The Ancient Law Part 35

"Yes, she is like you, I have always thought so," returned Lydia, quietly.

"And for that reason, perhaps, you have never quite understood her," he responded.

She bowed her head as if too polite or too indifferent to dissent from his words; and then slipping her hand through Richard Ordway's arm, she stood waiting patiently while the old man delivered his last bit of remonstrance.

"Try to curb her impulses, Daniel, or you will regret it."

He went out, still holding Lydia's hand, and a moment afterwards, when Daniel looked up at the sound of the hall door closing quickly, he saw that d.i.c.k also had vanished, and that he was alone in the library with Alice, who still sobbed on his breast.

A few moments before it had seemed to him that he needed only to be alone with her to make all perfectly clear between them. But when the others had pa.s.sed out, and the door had closed at last on the empty silence in which they stood, he found that the words which he had meant to utter had vanished hopelessly from his mind. He had said to Lydia that Alice was like himself, but there had never been an hour in his life when his hatred of a lie had not been as intense, as uncompromising, as it was to-day. And this lie which she had spoken appeared to divide them now like a drawn sword.

"Alice," he said, breaking with an effort through the embarra.s.sment which had held him speechless, "will you give me your word of honour that you will never tell me a falsehood again?"

She stirred slightly in his arms, and he felt her body grow soft and yielding. "I didn't to you," she answered, "oh, I wouldn't to you."

"Not to the others then. Will you promise?"

Her warm young arm tightened about his neck. "I didn't mean to--I didn't mean to," she protested between her sobs, "but they forced me to do it.

It was more than half their fault--they are so--so hateful! I tried to think of something else, but there was nothing to say, and I knew you would stand by me----"

"You have almost broken my heart," he answered, "for you have lied, Alice, you have lied."

She lifted her head and the next instant he felt her mouth on his cheek, "I wish I were dead! I have hurt you and I wish I were dead!" she cried.

"It is not hurting me that I mind--you may do that and welcome. It is hurting yourself, my child, my Alice," he answered; and pressing her upturned face back on his arm, he bent over her in an ecstasy of emotion, calling her his daughter, his darling, the one joy of his life.

The iron in his nature had melted beneath her warm touch, and he felt again the thrill, half agony, half rapture, with which he had received her into his arms on the day of her birth. That day was nearer to him now than was the minute in which he stood, and he could trace still the soft, babyish curves in the face which nestled so penitently on his arm.

His very fear for her moved him into a deeper tenderness, and the appeal she made to him now was one with the appeal of her infancy, for its power lay in her weakness, not in her strength.

"Be truthful with me, Alice," he said, "and remember that nothing can separate me from you."

An hour later when he parted from her and went upstairs, he heard Lydia's voice calling to him through her half open door, and turning obediently, he entered her bedroom for the first time since the night of his return. Now as then the luxury, the softness, of his wife's surroundings produced in him a curious depression, an enervation of body; and he stood for an instant vainly striving to close his nostrils against the delicious perfume which floated from her lace-trimmed dressing-table.

Lydia, still in her light mourning gown, was standing, when he entered, before a little marquetry desk in one corner, her eyes on an open letter which she appeared to have left partially unread.

"I wanted to tell you, Daniel," she began at once, approaching the point with a directness which left him no time to wonder as to the purpose of her summons, "that Alice's intimacy with Geoffrey Heath has already been commented upon in Botetourt. Cousin Paulina has actually written to me for an explanation."

"Cousin Paulina?" he repeated vaguely, and remembered immediately that the lady in question was his wife's one rich relation--an elderly female who was greatly respected for her fortune, which she spent entirely in gratifying her personal pa.s.sion for trinkets. "Oh, yes," he added flippantly, "the old lady who used to look like a heathen idol got up for the sacrifice."

He felt that his levity was out of place, yet he went on rashly because he knew that he was doomed forever to appear at a disadvantage in Lydia's presence. She would never believe in him--his best motives would wear always to her the covering of hypocrisy; and the very hopelessness of ever convincing her goaded him at times into the reckless folly of despair.

"She writes me that people are talking of it," she resumed, sweetly, as if his untimely mirth had returned still-born into the vacancy from which it emerged.

"Who is this Geoffrey Heath you speak of so incessantly?" he demanded.

"There was a Heath, I remember, who had a place near us in the country, and kept a barroom or a butcher's shop or something in town."

"That was the father," replied Lydia, with a shudder which deepened the slightly scornful curve of her lip. "He was a respectable old man, I believe, and made his fortune quite honestly, however it was. It was only after his son began to grow up that he became socially ambitious----"

"And is that all you have against him?"

"Oh, there's nothing against the old man--nothing at least except the glaring bad taste he showed in that monstrous house he built in Henry Street. He's dead now, you know."

