The Ancient Law Part 30

"Why should they judge you by that and by nothing else?" she demanded with pa.s.sion. "If that was true, is not your life in Tappahannock true also?"

"To you--to you," he answered, "but to-morrow everything will be forgotten about me except the fact that because I had been in prison, I have lived a lie."

"You are wrong--oh, believe me, you are wrong," she said softly, while her tears broke forth and streamed down her white face.

"No," he returned patiently, as if weighing her words in his thoughts, "I am right, and my life here is wasted now from the day I came. All that I do from this moment will be useless. I must go away."

"But where?" she questioned pa.s.sionately, as Banks had questioned before her.

"Where?" he echoed, "I don't know--anywhere. The midday train goes west."

"And what will you do in the new place?" she asked through her tears.

He shook his head as if the question hardly concerned him.

"I shall begin again," he answered indifferently at last.

She was turning hopelessly from him, when her eyes fell upon a slip of yellow paper which Beverly had placed under a vase on the mantel, and drawing it out, she glanced at the address before giving it into Ordway's hands.

"This must have come for you in the afternoon," she said, "I did not see it."

Taking the telegram from her, he opened it slowly, and read the words twice over.

"Your father died last night. Will you come home?

"RICHARD ORDWAY."

BOOK THIRD

THE LARGER PRISON

CHAPTER I

THE RETURN TO LIFE

As the train rounded the long curve, Ordway leaned from the window and saw spread before him the smiling battlefields that encircled Botetourt.

From the shadow and sunlight of the distance a wind blew in his face, and he felt suddenly younger, fresher, as if the burden of the years had been lifted from him. The Botetourt to which he was returning was the place of his happiest memories; and closing his eyes to the landscape, he saw Lydia standing under the sparrows that flew out from the ivied walls of the old church. He met her pensive gaze; he watched her faint smile under the long black feather in her hat.

"His death was unexpected," said a strange voice in his ear, "but for the past five years I've seen that he was a failing man."

The next instant his thoughts had scattered like startled birds, and without turning his head, he sat straining his ears to follow the conversation that went on, above the roar of the train, in the seat behind him.

"Had a son, didn't he?" inquired the man who had not spoken. "What's become of him, I'd like to know? I mean the chap who went to smash somewhere in the North."

"Oh, he misappropriated trust funds and got found out and sent to prison. When he came out, he went West, I heard, and struck a gold mine, but, all the same, he left his wife and children for the old man to look after. Ever seen his wife? Well, she's a downright saint, if there ever lived one."

"And yet he went wrong, the more's the pity."

"It's a funny thing," commented the first speaker, who was evidently of a philosophic bent, "but I've often noticed that a good wife is apt to make a bad husband. It looks somehow as if male human nature, like the Irish members, is obliged to sit on the Opposition bench. The only example that ever counts with it, is an example that urges the other way."

"Well, what about this particular instance? I hope at least that she has come into the old man's money?"

"n.o.body can tell, but it's generally believed that the two children will get the most of it. The son left a boy and a girl when he went to prison, you know."

"Ah, that's rather a pity, isn't it?"

"Well, I can't say--they've got good blood as well as bad, when it comes to that. My daughter went to school with the girl, and she was said to be, by long odds, the most popular member of her cla.s.s. She graduated last spring, and people tell me that she has turned out to be the handsomest young woman in Botetourt."

"Like the mother?"

"No, dark and tall, with those snapping blue eyes of her grandmother's----"

So Alice was no longer the little girl in short white skirts, outstanding like a ballet dancer's! There was a pang for him in the thought, and he tried in vain to accustom himself to the knowledge that she would meet him to-night as a woman, not as a child. He remembered the morning when she had run out, as he pa.s.sed up the staircase, to beg him to come in to listen to her music lesson; and with the sound of the stumbling scales in his ears, he felt again that terrible throbbing of his pulses and the dull weight of anguish which had escaped at last in an outburst of bitterness.

