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THE ANCIENT LAW
BY
THE SAME AUTHOR
THE WHEEL OF LIFE
THE DELIVERANCE
THE BATTLE-GROUND
THE FREEMAN, AND OTHER POEMS
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET
THE DESCENDANT
The Ancient Law
By
ELLEN GLASGOW
New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED, JANUARY, 1908
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
TO
MY GOOD FRIEND EFFENDI
CONTENTS
BOOK FIRST--THE NEW LIFE
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Road 3
II. The Night 15
III. The Return to Tappahannock 31
IV. The Dream of Daniel Smith 42
V. At Tappahannock 54
VI. The Pretty Daughter of the Mayor 62
VII. Shows the Graces of Adversity 72
VIII. "Ten Commandment Smith" 90
IX. The Old and the New 101
X. His Neighbour's Garden 111
XI. Bullfinch's Hollow 123
XII. A String of Coral 135
BOOK SECOND--THE DAY OF RECKONING
I. In Which a Stranger Appears 147
II. Ordway Compromises With the Past 162
III. A Change of Lodging 174
IV. Shows That a Laugh Does not Heal a Heartache 185
V. Treats of a Great Passion in a Simple Soul 196
VI. In Which Baxter Plots 209
VII. Shows That Politeness, Like Charity, Is an Elastic Mantle 222
VIII. The Turn of the Wheel 234
IX. At the Cross-roads 248
X. Between Man and Man 256
XI. Between Man and Woman 268
BOOK THIRD--THE LARGER PRISON
I. The Return to Life 281
II. His Own Place 290
III. The Outward Pattern 303
IV. The Letter and the Spirit 317
V. The Will of Alice 329
VI. The Iron Bars 341
VII. The Vision and the Fact 353
VIII. The Weakness in Strength 363
BOOK FOURTH--LIBERATION
I. The Inward Light 379
II. At Tappahannock Again 392
III. Alice's Marriage 409
IV. The Power of the Blood 420
V. The House of Dreams 434
VI. The Ultimate Choice 443
VII. Flight 454
VIII. The End of the Road 469
IX. The Light Beyond 482
BOOK FIRST
THE NEW LIFE
CHAPTER I
THE ROAD
Though it was six days since Daniel Ordway had come out of prison, he
was aware, when he reached the brow of the hill, and stopped to look
back over the sunny Virginia road, that he drank in the wind as if it
were his first breath of freedom. At his feet the road dropped between
two low hills beyond which swept a high, rolling sea of broomsedge; and
farther still--where the distance melted gradually into the blue sky--he
could see not less plainly the New York streets through which he had
gone from his trial and the walls of the prison where he had served five
years. Between this memory and the deserted look of the red clay road
there was the abrupt division which separates actual experience from the
objects in a dream. He felt that he was awake, yet it seemed that the
country through which he walked must vanish presently at a touch. Even
the rough March wind blowing among the broomsedge heightened rather than
diminished the effect of the visionary meeting of earth and sky.
As he stood there in his ill-fitting clothes, with his head bared in the
sun and the red clay ground to fine dust on his coarse boots, it would
have been difficult at a casual glance to have grouped him
appropriately in any division of class. He might have been either a
gentleman who had turned tramp or a tramp who had been born to look a
gentleman. Though he was barely above medium height, his figure produced
even in repose an impression of great muscular strength, and this
impression was repeated in his large, regular, and singularly expressive
features. His face was square with a powerful and rather prominent mouth
and chin; the brows were heavily marked and the eyes were of so bright a
blue that they lent an effect which was almost one of gaiety to his
smile. In his dark and slightly coarsened face the colour of his eyes
was intensified until they appeared to flash at times like blue lights
under his thick black brows. His age was, perhaps, forty years, though
at fifty there would probably be but little change recorded in his
appearance. At thirty one might have found, doubtless, the same lines of
suffering upon his forehead and about his mouth.
As he went on over some rotting planks which spanned a stream that had
gone dry, the road he followed was visible as a faded scar in a stretch
of impoverished, neutral-toned country--the least distinctive and most
isolated part of what is known in Virginia as "the Southside." A
bleached monotony was the one noticeable characteristic of the
landscape--the pale clay road, the dried broomsedge, and even the
brownish, circular-shaped cloud of smoke, which hung over the little
town in the distance, each contributing a depressing feature to a face
which presented at best an unrelieved flatness of colour. The single
high note in the dull perspective was struck by a clump of sassafras,
which, mistaking the mild weather for a genial April, had flowered
tremulously in gorgeous yellow.
