The Ancient Law Part 31

CHAPTER II

HIS OWN PLACE

Some hours later when he sat alone in his room, he told himself that he could never forget the drive home from the cemetery in the closed carriage. Lydia had raised her veil slightly, as if in a desire for air, and as she sat with her head resting against the lowered blind, he could trace the delicate, pale lines of her mouth and chin, and a single wisp of her ash blond hair which lay heavily upon her forehead. Not once had she spoken, not once had she met his eyes of her own accord, and he had discovered that she leaned almost desperately upon the iron presence of Richard Ordway. Had his sin, indeed, crushed her until she had not power to lift her head? he asked pa.s.sionately, with a sharper remorse than he had ever felt.

"I am glad that you were able to come in time," Richard Ordway remarked in his cold, even voice; and after this the rattle of the wheels on the cobblestones in the street was the only sound which broke the death-like stillness in which they sat. No, he could never forget it, nor could he forget the bewildering effect of the suns.h.i.+ne when they opened the carriage door. Beside the curbing a few idle Negroes were left of the crowd that had gathered to watch the coffin borne through the gate, and the pavement was thick with dust, as if many hurrying feet had tramped by since the funeral had pa.s.sed. As they entered the house the scent of lilies struck him afresh with all the agony of its a.s.sociations. The shutters were still closed, the chairs were still arranged in their solemn circle, the streamer of c.r.a.pe, hurriedly untied from the bell handle, still lay where it had been thrown on the library table; and as he crossed the threshold, he trod upon some fading lilies which had fallen, unnoticed, from a funeral wreath. Then, in the dining-room, Richard Ordway poured out a gla.s.s of whiskey, and in the very instant when he was about to raise it to his lips, he put it hurriedly down and pushed the decanter aside with an embarra.s.sed and furtive movement.

"Do you feel the need of a cup of coffee, Daniel?" he asked in a pleasant, conciliatory tone, "or will you have only a gla.s.s of seltzer?"

"I am not thirsty, thank you," Daniel responded shortly, and the next moment he asked Alice to show him the room in which he would stay.

With laughing eagerness she led him up the great staircase to the chamber in which he had slept as a boy.

"It's just next to d.i.c.k's," she said, "and mother's and mine are directly across the hall. At first we thought of putting you in the red guest-room, but that's only for visitors, so we knew you would be sure to like this better."

"Yes, I'll like this better," he responded, and then as she would have moved away, he caught her, with a gesture of anguish, back to his arms.

"You remember me, Alice, my child? you have not forgotten me?"

She laughed merrily, biting her full red lips the moment afterward to check the sound.

"Why, how funny of you! I was quite a big girl--don't you remember?--when you went away. It was so dull afterwards that I cried for days, and that was why I was so overjoyed when mamma told me you would come back. It was never dull when you lived at home with us, because you would always take me to the park or the circus whenever I grew tired of dolls. n.o.body did that after you went away and I used to cry and kick sometimes thinking that they would tell you and bring you back."

"And you remembered me chiefly because of the park and the circus?" he asked, smiling for joy, as he kissed her hand which lay on his sleeve.

"Oh, I never forget anything, you know. Mamma even says that about me. I remember my first nurse and the baker's boy with red cheeks who used to bring me pink cakes when I was three years old. No, I never forget--I never forget," she repeated with vehemence.

Animation had kindled her features into a beauty of colour which made her eyes bluer and brighter and softened the too intense contrast of her full, red lips.

"All these years I've hoped that you would come back and that things would change," she said impulsively, her words tripping rapidly over one another. "Everything is so dreadfully grave and solemn here.

Grandfather hated noise so that he would hardly let me laugh if he was in the house. Then mamma's health is wrecked, and she lies always on the sofa, and never goes out except for a drive sometimes when it is fair."

"Mamma's health is wrecked?" he repeated inquiringly, as she paused.

"Oh, that's what everybody says about her--her health is wrecked. And Uncle Richard is hardly any better, for he has a wife whose health is wrecked also. And d.i.c.k--he isn't sick, but he might as well be, he is so dull and plodding and over nice----"

"And you Alice?"

