A STRING OF CORAL
As Emily rode slowly up from Bullfinch's Hollow, it seemed to her that
the abandoned fields had borrowed an aspect which was almost one of
sentiment. In the golden light of the sunrise even the Negro hovels, the
refuse heaps and the dead thistles by the roadside, were transfigured
until they appeared to lose their ordinary daytime ugliness; and the
same golden light was shining inwardly on the swift impressions which
crowded her thoughts. This strange inner illumination surrounded, she
discovered now, each common fact which presented itself to her mind, and
though the outward form of life was not changed, her mental vision had
become suddenly enraptured. She did not stop to ask herself why the
familiar events of every day appear so full of vivid interests--why the
external objects at which she looked swam before her gaze in an
atmosphere that was like a rainbow mist? It was sufficient to be alive
to the finger tips, and to realise that everything in the great universe
was alive around one--the air, the sky, the thistles along the roadside
and the dust blowing before the wind, all moved, she felt, in harmony
with the elemental pulse of life. On that morning she entered for the
first time into the secret of immortality.
And yet--was it only the early morning hour? she asked herself, as she
rode back between the stretches of dried broomsedge. Or was it, she
questioned a moment later, the natural gratification she had felt in a
charity so generous, so unassuming as that of the man she had seen at
Mrs. Berry's?
"It's a pity he isn't a gentleman and that his clothes are so rough,"
she thought, and blushed the next instant with shame because she was
"only a wretched snob."
"Whatever his class he _is_ a gentleman," she began again, "and he would
be quite--even very--good-looking if his face were not so drawn and
thin. What strange eyes he has--they are as blue as Blair's and as
young. No, he isn't exactly good-looking--not in Beverly's way, at
least--but I should know his face again if I didn't see it for twenty
years. It's odd that there are people one hardly knows whom one never
forgets."
Her bare hands were on Major's neck, and as she looked at them a
displeased frown gathered her brows. She wondered why she had never
noticed before that they were ugly and unwomanly, and it occurred to her
that Aunt Mehitable had once told her that "ole Miss" washed her hands
in buttermilk to keep them soft and white. "They're almost as rough as
Mr. Smith's," she thought, "perhaps he noticed them." The idea worried
her for a minute, for she hated, she told herself, that people should
not think her "nice"--but the golden light was still flooding her
thoughts and these trivial disturbances scattered almost before they
had managed to take shape. Nothing worried her long to-day, and as she
dismounted at the steps, and ran hurriedly into the dining-room, she
remembered Beverly and Amelia with an affection which she had not felt
for years. It was as if the mere external friction of personalities had
dissolved before the fundamental relation of soul to soul; even poor
half-demented Aunt Mehitable wore in her eyes, at the minute, an
immortal aspect.
A little later when she rode in to the public school at Tappahannock,
she discovered that the golden light irradiated even the questions in
geography and arithmetic upon the blackboard; and coming out again, she
found that it lay like sunshine on the newly turned vegetable rows in
the garden. That afternoon for the first time she planted in a discarded
pair of buck-skin gloves, and as soon as her work was over, she went
upstairs to her bedroom, and regarded herself wistfully by the light
from a branched candlestick which she held against the old greenish
mirror. Her forehead was too high, she admitted regretfully, her mouth
was too wide, her skin certainly was too brown. The blue cotton dress
she wore appeared to her suddenly common and old-fashioned, and she
began looking eagerly through her limited wardrobe in the hopeless quest
for a gown that was softened by so much as a fall of lace about the
throat. Then remembering the few precious trinkets saved from the
bartered heirlooms of her dead mother, she got out the old black leather
jewel case and went patiently over the family possessions. Among the
mourning brooches and hair bracelets that the box contained there was a
necklace of rare pink coral, which she had meant to give Bella upon her
birthday--but as her gaze was arrested now by the cheerful colour, she
sat for a moment wondering if she might not honestly keep the beads for
her own. Still undecided she went to the bureau again and fastened the
string of coral around her firm brown throat.
"I may wear it for a week or two at least," she thought. "Why not?" It
seemed to her foolish, almost unfeminine that she had never cared or
thought about her clothes until to-day. "I've gone just like a boy--I
ought to be ashamed to show my hands," she said; and at the same instant
she was conscious of the vivid interest, of the excitement even, which
attached to this new discovery of the importance of one's appearance.
Before going downstairs she brushed the tangles out of her thick brown
hair, and spent a half hour arranging it in a becoming fashion upon her
neck.
The next day Micah was well enough to carry the milk to Mrs. Berry's,
but three mornings afterward, when she came from the dairy with the can,
the old negro was not waiting for her on the porch, and she found, upon
going to his cabin, that the attack of rheumatism had returned with
violence. There was nothing for her to do but carry the milk herself, so
after leading Major from his stall, she mounted and rode, almost with a
feeling of shyness, in the direction of Bullfinch's Hollow.
The door was closed this morning, and in answer to her knock, Mrs. Berry
appeared, rubbing her eyes, beyond the threshold.
"I declare, Miss Emily, you don't look like yourself at all," she
exclaimed at the girl's entrance, "it must be them coral beads you've
got on, I reckon. They always was becomin' things--I had a string once
myself that I used to wear when my po' dead husband was courtin' me.
Lord! Lord!" she added, bursting into sobs, "who'd have thought when I
wore those beads that I'd ever have come to this? My po' ma gave 'em to
me herself--they were her weddin' present from her first husband, and
when she made up her mind to marry again, she kind of thought it warn't
modest to go aroun' wearin' what she'd got from her first marriage. She
was always powerful sensitive to decency, was po' ma. I've seen her
scent vulgarity in the most harmless soundin' speech you ever
heard--such as when my husband asked her one day if she was afflicted
with the budges in her knee, and she told me afterward that he had made
a sneakin' allusion to her leg. Ten years from that time, when all my
trouble came upon me, she held that over me as a kind of warnin'. 'If
you'd listened to me, Sarindy,' she used to say, 'you'd never have got
into this scrape of marryin' a man who talked free befo' women. For a
man who is indecent in his language can't be decent in his life,' she
said."
As she talked she was pouring the milk into the cracked pitcher, and
Emily breaking in at the first pause, sought to hasten the washing of
the can, by bringing the old woman's rambling attention back to Kit.
"Has he had a quiet night?" she asked.
"Well, yes, miss, in a way, but then he always was what you might call a
quiet sleeper from the very hour that he was born. I remember old Aunt
Jemima, his monthly nurse, tellin' me that she had never in all her
experience brought a more reliable sleeper into the world. He never used
to stir, except to whimper now and then for his sugar rag when it
slipped out of his mouth."
Hurriedly seizing the half-washed can, Emily caught up her skirt and
moved toward the door.