The sound of a wagon jolting over the rough road, reached him presently
from the top of the hill, and as he glanced back, he heard a drawling
curse thrown to the panting horses. A moment later he was overtaken by
an open spring wagon filled with dried tobacco plants of the last
season's crop. In the centre of the load, which gave out a stale,
pungent odour, sat a small middle-aged countryman, who swore mild oaths
in a pleasant, jesting tone. From time to time, as the stalks beneath
him were jostled out of place, he would shift his seat and spread out
his short legs clad in overalls of blue jean. Behind him in the road the
wind tossed scattered and damaged leaves of tobacco.
When the wagon reached Ordway, he glanced over his shoulder at the
driver, while he turned into the small grass-grown path amid the clumps
of sassafras.
"Is that Bernardsville over there?" he asked, pointing in the direction
of the cloud of smoke.
The wagon drew up quickly and the driver--who showed at nearer view to
be a dirty, red-bearded farmer of the poorer class--stared at him with
an expression which settled into suspicion before it had time to denote
surprise.
"Bernardsville! Why, you've come a good forty miles out of your road.
That thar's Tappahannock."
"Tappahannock? I hadn't heard of it."
"Mebbe you ain't, but it never knowed it."
"Anything going on there? Work, I mean?"
"The biggest shippin' of tobaccy this side o' Danville is goin' on thar.
Ever heard o' Danville?"
"I know the name, but the tobacco market is about closed now, isn't it?
The season's over."
The man's laugh startled the waiting horses, and lifting their heads
from a budding bush by the roadside, they moved patiently toward
Tappahannock.
"Closed? Bless you, it never closes--Whoa! thar, won't you, darn you? To
be sure sales ain't so brisk to-day as they war a month back, but I'm
jest carryin' in my leetle crop to Baxter's warehouse."
"It isn't manufactured, then--only bought and sold?"
"Oh, it's sold quick enough and bought, too. Baxter auctions the leaf
off in lots and it's shipped to the factories in Richmond an' in
Danville. You ain't a native of these parts, I reckon?"
"A native--no? I'm looking for work."
"What sort of work? Thar's work an' work. I saw a man once settin' out
in an old field doin' a picture of a pine tree, an' he called it work.
Wall, wall, if you're goin' all the way to Tappahannock, I reckon I kin
give you a lift along. Mebbe you kin pick up an odd job in Baxter's
warehouse--thar's a sayin' that he feeds all the crows in Tappahannock."
He drove on with a chuckle, for Ordway had declined the proffered
"lift," and the little cloud of dust raised by the wagon drifted slowly
in the direction of the town.
A mile farther on Ordway found that as the road approached Tappahannock,
the country lost gradually its aspect of loneliness, and the colourless
fields were dotted here and there with small Negro cabins, built for the
most part of unbarked pine logs laid roughly cross-wise to form square
enclosures. Before one of these primitive dwellings a large black woman,
with a strip of checked blue and white gingham bound about her head, was
emptying a pail of buttermilk into a wooden trough. When she saw Ordway
she nodded to him from the end of the little path, bordered by rocks,
which led from the roadside to the single stone step before her cabin
door.
As he watched the buttermilk splash into the trough, Ordway remembered,
with a spasm of faintness, that he had eaten nothing since the day
before, and turning out of the road, he asked the woman for a share of
the supper that she gave the pigs.
"Go 'way, honey, dis yer ain' fit'n fur you," she replied, resting the
pail under her arm against her rolling hip, "I'se des' thowin' hit ter
de hawgs."
But when he had repeated his request, she motioned to a wooden bench
beside a scrubby lilac bush on which a coloured shirt hung drying, and
going into the single room inside, brought him a glass of buttermilk and
a piece of corn bread on a tin plate. While he ate hungrily of the
coarse food a half-naked Negro baby, covered with wood ashes, rolled
across the threshold and lay sprawling in the path at his feet.