"I? Oh, I'm not dull, but I'm unhappy--awfully--you'll find that out. I like fun and pretty clothes and new people and strange places. I want to marry and have a home of my own and a lot of rings like mamma's, and a carriage with two men on the box, and to go to Europe to buy things whenever I please. That's the way Molly Burridge does and she was only two cla.s.ses ahead of me. How rough your hands are, papa, and what a funny kind of s.h.i.+rt you have on. Do people dress like that where you came from? Well, I don't like it, so you'll have to change."

She had gone out at last, forgetting to walk properly in her mourning garments, tripping into a run on the threshold, and then checking herself with a prim, mocking look over her shoulder. Not until the door had closed with a slam behind her black skirt, did Ordway's gaze turn from following her and fix itself on the long mirror between the windows, in which he could see, as Alice had seen the moment before, his roughened hands, his carelessly trimmed hair and his common clothes. He was dressed as the labourers dressed on Sundays in Tappahannock; though, he remembered now, that in that crude little town he had been conspicuous for the neatness, almost the jauntiness, of his attire. As he laid out presently on the bed his few poor belongings, he told himself, with determination, that for Alice's sake even this must be changed. He was no longer of the cla.s.s of Baxter, of Banks, of Mrs.

Twine. All that was over, and he must return now into the world in which his wife and his children had kept a place. To do Alice honour--at least not to do her further shame--would become from this day, he realised, the controlling motive of his life. Then, as he looked down at the coa.r.s.e, unshapely garments upon the delicate counterpane, he knew that Daniel Smith and Daniel Ordway were now parted forever.

He was still holding one of the rough blue s.h.i.+rts in his hand, when a servant entered to inquire if there was anything that he might need. The man, a bright young mulatto, was not one of the old family slaves; and while he waited, alert and intelligent, upon the threshold, Ordway was seized by a nervous feeling that he was regarded with curiosity and suspicion by the black rolling eyes.

"Where is uncle Boaz? He used to wait upon me," he asked.

"He's daid, suh. He drapped down daid right on de do' step."

"And Aunt Mirandy?"

"She's daid, too, en' I'se her chile."

"Oh, you are, are you?" said Ordway, and he had again the sensation that he was watched through inquisitive eyes. "That is all now," he added presently, "you may go," and it was with a long breath of relief that he saw the door close after the figure of Aunt Mirandy's son.

When a little later he dressed himself and went out into the hall, he found, to his annoyance, that he walked with a cautious and timid step like that of a labourer who has stumbled by accident into surroundings of luxury. As he descended the wide curving staircase, with his hand on the mahogany bal.u.s.trade, the sound of his footsteps seemed to reverberate disagreeably through the awful funereal silence in which he moved. If he could only hear Alice's laugh, d.i.c.k's whistle, or even the garrulous flow of the Negro voices that he had listened to in his childhood. With a pang he recalled that Uncle Boaz was dead, and his heart swelled as he remembered how often he had pa.s.sed up and down this same staircase on the old servant's shoulder. At that age he had felt no awe of the s.h.i.+ning emptiness and the oppressive silence. Then he had believed himself to be master of all at which he looked; now he was conscious of that complete detachment from his surroundings which produces almost a sense of the actual separation of soul and body.

Reaching the hall below, he found that some hurried attempt had been made to banish or to conceal the remaining signs of the funeral. The doors and windows were open, the shreds of c.r.a.pe had disappeared from the carpet, and the fading lilies had been swept out upon the graveled walk in the yard. Upon entering the library, which invited him by its rows of calf-bound books, he discovered that Richard Ordway was patiently awaiting him in the large red leather chair which had once been the favourite seat of his father.

"Before I go home, I think it better to have a little talk with you, Daniel," began the old man, as he motioned to a sofa on the opposite side of the Turkish rug before the open grate. "It has been a peculiar satisfaction to me to feel that I was able to bring you back in time for the service."

"I came," replied Daniel slowly, "as soon as I received your telegram."

He hesitated an instant and then went on in the same quiet tone in which the other had spoken, "Do you think, though, that he would have wished me to come at all?"

After folding the newspaper which he had held in his hand, Richard laid it, with a courteous gesture upon the table beside him. As he sat there with his long limbs outstretched and relaxed, and his handsome, severe profile resting against the leather back of his chair, the younger man was impressed, as if for the first time, by the curious mixture of strength and refinement in his features. He was not only a cleverer man than his brother had been, he was gentler, smoother, more distinguished on every side. In spite of his reserve, it was evident that he had wished to be kind--that he wished it still; yet this kindness was so removed from the ordinary impulse of humanity that it appeared to his nephew to be in a way as detached and impersonal as an abstract virtue.