"Did you sit up with him last night?" she asked, turning upon the step.
"That was Mr. Smith's night, miss--he's taken such a fancy to Kit that
he comes every other night to watch by him--but he gets up and leaves
now a little before daybreak. I heard him choppin' wood before the sun
was up."
"He has been very kind about it, hasn't he?"
"Lord, miss, he's been a son and a brother as far as work goes, but I
declare I can't help wishin' he wasn't quite so shut mouthed. Every
blessed sound he utters I have to drag out of him like a fox out of a
burrow. He's a little cranky, too, I reckon, for he is so absent-minded
that sometimes when you call his name he never even turns aroun'. But
the Lord will overlook his unsociable ways, I s'pose, for he reads his
Bible half the night when he sets up, jest as hard as if he was paid to
do it. That's as good a recommendation, I reckon, as I need to have."
"I should think his charity would be a better one," rejoined Emily, with
severity.
"Well, that's as it may be, Miss," returned Mrs. Berry, "I'm not
ungrateful, I hope, and I'm much obliged for what he gives
me--particularly for the coffee, which ain't as thin as it might be
seein' it's a present. But when all's said I ain't so apt to jedge by
things like that because charity is jest a kind of Saint Vitus dance
with some folks--it's all in the muscles. Thank you, miss, yes, Kit is
doin' very well."
Mounting from the step, Emily turned back into the Tappahannock road,
aware as she passed through the deserted fields that her exaltation of
the morning had given way before a despondency which seemed to change
the face of nature. The day was oppressive, the road ugly, Mrs. Berry
more tiresome than usual--each of these things suggested itself as a
possible reason for the dissatisfaction which she could not explain. Not
once during her troubled mood did the name or the face of Ordway appear
as the visible cause of her disturbance. So far, indeed, was his
individual aspect from her reflections, that some hours later, when she
rode back to school, it was with a shock of surprise that she saw him
turn the corner by the new brick church, and come rapidly toward her
from the brow of the long hill. That he had not at first seen her was
evident, for he walked in an abstracted reverie with his eyes on the
ground, and when he looked up at last, she had drawn almost within
speaking distance. At sight of his face her heart beat so quickly that
she dropped the reins on Major's neck, and raised her free hand to her
bosom, while she felt the blood mount joyously to her cheeks; but, to
her amazement, in the first instant of recognition, he turned abruptly
away and entered the shop of a harness maker which happened to be
immediately on his right. The action was so sudden that even as she
quickened her horse's pace, there flashed into her mind the humiliating
conviction that he had sought purposely to avoid her. The throbs of her
heart grew faster and then seemed to die utterly away, yet even as the
warm blood turned cold in her cheeks, she told herself with spirit that
it was all because she "could not bear to be disliked." "Why should he
dislike me?" she questioned presently; "it is very foolish of him, and
what have I done?" She searched her memory for some past rudeness of
which she had been guilty, but there was nothing she could recall which
would justify, however slightly, his open avoidance of a chance meeting.
"Perhaps he doesn't like the colour of my hair. I've heard men were like
that," she thought, "or the freckles on my face? Or the roughness of my
hands?" But the instant afterward she saw how ridiculous were her
surmises, and she felt angry with herself for having permitted them to
appear in her mind. She remembered his blue eyes with the moonlight upon
them, and she wondered why he had seemed to her more masculine than any
man that she had ever known. With the memory of his eyes and his smile
she smelt again the odour of the warm earth that had clung about him,
and she was conscious that this and everything about him was strange and
new as if she had never looked into a pair of blue eyes or smelt the
odour of the soil before.
After this meeting she did not see Ordway again for several weeks, and
then it was only to pass him in the road one Sunday afternoon when he
had finished his sermon in the old field. As he drew back among the
thistles, he spoke to her gravely, with a deference, she noticed, which
had the effect of placing him apart from her as a member of the working
class. Since Kit Berry's recovery she had not gone again to Bullfinch's
Hollow; and she could not fail to observe that even when an opportunity
appeared, Ordway made no further effort to bridge the mere casual
acquaintance which divided rather than united them. If it were possible
to avoid conversation with her he did so by retiring into the
background; if the event forced him into notice, he addressed her with a
reserve which seemed at each meeting to widen the distance between them.
Though she hardly confessed it to herself, her heart was wounded for a
month or two by his frank indifference to her presence. Then one bright
afternoon in May, when she had observed him turn out of his path as she
rode up the hill, she saved the situation in her mind by the final
triumph of her buoyant humour.
"Everybody is privileged to be a little fool," she said with a laugh,
"but when there's the danger of becoming a great big one, it's time to
stop short and turn round. Now, Emily, my dear, you're to stop short
from this minute. I hope you understand me."
That the Emily she addressed understood her very clearly was proved a
little later in the afternoon, when going upstairs to her bedroom, she
unfastened the coral beads and laid them away again among the mourning
brooches and the hair bracelets in the leather case.
BOOK SECOND
THE DAY OF RECKONING
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH A STRANGER APPEARS
On a bright June morning, when Ordway had been more than two years at
Tappahannock, he came out upon Mrs. Twine's little porch as soon as
breakfast was over, and looked down the board walk for Harry Banks, who
had fallen into the habit of accompanying him to the warehouse. From
where he stood, under the hanging blossoms of the locust trees, he could
see the painted tin roofs and the huddled chimneys of the town, flanked
by the brazen sweep of the cornfields along the country roads. As his
eyes rested on the familiar scene, they softened unconsciously with an
affection which was almost paternal--for in the last two years
Tappahannock had become a different place from the Tappahannock he had
entered as a tramp on that windy afternoon in March. The town as it
stood to-day was the town which he had helped to make, and behind each
roll of progress there had been the informing purpose of his mind, as
well as the strength of his shoulder at the wheel. Behind the law which
had closed the disreputable barrooms; behind the sentiment for decency
which had purified the filthy hollows; behind the spirit of charity
which had organised and opened, not only a reading room for the factory
workers, but an industrial home for the poorer classes--behind each of
these separate movements there had been a single energy to plan and act.
In two years he had watched the little town cover the stretch of ten
years' improvement; in two years he had aroused and vitalised the
community into which he had come a stranger. Tappahannock was the child
of his brain--the life that was in her to-day he had given her out of
himself, and the love he felt for her was the love that one bestows upon
one's own. Standing there his eyes followed the street to the ugly brick
church at the corner, and then as his mental vision travelled down the
long, hot hill which led to the railroad, he could tell himself, with a
kind of exultation, that there was hardly a dwelling along the way which
had not some great or little reason to bless his name. Even Kelly, whose
saloon he had closed, had been put upon his feet again and started, with
a fair chance, in the tobacco market. Yes, a new life had been given
him, and he had made good his promise to himself. The clothes he wore
to-day were as rough as those in which he had chopped wood in
Bullfinch's Hollow; the room he lived in was the same small, bare
lodging of Mrs. Twine's; for though his position at Baxter's now assured
him a comfortable income, he had kept to his cramped manner of life in
order that he might contribute the more generously to the lives of
others. Out of his little he had given abundantly, and he had gained in
return the happiness which he had ceased to make the object of his
search. In looking back over his whole life, he could honestly tell
himself that his happiest years since childhood were the ones that he
had spent in Tappahannock.
