The Ancient Law Part 39

A soft May afternoon was just closing, and the street lamps glimmered, here and there, like white moths out of the mist which was fragrant with honeysuckle and roses. An old lamplighter, who was descending on his ladder from a tall lamppost at the corner, looked down at Ordway with a friendly and merry face.

"The days will soon be so long that you won't be needing us to light you home," he remarked, as he came down gingerly, his hands grasping the rungs of the ladder above his head. When he landed at Daniel's side he began to tell him in a pleasant, garrulous voice about his work, his rheumatism and the strange sights that he had seen in his rounds for so many years. "I've seen wonders in my day, you may believe it," he went on, chuckling, "I've seen babies in carriages that grew up to be brides in orange blossoms, and then went by me later as corpses in hea.r.s.es.

I've seen this town when it warn't mo'n a little middlin' village, and I've seen soldiers dyin' in blood in this very street." A train went by with a rush along the gleaming track that ran through the town. "An'

I've known the time when a sight like that would have skeered folks to death," he added.

For a minute Ordway looked back, almost wistfully, after the flying train. Then with a friendly "good-bye!" he parted from the lamplighter and went on his way.

When he reached home he half expected to find Alice waiting for him in the twilight on the piazza, but, to his surprise, Lydia met him as he entered the hall and asked him, in a voice which sounded as if she were speaking in the presence of servants, to come with her into the library.

There she closed the door upon him and inquired in a guarded tone:

"Has Alice been with you this afternoon? Have you seen or heard anything of her?"

"Not since luncheon. Why, I thought that she was at home with one of the girls."

"It seems she left the house immediately after you. She wore her dark blue travelling dress, and one of the servants saw her at the railway station at three o'clock."

For an instant the room swam before his eyes. "You believe, then, that she has gone off?" he asked in an unnatural voice, "that she has gone off with Geoffrey Heath?"

In the midst of his own hideous anguish he was impressed by the perfect decency of Lydia's grief--by the fact that she wore her anxiety as an added grace.

"I have telephoned for Uncle Richard," she said in a subdued tone, "and he has just sent me word that after making inquiries, he learned that Geoffrey Heath went to Was.h.i.+ngton on the afternoon train."

"And Alice is with him!"

"If she is not, where is she?" Her eyes filled with tears, and sinking into a chair she dropped her face in her clasped hands. "Oh, I wish Uncle Richard would come," she moaned through her fingers.

Again he felt a smothered resentment at this implicit reliance upon Richard Ordway. "We must make sure first that she is gone," he said, "and then it will be time enough to consider ways and means of bringing her back."

Turning abruptly away from her, he went out of the library and up the staircase to Alice's room, which was situated directly across the hall from his own. At the first glance it seemed to him that nothing was missing, but when he looked at her dressing-table in the alcove, he found that it had been stripped of her silver toilet articles, and that her little red leather bag, which he had filled with banknotes a few days ago, was not in the top drawer where she kept it. Something in the girl's chamber, so familiar, so redolent of a.s.sociations with her bright presence, tore at his heart with a fresh sense of loss, like a gnawing pain that fastens into a new wound. On the bed he saw her pink flannel dressing-gown, with the embroidered collar which had so delighted her when she had bought it; on the floor at one side lay her pink quilted slippers, slightly soiled from use; and between the larger pillows was the delicate, lace-trimmed baby's pillow upon which she slept. The perfume of her youth, her freshness, was still in the room, as if she had gone from it for a little while through a still open door.

At a touch on his arm he looked round startled, to find one of the servants--the single remaining slave of the past generation--rocking her aged body as she stood at his side.

"She ain' gwine come back no mo'--Yes, Lawd, she ain' gwine come back no mo'. Whut's done hit's done en hit cyarn be undone agin."

"Why, Aunt Mehaley, what do you mean?" he demanded sternly, oppressed, in spite of himself by her wailing voice and her African superst.i.tion.

"I'se seen er tur'ble heap done in my day wid dese hyer eyes," resumed the old negress, "but I ain' never seen none un um undone agin atter deys wunst been done. You kin cut down er tree, but you cyarn' mek hit grow back togedder. You kin wring de neck er a rooster, but you cyarn'

mek him crow. Yes, my Lawd, hit's easy to pull down, but hit's hard to riz up. I'se ole, Marster, en I'se mos' bline wid lookin', but I ain'

never seen whut's done undone agin."

She tottered out, still wailing in her half-crazed voice, and hastily shutting the drawers of the dressing-table, he went downstairs again to where Lydia awaited him in the library.

"There's no doubt, I fear, that she's gone with Heath," he said, with a constraint into which he had schooled himself on the staircase. "As he appears to have stopped at Was.h.i.+ngton, I shall take the next train there, which leaves at nine-twenty-five. If they are married----"

He broke off, struck by the pallor that overspread her face.

"But they are married! They must be married!" she cried in terror.

For an instant he stared back at her white face in a horror as great as hers. Was it the first time in his life, he questioned afterwards, that he had been brought face to face with the hideous skeletons upon which living conventions a.s.sume a semblance of truth?

"I hope to heaven that he has _not_ married her!" he exclaimed in a pa.s.sion from which she shrank back trembling. "Good G.o.d! do you want me to haggle with a cad like that to make him marry my child?"

"And if he doesn't? what then?" moaned Lydia, in a voice that seemed to fade away while she spoke.

"If he doesn't I shall be almost tempted to bless his name. Haven't you proved to me that he is a cheat and a brute and a libertine, and yet you dare to tell me that I must force him to marry Alice. Oh, if he will only have the mercy to leave her free, I may still save her!" he said.

