The Ancient Law Part 18

Across the hall he heard the soft opening and closing of a door, and immediately afterward the sound of rapid footsteps growing fainter as they descended the staircase. Already the room was full of a pale golden light, and as he could not sleep again because of the broken shutter to the window which gave on the lawn, he rose and dressed himself with an eagerness which recalled the early morning risings of his childhood. A little later when he went downstairs, he found that the front door was still barred, and removing the heavy iron fastenings, he descended the steps into the avenue, where the faint sunbeams had not yet penetrated the thick screen of boughs. Remembering the garden, while he stood watching the sunrise from the steps, he turned presently into the little footpath which led by the house, and pus.h.i.+ng aside the lilacs, from which the blossoms had all dropped, he leaned on the swinging gate before the beds he had spaded on those enchanted nights. Now the rank weeds were almost strangling the plants, and it occurred to him that there was still work ready for his hand in the Brooke's garden. He was telling himself that he would begin clearing the smothered rows as soon as his morning at the warehouse was over, when the old hound ran suddenly up to him, and turning quickly he saw Emily coming from the springhouse with a print of golden b.u.t.ter in her hand.

"So it was you I heard stirring before sunrise!" he exclaimed impulsively, as his eyes rested on her radiant face, over which the early mist had scattered a pearly dew like the fragrant moisture upon a rose.

"Yes, it was I. At four o'clock I remembered there was no b.u.t.ter for breakfast, so I got up and betook myself to the churn."

"And this is the result?" he asked, glancing down at the delicious creamy mould she had just worked into shape and crowned with a printed garland of thistles. "It makes me hungry enough for my m.u.f.fins upon the minute."

"You shall have them shortly," she said, smiling, "but do you prefer pop-overs or plain?"

He met the question with serious consideration.

"Well, if the choice is mine I think I'll have pop-overs," he replied.

Before his unbroken gravity her quick humour rippled forth.

"Then I must run to Aunt Mehitable," she responded merrily, "for I suspect that she has already made them plain."

With a laughing nod she turned from him, and following the little path entered the house under the honeysuckle arbour on the back porch.

CHAPTER IV

SHOWS THAT A LAUGH DOES NOT HEAL A HEARTACHE

When Emily entered the dining-room, she found that Beverly had departed from his usual custom sufficiently to appear in time for breakfast.

"I hardly got a wink of sleep last night, my dear," he remarked, "and I think it was due entirely to the heavy supper you insisted upon giving us."

"But, Beverly, we must have hot things now," said Emily, as she arranged the crocheted centrepiece upon the table. "Mr. Smith is our boarder, you know, not our guest."

"The fact that he is a boarder," commented Beverly, with dignity, "entirely relieves me of any feeling of responsibility upon his account.

If he were an invited guest in the house, I should feel as you do that hot suppers are a necessity, but when a man pays for the meals he eats, we are no longer under an obligation to consider his preferences."

"His presence in the household is a great trial to us all," observed his wife, whose att.i.tude of general acceptance was modified by the fact that she accepted everything for the worst. Her sense of tragic values had been long since obliterated by a gray wash of melancholy that covered all.

"Well, I don't see that he is very zealous about interfering with us,"

remarked Emily, almost indignantly, "he doesn't appear to be of a particularly sociable disposition."

"Yes, I agree with you that he is unusually depressing," rejoined Mrs.

Brooke. "It's a pity, perhaps, that we couldn't have secured a blond person--they are said to be of a more sanguine temperament, and I remember that the blond boarder at Miss Jennie Colton's, when I called there once, was exceedingly lively and entertaining. But it's too late, of course, to give advice now; I can only hope and pray that his morals, at least, are above reproach."

As the entire arrangement with Baxter had been made by Mrs. Brooke herself upon the day that Wilson, the grocer, had sent in his bill for the fifth time, Emily felt that an impatient rejoinder tripped lightly upon her tongue; but restraining her words with an effort, she observed cheerfully an instant later that she hoped Mr. Smith would cause no inconvenience to the family.

"Well, he seems to be a respectable enough person," admitted Beverly, in his gracious manner, "but, of course, if he were to become offensively presuming it would be a very simple matter to drop him a hint."

"It reminds me of a case I read of in the newspaper a few weeks ago,"

said Mrs. Brooke, "where a family in Roanoke took a stranger to board with them and shortly afterward were all poisoned by a powder in the soup. No, they weren't all poisoned," she corrected herself thoughtfully, "for I am positive now that the boarder was the only one who died. It was the cook who put the poison into the soup and the boarder who ate all of it. I remember the Coroner remarked at the inquest that he had saved the lives of the entire family."

