The Ancient Law Part 8

"I must be making him a little present upon his birthday."

The girl's eyes flashed under her dark lashes, but remembering Ordway's presence, she turned to him with a casual remark about the promise of the spring. He saw at once that she had achieved an indignant detachment from her thriftless family, and the ardent, almost impatient energy with which she fell to labour was, in itself, a rebuke to the pleasant indolence which had hastened, if it had not brought about, the ruin of the house. Was it some temperamental disgust for the hereditary idleness which had spurred her on to take issue with the worn-out traditions of her ancestors and to place herself among the labouring rather than the leisure cla.s.s? As she stood there in her freshness and charm, with the short brown curls blown from her forehead, the edge of light s.h.i.+ning in her eyes and on her lips, and the rich blood kindling in her vivid face, it seemed to Ordway, looking back at her from the end of his forty years, that he was brought face to face with the spirit of the future rising amid the decaying sentiment of the past.

CHAPTER VIII

"TEN COMMANDMENT SMITH"

When Ordway had disappeared beyond the curve in the avenue, Emily went slowly up the steps, her spade clanking against the stone as she ascended.

"Did he come about the tobacco, Beverly?" she asked.

Beverly rose languidly from the bench, and stood rubbing his hand across his forehead with an exhausted air.

"My head was very painful and he talked so rapidly I could hardly follow him," he replied; "but is it possible, Emily, that you have been digging in the garden?"

"There is n.o.body else to do it," replied Emily, with an impatient flash in her eyes; "only half the garden has been spaded. If you disapprove so heartily, I wish you'd produce someone to do the work."

Mrs. Brooke, who had produced nothing in her life except nine children, six of whom had died in infancy, offered at this a feeble and resigned rebuke.

"I am sure you could get Salem," she replied.

"We owe him already three months' wages," returned the girl, "I am still paying him for last autumn."

"All I ask of you, Emily, is peace," remarked Beverly, in a gentle voice, as he prepared to enter the house. "Nothing--no amount of brilliant argument can take the place of peace in a family circle. My poor head is almost distracted when you raise your voice."

The three children flocked out of the dining-room and came, with a rush, to fling themselves upon him. They adored him--and there was a live terrapin which they had brought in a box for him to see! In an instant his depression vanished, and he went off, his beautiful face beaming with animation, while the children clung rapturously to his corduroy coat.

"Amelia," said Emily, lowering her voice, "don't you think it would improve Beverly's health if he were to try working for an hour every day in the garden?"

Mrs. Brooke appeared troubled by the suggestion. "If he could only make up his mind to it, I've no doubt it would," she answered, "he has had no exercise since he was obliged to give up his horse. Walking he has always felt to be ungentlemanly."

She spoke in a softly tolerant voice, though she herself drudged day and night in her anxious, tearful, and perfectly ineffectual manner. For twenty years she had toiled patiently without, so far as one could perceive, achieving a single definite result--for by some unfortunate accident of temperament, she was doomed to do badly whatever she undertook to do at all. Yet her intention was so admirable that she appeared forever apologising in her heart for the incompetence of her hands.

Emily placed the spade in the corner of the porch, and desisting from her purpose, went upstairs to wash her hands before going in to dinner.

As she ascended the wide, dimly lighted staircase, upon which the sun shone with a greenish light from the gallery above, she stopped twice to wonder why Beverly's visitor had slept in the barn like a tramp only six weeks ago. Before her mirror, a minute later, she put the same question to herself while she braided her hair.

The room was large, cool, high-ceiled, with a great brick fireplace, and windows which looked out on the garden, where purple and white lilacs were blooming beside the gate. On the southern side the ivy had grown through the slats of the old green shutters, until they were held back, crumbling, against the house, and in the s.p.a.ce between one of the cedars brushed always, with a whispering sound, against the discoloured panes.

