The Ancient Law Part 4

"I warn't thinkin' about lettin' that room agin'," said Mrs. Twine, crus.h.i.+ng her husband's budding interference by the completeness with which she ignored his presence. "But it's jest as well, I reckon, for a defenceless married woman to have a stranger in the house. Though for the matter of that," she concluded in a burst of domestic confidence, "the woman that ain't a match for her own husband without outside help ain't deservin' of the pleasure an' the blessin' of one." Then as the man with the red nose slunk shamefacedly into the pa.s.sage, she added in an undertone to Ordway, "and now if you'll jest step inside, I'll show you the spare room that I've got to let."

She led the way indoors, scolding shrilly as she pa.s.sed through the hall, and up the little staircase, where several half-dressed children were riding, with shrieks of delight, down the bal.u.s.trade. "You needn't think you've missed a scrubbing because company's come," she remarked angrily, as she stooped to box the ears of a small girl lying flat on her stomach upon the landing. "Such is my taste for cleanness," she explained to Ordway, "that when my hands once tech the soap it's as much as I can do to keep 'em back from rubbin' the skin off. Thar 're times even when the taste is so ragin' in my breast that I can hardly wait for Sat.u.r.day night to come around. Yet I ain't no friend to license whether it be in whiskey or in soap an' water. Temperance is my pa.s.sion and that's why, I suppose, I came to marry a drunkard."

With this tragic confession, uttered in a matter of fact manner, she produced a key from the pocket of her blue gingham ap.r.o.n, and ushered Ordway into a small, poorly furnished room, which overlooked the front street and the two bared locust trees in the yard.

"I kin let you have this at three dollars a week," she said, "provided you're content to do yo' own reachin' at the table. Thar ain't any servant now except a twelve year old darkey."

"Yes, I'll take it," returned Ordway, almost cheerfully; and when he had agreed definitely as to the amount of service he was to receive, he closed the creaking door behind her, and looked about the crudely furnished apartment with a sense of owners.h.i.+p such as he had not felt since the afternoon upon which he had stood in his wife's sitting-room awaiting his arrest. He thought of the Florentine gilding, the rich curtains, the long mirrors, the famous bronze Mercury and the Corot landscape with the sunlight upon it--and then of the terrible oppression in which these familiar objects had seemed closing in upon him and smothering him into unconsciousness. The weight was lifted now, and he breathed freely while his gaze rested on the common pine bedstead, the scarred washstand, with the broken pitcher, the whitewashed walls, the cane chairs, the rusted scuttle, filled with cheap coal, and the unpainted table holding a gla.s.s lamp with a smoked chimney. From the hall below he could hear the scolding voice of Mrs. Twine, but neither the shrill sound nor the poor room produced in him the smothered anguish he felt even to-day at the memory of the Corot landscape bathed in sunlight.

An hour later, when he came upstairs again as an escape from the disorder of Mrs. Twine's supper table, he started a feeble blaze in the grate, which was half full of ashes, and after lighting the gla.s.s lamp, sat watching the shadows flicker to and fro on the whitewashed wall. His single possession, a photograph of his wife taken with her two children, rested against the brick chimney piece, and as he looked at it now it seemed to stand in no closer relations.h.i.+p to his life than did one of the brilliant chromos he had observed ornamenting the walls of Mrs.

Twine's dining-room. His old life, indeed, appeared remote, artificial, conjured from unrealities--it was as if he had moved lightly upon the painted surface of things, until at last a false step had broken through the thin covering and he had plunged in a single instant against the concrete actuality. The shock had stunned him, yet he realised now that he could never return to his old sheltered outlook--to his pleasant fiction--for he had come too close to experience ever to be satisfied again with falsehood.

The photograph upon the mantel was the single remaining link which held him to-day to his past life--to his forfeited ident.i.ty. In the exquisite, still virgin face of his wife, draped for effect in a scarf of Italian lace--he saw embodied the one sacred memory to which as Daniel Smith he might still cling with honour. The face was perfect, the expression of motherhood which bent, flamelike, over the small boy and girl, was perfect also; and the pure soul of the woman seemed to him to have formed both face and expression after its own divine image. In the photograph, as in his memory, her beauty was touched always by some rare quality of remoteness, as if no merely human conditions could ever entirely compa.s.s so ethereal a spirit. The pa.s.sion which had rocked his soul had left her serenity unshaken, and even sorrow had been powerless to leave its impress or disfigurement upon her features.