After a little rambling talk the woman went back into the cabin, where
she whipped up cornmeal dough in an earthenware bowl, turning at
intervals to toss a scrap or two to a red and white cock that hovered,
expectant, about the doorway. In the road a covered wagon crawled by,
and the shadow it threw stretched along the path to the lilac bush where
the coloured shirt hung drying. The pigs drank the buttermilk from the
trough with loud grunts; the red and white cock ventured, alert and
wary, across the threshold; and the Negro baby, after sprawling on its
stomach in the warm earth, rolled over and lay staring in silence at the
blue sky overhead.
There was little beauty in the scene except the beauty which belongs to
all things under the open sky. Road and landscape and cabin were bare
even of any chance effect of light and shadow. Yet there was life--the
raw, primal life of nature--and after his forty years of wasted
experience, Ordway was filled with a passionate desire for life. In his
careless pursuit of happiness he had often found weariness instead, but
sitting now homeless and penniless, before the negro's cabin, he
discovered that each object at which he looked--the long road that led
somewhere, the smoke hanging above the distant town, the deep-bosomed
negro mother and the half-naked negro baby--that each of these possessed
an interest to which he awakened almost with a start of wonder. And
yielding to the influence of his thought, his features appeared to lose
gradually their surface coarseness of line. It was as if his mouth grew
vague, enveloped in shadow, while the eyes dominated the entire face and
softened its expression to one of sweetness, gaiety and youth. The child
that is in every man big enough to contain it looked out suddenly from
his altered face.
He was thinking now of a day in his boyhood--of an early autumn morning
when the frost was white on the grass and the chestnuts dropped heavily
from the spreading boughs and the cider smelt strong and sweet as it
oozed from the crushed winesaps. On that morning, after dressing by
candlelight, he had gone into town with his maiden aunt, a lady whom he
remembered chiefly by her false gray curls which she wore as if they had
been a halo. At the wayside station, while they had waited for the train
to the little city of Botetourt, he had seen a convict brought in,
handcuffed, on his way to the penitentiary, and in response to the boy's
persistent questioning, his aunt had told him that the man was wicked,
though he appeared to the child's eyes to be only miserable--a thin,
dirty, poorly clad labourer with a red cotton handkerchief bound tightly
about his jaw. A severe toothache had evidently attacked him, for while
he had stared sullenly at the bare planks of the floor, he had made from
time to time a suffering, irritable movement with his head. At each
gesture the guard had called out sharply: "Keep still there, won't you?"
to which the convict had responded by a savage lowering of his heavy
brows.
For the first time it had occurred to the child that day that there must
be a strange contradiction--a fundamental injustice in the universal
scheme of nature. He had always been what his father had called
impatiently "a boy with ideas," and it had seemed to him then that this
last "idea" of his was far the most wonderful of them all--more
wonderful than any he had found in books or in his own head at night. At
the moment he had felt it swell so large in his heart that a glow of
happiness had spread through his body to his trembling hands. Slipping
from his aunt's hold he had crossed the room to where the convict sat
sullenly beside his guard.
"I'll give you all my money," he had cried out joyously, "because I am
so much happier than you."
The convict had started and looked up with an angry flash in his eyes;
the guard had burst into a loud laugh while he spat tobacco juice
through the window; the silver had scattered and rolled under the
benches on the plank floor; and the child's aunt, rustling over in her
stiff brocade, had seized his arm and dragged him, weeping loudly, into
the train. So his first mission had failed, yet at this day he could
remember the joy with which he had stretched out his little hand and the
humiliation in which he had drawn it back. That was thirty years ago,
but he wondered now if the child's way had been God's way, after all?