In Emily's absence a curious melancholy descended on the old mahogany furniture, the greenish windows and the fireless hearth; but with the opening of the door and the entrance of her vivid youth, there appeared also a light and gracious atmosphere in her surroundings. She remembered the day upon which she had returned after ten years' absence, and how as she opened the closed shutters, the gloom of the place had resisted the pa.s.sage of the suns.h.i.+ne, retreating stubbornly from the ceiling to the black old furniture and then across the uncarpeted floor to the hall where it still held control. For months after her return it had seemed to her that the fight was between her spirit and the spirit of the past--between hope and melancholy, between growth and decay. The burden of debt, of poverty, of hopeless impotence had fallen upon her shoulders, and she had struggled under it with impetuous gusts of anger, but with an energy that never faltered. To keep the children fed and clothed, to work the poor farm as far as she was able, to stay clear of any further debts, and to pay off the yearly mortgage with her small income, these were the things which had filled her thoughts and absorbed the gallant fervour of her youth. Her salary at the public school had seemed to Beverly, though he disapproved of her position, to represent the possibility of luxury; and in some loose, vague way he was never able to understand why the same amount could not be made to serve in several opposite directions at the same time.

"That fifty dollars will come in very well, indeed, my dear," he would remark, with cheerfulness, gloating over the unfamiliar sight of the bank notes, "it's exactly the amount of Wilson's bill which he's been sending in for the last year, and he refuses to furnish any groceries until the account is settled. Then there's the roof which must be repaired--it will help us there--then we must all have a supply of shoes, and the wages of the hands are due to-morrow, I overlooked that item."

"But if you pay it all to Wilson," Emily would ask, as a kind of elementary lesson in arithmetic, "how is the money going to buy all the other things?"

"Ah, to be sure," Beverly would respond, as if struck by the lucidity of the idea, "that is the question."

And it was likely to remain the question until the end of Beverly--for he had grown so accustomed to the weight of poverty upon his shoulders that he would probably have felt a sense of loss if it had been suddenly removed. But it was impossible to live in the house with him, to receive his confidences and meet his charming smile and not to entertain a sentiment of affection for him in one's heart. His unfailing courtesy was his defence, though even this at times worked in Emily an unreasonable resentment. He had ruined his family, and she felt that she could have forgiven him more easily if he had ruined it with a less irreproachable demeanour.

After her question he had said nothing further about the tobacco, but a chance meeting with Adam Whaley, as she rode into Tappahannock on the Sunday after Ordway's visit, made clear to her exactly what the purpose of that visit had been.

"It's a pity Mr. Beverly let his tobacco spoil, particular' arter his wheat turned out to be no account," remarked Adam. "I hope you don't mind my sayin', Miss Em'ly, that Mr. Beverly is about as po' a farmer as he is a first rate gentleman."

"Oh, no, I don't mind in the least, Adam," said Emily. "Do you know,"

she asked presently, "any hands that I can get to work the garden this week?"

Whaley shook his head. "They get better paid at the factories," he answered; "an' them that ain't got thar little patch to labour in, usually manage to git a job in town."

Emily was on her old horse--an animal discarded by Mr. Beverly on account of age--and she looked down at his hanging neck with a feeling that was almost one of hopelessness. Beverly, who had never paid his bills, had seldom paid his servants; and of the old slave generation that would work for its master for a song, there were only Micah and poor half-demented Aunt Mehitable now left.

"The trouble with Mr. Beverly," continued Adam, laying his hand on the neck of the old horse, "is that he was born loose-fingered jest as some folks are born loose-moraled. He's never held on to anything sense he came into the world an' I doubt if he ever will. Why, bless yo' life, even as a leetle boy he never could git a good grip on his fis.h.i.+n' line.

It was always a-slidin' an' slippin' into the water."

They had reached Tappahannock in the midst of Adam's philosophic reflection; and as they were about to pa.s.s an open field on the edge of the town, Emily pointed to a little crowd which had gathered in the centre of the gra.s.s-grown s.p.a.ce.

"Is it a Sunday frolic, do you suppose?" she inquired.

"That? Oh no--it's 'Ten Commandment Smith,' as they call him now. He gives a leetle talk out thar every fine Sunday arternoon."

"A talk? About what?"

"Wall, I ain't much of a listener, Miss, when it comes to that. My soul is willin' an' peart enough, but it's my hands an' feet that make the trouble. I declar' I've only got to set down in a pew for 'em to twitch untwel you'd think I had the Saint Vitus dance. It don't look well to be twitchin' the whole time you are in church, so that's the reason I'm obleeged to stay away. As for 'Ten Commandment Smith,' though, he's got a voice that's better than the doxology, an' his words jest boom along like cannon."

"And do the people like it?"