The gate closed with a slam, and Banks came up the short brick walk
inside, mopping his heated face with a pink bordered handkerchief.
"I'm a minute late," he said, "but it doesn't matter, does it? The
Trends asked me to breakfast."
"It doesn't matter in the least if you spent that minute with Milly,"
replied Ordway, with a laugh, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe
and descended the steps. "The hot weather has come early, hasn't it?"
"Oh, we're going in for a scorcher," responded Banks, indifferently.
There was a heavy gloom in his manner which was hardly to be accounted
for by the temperature in which he moved, and as they closed the gate
behind them and passed under the shade of the locust trees on the board
walk, he turned to Ordway in an outburst which was little short of
desperation.
"I don't know how it is--or whether it's just a woman's way," he said,
"but I never can be sure of Milly for ten minutes at a time. A month ago
I was positive that she meant to marry me in the autumn, but now I'm in
a kind of blue funk about her doing it at all. She's never been the same
since she went North in April."
"My dear chap, these things will vary, I suppose--though, mind you, I
make no claim to exact knowledge of the sex."
"It isn't the sex," said Banks, "it's Milly."
"Well, I certainly can't claim any particular knowledge of Milly. It
would be rather presumptuous if I did, considering I've only seen her
about a dozen times--mostly at a distance."
"I wish you knew her better, perhaps you could help me," returned Banks
in a voice of melancholy. "To save the life of me I don't see how it
is--I've done my best--I swear I've done my best--yet nothing somehow
seems to suit her. She wants to make me over from the skin and even that
doesn't satisfy her. When my hair is short she wants it long, and when
it's long she says she wants it short. She can't stand me in coloured
cravats and when I put on a black tie she calls me an undertaker. I had
to leave off my turtle-dove scarf-pin and this morning," he rolled his
innocent blue eyes, like pale marbles, in the direction of Ordway, "she
actually got into a temper about my stockings."
"It seems to be a case for sympathy," commented Ordway seriously, "but
hardly, I should say, for marriage. Imagine, my dear Banks, what a hell
you'd make out of your domesticity. Suppose you give her up and bear it
like a man?"
"Give her up? to what?"
"Well, to her own amiability, we'll say."
"I can't," said Banks, waving his pink bordered handkerchief before his
face in an effort either to disperse the swarming blue flies or to
conceal the working of his emotion. "I'd die--I'd kill myself--that's
the awful part of it. The more she bangs me over the head, the more I
feel that I can't live without her. Is that natural, do you s'pose?" he
inquired uneasily, "or have I gone clean crazy?"
Checking his smile severely, Ordway turned and slipped his left arm
affectionately through his companion's.
"I've heard of similar cases," he remarked, "though I confess, they
sounded a little strained."
"Do you think I'd better see a doctor? I will if you say so."
"By no means. Go off on a trip."
"And leave Milly here? I'd jump out of the train--and, I reckon, she'd
bang my head off for doing it."
"But if it's as bad as that, you couldn't be much more miserable without
her."
"I know it," replied Banks obstinately, "but it would be a different
sort of miserableness, and that happens to be the sort that I can't
stand."
"Then I give it up," said Ordway, cheerfully, "there's no hope but
marriage."
With his words they turned under the archway of Baxter's warehouse, and
Banks's passionate confidences were extinguished in the odour of
tobacco.
A group of men stood talking loudly in the centre of the building, and
as Ordway approached, Baxter broke away, with his great rolling laugh,
and came to join him at the door of his private office.
"Catesby and Frazier have got into a squabble about that lot of tobacco
they brought in last February," he said, "and they have both agreed to
accept your decision in the matter."
Ordway nodded, without replying, as he followed the other through the
doorway. Such judicial appeals to him were not uncommon, and his power
of pacification, as his employer had once remarked, was one of his
principal qualifications for the tobacco market.
"Shall I hear them now? or would it be as well to give them time to cool
off?" he asked presently, while Baxter settled his great person in a
desk chair that seemed a size too small to contain it.
"If they can cool off on a day like this they're lucky dogs," returned
Baxter, with a groan, "however, I reckon you might as well get it over
and let 'em go home and stew in peace. By the way, Smith, I forgot to
tell you that Major Leary--he's the president of the Southside Bank, you
know, was asking me yesterday if I could tell him anything about you
before you came to work for me."
"Of the Southside Bank," repeated Ordway, while his hand closed tightly
over a paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, which lay on
Baxter's desk. With the words he was conscious only of the muffled
drumming of his pulses, and above the discord in his ears, the cheerful
tones of Baxter sounded like an echo rather than a real voice. At the
instant he was back again in his room in the great banking house of
Amos, Bonner & Amos, in the midst of the pale brown walls, the black oak
furniture and the shining leather covered volumes behind the glass doors
of the bookcases. With peculiar vividness he remembered the eccentric
little bird on the bronze clock on the mantel, which had hopped from
its swinging perch to strike the hour with its beak; and through the
open windows he could hear still the din of traffic in the street below
and the ceaseless, irregular tread of footsteps upon the pavement.
"Oh, I didn't mean to raise your hopes too high," remarked Baxter,
rising from his chair to slap him affectionately upon the shoulder, "he
isn't going to make you president of the bank, but of the Citizen's
Improvement League, whose object is to oust Jasper Trend, you know, in
the autumn. The Major told me before he left that you'd done as much for
Tappahannock in two years as any other man had done in a lifetime. I
said I thought he'd hit the nail pretty squarely, which is something he
doesn't generally manage to do."
"So I'm to fight Jasper Trend, am I?" asked Ordway, with sudden
interest. The sound of his throbbing arteries was no longer in his ears,
and as he spoke, he felt that his past life with his old identity had
departed from him. In the swift renewal of his confidence he had become
again "Ten Commandment Smith" of Tappahannock.
"Well, you see, Jasper has been a precious bad influence around here,"
pursued Baxter, engrossed in the political scheme he was unfolding. "The
only thing on earth he's got to recommend him is his pretty daughter.
Now, I've a soft enough heart, as everybody knows, when the ladies come
about--particularly if they're pretty--but I'm ready to stand up and say
that Jasper Trend can't be allowed to run this town on the platform of
pure chivalry. There's such a thing as fairness, suh, even where women
are concerned, and I'll back my word with my oath that it ain't fair!"