For there had come an hour in his life when the convict of his boyhood
had stood in closer relationship to his misery than the people whom he
had touched in the street. His childish memories scattered like mist,
and the three great milestones of his past showed bare and white, as his
success, his temptation and his fall. He remembered the careless
ambition of his early youth, the brilliant promise of his college years,
and the day on which he had entered as a younger member the great
banking house of Amos, Bonner, and Amos. Between this day and the slow
minutes when he had stood in his wife's sitting-room awaiting his
arrest, he could find in his thoughts no gradation of years to mark the
terrible swiftness of his descent. In that time which he could not
divide Wall Street had reached out and sucked him in; the fever of
speculation had consumed like disease the hereditary instincts, the
sentiments of honour, which had barred its way. One minute he had stood
a rich man on the floor of the Stock Exchange--and was it an instant or
a century afterwards that he had gone out into the street and had known
himself to be a beggar and a criminal? Other men had made millions with
the use of money which they held in trust; but the star of the gambler
had deserted him at the critical hour; and where other men had won and
triumphed, he had gone down, he told himself, dishonoured by a stroke of
luck. In his office that day a mirror over the mantel had showed him his
face as he entered, and he had stopped to look at it almost with
curiosity--as if it were the face of a stranger which repelled him
because it bore some sinister likeness to his own. After this there had
come days, weeks, months, when at each sudden word, at each opening of
the door, he had started, half sickened, by fear of the discovery which
he knew must come. His nerves had quivered and given way under the
pressure; he had grown morose, irritable, silent; and in some
half-insane frenzy, he had imagined that his friends, his family, his
wife, even his young children, had begun to regard him with terror and
suspicion. But at last the hour had come, and in the strength with which
he had risen to meet it, he had won back almost his old self--for
courage, not patience, was the particular virtue of his temperament. He
had stood his trial bravely, had heard his sentence without a tremor,
and had borne his punishment without complaint. The world and he were
quits now, and he felt that it owed him at least the room for a fair
fight.
The prison, he had said once, had squared him with his destiny, yet
to-day each act of his past appeared to rivet, not itself, but its
result upon his life. Though he told himself that he was free, he knew
that, in the reality of things, he was still a prisoner. From the lowest
depths that he had touched he was reached even now by the agony of his
most terrible moment when, at the end of his first hopeless month, he
had found awaiting him one day a letter from his wife. It was her final
good-bye, she had written; on the morrow she would leave with her two
children for his father's home in Virginia; and the single condition
upon which the old man had consented to provide for them was that she
should separate herself entirely from her husband. "The condition is
hard," she had added, "made harder, too, by the fact that you are his
son and my only real claim upon him is through you--yet when you
consider the failure of our life together, and that the children's
education even is unprovided for, you will, I feel sure, admit that my
decision has been a wise one."
The words had dissolved and vanished before his eyes, and turning away
he had flung himself on his prison bed, while the hard, dry sobs had
quivered like blows in his chest. Yet she was right! His judgment had
acquitted her in the first agony of his reproach, and the unerring
justice in her decision had convicted him with each smooth, calm
sentence in her letter. As he lay there he had lost consciousness of the
bare walls and the hot sunshine that fell through the grating, for the
ultimate desolation had closed over him like black waters.
A little later he had gone from his cell and taken up his life again;
but all that he remembered of it now was a voice that had called to him
in the prison yard.
"You look so darn sunk in the mouth I'll let you have my last
smoke--damn you!"
Turning sullenly he had accepted the stranger's tobacco, unaware at the
moment that he was partaking of the nature of a sacrament--for while he
had smoked there in his dogged misery, he had felt revive in his heart a
stir of sympathy for the convict he had seen at the wayside station in
Virginia. As if revealed by an inner illumination the impressions of
that morning had started, clear as light, into his brain. The frost on
the grass, the dropping chestnuts, the strong sweet smell of the crushed
winesaps--these things surrounded in his memory the wretched figure of
the man with the red cotton handkerchief bound tightly about his swollen
jaw. But the figure had ceased now to stand for itself and for its own
degradation alone--haunting, tragic, colossal, it had become in his
thoughts the image of all those who suffer and are oppressed. So through
his sin and his remorse, Ordway had travelled slowly toward the vision
of service.
With a word of thanks to the woman, he rose from the bench and went down
the little path and out into the road. The wind had changed suddenly,
and as he emerged from the shelter of a thicket, it struck against his
face with a biting edge. Where the sun had declined in the western sky,
heavy clouds were driving close above the broken line of the horizon.
The night promised to be cold, and he pushed on rapidly, urged by a
feeling that the little town before him held rest and comfort and the
new life beneath its smoking chimneys. Walking was less difficult now,
for the road showed signs of travel as it approached the scattered
houses, which appeared thrust into community by the surrounding
isolation of the fields. At last, as he ascended a slight elevation, he
found that the village, screened by a small grove of pines, lay
immediately beneath the spot upon which he stood.