She looked at him with dilated eyes as if rooted in fear to the spot upon which she stood. "But the consequences," she urged weakly at last in a burst of tears.

"Oh, I'll take the consequences," he retorted harshly, as he went out.

An hour later, when he was settled in the rus.h.i.+ng train, it seemed to him that he was able to find comfort in the words with which he had separated from his wife. Let Alice do what she would, there was always hope for her in the thought that he might help her to bear, even if he could not remove from her, the consequences of her actions. Could so great a force as his love for her fail to avert from her young head at least a portion of her inevitable disillusionment? The recollection of her beauty, of her generosity, and of the wreck of her womanhood almost before it had begun, not only added to his suffering, but seemed in some inexplicable way to increase his love. The affection he had always felt for her was strengthened now by that touch of pity which lends a deeper tenderness to all human relations.

Upon reaching Was.h.i.+ngton he found that a shower had come up, and the pavements were already wet when he left the station. He had brought no umbrella, but he hardly heeded this in the eagerness which drove him from street to street in his search for his child. After making vain inquiries at several of the larger hotels, he had begun to feel almost hopeless, when going into the newest and most fas.h.i.+onable of them all, he discovered that "Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Heath" had been a.s.signed an apartment there an hour before. In answer to his question the clerk informed him that the lady had ordered her dinner served upstairs, leaving at the same time explicit instructions that she was "not at home" to anyone who should call. But in spite of this rebuff, he drew out his card, and sat down in a chair in the brilliantly lighted lobby.

He had selected a seat near a radiator in the hope of drying his damp clothes, and presently a little cloud of steam rose from his shoulders and drifted out into the s.h.i.+ning s.p.a.ce. As he watched the gorgeous, over-dressed women who swept by him, he remembered as one remembers a distant dream, the years when his life had been spent among such crowds in just such a dazzling glare of electric light. It appeared false and artificial to him now, but in the meantime, he reflected, while he looked on, he had been in prison.

A voice at his elbow interrupted his thoughts, and turning in response to an invitation from a b.u.t.toned sleeve, he entered an elevator and was borne rapidly aloft among a tightly wedged group of women who were loudly bewailing their absence from the theatre. It was with difficulty that he released himself at the given signal from his escort, and stepped out upon the red velvet carpet which led to Alice's rooms. In response to a knock from the boy who had accompanied him, the door flew open with a jerk, and Alice appeared before him in a bewildering effect of lace and pink satin.

"O papa, papa, you naughty darling!" she exclaimed, and was in his arms before he had time to utter the reproach on his lips.

With her head on his breast, he was conscious at first only of an irresponsible joy, like the joy of the angels for whom evil no longer exists. To know that she was alive, that she was safe, that she was in his arms, seemed sufficient delight, not only unto the day, but unto his whole future as well. Then the thought of what it meant to find her thus in her lace and satin came over him, and drawing slightly away he looked for the first time into her face.

"Alice, what does it mean?" he asked, as he kissed her.

Pus.h.i.+ng the loosened hair back from her forehead, she met his question with a protesting pout.

"It means that you're a wicked boy to run away from home like this and be all by yourself in a bad city," she responded with a playful shake of her finger. Then she caught his hand and drew him down on the sofa beside her in the midst of the filmy train of her tea-gown. "If you promise never to do it again, I shan't tell mamma on you," she added, with a burst of light-hearted merriment.

"Where were you married, Alice? and who did it?" he asked sternly.

At his tone a ripple of laughter broke from her lips, and reaching for her little red leather bag on the table, she opened it and tossed a folded paper upon his knees. "I didn't ask his name," she responded, "but you can find it all written on that, I suppose."

"And you cared nothing for me?--nothing for my anxiety, my distress?"

"I always meant to telegraph you, of course. Geoffrey has gone down now to do it."

"But were you obliged to leave home in this way? If you had told me you loved him, I should have understood--should have sympathised."

"Oh, but mamma wouldn't, and I had to run off. Of course, I wanted a big wedding like other girls, and a lot of bridesmaids and a long veil, but I knew you'd never consent to it, so I made up my mind just to slip away without saying a word. Geoffrey is so rich that I can make up afterwards for the things I missed when I was married. This is what he gave me to-day. Isn't it lovely?"

Baring her throat she showed him a pearl necklace hidden beneath her lace collar. "We're sailing day after to-morrow," she went on, delightedly, "and we shall go straight to Paris because I am dying to see the shops. I wouldn't run away with him until he promised to take me there."

There was no regret in her mind, no misgiving, no disquietude. The thought of his pain had not marred for an instant the pleasure of her imaginary shopping. "O papa, I am happy, so happy!" she sang aloud, springing suddenly to her full height and standing before him in her almost barbaric beauty--from the splendid hair falling upon her shoulders to the little feet that could not keep still for sheer joy of living. He saw her red mouth glow and tremble as she bent toward him.

"To think that I'm really and truly out of Botetourt at last!" she cried.

"Then you've no need of me and I may as well go home?" he said a little wistfully as he rose.

At this she hung upon his neck for a minute with her first show of feeling. "I'd rather you wouldn't stay till Geoffrey comes back," she answered, abruptly releasing him, "because it would be a surprise to him and he's always so cross when he's surprised. He has a perfectly awful temper," she confided in a burst of frankness, "but I've learned exactly how to manage him, so it doesn't matter. Then he's so handsome, too. I shouldn't have looked at him twice if he hadn't been handsome. Now, go straight home and take good care of yourself and don't get fat and bald before I come back."

She kissed him several times, laughing in little gasps, while she held him close in her arms. Then putting him from her, she pushed him gently out into the hall. As the door closed on her figure, he felt that it shut upon all that was living or warm in his heart.