pale beer behind the fly-specked window panes of a cheap eating house. In front of them, a Negro woman, barefooted, with her ragged calico dress tucked up about her waist, was sousing the steaming board walk with a pailful of dirty water. From his memory of two years ago there floated the mingled odours of wild flowers and freshly turned earth in the garden of Cedar Hill, and Emily appeared in his thoughts only as an appropriate figure against the pleasant natural background of the lilacs and the meadows. In the past year he had seen her hardly more than a dozen times--mere casual glimpses for the most part--and he had almost forgotten his earlier avoidance of her, which had resulted from an instinctive delicacy rather than from any premeditated purpose. His judgment had told him that he had no right to permit a woman to become his friend in ignorance of his past; and at the same time he was aware of a terrible shrinking from intruding his old self, however remotely, into the new life at Tappahannock. When the choice came between confessing his sin and sacrificing the chance acquaintance, he had found it easier simply to keep away from her actual presence. Yet his interest in her had been so closely a.s.sociated with his larger feeling for humanity, that he could tell himself with sincerity that it was mere folly which put her forward as an objection to his boarding for the summer at Cedar Hill.

"The truth is," admitted Baxter, after a pause, "that Mrs. Brooke spoke to me about having to take a boarder or two, when I went out there to pay Mr. Beverly for that tobacco I couldn't sell."

"So you bought it in the end," laughed Ordway, "as you did last year after sending me out there on a mission?"

"Yes, I bought it," replied Baxter, blus.h.i.+ng like a boy under the beads of perspiration upon his face. "I may as well confess it, though I tried to keep it secret. But I ask you as man to man," he demanded warmly, "was there another blessed thing on G.o.d's earth for me to do?"

"Let Mr. Beverly go about his business--that's what I'd have done."

"Oh, no, you wouldn't," protested Baxter softly, "not when he'd ruin himself for you to-morrow if you were to walk out and ask him."

"But he couldn't," insisted Ordway with the brutality of the naked fact, "he did that little job on his own account too long ago."

"But that ain't the point, Smith," replied Baxter in an awed and solemn accent. "The point ain't that he couldn't, but that he _would_. As I make it out that's the point which has cost me money on him for the last thirty years."

"Oh, well, I suppose it's a charity like any other, only the old fool is so pompous about his poverty that it wears me out."

"It does at Tappahannock, but it won't when you get out to Cedar Hill, that's the difference between Mr. Beverly in the air and Mr. Beverly in the flesh. The one wears you out, the other rests you for all his darnation foolishness. Now, you can board out there for twenty-five dollars a month and put a little ready money where it ought to be in Mrs. Brooke's pocket."

"Of course I'd like it tremendously," said Ordway, after a moment in which the perfume of the lilacs filled his memory. "It would be like stepping into heaven after that stifling little room under the tin roof at Mrs. Twine's. Do you know I slept out in the fields every hot night last summer?"

"You see you ain't a native of these parts," remarked Baxter with a large resigned movement of his palm leaf fan, "and your skin ain't thick enough to keep out the heat. I'll speak to 'em at Cedar Hill this very day, and if you like, I reckon, you can move out at the beginning of the week. I hope if you do, Smith, that you'll bear with Mr. Beverly.

There's nothing in the universe that he wouldn't do for me if he had the chance. It ain't his fault, you see, that he's never had it."

"Oh, I promise you I'll bear with him," laughed Ordway, as he left the office and went out into the warehouse.

The knot of men was still in the centre of the building, and as Ordway walked down the long floor in search of Catesby and Frazier, he saw that a stranger had drifted in during his half hour in Baxter's office. With his first casual glance all that he observed of the man was a sleek fair head, slightly bald in the centre, and a pair of abnormally flat shoulders in a light gray coat, which had evidently left a clothing shop only a day or two before. Then as Frazier--a big, loud voiced planter--turned toward him with the exclamation, "here's Smith, himself, now!"--he saw the stranger wheel round abruptly and give vent the next instant to a sharp whistle of surprise.

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned!" he said.

For a minute the tobacco dust filled Ordway's throat and nostrils, and he felt that he was stifling for a breath of air. The dim length of the warehouse and the familiar shadowy figures of the planters receded before his eyes, and he saw again the bare walls of the prison chapel, with the rows of convicts seated in the pale, greenish light. With his recognition of the man before him, it seemed to him suddenly that the last year in Tappahannock was all a lie. The prison walls, the grated windows, and the hard benches of the shoe shop were closer realities than were the open door of the warehouse and the free, hot streets of the little town.

"I am very happy to meet you, Mr. Smith," said the stranger, as he held out his hand with a good-humoured smile.