"And I'll back your word with another that it isn't," rejoined Ordway.
"There's no doubt, I reckon," continued Baxter, "that Jasper has
connived with those disorderly saloons that you've been trying to shut
up, and for all his money and the men he employs in the cotton mills
there's come a considerable reaction against him in public sentiment.
Now, I ain't afraid to say, Smith," he concluded with an ample flourish
of his dirty hand, "that the fact that there's any public sentiment at
all in Tappahannock is due to you. Until you came here there weren't six
decent men you could count mixed up in the affairs of this town. Jasper
had everything his own way, that's why he hates you."
"But I wasn't even aware that he did me so much honour."
"You mean he hasn't told you his feelings to your face. Well, he hasn't
gone so far as to confide them to me either--but even if I ain't a
woman, I can hear some things that ain't spoke out in words. He's made a
dirty town and you're sweepin' it clean--do you think it likely that it
makes him love you?"
"He's welcome to feel about me anyway he pleases, but do you know,
Baxter," he added with his whimsical gravity, "I've a pretty strong
conviction that I'd make a jolly good street sweeper."
"I reckon you're right!" roared Baxter, "and when you're done, we'll
shoot off some sky-rockets over the job--so there you are, ain't you?"
"All right--but there's Jasper Trend also," retorted Ordway.
"Oh, he can afford to send off his own sky-rockets. We needn't bother
about him. He won't be out of a job like Kelly, you know. Great Scott!"
he added, chuckling, "I can see your face now when you marched in here
the day after you closed Kelly's saloon, and told me you had to start a
man in tobacco because you'd taken him out of whiskey."
His laugh shook through his figure until Ordway saw his fat chest heave
violently beneath his alpaca coat. Custom had made the younger man
almost indifferent to the external details which had once annoyed him in
his employer, and he hardly noticed now that Baxter's coat was turning
from black to green and that the old ashes from his pipe had lodged in
the crumpled bosom of his shirt. Baxter was--well, Baxter, and tolerance
was a virtue which one acquired sooner or later in Tappahannock.
"I suppose I might as well get at Catesby and Frazier now," remarked
Ordway, watching the other disinter a tattered palm leaf fan from
beneath a dusty pile of old almanacs and catalogues.
"Wait a minute first," said Baxter, "there's something I want to say as
soon as I get settled. I ain't made for heat, that's certain," he
pursued, as he pulled off his coat, and hung it from a nail in the wall,
"it sweats all my morals out of me."
Detaching the collar from his shirt, he placed it above his coat on the
nail, and then rolling up his shirt sleeves, sank, with a panting
breath, back into his chair.
"If I were you I'd get out of this at night anyway, Smith," he urged.
"Why don't you try boarding for the next few months over at Cedar Hill.
It would be a godsend to the family, now that Miss Emily's school has
stopped."
"But I don't suppose they'd take me in," replied Ordway, staring out
into the street, where the dust rose like steam in the air, and the
rough-coated country horses toiled patiently up the long hill. Across
the way he saw the six stale currant buns and the three bottles of pale
beer behind the fly-specked window panes of a cheap eating house. In
front of them, a Negro woman, barefooted, with her ragged calico dress
tucked up about her waist, was sousing the steaming board walk with a
pailful of dirty water. From his memory of two years ago there floated
the mingled odours of wild flowers and freshly turned earth in the
garden of Cedar Hill, and Emily appeared in his thoughts only as an
appropriate figure against the pleasant natural background of the lilacs
and the meadows. In the past year he had seen her hardly more than a
dozen times--mere casual glimpses for the most part--and he had almost
forgotten his earlier avoidance of her, which had resulted from an
instinctive delicacy rather than from any premeditated purpose. His
judgment had told him that he had no right to permit a woman to become
his friend in ignorance of his past; and at the same time he was aware
of a terrible shrinking from intruding his old self, however remotely,
into the new life at Tappahannock. When the choice came between
confessing his sin and sacrificing the chance acquaintance, he had found
it easier simply to keep away from her actual presence. Yet his interest
in her had been so closely associated with his larger feeling for
humanity, that he could tell himself with sincerity that it was mere
folly which put her forward as an objection to his boarding for the
summer at Cedar Hill.
"The truth is," admitted Baxter, after a pause, "that Mrs. Brooke spoke
to me about having to take a boarder or two, when I went out there to
pay Mr. Beverly for that tobacco I couldn't sell."
"So you bought it in the end," laughed Ordway, "as you did last year
after sending me out there on a mission?"
"Yes, I bought it," replied Baxter, blushing like a boy under the beads
of perspiration upon his face. "I may as well confess it, though I tried
to keep it secret. But I ask you as man to man," he demanded warmly,
"was there another blessed thing on God's earth for me to do?"
"Let Mr. Beverly go about his business--that's what I'd have done."
"Oh, no, you wouldn't," protested Baxter softly, "not when he'd ruin
himself for you to-morrow if you were to walk out and ask him."
"But he couldn't," insisted Ordway with the brutality of the naked
fact, "he did that little job on his own account too long ago."
"But that ain't the point, Smith," replied Baxter in an awed and solemn
accent. "The point ain't that he couldn't, but that he _would_. As I
make it out that's the point which has cost me money on him for the last
thirty years."
"Oh, well, I suppose it's a charity like any other, only the old fool is
so pompous about his poverty that it wears me out."
"It does at Tappahannock, but it won't when you get out to Cedar Hill,
that's the difference between Mr. Beverly in the air and Mr. Beverly in
the flesh. The one wears you out, the other rests you for all his
darnation foolishness. Now, you can board out there for twenty-five
dollars a month and put a little ready money where it ought to be in
Mrs. Brooke's pocket."
"Of course I'd like it tremendously," said Ordway, after a moment in
which the perfume of the lilacs filled his memory. "It would be like
stepping into heaven after that stifling little room under the tin roof
at Mrs. Twine's. Do you know I slept out in the fields every hot night
last summer?"
"You see you ain't a native of these parts," remarked Baxter with a
large resigned movement of his palm leaf fan, "and your skin ain't thick
enough to keep out the heat. I'll speak to 'em at Cedar Hill this very
day, and if you like, I reckon, you can move out at the beginning of the
week. I hope if you do, Smith, that you'll bear with Mr. Beverly.
There's nothing in the universe that he wouldn't do for me if he had
the chance. It ain't his fault, you see, that he's never had it."
"Oh, I promise you I'll bear with him," laughed Ordway, as he left the
office and went out into the warehouse.