"Some, of 'em do, I reckon, bein' as even sermons have thar followers, but thar're t'others that go jest out of the sperit to be obleegin', an'

it seems to them that a man's got a pretty fair licence to preach who gives away about two-thirds of what he gits a month. Good Lord, he could drum up a respectable sized congregation jest from those whose back mortgages he's helped pay up."

While he spoke Emily had turned her horse's head into the field, and riding slowly toward the group, she stopped again upon discovering that it was composed entirely of men. Then going a little nearer, she drew rein just beyond the outside circle, and paused for a moment with her eyes fixed intently upon the speaker's face.

In the distance a forest, still young in leaf, lent a radiant, springlike background to the field, which rose in soft green swells that changed to golden as they melted gradually into the landscape. Ordway's head was bare, and she saw now that the thick locks upon his forehead were powdered heavily with gray. She could not catch his words, but his voice reached her beyond the crowd; and she found herself presently straining her ears lest she miss the sound which seemed to pa.s.s with a peculiar richness into the atmosphere about the speaker. The religious significance of the scene moved her but little--for she came of a race that scorned emotional conversions or any faith, for that matter, which did not confine itself within four well-built walls. Yet, in spite of her convictions, something in the voice whose words she could not distinguish, held her there, as if she were rooted on her old horse to the spot of ground. The unconventional preacher, in his cheap clothes, aroused in her an interest which seemed in some vague way to have its beginning in a mystery that she could not solve. The man was neither a professional revivalist nor a member of the Salvation Army, yet he appeared to hold the attention of his listeners as if either their money or their faith was in his words. And it was no uncultured oratory--"Ten Commandment Smith," for all his rough clothes, his muddy boots and his hardened hands, was beneath all a gentleman, no matter what his work--no matter even what his cla.s.s. Though she had lived far out of the world in which he had had his place, she felt instinctively that the voice she heard had been trained to reach another audience than the one before him in the old field. His words might be simple and straight from the heart--doubtless they were--but the voice of the preacher--the vibrant, musical, exquisitely modulated voice--was not merely a personal gift, but the result of generations of culture. The atmosphere of a larger world was around him as he stood there, bare-headed in the suns.h.i.+ne, speaking to a breathless crowd of factory workers as if his heart went out to them in the words he uttered. Perfectly motionless on the gra.s.s at his feet his congregation sat in circles with their pathetic dumb eyes fixed on his face.

"What is it about, Adam? Can't you find out?" asked Emily, stirred by an impulsive desire to be one of the attentive group of listeners--to come under the spell of personality which drew its magic circle in the centre of the green field.

Adam crossed the s.p.a.ce slowly, and returned after what was to Emily an impatient interval.

"It's one of his talks on the Ten Commandments--that's why they gave him his nickname. I didn't stay to find out whether 'twas the top or the bottom of 'em, Miss, as I thought you might be in a hurry."

"But they can get that in church. What makes them come out here?"

"Oh, he tells 'em things," said Adam, "about people and places, and how to get on in life. Then he's al'ays so ready to listen to anybody's troubles arterward; and he's taken over Martha Frayley's mortgage--you know she's the widow of Mike Frayley who was a fireman and lost his life last January in the fire at Bingham's Wall--I reckon, a man's got a right to talk big when he lives big, too."

"Yes, I suppose he has," said Emily. "Well, I must be going now, so I'll ride on ahead of you."

Touching the neck of the horse with her bare hand, she pa.s.sed at a gentle amble into one of the smaller streets of Tappahannock. Her purpose was to call upon one of her pupils who had been absent from school for several days, but upon reaching the house she found that the child, after a slight illness, had recovered sufficiently to be out of doors. This was a relief rather than a disappointment, and mounting again, she started slowly back in the direction of Cedar Hill. A crowd of men, walking in groups along the roadside, made her aware that the gathering in the field had dispersed, and as she rode by she glanced curiously among them in the hope of discovering the face of the speaker.

He was walking slightly behind the crowd, listening with an expression of interest, to a man in faded blue overalls, who kept a timid yet determined hold upon his arm. His face, which had appeared grave to Emily when she saw it at Cedar Hill, wore now a look which seemed a mixture of spiritual pa.s.sion and boyish amus.e.m.e.nt. He impressed her as both sad and gay, both bitter and sympathetic, and she was struck again by the contrast between his hard mouth and his gentle eyes. As she met his glance, he bowed without a smile, while he stepped back into the little wayside path among the dusty thistles.