The Ancient Law Part 29

BETWEEN MAN AND WOMAN

He walked rapidly to the end of the street, and then slackened his pace almost unconsciously as he turned into the country road. The night had closed in a thick black curtain over the landscape, and the windows of the Negroes' cabins burned like little still red flames along the horizon. Straight ahead the road was visible as a pale, curving streak across the darkness.

A farmer, carrying a lantern, came down the path leading from the fields, and hearing Ordway's footsteps in the road, flashed the light suddenly into his face. Upon recognition there followed a cheerful "good-night!" and the offer of the use of the lantern to Cedar Hill.

"It's a black night and you'll likely have trouble in keeping straight.

I've been to look after a sick cow, but I can feel my way up to the house in two minutes."

"Thank you," returned Ordway, smiling as the light shone full in his face, "but my feet are accustomed to the road."

He pa.s.sed on, while the farmer turned at the gate by the roadside, to shout cheerfully after him: "Well, good-night--Mayor!"

The gate closed quickly, and the ray of the lantern darted like a pale yellow moth across the gra.s.s.

As Ordway went on it seemed to him that the darkness became tangible, enveloping--that he had to fight his way through it presently as through water. The little red flames danced along the horizon until he wondered if they were burning only in his imagination. He felt tired and dazed as if his body had been beaten into insensibility, but the hour through which he had just pa.s.sed appeared to have left merely a fading impression upon his brain. Not only had he ceased to care, he had ceased to think of it. When he tried now to recall the manager of the cotton mills, it was to remember, with aversion, his angry little eyes, his high nasal voice, and the wart upon the end of his long nose. At the instant these physical details were the only a.s.sociations which the man's name presented to his thoughts. The rest was something so insignificant that it had escaped his memory. He felt in a vague way that he was sorry for Baxter, yet this very feeling of sympathy bored and annoyed him. It was plainly ridiculous to be sorry for a person as rich, as fat, as well fed as his employer. Wherever he looked the little red flames flickered and waved in the fields, and when he lifted his eyes to the dark sky, he saw them come and go in short, scintillant flashes, like fire struck from an anvil. They were in his brain, he supposed, after all, and so was this tangible darkness, and so, too, was this indescribable delicacy and lightness with which he moved.

Everything was in his brain, even his ridiculous pity for Baxter and the angry-eyed little manager with the wart on his long nose. He could see these things distinctly, though he had forgotten everything that had been so clear to him while he stood on the stage of the town hall. His past life and the prison and even the illumination in which he had remembered them so vividly were obscured now as if they, too, had been received into the tangible darkness.

From the road behind him the sound of footsteps reached him suddenly, and he quickened his pace with an impulse, rather than a determination of flight. But the faster he walked the faster came the even beat of the footsteps, now rising, now falling with a rhythmic regularity in the dust of the road. Once he glanced back, but he could see nothing because of the encompa.s.sing blackness, and in the instant of his delay it seemed to him that the pursuit gained steadily upon him, still moving with the regular m.u.f.fled beat of the footsteps in the thick dust. A horror of recognition had come over him, and as he walked on breathlessly, now almost running, it occurred to him, like an inspiration, that he might drop aside into the fields and so let his pursuer pa.s.s on ahead. The next instant he realised that the darkness could not conceal the abrupt pause of his flight--that as those approaching footsteps fell on his ears, so must the sound of his fall on the ears of the man behind him.

Then a voice called his name, and he stopped short, and stood, trembling from head to foot, by the side of the road.

"Smith!" cried the voice, "if it's you, Smith, for G.o.d's sake stop a minute!"

"Yes, it's I," he answered, waiting, and a moment afterward the hand of Banks reached out of the night and clasped his arm.

"Hold on," said Banks, breathing hard, "I'm all blown."

His laboured breath came with a struggling violence that died gradually away, but while it lasted the strain of the meeting, the awkwardness of the emotional crisis, seemed suddenly put off--suspended. Now in the silence the tension became so great that, drawing slightly away from the detaining hold, Ordway was about to resume his walk. At his first movement, however, Banks clung the more firmly to his arm. "Oh, d.a.m.n it, Smith!" he burst out, and with the exclamation Ordway felt that the touch of flesh and blood had reached to the terrible loneliness in which he stood. In a single oath Banks had uttered the unutterable spirit of prayer.

"You followed me?" asked Ordway quietly, while the illusions of the flight, the physical delicacy and lightness, the tangible darkness, the little red flames in the fields, departed from him. With the first hand that was laid on his own, his nature swung back into balance, and he felt that he possessed at the moment a sanity that was almost sublime.

"As soon as I could get out I came. There was such a crush," said Banks, "I thought I'd catch up with you at once, but it was so black I couldn't see my hand before me. In a little while I heard footsteps, so I kept straight on."

"I wish you hadn't, Banks."

"But I had to." His usually cheerful voice sounded hoa.r.s.e and throaty.