The knot of men was still in the centre of the building, and as Ordway
walked down the long floor in search of Catesby and Frazier, he saw that
a stranger had drifted in during his half hour in Baxter's office. With
his first casual glance all that he observed of the man was a sleek fair
head, slightly bald in the centre, and a pair of abnormally flat
shoulders in a light gray coat, which had evidently left a clothing shop
only a day or two before. Then as Frazier--a big, loud voiced
planter--turned toward him with the exclamation, "here's Smith, himself,
now!"--he saw the stranger wheel round abruptly and give vent the next
instant to a sharp whistle of surprise.
"Well, I'll be damned!" he said.
For a minute the tobacco dust filled Ordway's throat and nostrils, and
he felt that he was stifling for a breath of air. The dim length of the
warehouse and the familiar shadowy figures of the planters receded
before his eyes, and he saw again the bare walls of the prison chapel,
with the rows of convicts seated in the pale, greenish light. With his
recognition of the man before him, it seemed to him suddenly that the
last year in Tappahannock was all a lie. The prison walls, the grated
windows, and the hard benches of the shoe shop were closer realities
than were the open door of the warehouse and the free, hot streets of
the little town.
"I am very happy to meet you, Mr. Smith," said the stranger, as he held
out his hand with a good-humoured smile.
"I beg your pardon," returned Ordway quietly, "but I did not catch your
name."
At the handshake a chill mounted from his finger tips to his shoulder,
but drawing slightly away he stood his ground without so much as the
perceptible flicker of an eyelash.
"My name is Brown--Horatio Brown, very much at your service," answered
the other, with a manner like that of a successful, yet obsequious
commercial traveller.
It was on Ordway's tongue to retort: "You lie--it's Gus Wherry!"--but
checking the impulse with a frown, he turned on his heel and asked the
two men for whom he was looking to come with him to settle their
disagreement in Baxter's office. As he moved down the building an
instant later, it was with an effort that he kept his gaze fixed
straight ahead through the archway, for he was aware that every muscle
in his body pricked him to turn back and follow Wherry to the end. That
the man would be forced, in self-defence, to keep his secret for a time
at least, he had caught in the smiling insolence of his glance; but that
it was possible to enter into a permanent association or even a treaty
with Gus Wherry, he knew to be a supposition that was utterly beyond
the question. The crime for which the man had been sentenced he could
not remember; but he had a vague recollection that something morbidly
romantic in his history had combined with his handsome face to give him
an ephemeral notoriety as the Adonis of imaginative shop-girls. Even in
prison Wherry had attained a certain prominence because of his beauty,
which at the time when Ordway first saw him had been conspicuous in
spite of his convict's clothes. In the years since then his athletic
figure had grown a trifle too heavy, and his fair hair had worn a little
thin on the crown of his head; yet these slight changes of time had left
him, Ordway admitted reluctantly, still handsome in the brawny,
full-blooded style, which had generally made fools of women. His lips
were still as red, his features as severely classic, and his manner was
not less vulgar, and quite as debonnair as in the days when the
newspapers had clamoured for his pictures. Even the soft, girlish cleft
in his smooth-shaven chin, Ordway remembered now, with a return of the
instinctive aversion with which it had first inspired him. Yet he was
obliged to confess, as he walked ahead of Catesby and Frazier down the
dusty floor of the warehouse, that if Wherry had been less of an
uncompromising rascal, he would probably have made a particularly
amiable acquaintance.
CHAPTER II
ORDWAY COMPROMISES WITH THE PAST
When Ordway came out of Baxter's office, he found that Gus Wherry had
left the warehouse, but the effect upon him of the man's appearance in
Tappahannock was not to be overcome by the temporary withdrawal of his
visible presence. Not only the town, but existence itself seemed
altered, and in a way polluted, by the obtrusion of Wherry's personality
upon the scene. Though he was not in the building, Ordway felt an angry
conviction that he was in the air. It was impossible to breathe freely
lest he might by accident draw in some insidious poison which would
bring him under the influence of his past life and of Gus Wherry.
As he went along the street at one o'clock to his dinner at Mrs.
Twine's, he was grateful for the intensity of the sun, which rendered
him, while he walked in it, almost incapable of thought. There was
positive relief in the fact that he must count the uneven lengths of
board walk which it was necessary for him to traverse, and the buzzing
of the blue flies before his face forced his attention, at the minute,
from the inward to the outward disturbance.
When he reached the house, Mrs. Twine met him at the door and led him,
with an inquiry as to his susceptibility to sunstroke, into the awful
gloom of her tightly shuttered parlour.
"I declar' you do look well nigh in yo' last gasp," she remarked
cheerfully, bustling into the dining-room for a palm leaf fan. "Thar,
now, come right in an' set down an' eat yo' dinner. Hot or cold, glad or
sorry, I never saw the man yit that could stand goin' without his dinner
at the regular hour. Sech is the habit in some folks that I remember
when old Mat Fawling's second wife died he actually hurried up her
funeral an hour earlier so as to git back in time for dinner. 'It ain't
that I'm meanin' any disrespect to Sary, Mrs. Twine,' he said to me
right whar I was layin' her out, 'but the truth is that I can't even
mourn on an empty stomach. The undertaker put it at twelve,' he said,
'but I reckon we might manage to git out to the cemetery by eleven.'"
"All the same if you'll give me a slice of bread and a glass of milk,
I'll take it standing," remarked Ordway. "I'm sorry to leave you, Mrs.
Twine, even for a few months," he added, "but I think I'll try to get
board outside the town until the summer is over."
"Well, I'll hate to lose you, suh, to be sure," responded Mrs. Twine,
dealing out the fried batter with a lavish hand despite his protest,
"for I respect you as a fellow mortal, though I despise you as a sex."
Her hard eyes softened as she looked at him; but his gaze was on the
walnut coloured oilcloth, where the flies dispersed lazily before the
waving elm branch in the hands of the small Negro, and so he did not
observe the motherly tenderness which almost beautified her shrewish
face.
"You've been very kind to me," he said, as he put his glass and plate
down, and turned toward the door. "Whatever happens I shall always
remember you and the children with pleasure."
She choked violently, and looking back at the gasping sound, he saw that
her eyes had filled suddenly with tears. Lifting a corner of her blue
gingham apron, she mopped her face in a furious effort to conceal the
cause of her unaccustomed emotion.
"I declar' I'm all het up;" she remarked in an indignant voice, "but if
you should ever need a friend in sickness, Mr. Smith," she added, after
a moment in which she choked and coughed under the shelter of her apron,
"you jest send for me an' I'll drop every thing I've got an' go. I'll
leave husband an' children without a thought, suh, an' thar's nothin' I
won't do for you with pleasure, from makin' a mustard plaster to layin'
out yo' corpse. When I'm a friend, I'm a friend, if I do say it, an'
you've had a way with me from the very first minute that I clapped eyes
upon you. 'He may not have sech calves as you've got,' was what I said
to Bill, 'but he's got a manner of his own, an' I reckon it's the manner
an' not the calves that is the man.' Not that I'm meaning any slur on
yo' shape, suh," she hastened to explain.