With a jolting motion the train drew up into the little station, and following the crowd that pressed through the door of the car, he emerged presently into the noisy throng of Negro drivers gathered before the rusty vehicles which were waiting beside the narrow pavement. Pus.h.i.+ng aside the gaily decorated whips which encircled him at his approach, he turned, after a moment's hesitation, into one of the heavily shaded streets, which seemed to his awakened memory to have remained unaltered since the afternoon upon which he had left the town almost twenty years ago. The same red and gold maples stirred gently above his head; the same silent, green-shuttered houses were withdrawn behind glossy cl.u.s.ters of microphylla rose-creepers. Even the same shafts of suns.h.i.+ne slanted across the roughly paved streets, which were strewn thickly with yellowed leaves. It was to Ordway as if a pleasant dream had descended upon the place, and had kept unchanged the particular golden stillness of that autumn afternoon when he had last seen it. All at once he realised that what Tappahannock needed was not progress, but age; and he saw for the first time that the mellowed charm of Botetourt was relieved against the splendour of an historic background. Not the distinction of the present, but the enchantment of the past, produced this quality of atmosphere into which the thought of Tappahannock entered like a vulgar discord. The dead, not the living, had built these walls, had paved these streets, had loved and fought and starved beneath these maples; and it was the memory of such solemn things that steeped the little town in its softening haze of sentiment. A thrill of pleasure, more intense than any he had known for months, shot through his heart, and the next instant he acknowledged with a sensation of shame that he was returning, not only to his people, but to his cla.s.s.

Was this all that experience, that humiliation, could do for one--that he should still find satisfaction in the refinements of habit, in the mere external pleasantness of life? As he pa.s.sed the old church he saw that the sparrows still fluttered in and out of the ivy, which was full of twittering cries like a gigantic bird's nest, and he had suddenly a ghostly feeling as if he were a moving shadow under shadowy trees and unreal shafts of sunlight. A moment later he almost held his breath lest the dark old church and the dreamy little town should vanish before his eyes and leave him alone in the outer s.p.a.ce of shadows.

Coming presently under a row of poplars to the street in which stood his father's house--a square red brick building with white Doric columns to the portico--he saw with a shock of surprise that the funeral carriages were standing in a solemn train for many blocks. Until that moment it had not occurred to him that he might come in time to look on the dead face of the man who had not forgiven him while he was alive; and at first he s.h.i.+vered and shrank back as if hesitating to enter the door that had been so lately closed against him. An old Negro driver, who sat on the curbing, wiping the broad black band on his battered silk hat with a red bandanna handkerchief, turned to speak to him with mingled sympathy and curiosity.

"Ef'n you don' hurry up, you'll miss de bes' er hit, marster," he remarked. "Dey's been gwine on a pow'ful long time, but I'se been a-lisenin' wid all my years en I ain' hyearn nairy a sh'ut come thoo' de do'. Lawd! Lawd! dey ain' mo'n like I mo'n, caze w'en dey buried my Salviny I set up sech a sh'uttin' dat I bu'st two er my spar ribs clean ter pieces."

Still muttering to himself he fell to polis.h.i.+ng his old top hat more vigorously, while Ordway quickened his steps with an effort, and entering the gate, ascended the brick walk to the white steps of the portico. A wide black streamer hung from the bell handle, so pus.h.i.+ng open the door, which gave noiselessly before him, he entered softly into the heavy perfume of flowers. From the room on his right, which he remembered dimly as the formal drawing-room in the days of his earliest childhood, he heard a low voice speaking as if in prayer; and looking across the threshold, he saw a group of black robed persons kneeling in the faint light which fell through the c.h.i.n.ks in the green shutters. The intense odour of lilies awoke in him a sharp anguish, which had no a.s.sociation in his thoughts with his father's death, and which he could not explain until the incidents of his mother's funeral crowded, one by one, into his memory. The scent of lilies was the scent of death in his nostrils, and he saw again the cool, high-ceiled room in the midst of which her coffin had stood, and through the open windows the wide green fields in which spring was just putting forth. That was nearly thirty years ago, yet the emotion he felt at this instant was less for his father who had died yesterday than for his mother whom he had lost while he was still a child.

