The Ancient Law

CHAPTER II
His Own Place

SOME hours later when he sat alone in his room, he told himself that he could never forget the drive home from the cemetery in the closed carriage. Lydia had raised her veil slightly, as if in a desire for air, and as she sat with her head resting against the lowered blind, he could trace the delicate, pale lines of her mouth and chin, and a single wisp of her ash blond hair which lay heavily upon her forehead. Not once had she spoken, not once had she met his eyes of her own accord, and he had discovered that she leaned almost desperately upon the iron presence of Richard Ordway. Had his sin, indeed, crushed her until she had not power to lift her head? he asked passionately, with a sharper remorse than he had ever felt.

"I am glad that you were able to come in time," Richard Ordway remarked in his cold, even voice; and after this the rattle of the wheels on the cobblestones in the street was the only sound which broke the death-like stillness in which they sat. No, he could never forget it, nor could he forget the bewildering effect of the sunshine when they opened the carriage door. Beside the curbing a few idle Negroes were left of the crowd that had gathered to watch the coffin borne through the gate, and the pavement was thick with dust, as if many hurrying feet had tramped by since the funeral had passed. As they entered the house the scent of lilies struck him afresh with all the agony of its associations. The shutters were still closed, the chairs were still arranged in their solemn circle, the streamer of crape, hurriedly untied from the bell handle, still lay where it had been thrown on the library table; and as he crossed the threshold, he trod upon some fading lilies which had fallen, unnoticed, from a funeral wreath. Then, in the dining-room, Richard Ordway poured out a glass of whiskey, and in the very instant when he was about to raise it to his lips, he put it hurriedly down and pushed the decanter aside with an embarrassed and furtive movement.

"Do you feel the need of a cup of coffee, Daniel?" he asked in a pleasant, conciliatory tone, "or will you have only a glass of seltzer?"

"I am not thirsty, thank you," Daniel responded shortly, and the next moment he asked Alice to show him the room in which he would stay.

With laughing eagerness she led him up the great staircase to the chamber in which he had slept as a boy.

"It's just next to Dick's," she said, "and mother's and mine are directly across the hall. At first we thought of putting you in the red guest-room, but that's only for visitors, so we knew you would be sure to like this better."

"Yes, I'll like this better," he responded, and then as she would have moved away, he caught her, with a gesture of anguish, back to his arms.

"You remember me, Alice, my child? you have not forgotten me?"

She laughed merrily, biting her full red lips the moment afterward to check the sound.

"Why, how funny of you! I was quite a big girl – don't you remember? – when you went away. It was so dull afterwards that I cried for days, and that was why I was so overjoyed when mamma told me you would come back. It was never dull when you lived at home with us, because you would always take me to the park or the circus whenever I grew tired of dolls. Nobody did that after you went away and I used to cry and kick sometimes thinking that they would tell you and bring you back."

"And you remembered me chiefly because of the park and the circus?" he asked, smiling for joy, as he kissed her hand which lay on his sleeve.

"Oh, I never forget anything, you know. Mamma even says that about me. I remember my first nurse and the baker's boy with red cheeks who used to bring me pink cakes when I was three years old. No, I never forget – I never forget," she repeated with vehemence.

Animation had kindled her features into a beauty of colour which made her eyes bluer and brighter and softened the too intense contrast of her full, red lips.

"All these years I've hoped that you would come back and that things would change," she said impulsively, her words tripping rapidly over one another. "Everything is so dreadfully grave and solemn here. Grandfather hated noise so that he would hardly let me laugh if he was in the house. Then mamma's health is wrecked, and she lies always on the sofa, and never goes out except for a drive sometimes when it is fair."

"Mamma's health is wrecked?" he repeated inquiringly, as she paused.

"Oh, that's what everybody says about her – her health is wrecked. And Uncle Richard is hardly any better, for he has a wife whose health is wrecked also. And Dick – he isn't sick, but he might as well be, he is so dull and plodding and over nice – "

"And you Alice?"