"All the same I hope Mr. Smith won't eat all the soup," observed Emily.

"It terrifies me at times," murmured Amelia, "to think of the awful power that we place so carelessly in the hands of cooks."

"In that case, my dear, it might be quite a safeguard always to have a boarder at the table," suggested Beverly, with his undaunted optimism.

"But surely, Amelia," laughed Emily, "you can't suppose that after she has lived in the family for seventy years, Aunt Mehitable would yield at last to a pa.s.sing temptation to destroy us?"

"I imagine the poor boarder suspected nothing while he ate his soup,"

returned Mrs. Brooke. "No, I repeat that in cases like that no one is safe, and the only sensible att.i.tude is to be prepared for anything."

"Well, if I'm to be poisoned, I think I'd prefer to take it without preparation," rejoined Emily. "There is Mr. Smith now in the hall, so we may as well send Malviny to bring in breakfast."

When Ordway entered an instant later with his hearty greeting, even Mrs.

Brooke unbent a trifle from her rigid melancholy and joined affably in the conversation. By a curious emotional paradox she was able to enjoy him only as an affliction; and his presence in the house had served as an excuse for a continuous parade of martyrdom. From the hour of his arrival, she had been perfectly convinced not only that he interfered with her customary peace of mind, but that he prevented her as surely from receiving her supply of hot water upon rising and her ordinary amount of food at dinner.

But as the days went by he fell so easily into his place in the family circle that they forgot at last to remark either his presence or his personal peculiarities. After dinner he would play his game of dominoes with Beverly in the breezy hall, until the sunlight began to slant across the cedars, when he would go out into the garden and weed the overgrown rows. Emily had seen him but seldom alone during the first few weeks of his stay, though she had found a peculiar pleasure in rendering him the small domestic services of which he was quite unconscious. How should he imagine that it was her hand that arranged the flowers upon his bureau, that placed his favourite chair near the window, and that smoothed the old-fas.h.i.+oned dimity coverlet upon his bed. Still less would he have suspected that the elaborate rag carpet upon his floor was one which she had contributed to his comfort from her own room. Had he known these things he would probably have been melancholy enough to have proved congenial company even to Mrs. Brooke, though, in reality, there was, perhaps, nothing he could have offered Emily which would have exceeded the pleasure she now found in these simple services. Ignorant as she was in all worldly matters, in grasping this essential truth, she had stumbled unawares upon the pure philosophy of love--whose satisfaction lies, after all, not in possession, but in surrender.

She was still absorbed in the wonder of this discovery, when going out into the garden one afternoon to gather tomatoes for a salad, she found him working among the tall, green corn at the end of the long walk. As he turned toward her in the late suns.h.i.+ne, which slanted across the waving yellow ta.s.sels, she noticed that there was the same eager, youthful look in his face that she had seen on the night when she had come down to find him spading by the moonbeams.

In response to her smile he came out from among the corn, and went with her down the narrow s.p.a.ce which separated two overgrown hills of tomato plants. He wore no coat and his striped cotton s.h.i.+rt was open at the throat and wrists.

"It's delicious in the corn now," he said; "I can almost fancy that I hear the light rustle along the leaves."

"You love the country so much that you ought to have been a farmer," she returned, "then you might have raised tobacco."

"That reminds me that I worked yesterday in your brother's crop--but it's too sticky for me. I like the garden better."

"Then you ought to have a garden of your own. Is all your chopping and your digging merely for the promotion of the general good?"

"Isn't it better so?" he asked, smiling, "particularly when I share in the results as I shall in this case? Who knows but that I shall eat this wonderful tomato to-night at supper?"

She took it from his hand and placed it on the lettuce leaves in the bottom of the basket upon her arm.

"You make a careful choice, I see," she observed, "it is a particularly fine one."

"I suppose your philosophy would insist that after plucking it I should demand the eating of it also?"

"I don't know about my philosophy--I haven't any--but my common sense would."

"I'm not sure," he returned half seriously, "that I have much opinion of common sense."

"But you would have," she commented gravely, "if you had happened to be born with Beverly for a brother. I used to think that all men were alike," she added, "but you don't remind me of Beverly in the very least."

As she spoke she turned her face slightly toward him, and still leaning over the luxuriant tomato row, looked up at him joyously with her sparkling eyes. Her breath came quickly and he saw her bosom rise and fall under the scant bodice of her blue cotton gown. Almost unconsciously he had drifted into an a.s.sociation with her which const.i.tuted for him the princ.i.p.al charm of his summer at Cedar Hill.

"On the other hand I've discovered many points of resemblance," he retorted in his whimsical tone.