"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 nobody 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 space 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
passage of the sunshine, 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 fishin' 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 pass an open field on the edge of
the town, Emily pointed to a little crowd which had gathered in the
centre of the grass-grown space.
"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 pass 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 class. 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 sunshine,
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 grass
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 space 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 passed 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 passion and boyish amusement. 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.
Unconsciously, she had searched his face as Milly Trend had done before
her, and like her, she had found there only an impersonal kindliness.