"I? Oh, I'm not dull, but I'm unhappy – awfully – you'll find that out. I like fun and pretty clothes and new people and strange places. I want to marry and have a home of my own and a lot of rings like mamma's, and a carriage with two men on the box, and to go to Europe to buy things whenever I please. That's the way Molly Burridge does and she was only two classes ahead of me. How rough your hands are, papa, and what a funny kind of shirt you have on. Do people dress like that where you came from? Well, I don't like it, so you'll have to change."

She had gone out at last, forgetting to walk properly in her mourning garments, tripping into a run on the threshold, and then checking herself with a prim, mocking look over her shoulder. Not until the door had closed with a slam behind her black skirt, did Ordway's gaze turn from following her and fix itself on the long mirror between the windows, in which he could see, as Alice had seen the moment before, his roughened hands, his carelessly trimmed hair and his common clothes. He was dressed as the labourers dressed on Sundays in Tappahannock; though, he remembered now, that in that crude little town he had been conspicuous for the neatness, almost the jauntiness, of his attire. As he laid out presently on the bed his few poor belongings, he told himself, with determination, that for Alice's sake even this must be changed. He was no longer of the class of Baxter, of Banks, of Mrs. Twine. All that was over, and he must return now into the world in which his wife and his children had kept a place. To do Alice honour – at least not to do her further shame – would become from this day, he realised, the controlling motive of his life. Then, as he looked down at the coarse, unshapely garments upon the delicate counterpane, he knew that Daniel Smith and Daniel Ordway were now parted forever.

He was still holding one of the rough blue shirts in his hand, when a servant entered to inquire if there was anything that he might need. The man, a bright young mulatto, was not one of the old family slaves; and while he waited, alert and intelligent, upon the threshold, Ordway was seized by a nervous feeling that he was regarded with curiosity and suspicion by the black rolling eyes.

"Where is uncle Boaz? He used to wait upon me," he asked.

"He's daid, suh. He drapped down daid right on de do' step."

"And Aunt Mirandy?"

"She's daid, too, en' I'se her chile."

"Oh, you are, are you?" said Ordway, and he had again the sensation that he was watched through inquisitive eyes. "That is all now," he added presently, "you may go," and it was with a long breath of relief that he saw the door close after the figure of Aunt Mirandy's son.

When a little later he dressed himself and went out into the hall, he found, to his annoyance, that he walked with a cautious and timid step like that of a labourer who has stumbled by accident into surroundings of luxury. As he descended the wide curving staircase, with his hand on the mahogany balustrade, the sound of his footsteps seemed to reverberate disagreeably through the awful funereal silence in which he moved. If he could only hear Alice's laugh, Dick's whistle, or even the garrulous flow of the Negro voices that he had listened to in his childhood. With a pang he recalled that Uncle Boaz was dead, and his heart swelled as he remembered how often he had passed up and down this same staircase on the old servant's shoulder. At that age he had felt no awe of the shining emptiness and the oppressive silence. Then he had believed himself to be master of all at which he looked; now he was conscious of that complete detachment from his surroundings which produces almost a sense of the actual separation of soul and body.

Reaching the hall below, he found that some hurried attempt had been made to banish or to conceal the remaining signs of the funeral. The doors and windows were open, the shreds of crape had disappeared from the carpet, and the fading lilies had been swept out upon the graveled walk in the yard. Upon entering the library, which invited him by its rows of calf-bound books, he discovered that Richard Ordway was patiently awaiting him in the large red leather chair which had once been the favourite seat of his father.

"Before I go home, I think it better to have a little talk with you, Daniel," began the old man, as he motioned to a sofa on the opposite side of the Turkish rug before the open grate. "It has been a peculiar satisfaction to me to feel that I was able to bring you back in time for the service."

"I came," replied Daniel slowly, "as soon as I received your telegram." He hesitated an instant and then went on in the same quiet tone in which the other had spoken, "Do you think, though, that he would have wished me to come at all?"