"Well, I'll come to see you now and then," said Ordway, smiling, "and I
shan't forget to take the children for a picnic as I promised." But with
the words he remembered Gus Wherry, as he had seen him standing in the
centre of Baxter's warehouse, and it seemed to him that even his promise
to the children was rendered vain and worthless.
The next day was Sunday, and immediately after dinner he walked over to
Baxter's house, where he learned that Mrs. Brooke had expressed her
willingness to receive him upon the following afternoon.
"We had to talk Mr. Beverly over," said Baxter, chuckling. "At first he
didn't like the idea because of some notion he'd got out of his
great-grandfather's head about the sacredness of the family circle.
However, he's all right now, though if you take my advice, Smith, you'll
play a game of dominoes with him occasionally just to keep him kind of
soft. The chief thing he has against you is your preachin' in the
fields, for he told me he could never bring himself to countenance
religion out of doors. He seems to think that it ought to be kept shut
up tight."
"Well, I'm glad he doesn't have to listen to me," responded Ordway. "By
the way, you know I'm speaking in Catlett's grove of pines now. It's
pleasanter away from the glare of the sun." Then as Baxter pressed him
to come back to supper, he declined the oppressive hospitality and went
back to Mrs. Twine's.
That afternoon at five o'clock he went out to the grove of pines on the
Southern edge of the town, to find his congregation gathered ahead of
him on the rude plank benches which had been placed among the trees.
The sunshine fell in drops through the tent of boughs overhead, and from
the southwest a pleasant breeze had sprung up, blowing the pine needles
in eddies about his feet. At sight of the friendly faces gathered so
closely around him, he felt his foreboding depart as if it had been
blown from him by the pure breeze; and beginning his simple discourse,
he found himself absorbed presently in the religious significance of his
subject, which chanced to be an interpretation of the parable of the
prodigal son. Not until he was midway of his last sentence did he
discover that Gus Wherry was standing just beyond the little wildrose
thicket on the edge of the grove.
In the instant of recognition the words upon his lips sounded strangely
hollow and meaningless in his ears, and he felt again that the
appearance of the man had given the lie, not only to his identity, but
to his life. He knew himself at the instant to have changed from Daniel
Smith to Daniel Ordway, and the name that he had worn honestly in
Tappahannock showed to him suddenly as a falsehood and a cheat. Even his
inward motive was contemptible in his eyes, and he felt himself dragged
back in a single minute to the level upon which Wherry stood. As he
appeared to Wherry, so he saw himself now by some distorted power of
vision, and even his religion seemed but a convenient mask which he had
picked up and used. When he went on a moment later with his closing
words, he felt that the mockery of his speech must be evident to the
ears of the congregation that knew and loved him.
The gathering broke up slowly, but after speaking to several men who
stood near him, Ordway turned away and went out into the road which led
from Tappahannock in the direction of Cedar Hill. Only after he had
walked rapidly for a mile, did the sound of footsteps, following close
behind him, cause him to wheel round abruptly with an impatient
exclamation. As he did so, he saw that Wherry had stopped short in the
road before him.
"I wanted to tell you how much obliged I am for your talk, Mr. Smith,"
he said, with a smile which appeared to flash at the same instant from
his eyes and his teeth. "I declare you came pretty near converting
me--by Jove, you did. It wouldn't be convenient to listen to you too
often."
Whatever might be said of the effusive manner of his compliments, his
good humour was so evident in his voice, in his laugh, and even in his
conspicuously flashing teeth, that Ordway, who had been prepared for a
quarrel, was rendered almost helpless by so peaceable an encounter.
Turning out of the road, he stepped back among the tall weeds growing in
the corner of the old "worm" fence, and rested his tightly clinched hand
on the topmost rail.
"If you have anything to say to me, you will do me a favour by getting
it over as soon as possible," he rejoined shortly.
Wherry had taken off his hat and the red disc of the setting sun made an
appropriate frame for his handsome head, upon which his fair hair grew,
Ordway noticed, in the peculiar waving circle which is found on the
heads of ancient statues.
"Well, I can't say that I've anything to remark except that I
congratulate you on your eloquence," he replied, with a kind of infernal
amiability. "If this is your little game, you are doing it with a
success which I envy from my boots up."
"Since this is your business with me, there is no need for us to discuss
it further," returned Ordway, at white heat.
"Oh, but I say, don't hurry--what's the use? You're afraid I'm going to
squeeze you, now, isn't that it?"
"You'll get nothing out of me if you try."
"That's as much as I want, I guess. Have I asked you for as much as a
darned cent? Haven't I played the gentleman from the first minute that I
spotted you?"
Ordway nodded. "Yes, I suppose you've been as fair as you knew how," he
answered, "I'll do you the justice to admit that."
"Well, I tell you now," said Wherry, growing confidential as he
approached, "my object isn't blackmail, it's human intercourse. I want a
decent word or two, that's all, on my honour."
"But I won't talk to you. I've nothing further to say, that's to be
understood."
"You're a confounded bully, that's what you are," observed Wherry, in
the playful tones which he might have used to a child or an animal.
"Now, I don't want a blooming cent out of you, that's flat--all I ask
for is a pleasant word or two just as from man to man."
"Then why did you follow me? And what are you after in Tappahannock?"
Wherry laughed hilariously, while his remarkably fine teeth became the
most prominent feature in his face.
"The reply to your question, Smith," he answered pleasantly, "is that I
followed you to say that you're an all-fired, first rate sort of a
preacher--there's not harm in that much, is there? If you don't want me
to chaff you about it, I'll swear to be as dead serious on the subject
as if it were my wife's funeral. What I want is your hand down, I
say--no matter what is trumps!"
"My hand down for what?" demanded Ordway.
"Just for plain decency, nothing more, I swear. You've started on your
road, and I've started on mine, and the square thing is to live and let
live, that's as I see it. Leave room for honest repentance to go to
work, but don't begin to pull back before it's had a chance to begin.
Ain't we all prodigals, when it comes to that, and the only difference
is that some of us don't get a bite at the fatted calf."
For a moment Ordway stared in silence to where the other stood with his
face turned toward the red light of the sunset.
"We're all prodigals," repeated Wherry, as if impressed by the ethical
problem he had uttered unawares, "you and me and the President and
every man. We've all fallen from grace, ain't we?--and it's neither
here nor there that you and I have got the swine husks while the
President has stuffed and eaten the fatted calf."