"I beg your pardon," returned Ordway quietly, "but I did not catch your name."

At the handshake a chill mounted from his finger tips to his shoulder, but drawing slightly away he stood his ground without so much as the perceptible flicker of an eyelash.

"My name is Brown--Horatio Brown, very much at your service," answered the other, with a manner like that of a successful, yet obsequious commercial traveller.

It was on Ordway's tongue to retort: "You lie--it's Gus Wherry!"--but checking the impulse with a frown, he turned on his heel and asked the two men for whom he was looking to come with him to settle their disagreement in Baxter's office. As he moved down the building an instant later, it was with an effort that he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead through the archway, for he was aware that every muscle in his body p.r.i.c.ked him to turn back and follow Wherry to the end. That the man would be forced, in self-defence, to keep his secret for a time at least, he had caught in the smiling insolence of his glance; but that it was possible to enter into a permanent a.s.sociation or even a treaty with Gus Wherry, he knew to be a supposition that was utterly beyond the question. The crime for which the man had been sentenced he could not remember; but he had a vague recollection that something morbidly romantic in his history had combined with his handsome face to give him an ephemeral notoriety as the Adonis of imaginative shop-girls. Even in prison Wherry had attained a certain prominence because of his beauty, which at the time when Ordway first saw him had been conspicuous in spite of his convict's clothes. In the years since then his athletic figure had grown a trifle too heavy, and his fair hair had worn a little thin on the crown of his head; yet these slight changes of time had left him, Ordway admitted reluctantly, still handsome in the brawny, full-blooded style, which had generally made fools of women. His lips were still as red, his features as severely cla.s.sic, and his manner was not less vulgar, and quite as debonnair as in the days when the newspapers had clamoured for his pictures. Even the soft, girlish cleft in his smooth-shaven chin, Ordway remembered now, with a return of the instinctive aversion with which it had first inspired him. Yet he was obliged to confess, as he walked ahead of Catesby and Frazier down the dusty floor of the warehouse, that if Wherry had been less of an uncompromising rascal, he would probably have made a particularly amiable acquaintance.

CHAPTER II

ORDWAY COMPROMISES WITH THE PAST

When Ordway came out of Baxter's office, he found that Gus Wherry had left the warehouse, but the effect upon him of the man's appearance in Tappahannock was not to be overcome by the temporary withdrawal of his visible presence. Not only the town, but existence itself seemed altered, and in a way polluted, by the obtrusion of Wherry's personality upon the scene. Though he was not in the building, Ordway felt an angry conviction that he was in the air. It was impossible to breathe freely lest he might by accident draw in some insidious poison which would bring him under the influence of his past life and of Gus Wherry.

As he went along the street at one o'clock to his dinner at Mrs.

Twine's, he was grateful for the intensity of the sun, which rendered him, while he walked in it, almost incapable of thought. There was positive relief in the fact that he must count the uneven lengths of board walk which it was necessary for him to traverse, and the buzzing of the blue flies before his face forced his attention, at the minute, from the inward to the outward disturbance.

When he reached the house, Mrs. Twine met him at the door and led him, with an inquiry as to his susceptibility to sunstroke, into the awful gloom of her tightly shuttered parlour.

"I declar' you do look well nigh in yo' last gasp," she remarked cheerfully, bustling into the dining-room for a palm leaf fan. "Thar, now, come right in an' set down an' eat yo' dinner. Hot or cold, glad or sorry, I never saw the man yit that could stand goin' without his dinner at the regular hour. Sech is the habit in some folks that I remember when old Mat Fawling's second wife died he actually hurried up her funeral an hour earlier so as to git back in time for dinner. 'It ain't that I'm meanin' any disrespect to Sary, Mrs. Twine,' he said to me right whar I was layin' her out, 'but the truth is that I can't even mourn on an empty stomach. The undertaker put it at twelve,' he said, 'but I reckon we might manage to git out to the cemetery by eleven.'"

"All the same if you'll give me a slice of bread and a gla.s.s of milk, I'll take it standing," remarked Ordway. "I'm sorry to leave you, Mrs.

Twine, even for a few months," he added, "but I think I'll try to get board outside the town until the summer is over."

"Well, I'll hate to lose you, suh, to be sure," responded Mrs. Twine, dealing out the fried batter with a lavish hand despite his protest, "for I respect you as a fellow mortal, though I despise you as a s.e.x."

Her hard eyes softened as she looked at him; but his gaze was on the walnut coloured oilcloth, where the flies dispersed lazily before the waving elm branch in the hands of the small Negro, and so he did not observe the motherly tenderness which almost beautified her shrewish face.