After folding the newspaper which he had held in his hand, Richard laid it, with a courteous gesture upon the table beside him. As he sat there with his long limbs outstretched and relaxed, and his handsome, severe profile resting against the leather back of his chair, the younger man was impressed, as if for the first time, by the curious mixture of strength and refinement in his features. He was not only a cleverer man than his brother had been, he was gentler, smoother, more distinguished on every side. In spite of his reserve, it was evident that he had wished to be kind – that he wished it still; yet this kindness was so removed from the ordinary impulse of humanity that it appeared to his nephew to be in a way as detached and impersonal as an abstract virtue. The very lines of his face were drawn with the precision, the finality, of a geometrical figure. To imagine that they could melt into tenderness was as impossible as to conceive of their finally crumbling into dust.

"He would have wished it – he did wish it," he said, after a minute. "I talked with him only a few hours before his death, and he told me then that it was necessary to send for you – that he felt that he had neglected his duty in not bringing you home immediately after your release. He saw at last that it would have been far better to have acted as I strongly advised at the time."

"It was his desire, then, that I should return?" asked Daniel, while a stinging moisture rose to his eyes at the thought that he had not looked once upon the face of the dead man. "I wish I had known."

A slight surprise showed in the other's gesture of response, and he glanced hastily away as he might have done had he chanced to surprise his nephew while he was still without his boots or his shirt.

"I think he realised before he died that the individual has no right to place his personal pride above the family tie," he resumed quietly, ignoring the indecency of emotion as he would have ignored, probably, the unclothed body. "I had said much the same thing to him eight years ago, when I told him that he would realise before his death that he was not morally free to act as he had done with regard to you. As a matter of fact," he observed in his trained, legal voice, "the family is, after all, the social unit, and each member is as closely related as the eye to the ear or the right arm to the left. It is illogical to speak of denying one's flesh and blood, for it can't be done."

So this was why they had received him. He turned his head away, and his gaze rested upon the boughs of the great golden poplar beyond the window.

"It is understood, then," he asked "that I am to come back – back to this house to live?"

When he had finished, but not until then, Richard Ordway looked at him again with his dry, conventional kindness. "If you are free," he began, altering the word immediately lest it should suggest painful associations to his companion's mind, "I mean if you have no other binding engagements, no decided plans for the future."

"No, I have made no other plans. I was working as a bookkeeper in a tobacco warehouse in Tappahannock."

"As a bookkeeper?" repeated Richard, as he glanced down inquiringly at the other's hands.

"Oh, I worked sometimes out of doors, but the position I held was that of confidential clerk."

The old man nodded amiably, accepting the explanation with a readiness for which the other was not prepared. "I was about to offer you some legal work in my office," he remarked. "Dry and musty stuff, I fear it is, but it's better – isn't it? – for a man to have some kind of occupation – "

Though the words were uttered pleasantly enough, it seemed to the younger man that the concluding and significant phrase was left unspoken. "Some kind of occupation to keep you out of temptation" was what Richard had meant to say – what he had withheld, from consideration, if not from humanity. While the horror of the whole situation closed over Daniel like a mental darkness, he remembered the sensitive shrinking of Lydia on the drive home, the prying, inquisitive eyes of the mulatto servant, the furtive withdrawal of the whiskey by the man who sat opposite to him. With all its attending humiliation and despair, there rushed upon him the knowledge that by the people of his own household he was regarded still as a creature to be restrained and protected at every instant. Though outwardly they had received him, instinctively they had repulsed him. The thing which stood between them and himself was neither of their making nor of his. It belonged to their very nature and was woven in with their inner fibre. It was a creation, not of the individual, but of the race, and the law by which it existed was rooted deep in the racial structure. Tradition, inheritance, instinct – these were the barriers through which he had broken and which had closed like the impenetrable sea-gates behind him. Though he were to live on day by day as a saint among them, they could never forget: though he were to shed his heart's blood for them, they would never believe. To convince them of his sincerity was more hopeless, he understood, than to reanimate their affection. In their very forgiveness they had not ceased to condemn him, and in the shelter which they offered him there would be always a hidden restraint. With the thought it seemed to him that he was stifling in the closeness of the atmosphere, that he must break away again, that he must find air and freedom, though it cost him all else besides. The possibility of his own weakness seemed created in him by their acceptance of it; and he felt suddenly a terror lest the knowledge of their suspicion should drive him to justify it by his future in Botetourt.