As the shadows flickered out on the walls, the room grew suddenly colder. Rising, he replenished the fire, and then going over to the bed, he flung himself, still dressed, under the patchwork quilt from which the wool was protruding in places. He was thinking of the morning eighteen years ago when he had first seen her as she came, with several girl companions, out of the old church in the little town of Botetourt.

It was a Christmas during his last year at Harvard, when moved by a sudden interest in his Southern a.s.sociations, he had gone down for two days to his childhood's home in Virginia. Though the place was falling gradually to ruin, his maiden great-aunt still lived there in a kind of luxurious poverty; and at the sight of her false halo of gray curls, he had remembered, almost with a start of surprise, the morning when he had seen the convict at the little wayside station. The station, the country, the muddy roads, and even the town of Botetourt were unchanged, but he himself belonged now to another and what he felt to be a larger world. Everything had appeared provincial and amusing to his eyes--until as he pa.s.sed on Christmas morning by the quaint old churchyard, he had seen Lydia Preston standing in the suns.h.i.+ne amid the crumbling tombstones of several hundred years. Under the long black feather in her hat, her charming eyes had dwelt on him kindly for a minute, and in that minute it had seemed to him that the racial ideal slumbering in his brain had responded quickly to his startled blood. Afterward they had told him that she was only nineteen, a Southern beauty of great promise, and the daughter of old Adam Preston, who had made and lost a fortune in the last ten years. But these details seemed to him to have no relation to the face he had seen under the black feather against the ivy-covered walls of the old church. The next evening they had danced together at a ball; he had carried her fan, a trivial affair of lace and satin, away in his pocket, and ten days later he had returned, flushed with pa.s.sion, to finish his course at Harvard. Love had put wings to his ambition; the following year he had stood at the head of his cla.s.s, and before the summer was over he had married her and started brilliantly in his career. There had been only success in the beginning. When had the tide turned so suddenly? he wondered, and when had he begun to drift into the great waters where men are washed down and lost?

Lying on the bed now in the firelight, he s.h.i.+vered and drew the quilt closer about his knees. She had loved beauty, riches, dignity, religion--she had loved her children when they came; but had she ever really loved him--the Daniel Ordway whom she had married? Were all pure women as pa.s.sionless--as utterly detached--as she had shown herself to him from the beginning? And was her coldness, as he had always believed, but the outward body of that spiritual grace for which he had loved her?

He had lavished abundantly out of his stormy nature; he had spent his immortal soul upon her in desperate determination to possess her utterly at her own price; and yet had she ever belonged to him, he questioned now, even in the supreme hours of their deepest union? Had her very innocence shut him out from her soul forever?

In the end the little world had closed over them both; he had felt himself slipping further--further--had made frantic efforts to regain his footing; and had gone down hopelessly at last. Those terrible years before his arrest crowded like minutes into his brain, and he knew now that there had been relief--comfort--almost tranquillity in his life in prison. The strain was lifted at last, and the days when he had moved in dull hope or acute despair through the crowd in Wall Street were over forever. To hold a place in the little world one needed great wealth; and it had seemed to him in the time of temptation that this wealth was not a fugitive possession, but an inherent necessity--a thing which belonged to the inner structure of Lydia's nature.

A shudder ran over him, while he drew a convulsive breath like one in physical pain. The slow minutes in which he had waited for a rise in the market were still ticking in agony somewhere in his brain. Time moved on, yet those minutes never pa.s.sed--his memory had become like the face of a clock where the hands pointed, motionless, day or night, to the same hour. Then hours, days, weeks, months, years, when he lived with ruin in his thoughts and the sound of merriment, which was like the pipe of hollow flutes, in his ears. At the end it came almost suddenly--the blow for which he had waited, the blow which brought something akin to relief because it ended the quivering torture of his suspense, and compelled, for the hour at least, decisive action. He had known that before evening he would be under arrest, and yet he had walked slowly along Fifth Avenue from his office to his home; he recalled now that he had even joked with a club wit, who had stopped him at the corner to divulge the latest bit of gossip. At the very instant when he felt himself to be approaching ruin in his house, he remembered that he had complained a little irritably of the breaking wrapper of his cigar. Yet he was thinking then that he must reach his home in time to prevent his wife from keeping a luncheon engagement, of which she had spoken to him at breakfast; and ten minutes later it was with a sensation of relief that he met the blank face of his butler in the hall. On the staircase his daughter ran after him, her short white, beruffled skirts standing out stiffly like the skirts of a ballet dancer. She was taking her music lesson, she cried out, and she called to him to come into the music room and hear how wonderfully she could run her scales! Her blue eyes, which were his eyes in a child's face, looked joyously up at him from under the thatch of dark curls which she had inherited from him, not from her blond mother.