At his entrance no one had observed him, and while the low prayer went on, he stood with bowed head searching among the veiled figures about the coffin for the figure of his wife. Was that Lydia, he wondered, kneeling there in her mourning garments with her brow hidden in her clasped hands? And as he looked at her it seemed to him that she had never lifted the black veil which she had lowered over her face at their last parting. Though he was outwardly now among his own people, though the physical distance which divided him from his wife and children was barely a dozen steps, the loneliness which oppressed him was like the loneliness of the prison; and he understood that his real home was not here, but in Tappahannock--that his true kins.h.i.+p was with the labourers whose lives he had shared and whose bitter poverty he had lessened. In the presence of death he was conscious of the s.p.a.ce, the luxury, the costly funeral wreaths that surrounded him; and these external refinements of living produced in him a sensation of shyness, as if he had no longer a rightful place in the cla.s.s in which he had been born. Against his will he grew ashamed of his coa.r.s.e clothes and his roughened hands; and with this burning sense of humiliation a wave of homesickness for Tappahannock swept over him--for the dusty little town, with its hot, close smells and for the blue tent of sky which was visible from his ivied window at Cedar Hill. Then he remembered, with a pang, that even from Tappahannock he had been cast out. For the second time since his release from prison, he felt cowed and beaten, like an animal that is driven to bay. The dead man in his coffin was more closely woven into his surroundings than was the living son who had returned to his inheritance.

As the grave faces looked back at him at the end of the prayer, he realised that they belonged to branches, near or distant, of the Ordway connections. With the first glimpse of his figure in the doorway there came no movement of recognition; then he observed a slight start of surprise--or was it dismay? He knew that Lydia had seen him at last, though he did not look at her. It appeared to him suddenly that his return was an insult to her as well as to the dead man who lay there, helpless yet majestic, in the centre of the room. Flight seemed to him at the instant the only amendment in his power, and he had made an impulsive start back from the threshold, when the strained hush was broken by a word that left him trembling and white as from a blow.

"Father!" cried a voice, in the first uncontrollable joy of recognition; and with an impetuous rush through the crowd that surrounded her, Alice threw herself into his arms.

A mist swam before his eyes and he lost the encircling faces in a blur of tears; but as she clung to his breast and he held her close, he was conscious of a fierce joy that throbbed, like a physical pain, in his throat. The word which she had uttered had brought his soul up from the abyss as surely as if it were lifted by the hands of angels; and with each sobbing breath of happiness she drew, he felt that her nature was knit more firmly into his. The repulse he had received the moment before was forgotten, and while he held her drawn apart in the doorway, the silence of Lydia, and even the reproach of the dead man, had ceased to affect him. In that breathless, hysterical rush to his embrace Alice saved him to-day as Emily's outstretched hand had saved him three years before.

"They did not tell me! Oh, why, did they not tell me?" cried the girl, lifting her head from his breast, and the funeral hush that shrouded the room could not keep back the ecstasy in her voice. Even when after the first awkward instant the others gathered around him, nervous, effusive, friendly, Alice still clung to his hands, kissing first one and then the other and then both together, with the exquisite joyous abandonment of a child.

Lydia had kissed him, weeping softly under her long black veil, and hiding her pale, lovely face the moment afterwards in her clasped hands.

d.i.c.k, his son, had touched his cheek with his fresh young mouth; Richard Ordway, his father's brother, had shaken him by the hand; and the others, one and all, kinsmen and kinswomen, had given him their embarra.s.sed, yet kindly, welcome. But it was on Alice that his eyes rested, while he felt his whole being impelled toward her in a recovered rapture that was almost one of wors.h.i.+p. In her dark beauty, with her splendid hair, her blue, flas.h.i.+ng Ordway eyes, and her lips which were too red and too full for perfection, she appeared to him the one vital thing among the mourning figures in this house of death. Her delight still ran in little tremors through her limbs, and when a moment later, she slipped her hand through his arm, and followed Lydia and Richard Ordway down the steps, and into one of the waiting carriages, he felt that her bosom quivered with the emotion which the solemn presence of his father had forced back from her lips.