"Yes, it is better for me to work," he said aloud. "I hope that I shall be able to make myself of some small use in your office."

"There's no doubt of that, I'm sure," responded Richard, in his friendliest tone.

"It is taken for granted, then, that I shall live on here with my wife and children?"

"We have decided that it is best. But as for your wife, you must remember that she is very much of an invalid. Do not forget that she has had a sad – a most tragic life."

"I promise you that I shall not forget it – make your mind easy."

After this it seemed to Daniel that there was nothing further to be said; but before rising from his chair, the old man sat for a moment with his thin lips tightly folded and a troubled frown ruffling his forehead. In the dim twilight the profile outlined against the leather chair appeared to have been ground rather than roughly hewn out of granite.

"About the disposition of the estate, there were some changes made shortly before your father's death," remarked Richard presently. "In the will itself you were not mentioned; a provision was made for your wife and the bulk of the property left to your two children. But in a codicil, which was added the day before your father died, he directed that you should be given a life interest in the house as well as in investments to the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This is to be paid you in the form of a quarterly allowance, which will yield you a personal income of about six thousand a year."

"I understand," replied the younger man, without emotion, almost without surprise. At the moment he was wondering by what name his father had alluded to him in his will. Had he spoken of him as "my son," or merely as "Daniel Ordway"?

"That is all, I think," remarked the other, with a movement which expressed, in spite of him, a sensation of relief. With a smile which appeared to be little more than a muscular contraction of his mouth, he held out his hand and stood for a moment, vainly searching for a phrase or a word that would fit the delicate requirements of the occasion.

"Well, I shall never cease to be thankful that you were with us at the cemetery," he said at last in a tone which was a patent admission that he had failed. Then, with a kindly inclination of his head, he released the hand he held and passed at his rapid, yet dignified step out of the house.

CHAPTER III
The Outward Pattern

THE front door had hardly closed when a breath of freshness blew into the library with the entrance of Alice, and a moment afterwards the butler rolled back the mahogany doors of the dining-room and they saw the lighted candles and the chrysanthemums upon the dinner table.

"We hardly ever dress," said Alice, slipping her hand through his arm, "I wish we did."

"Well, if you'll only pardon these clothes to-night I'll promise to call on the tailor before breakfast," he returned, smiling, conscious that he watched in anxiety lest the look of delight in his presence should vanish from her face.

"Oh, it doesn't matter now, because we're in the deepest grief – aren't we? – and mamma isn't coming down. She wants to see you, by the way, just for a minute when you go upstairs. It is to be just for a minute, I was to be very particular about that, as she is broken down. I wonder why they have put so many covers. There is nobody but you and Dick. I asked Uncle Richard, but he said that he wouldn't stay. It's just as well he didn't – he's so dreadfully dull, isn't he, papa?"

"All I wish is that I were dull in Uncle Richard's way," remarked Dick, with his boyish air of superiority, "I'd be the greatest lawyer in the state then, when my turn came."

"And you'd be even more tiresome than you are now," retorted the girl with a flash of irritation which brought out three fine, nervous wrinkles on her delicate forehead.

"Well, I shouldn't have your temper anyway," commented Dick imperturbably, as he ate his soup. "Do you remember, papa, how Alice used to bite and scratch as a baby? She'd like to behave exactly that way now if she weren't so tall."

"Oh, I know Alice better than you do," said Ordway, in a voice which he tried to make cheerful. The girl sat on his right, and while she choked back her anger, he reached out and catching her hand, held it against his cheek. "We stand together, Alice and I," he said softly – "Alice and I."