"Not now, Alice," he answered, almost impatiently, "not now--I will come a little later."

Then she darted back, and the stumbling music preceded him up the staircase to the door of his wife's dressing-room. When he entered Lydia was standing before her mirror, fastening a spotted veil with a diamond b.u.t.terfly at the back of her blond head; and as she turned smilingly toward him, he put out his hand with a gesture of irritation.

"Take that veil off, Lydia, I can't see you for the spots," he said.

Complaisant always, she unfastened the diamond b.u.t.terfly without a word, and taking off the veil, flung it carelessly across the golden-topped bottles upon her dressing-table.

"You look ill," she said with her charming smile; "shall I ring for Marie to bring you whiskey?"

At her words he turned from her, driven by a torment of pity which caused his voice to sound harsh and constrained in his own ears.

"No--no--don't put that on again," he protested, for while she waited she had taken up the spotted veil and the diamond pin.

Something in his tone startled her into attention, and moving a step forward, she stood before him on a white bearskin rug. Her face had hardly changed, yet in some way she seemed to have put him at a distance, and he felt all at once that he had never known her.

From the room downstairs he heard Alice's music lesson go on at broken intervals, the uncertain scales she ran now stopping, now beginning violently again. The sound wrought suddenly on his nerves like anger, and he felt that his voice was querulous in spite of the torment of pity at his heart.

"There's no use putting on your veil," he said, "a warrant is out for my arrest and I must wait here till it comes."

His memory stopped now, as if it had snapped suddenly beneath the strain. After this there was a mere blank of existence upon which people and objects moved without visible impression. From that minute to this one appeared so short a time that he started up half expecting to hear Alice's scales filling Mrs. Twine's empty lodgings. Then his eyes fell on the whitewashed walls, the smoking lamp, the bare table, and the little square window with the branches of the locust tree frosted against the pane.

Rising from the bed, he fell on his knees and pressed his quivering face to the patchwork quilt.

"Give me a new life, O G.o.d--give me a new life!"

CHAPTER V

AT TAPPAHANNOCK

After a sleepless night, he rose as soon as the dawn had broken, and sitting down before the pine table wrote a letter to Lydia, on a sheet of paper which had evidently been left in the drawer by the former lodger. "It isn't likely that you'll ever want me," he added at the end, "but if you should happen to, remember that I am yours, as I have always been, for whatever I am worth." When he had sealed the envelope and written her name above that of the town of Botetourt, he put it into his pocket and went down to the dining-room, where he found Mrs. Twine pouring steaming coffee into a row of broken cups. A little mulatto girl, with her hair plaited in a dozen fine braids, was placing a dish of fried bacon at one end of the walnut-coloured oil-cloth on the table, around which the six children, already clothed and hungry, were beating an impatient tattoo with pewter spoons. Bill Twine, the father of the family, was evidently sleeping off a drunken headache--a weakness which appeared to afford his wife endless material for admonition and philosophy.

"Thar now, Canty," she was remarking to her son, "yo' po' daddy may not be anything to be proud of as a man, but I reckon he's as big an example as you'll ever see. He's had sermons p'inted at him from the pulpit; they've took him up twice to the police court, an' if you'll believe me, suh," she added with a kind of outraged pride to Ordway, "thar's been a time when they've had out the whole fire department to protect me."

The coffee though poor was hot, and while Ordway drank it, he listened with an attention not unmixed with sympathy to Mrs. Twine's continuous flow of speech. She was coa.r.s.e and shrewish and unshapely, but his judgment was softened by the marks of anxious thought on her forehead and the disfigurements of honest labour on her hands. Any toil appeared to him now to be invested with peculiar dignity; and he felt, sitting there at her slovenly breakfast table, that he was closer to the enduring heart of humanity than he had been among the shallow refinements of his past life. Mrs. Twine was unpleasant, but at her worst he felt her to be the real thing.