"Then the son has all the money and the house, too, hasn't he?"

"All he hasn't wasted, yes."

As she spoke she subsided into a chair, with a graceful, eddying motion of her black chiffon draperies, and continued the conversation with an expression of smiling weariness. All her att.i.tudes were effective, and he was struck, while he stood, embarra.s.sed and awkward, before her, by the plaintive grace that she introduced into her smallest gesture.

Though he was aware that he saw her now too clearly for pa.s.sion, the appeal of her delicate fairness went suddenly to his head.

"Then there's not much to be said for the chap, I suppose?" he asked abruptly, fearing the prolonged strain of the silence.

"Very little for him, but a good deal about him, according to Cousin Paulina. It seems that three years ago he was sent away from the University for something disgraceful--cheating at cards, I believe; and since then he has been conspicuous chiefly because of his low a.s.sociations. How Alice met him, I could never understand--I can't understand now."

"And do you think she cares for him--that she even imagines that she does?" he demanded, while his terror rose in his throat and choked back his words.

"She will not confess it--how could she?" replied Lydia wearily, "I believe it is only wildness, recklessness, lack of discipline that prompts her. Yet he is good-looking--in a vulgar way," she added in disgust, "and Alice has always seemed to like vulgar things."

Her eyes rested on him, not directly, but as if they merely included him in their general pensive survey of the world; yet he read the accusation in her gentle avoidance of his gaze as plainly as she had uttered in it her clear, flute-like tones.

"It is very important," she went on, "that she should be curbed in her impulses, in her extravagance. Already her bills are larger than mine and yet she is never satisfied with the amount of her allowance. We can do nothing with her, Uncle Richard and I, but she seems to yield, in a measure, to your influence, and we thought--we hoped----"

"I will--I will," he answered. "I will give my life to help her if need be. But Lydia," he broke out more earnestly, "you must stand by and aid me for her sake, for the sake of our child, we must work together----"

Half rising in her chair, she looked at him fixedly a moment, while he saw her pupils dilate almost as if she were in physical fear.

"But what can I do? I have done all I could," she protested, with an injured look. By this look, without so much as a gesture, she put the s.p.a.ce of the whole room between them. The corners of her mouth quivered and drooped, and he watched the pathos creep back into her light blue eyes. "I have given up my whole life to the children since--since----"

She broke off in a frightened whisper, but the unfinished sentence was more expressive than a volley of reproaches would have been. There was something in her thoughts too horrible to put into words, and this something of which she could not bring herself to speak, would have had no place in her existence except for him. He felt cowed suddenly, as if he had been physically beaten and thrust aside.

"You have been very brave--I know--I appreciate it all," he said, and while he spoke he drew away from her until he stood with his back against one of the amber satin curtains. Instinctively he put out his hand for support, and as it closed over the heavy draperies, he felt that the hard silken texture made his flesh creep. The physical sensation, brief as it was, recalled in some strange way the effect upon him of Lydia's smooth and s.h.i.+ning surface when he had knelt before her on the night of his homecoming. Yet it was with difficulty even now that he could free himself from the conviction that her emotional apathy was but one aspect of innocence. Would he admit to-day that what he had once wors.h.i.+pped as purity of soul was but the frost of an unnatural coldness of nature? All at once, as he looked at her, he found himself reminded by her calm forehead, her cla.s.sic features, of the sculptured front of a marble tomb which he had seen in some foreign gallery. Was there death, after all, not life hidden for him in her plaintive beauty? The next instant, as he watched her, he told himself that such questions belonged to the evil promptings of his own nature.

"I realise all that you have been, all that you have suffered," he said at last, aware that his words sounded hysterical in the icy constraint which surrounded them.

When his speech was out, his embarra.s.sment became so great that he found himself presently measuring the distance which divided him from the closed door. With a last effort of will, he went toward her and stretched out his hand in a gesture that was almost one of entreaty.

"Lydia," he asked, "is it too painful for you to have me here? Would it be any better for you if I went away?"

As he moved toward her she bent over with a nervous, mechanical movement to arrange her train, and before replying to his question, she laid each separate fold in place. "Why, by no means," she answered, looking up with her conventional smile. "It would only mean--wouldn't it?--that people would begin to wonder all over again?"

CHAPTER VI

THE IRON BARS

As the days went on it seemed to him that his nature, repressed in so many other directions, was concentrated at last in a single channel of feeling. The one outlet was his pa.s.sion for Alice, and nothing that concerned her was too remote or too trivial to engross him--her clothes, her friends.h.i.+ps, the particular chocolate creams for which she had once expressed a preference. To fill her life with amus.e.m.e.nts that would withdraw her erring impulses from Geoffrey Heath became for a time his absorbing purpose.