As he repeated the words a wave of joy rose in his heart, submerging the disappointment, the bitterness, the hard despair, of the last few hours. Here also, as well as in Tappahannock, he found awaiting him his appointed task.

Dick laughed pleasantly, preserving always the unshakable self-possession which reminded his father of Richard Ordway. He was a good boy, Daniel knew, upright, honest, manly, all the things which his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been before him.

"Then you'll have to stand with Geoffrey Heath," he said jestingly, "and, by Jove, I don't think I'd care for his company."

"Geoffrey Heath?" repeated Ordway inquiringly, with his eyes on his daughter, who sat silent and angry, biting her lower lip. Her mouth, which he had soon discovered to be her least perfect feature, was at the same time her most expressive one. At her slightest change of mood, he watched it tremble into a smile or a frown, and from a distance it was plainly the first thing one noticed about her face. Now, as she sat there, with her eyes on her plate, her vivid lips showed like a splash of carmine in the lustreless pallor of her skin.

"Oh, he's one of Alice's chums," returned Dick with his merciless youthful sneer, "she has a pretty lot of them, too, though he is by long odds the worst."

"Well, he's rich enough anyway," protested Alice defiantly, "he keeps beautiful horses and sends me boxes of candy, and I don't care a bit for the rest."

"Who is he, by the way?" asked Daniel. "There was a family of Heaths who lived near us in the country when I was a boy. Is he one of these?"

"He's the son of old Rupert Heath, who made a million out of some panic in stocks. Uncle Richard says the father was all right, but he's tried his best to break up Alice's craze about Geoffrey. But let her once get her nose to the wind and nobody can do anything with her."

"Well, I can, can't I, darling?" asked Ordway, smiling in spite of a jealous pang. The appeal of the girl to him was like the appeal of the finer part of his own nature. Her temptations he recognised as the old familiar temptations of his youth, and the kinship between them seemed at the moment something deeper and more enduring than the tie of blood. Yet the thought that she was his daughter awoke in him a gratitude that was almost as acute as pain. The emptiness of his life was filled suddenly to over-flowing, and he felt again that he had found here as he had found at Tappahannock both his mission and his reward.

When dinner was over he left the boy and girl in the library and went slowly, and with a nervous hesitation, upstairs to the room in which Lydia was lying on her couch, with a flower-decked tray upon the little inlaid table beside her. As he entered the room something in the luxurious atmosphere – in the amber satin curtains, the white bearskin rugs, the shining mirrors between the windows – recalled the early years of his marriage, and as he remembered them, he realised for the first time the immensity of the change which divided his present existence from his past. The time had been when he could not separate his inner life from his surroundings, and with the thought he saw in his memory the bare cleanliness of the blue guest-room at Cedar Hill – with its simple white bed, its rag carpet, its faded sampler worked in blue worsteds. That place had become as a sanctuary to him now, for it was there that he had known his most perfect peace, his completest reconciliation with God.

As he entered the room Lydia raised herself slightly upon her elbow, and without turning her head, nervously pushed back a white silk shawl which she had thrown over her knees. A lamp with an amber shade cast its light on her averted profile, and he noticed that its perfect outline, its serene loveliness, was untouched by suffering. Already he had discovered those almost imperceptible furrows between Alice's eyebrows, but when Lydia looked up at him at last, he saw that her beautiful forehead, under its parting of ash blond hair, was as smooth as a child's. Was it merely the Madonna-like arrangement of her hair, after all, he wondered, not without bitterness, that had bestowed upon her that appealing expression of injured innocence?

"You wished to speak to me, Alice said," he began with an awkward gesture, acutely conscious, as he stood there, of the amber light in the room, of the shining waves of her hair, of the delicate perfume which floated from the gold-topped boxes upon her dressing-table. An oval mirror above the mantel gave back to him the reflection of his own roughly clad figure, and the violent contrast between himself and his surroundings stung him into a sense of humiliation that was like a physical smart.