The very lines of his face were drawn with the precision, the finality, of a geometrical figure. To imagine that they could melt into tenderness was as impossible as to conceive of their finally crumbling into dust.

"He would have wished it--he did wish it," he said, after a minute. "I talked with him only a few hours before his death, and he told me then that it was necessary to send for you--that he felt that he had neglected his duty in not bringing you home immediately after your release. He saw at last that it would have been far better to have acted as I strongly advised at the time."

"It was his desire, then, that I should return?" asked Daniel, while a stinging moisture rose to his eyes at the thought that he had not looked once upon the face of the dead man. "I wish I had known."

A slight surprise showed in the other's gesture of response, and he glanced hastily away as he might have done had he chanced to surprise his nephew while he was still without his boots or his s.h.i.+rt.

"I think he realised before he died that the individual has no right to place his personal pride above the family tie," he resumed quietly, ignoring the indecency of emotion as he would have ignored, probably, the unclothed body. "I had said much the same thing to him eight years ago, when I told him that he would realise before his death that he was not morally free to act as he had done with regard to you. As a matter of fact," he observed in his trained, legal voice, "the family is, after all, the social unit, and each member is as closely related as the eye to the ear or the right arm to the left. It is illogical to speak of denying one's flesh and blood, for it can't be done."

So this was why they had received him. He turned his head away, and his gaze rested upon the boughs of the great golden poplar beyond the window.

"It is understood, then," he asked "that I am to come back--back to this house to live?"

When he had finished, but not until then, Richard Ordway looked at him again with his dry, conventional kindness. "If you are free," he began, altering the word immediately lest it should suggest painful a.s.sociations to his companion's mind, "I mean if you have no other binding engagements, no decided plans for the future."

"No, I have made no other plans. I was working as a bookkeeper in a tobacco warehouse in Tappahannock."

"As a bookkeeper?" repeated Richard, as he glanced down inquiringly at the other's hands.

"Oh, I worked sometimes out of doors, but the position I held was that of confidential clerk."

The old man nodded amiably, accepting the explanation with a readiness for which the other was not prepared. "I was about to offer you some legal work in my office," he remarked. "Dry and musty stuff, I fear it is, but it's better--isn't it?--for a man to have some kind of occupation----"

Though the words were uttered pleasantly enough, it seemed to the younger man that the concluding and significant phrase was left unspoken. "Some kind of occupation to keep you out of temptation" was what Richard had meant to say--what he had withheld, from consideration, if not from humanity. While the horror of the whole situation closed over Daniel like a mental darkness, he remembered the sensitive shrinking of Lydia on the drive home, the prying, inquisitive eyes of the mulatto servant, the furtive withdrawal of the whiskey by the man who sat opposite to him. With all its attending humiliation and despair, there rushed upon him the knowledge that by the people of his own household he was regarded still as a creature to be restrained and protected at every instant. Though outwardly they had received him, instinctively they had repulsed him. The thing which stood between them and himself was neither of their making nor of his. It belonged to their very nature and was woven in with their inner fibre. It was a creation, not of the individual, but of the race, and the law by which it existed was rooted deep in the racial structure. Tradition, inheritance, instinct--these were the barriers through which he had broken and which had closed like the impenetrable sea-gates behind him. Though he were to live on day by day as a saint among them, they could never forget: though he were to shed his heart's blood for them, they would never believe. To convince them of his sincerity was more hopeless, he understood, than to reanimate their affection. In their very forgiveness they had not ceased to condemn him, and in the shelter which they offered him there would be always a hidden restraint. With the thought it seemed to him that he was stifling in the closeness of the atmosphere, that he must break away again, that he must find air and freedom, though it cost him all else besides. The possibility of his own weakness seemed created in him by their acceptance of it; and he felt suddenly a terror lest the knowledge of their suspicion should drive him to justify it by his future in Botetourt.

"Yes, it is better for me to work," he said aloud. "I hope that I shall be able to make myself of some small use in your office."

"There's no doubt of that, I'm sure," responded Richard, in his friendliest tone.

"It is taken for granted, then, that I shall live on here with my wife and children?"

"We have decided that it is best. But as for your wife, you must remember that she is very much of an invalid. Do not forget that she has had a sad--a most tragic life."