"Not that I'm blamin' Bill, suh, as much as some folks," she proceeded charitably, while she helped her youngest child to gravy, "for it made me downright sick myself to hear them carryin' on over his beatin' his own wife jest as much as if he'd been beatin' somebody else's. An' I ain't one, when it comes to that, to put up with a white-livered, knock-kneed, pulin' sort of a critter, as I told the Jedge a-settin'

upon his bench. When a woman is obleeged to take a strappin' thar's some real satisfaction in her feelin' that she takes it from a man--an' the kind that would lay on softly with never a broken head to show for it--well, he ain't the kind, suh, that I could have helt in any respect an' honour. And as to that, as I said to 'em right then an' thar, take the manly health an' spirit out o' Bill, an' he's jest about as decent an' law abidin' as the rest. Why, when he was laid up with malaria, he never so much as rized his hand agin me, an' it'll be my belief untwel my dyin' day that chills an' fever will keep a man moral when all the sermons sence Moses will leave him unteched. Feed him low an' work him hard, an' you kin make a saint out of most any male critter, that's my way of thinkin'."

While she talked she was busily selecting the choicest bit of bacon for Bill's plate, and as Ordway left the house a little later, he saw her toiling up the staircase with her husband's breakfast on a tin tray in her hands.

"If you think I'm goin' to set an' wait all day for you to get out o'

bed, you've jest about clean lost yo' wits, Bill Twine," she remarked in furious tones, as she flung open a door on the landing above.

Out of doors Ordway found that the wind had died down, though a sharp edge of frost was still in the air. The movement of the day had already begun; and as he pa.s.sed the big house on the brow of the hill he saw a pretty girl, with her hair tied back with a velvet ribbon, run along the gravelled walk to meet the postman at the gate. A little farther, when he had reached the corner, he turned back to hand his letter to the postman, and found to his surprise that the pretty girl was still gazing after him. No possible interest could attach to her in his thoughts; and with a careless acknowledgment of her beauty, she faded from his consciousness as rapidly as if she had been a ray of suns.h.i.+ne which he had admired as he pa.s.sed along. Then as he turned into the main street at the corner, he saw that Emily Brooke was riding slowly up the hill on her old white horse. She still wore her red cape, which fell over the saddle on one side, and completely hid the short riding-skirt beneath.

On her head there was a small knitted Tam-o'-shanter cap, and this, with the easy freedom of her seat in the saddle, gave her an air which was gallant rather than graceful. The more feminine adjective hardly seemed to apply to her at the moment; she looked brave, strong, buoyant, a creature that had not as yet become aware of its s.e.x. Yet she was older, he discovered now, than he had at first imagined her to be. In the barn he had supposed her age to be not more than twenty years; seen in the morning light it was impossible to decide whether she was a year younger or ten years older than he had believed. The radiant energy in her look belonged, after all, less to the accident of youth than to some enduring quality of spirit.

As she neared him, she looked up from her horse's neck, rested her eyes upon him for an instant, and smiled brightly, much as a charming boy might have done. Then, just as she was about to pa.s.s on, the girth of her saddle slipped under her, and she was thrown lightly to the ground, while the old horse stopped and stood perfectly motionless above her.

"My skirt has caught in the stirrup," she said to Ordway, and while he bent to release her, he noticed that she clung, not to his arm, but to the neck of the horse for support.

To his surprise there was neither embarra.s.sment nor amus.e.m.e.nt in her voice. She spoke with the cool authority which had impressed him during the incident of the ram's attack upon "Sis Mehitable."

"I don't think it is quite safe yet," he said, after he had drawn the rotten girth as tight as he dared. "It looks as if it wouldn't last, you see."

"Well, I dare say, it may be excused after forty years of service," she returned, smiling.

"What? this saddle? It does look a little quaint when one examines it."

"Oh, it's been repaired, but even then one must forgive an old servant for growing decrepit."

"Then you'll ride it again?" he asked, seeing that she was about to mount.

"Of course--this isn't my first tumble--but Major expects them now and he knows how to behave. So do I," she added, laughing, "you see it doesn't take me by surprise."

"Yes, I see it doesn't," he answered gaily.

"Then if you chance to be about the next time it happens, I hope it won't disturb you either," she remarked, as she rode up the hill.