"If you've honestly meant to begin again, I have certainly no wish to
interfere," remarked Ordway, ignoring the other's excursion into the
field of philosophy. As he spoke, however, it occurred to him that
Wherry's reformation might have had better chance of success if it had
been associated with fewer physical advantages.
"Well, I'm much obliged to you," said Wherry, "and I'll say the same by
you, here's my hand on it. Rise or fall, we'll play fair."
"You haven't told me yet why you came to Tappahannock," rejoined Ordway,
shortly.
"Oh, a little matter of business. Are you settled here now?"
"At the moment you can answer that question better than I."
"You mean when I come, you quit?"
Ordway nodded. "That's something like it."
"Well, I shan't drive you out if I can help it--I hate to play the
sneak. The truth is if you'd only get to believe it, there's not a more
peaceable fellow alive if I don't get backed up into a place where
there's no way out. When it comes to that I like the clean, straight
road best, and I always have. From first to last, though, it's the women
that have been dead against me, and I may say that a woman--one or more
of 'em--has been back of every single scrape I ever got into in my
life. If I'd had ten thousand a year and a fine looking wife, I'd have
been a pillar in the Church and the father of a family. My tastes all
lean that way," he added sentimentally. "I've always had a weakness for
babies, and I've got it to this day."
As he could think of nothing to reply to this touching confession,
Ordway picked up a bit of wood from the ground, and taking out his
knife, began whittling carelessly while he waited.
"I suppose you think I want to work you for that fat old codger in the
warehouse," observed Wherry suddenly, passing lightly from the pathetic
to the facetious point of view, "but I'll give you my word I haven't
thought of it a minute."
"I'm glad you haven't," returned Ordway, quietly, "for you would be
disappointed."
"You mean you wouldn't trust me?"
"I mean there's no place there. Whether I trust you or not is another
question--and I don't."
"Do you think I'd turn sneak?"
"I think if you stay in Tappahannock that I'll clear out."
"Well, you're a darn disagreeable chap," said Wherry, indignantly,
"particularly after all you've had to say about the prodigal. But, all
the same," he added, as his natural amiability got the better of his
temper, "it isn't likely that I'll pitch my tent here, so you needn't
begin to pack for a day or two at least."
"Do you expect to go shortly?"
"How about to-morrow? Would that suit you?"
"Yes," said Ordway, gravely, "better than the day afterward." He threw
the bit of wood away and looked steadily into the other's face. "If I
can help you live honestly, I am ready to do it," he added.
"Ready? How?"
"However I can."
"Well, you can't--not now," returned Wherry, laughing, "because I've
worked that little scheme already without your backing. Honesty is going
to be my policy from yesterday on. Did you, by the way," he added
abruptly, "ever happen to run up against Jasper Trend?"
"Jasper Trend?" exclaimed Ordway, "why, yes, he owns the cotton mills."
"He makes a handsome little pile out of 'em too, I guess?"
"I believe he does. Are you looking for a job with him?"
At this Wherry burst again into his hilarious humour. "If I am," he
asked jokingly, "will you promise to stand off and not spoil the game?"
"I have nothing to do with Trend," replied Ordway, "but the day you come
here is my last in Tappahannock."
"Well, I'm sorry for that," remarked Wherry, pleasantly, "for it appears
to be a dull enough place even with the addition of your presence." He
put on his hat and held out his hand with a friendly gesture. "Are you
ready to walk back now?" he inquired.
"When I am," answered Ordway, "I shall walk back alone."
Even this rebuff Wherry accepted with his invincible good temper.
"Every man to his company, of course," he responded, "but as to my
coming to Tappahannock, if it is any comfort to you to know it, you
needn't begin to pack."
CHAPTER III
A CHANGE OF LODGING
When Ordway awoke the next morning, it seemed to him that Wherry had
taken his place among the other nightmares, which, combined with the
reflected heat from the tin roof, had rendered his sleep broken and
distracted. With the sunrise his evil dreams and his recollections of
Wherry had scattered together, and when, after the early closing at
Baxter's warehouse, he drove out to Cedar Hill, with the leather bag
containing his few possessions at his feet, he felt that there had been
something morbid, almost inhuman, in the loathing aroused in him by the
handsome face of his fellow prisoner. In any case, for good or for evil,
he determined to banish the man utterly from his thoughts.
The vehicle in which he sat was an ancient gig driven by a decrepit
Negro, and as it drew up before the steps at Cedar Hill, he was
conscious almost of a sensation of shame because he had not approached
the ruined mansion on foot. Then descending over the dusty wheel, he
lifted out his bag, and rapped twice upon the open door with the
greenish knocker which he supposed had once been shining brass. Through
the hall a sleepy breeze blew from the honeysuckle arbour over the back
porch, and at his right hand the swinging sword still clanked against
the discoloured plaster. So quiet was the house that it seemed as if the
movement of life within had been suspended, and when at last the figure
of Mrs. Brooke floated down the great staircase under the pallid light
from the window above, she appeared to him as the disembodied spirit of
one of the historic belles who had tripped up and down in trailing
brocades and satin shoes. Instead of coming toward him, she completed
her ghostly impression by vanishing suddenly into the gloom beyond the
staircase, and a moment afterward his knock was answered by a small,
embarrassed darky in purple calico. Entering the dining-room by her
invitation, he stumbled upon Beverly stretched fast asleep, and snoring
slightly, upon a horsehair sofa, with the brown and white setter dozing
on a mat at his feet. At the approach of footsteps, the dog, without
lifting its head, began rapping the floor heavily with its tail, and
aroused by the sound, Beverly opened one eye and struggled confusedly
into an upright position.
"I was entirely overcome by the heat," he remarked apologetically, as he
rose from the sofa and held out his hand, "but it is a pleasure to see
you, Mr. Smith. I hope you did not find the sun oppressive on your drive
out. Amelia, my dear," he remarked courteously, as Mrs. Brooke entered
in a freshly starched print gown, "I feel a return of that strange
dizziness I spoke of, so if it will not inconvenience you, may I beg for
another of your refreshing lemonades?"
Mrs. Brooke, who had just completed the hasty ironing of her dress,
which she had put on while it was still warm, met his request with an
amiable but exhausted smile.
"Don't you think six lemonades in one day too many?" she asked
anxiously, when she had shaken hands with Ordway.
"But this strange dizziness, my dear? An iced drink, I find far more
effective than a bandage."
"Very well, I'll make it of course, if it gives you any relief," replied
his wife, wondering if she would be able to bake the bread by the time
Beverly demanded supper. "If you'll come up stairs now, Mr. Smith," she
added, "Malviny will show you to the blue room."
Malviny, who proved upon further acquaintance to be the eldest
great-grandchild of Aunt Mehitable, descended like a hawk upon his
waiting property, while Mrs. Brooke led the procession up the staircase
to an apartment upon the second floor.
