The Ancient Law Part 33

Back in his own room again, he asked himself desperately if this existence could be possible? Would it not be better for him to lose himself a second time--to throw in his lot with a lower cla.s.s, since his own had rejected him? Flinging himself on the floor beside the window, he pressed his forehead against the white painted wood as if the outward violence could deaden the throbbing agony he felt within. Again he smelt the delicate, yet intense perfume of Lydia's chamber; again he saw her shrinking from him until she lay crushed and white against the back of the sofa; again he watched her features contract with the instinctive repulsion she could not control. The pitiful deprecating gesture with which she had murmured: "It is nothing--a moment's pain," was seared forever like the mark from a burning iron into his memory.

"No, no--it cannot be--it is impossible," he said suddenly aloud. And though he had not the strength to frame the rest of his thought into words, he knew that the impossible thing he meant was this life, this torture, this slow martyrdom day by day without hope and without end except in death. After all there was a way of escape, so why should it be closed to him? What were these people to him beside those others whom he might yet serve--the miserable, the poor, the afflicted who would take from him the gifts which his own had rejected? What duty remained?

What obligation? What responsibility? Step by step he retraced the nineteen years of his marriage, and he understood for the first time, that Lydia had given him on her wedding day nothing of herself beyond the gentle, apologetic gesture which had followed that evening her involuntary repulsion. From the beginning to the end she had presided always above, not shared in his destiny. She had wanted what he could give, but not himself, and when he could give nothing more she had shown that she wanted him no longer. While he knelt there, still pressing his forehead against the window sill, the image of her part in his life rose out of the darkness of his mind, which opened and closed over it, and he saw her fixed, s.h.i.+ning and immovable, to receive his offerings, like some heathen deity above the sacrificial altar.

The next instant the image faded and was replaced by Emily as she had looked at him on that last evening with her soft, comforting gaze. The weakness of self pity came over him, and he asked himself in the coward's luxury of hopeless questioning, what Emily would have done had she stood to him in Lydia's place? He saw her parting from him with her bright courage at the prison doors; he saw her meeting him with her smile of welcome and of forgiveness when he came out. As once before he had risen to the vision of service, so now in the agony of his humiliation he was blessed at last with the understanding of love.

For many minutes he knelt there motionless by the open window, beyond which he could see the dimly lighted town on which a few drops of rain had begun to fall. The faint perfume of lilies came up to him from the walk below, where the broken sprays swept from the house were fading under the slow, soft rain. With the fragrance the image of Emily dissolved as in a mist to reappear the minute afterwards in a more torturing and human shape. He saw her now with her bright dark hair blown into little curls on her temples, with her radiant brown eyes that penetrated him with their soft, yet animated glance. The vigorous grace of her figure, as he had seen it outlined in her scant blue cotton gown against the background of cedars, remained motionless in his thoughts, bathed in a clear golden light that tormented his senses.

Rising from his knees with an effort, he struck a match and raised the green shade from the lamp on the table. Then while the little blue flame flickered out in his hand, he felt that he was seized by a frantic, an irresistible impulse of flight. Gathering his clothes from the bed in the darkness, he pushed them hurriedly back into the bag he had emptied, and with a last glance at the room which had become unendurable to him, opened the door and went with a rapid step down the great staircase and into the hall below. The direction of his journey, as well as the purpose of it, was obscure in his mind. Yesterday he had told himself that he could not remain in Tappahannock, and to-day he knew that it was impossible for him to live on in his father's house. To pa.s.s the hall door meant release--escape to him; beyond that there lay only the distance and the unknown.

The lights burned dimly on the staircase, and when he reached the bottom he could see on the carpet the thin reddish stream which issued from the closed door of the library. As he was about to pa.s.s by, a short sob fell on his ear, arresting him as authoritatively as if it had been the sound of his own name. While he stood there listening the sobs ceased and then broke out more loudly, now violent, now smothered, now followed by quick, furious steps across the floor within. Alice was shut in the room alone and suffering! With the realisation the bag fell from his hand, and turning the k.n.o.b softly, he opened the door and paused for an instant upon the threshold.

At the noise of the opening door the girl made a single step forward, and as she raised her hands to conceal her distorted features, her handkerchief, torn into shreds, fell to the carpet at her feet. Around her the room showed other signs of an outbreak of anger--the chairs were pushed hurriedly out of place, the books from the centre table were lying with opened backs on the floor, and a vase of dahlias lay overturned and scattered upon the mantel.