"I ain't much of a chap at words, Smith, you know that, but I want just to say that you're the best friend I ever had, and I haven't forgot it--I haven't forgot it," he repeated, and blew his nose. "Nothing that that darn fool of a manager said to-night can come between you and me,"

he went on laboriously after a minute. "If you ever want my help, by thunder, I'll go to h.e.l.l and back again for you without a word."

Stretching out his free hand Ordway laid it upon his friend's shoulder.

"You're a first-rate chap, Banks," he said cheerfully, at which a loud sob burst from Banks, who sought to disguise it the instant afterward in a violent cough.

"You're a first-rate chap," repeated Ordway gently, "and I'm glad, in spite of what I said, that you came after me just now. I'm going away to-morrow, you know, and it's probable that I shan't see you again."

"But won't you stay on in Tappahannock? In two weeks all this will blow over and things will be just what they were before."

Ordway shook his head, a movement which Banks felt, though he did not see it.

"No, I'll go away, it's best," he answered, and though his voice had dropped to a dull level there was still a cheerful sound to it, "I'll go away and begin again in a new place."

"Then I'll go, too," said Banks.

"What! and leave Milly? No, you won't come. Banks, you'll stay here."

"But I'll see you sometimes, shan't I?"

"Perhaps?--that's likely, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's likely," repeated Banks, and fell silent from sheer weight of sorrow. "At least you'll let me go with you to the station?" he said at last, after a long pause in which he had been visited by one of those acute flashes of sympathy which are to the heart what intuition is to the intellect.

"Why, of course," responded Ordway, more touched by the simple request than he had been even by the greater loyalty. "You may do that, Banks, and I'll thank you for it. And now go back to Tappahannock," he added, "I must take the midday train and there are a few preparations I've still to make."

"But where will you go?" demanded Banks, swinging round again after he had turned from him.

"Where?" repeated Ordway blankly, and he added indifferently, "I hadn't thought."

"The midday train goes west," said Banks.

"Then, I'll go west. It doesn't matter."

Banks had already started off, when turning back suddenly, he caught Ordway's hand and wrung it in a grip that hurt. Then without speaking again, he hurried breathlessly in the direction from which he had come.

A few steps beyond the cross-roads Ordway saw through the heavy foliage the light in the dining-room at Cedar Hill. Then as he entered the avenue, he lost sight of it again, until he had rounded the curve that swept up to the front porch. At his knock Emily opened the door, with a lamp held in her hand, and he saw her face, surrounded by dim waves of hair, s.h.i.+ning pale and transparent in the glimmering circle of light. As he followed her into the dining-room, he realised that after the family had gone upstairs to bed, she had sat at her sewing under the lamp and waited for his knock. At the knowledge a sense of comfort, of homeliness came over him, and he felt all at once that his misery was not so great as he had believed it to be a moment ago.

"May I get you something?" she asked, placing the lamp upon the table and lowering the wick that the flame might not s.h.i.+ne on his pallid and haggard face.

He shook his head; then as she turned from him toward the hearth, he followed her and stood looking down at the smouldering remains of a wood fire. Her work-basket and a pile of white ruffles which she had been hemming were on the table, but moved by a feeling of their utter triviality in the midst of a tragedy she vaguely understood, she swept them hurriedly into a chair, and came over to lay her hand upon his arm.

"What can I do? Oh, what can I do?" she asked. Taking her hand from his sleeve, he held it for an instant in his grasp, as if the pressure of her throbbing palm against his revived some living current under the outer deadness that enveloped him.

"I am going away from Tappahannock to-morrow, Emily," he said.

"To-morrow?" she repeated, and laid her free hand upon his shoulder with a soothing, motherly gesture--a gesture which changed their spiritual relations to those of a woman and a child.

"A man asked me three questions to-night," he went on quietly, yet in a voice which seemed to feel a pang in every word it uttered. "He asked me if my name was Daniel Smith, and I answered--no."

As he hesitated, she lifted her face and smiled at him, with a smile which he knew to be the one expression of love, of comprehension, that she could offer. It was a smile which a mother might have bent upon a child that was about to pa.s.s under the surgeon's knife, and it differed from tears only in that it offered courage and not weakness.

"He asked me if I had been in prison before I came to Tappahannock--and I answered--yes."

His voice broke, rather than ceased, and lifting his gaze from her hands he looked straight into her wide-open eyes. The smile which she had turned to him a moment before was still on her lips, frozen there in the cold pallor of her face. Her eyes were the only things about her which seemed alive, and they appeared to him now not as eyes but as thoughts made visible. Bending her head quickly she kissed the hand which enclosed her own.

"I still believe," she said, and looked into his face.

"But it is true," he replied slowly.

"But it is not the whole truth," she answered, "and for that reason it is half a lie."

"Yes, it is not the whole truth," he repeated, in his effort to catch something of her bright courage.