"I thought it better to speak to you – Uncle Richard and Dick advised me to – " she broke off in a gentle confusion, lifting her lovely, pensive eyes for the first time to his face.

"Of course it is better, Lydia," he answered gravely. "You must let me know what you wish – you must tell me quite frankly just what you would rather that I should do – "

The look of gratitude in her face gave him a sudden inexplicable pang.

"I am hardly more than an invalid," she said in a voice that had grown firm and sweet, "Uncle Richard will tell you – "

Her reliance upon Richard Ordway aroused in him a passion of resentment, and for an instant the primitive man in him battled hotly against the renunciation his lips had made.

"I know, I understand," he said hurriedly at last. "I appreciate it all and I shall do whatever is in my power to make it easier for you." As he looked at her bowed head a wave of remorse rose in his breast and swept down, one by one, the impulses of anger, of pride, of self-righteousness. "O my dear, my dear, don't you think I know what I have done to you?" he asked, and going a step toward her, he fell on his knees beside the couch and kissed passionately the hand that lay in her lap. "Don't you think I know that I have ruined your life?"

For a moment her eyes dwelt thoughtfully upon his, and she let her hand lie still beneath his remorseful kisses, until her withdrawal of it had lost any appearance of haste or of discourtesy.

"Then you will not object to my living on in this way? You will not seek to change anything? You will – " She hesitated and broke off, not impulsively, but with the same clear, sweet voice in which she had put her question.

Lifting his head, he looked up at her from his knees, and the dumb loneliness in his eyes caused her at last to drop her own to the rug upon which he knelt.

"If you will only let me care for you – serve you – work for you," he implored brokenly. "If you will only let me make up, however poorly, something of what you have suffered."

A vague discomfort, produced in her by the intensity of his gaze, moved her to draw slightly away from him, while she turned restlessly on her pillows. At the first shade of perplexity, of annoyance, that showed in her face, he felt, with a terrible power of intuition, that she was seeking in vain to estimate each of his heartbroken words at its full value – to read calmly by the light of experience the passion for atonement to which his lips had tried hopelessly to give expression. The wall of personality rose like a visible object between them. He might beat against it in desperation until his strength was gone, yet he knew that it would remain forever impenetrable, and through its thickness there would pass only the loud, unmeaning sound of each other's voice.

"Have you lost all love for me, Lydia?" he asked. "Have you even forgotten that I am the father of your children?"

As soon as his words were uttered, he stumbled to his feet, horrified by the effect upon her. A change that was like a spasm of physical nausea had shaken her limbs, and he felt rather than saw that she had shrunk from him, convulsed and quivering, until she was crushed powerless against the back of the sofa on which she lay. Her whole attitude, he realised, was the result, not of a moral judgment, but of a purely physical antipathy. Her horror of him had become instinctive, and she was no more responsible for its existence than a child is responsible for the dread aroused in it by the goblins of nursery rhymes. His life as a convict had not only unclassed him in her eyes, it had put him entirely outside and below the ordinary relations of human beings. To his wife he must remain forever an object of pity, perhaps, but of intense loathing and fear also.

The wave of remorse turned to bitterness on his lips, and all the tenderer emotions he had felt when he knelt by her side – the self-reproach, the spiritual yearning, the passion for goodness, all these were extinguished in the sense of desolation which swept over him.

"Don't be afraid," he said coldly, "I shall not touch you."

"It was nothing – a moment's pain," she answered, in a wistful, apologetic voice.

She was playing nervously with the fringe of the silk shawl, and he stood for a minute in silence while he watched her long, slender fingers twine themselves in and out of the tasseled ends. Then turning aside she pushed away the coffee service on the little table as if its fragrance annoyed her.

"Is it in your way? Do you wish it removed?" he inquired, and when she had nodded in reply, he lifted the tray and carried it in the direction of the door. "Don't be afraid. It is all right," he repeated as he went out.

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 class, 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, shining and immovable, to receive his offerings, like some heathen deity above the sacrificial altar.