"I don't care--I don't care," she repeated, convulsively. "Why do they always interfere with me? What right has d.i.c.k or Uncle Richard to say whom I shall see or whom I shall not? I hate them all. Mamma is always against me--so is Uncle Richard--so is everybody. They side with d.i.c.k--always--always."

A single wave of her dark hair had fallen low on her forehead, and this, with the violent colour of her mouth, gave her a look that was almost barbaric. The splendid possibilities in her beauty caused him, in the midst of his pity, a sensation of dread.

"Alice," he said softly, almost in a whisper, and closing the door after him, he came to the middle of the room and stood near her, though still without touching her quivering body.

"They side with d.i.c.k always," she repeated furiously, "and you will side with him, too--you will side with him, too!"

For a long pause he looked at her in silence, waiting until the convulsive tremors of her limbs should cease.

"I shall never side against my daughter," he said very slowly. "Alice, my child, my darling, are you not really mine?"

A last quivering sob shook through her and she grew suddenly still.

"They will tell you things about me and you will believe them," she answered sternly.

"Against you, Alice? Against you?"

"You will blame me as they do."

"I love you," he returned, almost as sternly as she had spoken.

An emotional change, so swift that it startled him, broke in her look, and he saw the bright red of her mouth tremble and open like a flower in her glowing face. At the sight a sharp joy took possession of him--a joy that he could measure only by the depth of the agony out of which he had come. Without moving from his place, he stretched out his arms and stood waiting.

"Alice, I love you," he said.

Then his arms closed over her, for with the straight flight of a bird she had flown to his breast.

CHAPTER IV

THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT

Awaking before dawn, he realised with his first conscious thought that his life had been irrevocably settled while he slept. His place was here; he could not break away from it without leaving a ragged edge; and while he had believed himself to be deciding his future actions, that greater Destiny, of which his will was only a part, had arranged them for him during the dim pause of the night. He could feel still on his arm, as if it had persisted there through his sleep, the firm, almost viselike pressure of Alice's hands, and his whole sensitive nature thrilled in response to this mute appeal to his fatherhood. Yes, his purpose, his mission, and his happiness were here in his father's house.

At breakfast he found a white rosebud on his plate, and as he took it up, Alice rushed in from the garden and threw herself into his arms.

"I thought you were never, never coming down!" she exclaimed, choking with laughter, and utterly forgetful of the shadow of death which still lay over the house. "At first I was afraid you might have gone away in the night--just as you went that awful day eight years ago. Then I peeped out and saw your boots, so I went back to bed again and fell asleep. Oh, I'm so glad you've come! Why did you stay away such an age?

Now, at last, I'll have somebody to take my side against mamma and d.i.c.k and Uncle Richard----"

"But why against them, Alice? Surely they love you just as I do?"

Biting her lips sharply, she bent her heavy brows in a stern and frowning expression. "Oh, they're horrid," she said angrily, "they want me to live just as mamma does--shut up all day in a hot room on a hateful sofa. She reads novels all the time, and I despise books. I want to go away and see things and to have plenty of clothes and all the fun I choose. They let d.i.c.k do just as he pleases because he's a boy, but they try to make me dull and stupid and foolish all because I'm a girl.

I won't have it like that and it makes them angry----"

"Oh, well, we'll have fun together, you and I," returned Ordway, with a sinking heart, "but you must wait a bit till I catch up with you. Don't be in a precious hurry, if you please."

"Shall we have a good time, then? Shall we?" she persisted, delighted, kissing him with her warm mouth until he was dazzled by her beauty, her fascination, her ardent vitality. "And you will do just what I wish, won't you?" she whispered in his ear as she hung on his shoulder, "you will be good and kind always? and you will make them leave me alone about Geoffrey Heath?"

"About Geoffrey Heath?" he repeated, and grew suddenly serious.

"Oh, he's rich and he's fun, too," she responded irritably. "He has asked me to ride one of his horses--the most beautiful chestnut mare in the world--but mamma scolds me about it because she says he's not nice and that he did something once years ago about cards. As if I cared about cards!"

By the fear that had gripped him he could judge the strength of her hold on his heart. "Alice, be careful--promise me to be careful!" he entreated.

At his words he felt her arms relax from their embrace, and she seemed instantly to turn to marble upon his breast. "Oh, you're just like the others now. I knew you would be!" she exclaimed, as she drew away from him.

Before the coldness of her withdrawal he felt that his will went out of him; and in one despairing flight of imagination he saw what the loss of her affection would mean now in his life. An emotion which he knew to be weakness pervaded not only his heart, but his soul and his senses and the remotest fibre of his physical being. "Whatever comes I shall always stand by you, Alice," he said.

Though she appeared to be mollified by his subjection, the thin almost imperceptible furrows caused by the moment's anger, were still visible between her eyebrows. There was a certain fascination, he found, in watching these marks of age or of experience come and go on her fresh, childlike forehead, with its l.u.s.trous pallor, from which her splendid dark hair rolled back, touched with light, like a moonlit cloud. It was a singular characteristic of her beauty that its appeal was rather to the imagination than to the eye, and the moments, perhaps, when she dazzled least were those in which she conquered most through her enigmatical charm.

"You will buy some clothes, first of all, will you not?" she said, when, having finished his breakfast, he rose from the table and went out into the hall.

He met her eyes laughing, filled with happiness at the playful authority she a.s.sumed, and yet fearful still lest some incautious word of his should bring out those fine nervous wrinkles upon her forehead.

"Give me a week and I'll promise you a fas.h.i.+on plate," he responded gaily, kissing his hand to her as he went down the steps, and, under the trailing rose creepers at the gate, out into the street.

Rain had fallen in the night, and the ground was covered with s.h.i.+ning puddles beneath which a few autumn leaves showed drenched and beaten.

From the golden and red maples above a damp odour was wafted down into his face by the October wind, which now rose and now died away with a gentle sound. In the pale suns.h.i.+ne, which had not yet drained the moisture from the bricks, a wonderful freshness seemed to emanate from the sky and the earth and the white-pillared houses.

As he approached the corner, he heard his name called in a clear emphatic voice from the opposite sidewalk, and turning his head, he saw hastening toward him, a little elderly lady in a black silk gown trimmed heavily with bugles. As she neared him, followed by a young Negro maid bearing a market basket filled with vegetables, he recognised her as an intimate friend of his mother's, whom he had known familiarly in his childhood as "Aunt Lucy." It seemed so long now since his mother's death that he was attacked by a ghostly sensation, as if he were dreaming over his past life, while he stood face to face with the old lady's small soldierly figure and listened to the crisp, emphatic tones in which she welcomed him back to Botetourt. He remembered his frequent visits to her solemn old house, which she kept so dark that he had always stumbled over the two embroidered ottomans on the parlour hearth. He recalled the smell of spices which had hung about her storeroom, and the raspberry preserves which she had never failed to give him out of a blue china jar.

"Why, my dear, blessed child, it's such a pleasure to have you back!"

she exclaimed now with an effusion which he felt to be the outward veil of some hidden embarra.s.sment. "You must come sometimes and let me talk to you about your mother. I knew your mother so well--I was one of her bridesmaids."

Seizing his arm in her little firm, clawlike hands, she a.s.sured him with animation of her delight at his return, alluding in a shaking voice to his mother, and urging him to come to sit with her whenever he could stand the gloom of her empty house.

"And you will give me raspberry preserves out of the blue china jar?" he asked, laughing, "and let me feed crackers to the green parrot?"

"What a boy! What a boy!" she returned. "You remember everything. The parrot is dead--my poor Polly!--but there is a second."

Her effusiveness, her volubility, which seemed to him to be the result of concealed embarra.s.sment, produced in him presently a feeling of distrust, almost of resentment, and he remembered the next instant that, in his childhood, she had been looked upon as a creature of uncontrolled charitable impulses. Upon the occasion of his last meeting with her was she not hastening upon some ministering errand to the city gaol? At the casual recollection an unreasoning bitterness awoke in his mind; her reiterated raptures fell with a strange effect of irritation upon his ears; and he knew now that he could never bring himself to enter her house again, that he could never accept her preserved raspberries out of the blue china jar. Her reception of him, he saw, was but a part of the general reception of Botetourt. Like her the town would be voluble, unnatural, overdone in its kindness, hiding within itself a furtive constraint as if it addressed its speeches to the sensitive sufferer from some incurable malady. The very tenderness, the exaggerated sympathy in its manner would hardly have been different, he understood, if he had been recently discharged as harmless, yet half-distraught, from an asylum for the insane.