The blue room, as he discovered presently, contained a few rather fine
pieces of old mahogany, a grandfather's chair, with a freshly laundered
chintz cover, and a rag carpet made after the "log cabin" pattern. Of
the colour from which it had taken its name, there was visible only a
faded sampler worked elaborately in peacock blue worsteds, by one
"Margaret, aged nine." Beyond this the walls were bare of decoration,
though an oblong streak upon the plaster suggested to Ordway that a
family portrait had probably been removed in the hurried preparations
for his arrival.
After remarking that she hoped he would "make himself quite at home,"
Mrs. Brooke was glancing inquiringly about the room with her large,
pale, rather prominent eyes, when a flash of purple in the doorway
preceded the announcement that "Marse Beverly done turn right green wid
de dizziness, en wus axin' kinder faintlike fur his lemonade."
"My poor husband," explained the exhausted wife, "contracted a chronic
heart trouble in the War, and he suffers so patiently that at times we
are in danger of forgetting it."
Pressing her aching head, she hurried downstairs to prepare Beverly's
drink, while Ordway, after closing the broken latch of the door, walked
slowly up and down the large, cool, barely furnished room. After his
cramped chamber at Mrs. Twine's his eyes rested with contentment upon
the high white ceiling overhead, and then descended leisurely to the
stately bedstead, with its old French canopy above, and to the broad,
red brick hearth freshly filled with odorous boughs of cedar. The
cleanly quiet of the place restored to him at once the peace which he
had missed in the last few days in Tappahannock, and his nerves, which
had revolted from Mrs. Twine's scolding voice and slovenly table, became
composed again in the ample space of these high white walls. Even
"Margaret, aged nine," delivered a soothing message to him in the faded
blues of her crewel work.
When he had unpacked his bag, he drew the chintz-covered chair to the
window, and leaning his elbow on the sill, looked out gratefully upon
the overgrown lawn filled with sheepmint and clover. Though it was
already twilight under the cedars, the lawn was still bright with
sunshine, and beyond the dwindling clump of cabbage roses in the centre,
he saw that the solitary cow had not yet finished her evening meal. As
he watched her, his ears caught the sound of light footsteps on the
porch below, and a moment afterward, he saw Emily pass from the avenue
to the edge of the lawn, where she called the cow by name in a caressing
voice. Lifting her head, the animal started at a slow walk through the
tangled weeds, stopping from time to time to bite a particularly
tempting head of purple clover. As the setting sun was in Emily's eyes,
she raised her bared arm while she waited, to shield her forehead, and
Ordway was struck afresh by the vigorous grace which showed itself in
her slightest movement. The blue cotton dress she wore, which had shrunk
from repeated washings until it had grown scant in the waist and skirt,
revealed the firm rounded curve of her bosom and her slender hips.
Standing there in the faint sunshine against the blue-black cedars, he
felt her charm in some mysterious way to be akin to the beauty of the
hour and the scene. The sight of her blue gown was associated in his
mind with a peculiar freshness of feeling--an intensified enjoyment of
life.
When the cow reached her side, the girl turned back toward the barnyard,
and the two passed out of sight together beyond the avenue. As he
followed them with his gaze, Ordway had no longer any thought of Gus
Wherry, or of his possible presence in Tappahannock upon the morrow.
The evil association was withdrawn now from his consciousness, and in
its place he found the tranquil pleasure which he had felt while he
watched the sunshine upon the sheepmint and clover--a pleasure not
unlike that he had experienced when Emily's blue cotton dress was
visible against the cedars. The faces of the men who had listened to him
yesterday returned to his memory; and as he saw them again seated on the
rude benches among the pines, his heart expanded in an emotion which was
like the melting of his will into the Divine Will which contained and
enveloped all.
A knock at the door startled him back to his surroundings, and when he
went to answer it, he found the small frightened servant standing
outside, with an old serving tray clutched desperately to her bosom.
From her excited stutter he gathered that supper awaited him upon the
table, and descending hastily, he found the family already assembled in
the dining-room. Beverly received him graciously, Emily quietly, and the
children assured him enthusiastically that they were glad he had come to
stay because now they might eat ham every night. When they had been
properly suppressed by Emily, her brother took up the conversation which
he carried on in a polite, rambling strain that produced upon Ordway the
effect of a monologue delivered in sleep.
"I hope the birds won't annoy you at daybreak, Mr. Smith," he remarked,
"the ivy at your windows harbours any number of wrens and sparrows."
"Oh, I like them," replied Ordway, "I've been sleeping under a tin roof
in Tappahannock which no intelligent bird or human being would
approach."
"I remember," said Mr. Beverly pensively, "that there was a tin roof on
the hotel at Richmond I stayed at during the War when I first met my
wife. Do you recall how very unpleasant that tin roof was, Amelia? Or
were you too young at the time to notice it? You couldn't have been more
than fifteen, I suppose? Yes, you must have been sixteen, because I
remember when I marched past the door with my regiment, I noticed you
standing on the balcony, in a long white dress, and you couldn't have
worn long dresses before you were sixteen."
Mrs. Brooke glanced up calmly from the coffee-pot.
"The roof was slate," she remarked with the rigid adherence to a single
idea, which characterised her devoted temperament.
"Ah, to be sure, it was slate," admitted Beverly, turning his genial
face upon Ordway, "and I remember now it wasn't the roof that was
unpleasant, but the food--the food was very unpleasant indeed, was it
not, Amelia?"
"I don't think we ever got enough of it to test its quality," replied
Mrs. Brooke, "poor mama was so reduced at the end of a month that she
had to take up three inches of her bodice."
"It's quite clear to me now," observed Beverly, delightedly, "it was not
that the food was unpleasant, but that it was scarce--very scarce."
He had finished his supper; and when he had risen from the table with
his last amiable words, he proceeded to install himself, without
apparent selection, into the only comfortable chair which the room
contained. Drawing out his pipe a moment afterward, he waved Ordway,
with a hospitable gesture, to a stiff wooden seat, and invited him in a
persuasive tone, to join him in a smoke.
"My tobacco is open to you," he observed, "but I regret to say that I am
unable to offer you a cigar. Yet a cigar, I maintain, is the only form
in which a gentleman should use tobacco."
Ordway took out the leather case he carried and offered it to him with a
smile.
"I'm afraid they are not all that they might be," he remarked, as
Beverly supplied himself with a murmured word of thanks.
Mrs. Brooke brought out her darning, and Emily, after disappearing into
the pantry, sent back the small servant for the dishes. The girl did not
return again before Ordway took his candle from the mantel-piece and
went upstairs; and he remembered after he had reached his bedroom that
she had spoken hardly two words during the entire evening. Had she any
objection, he asked himself now, to his presence in the household? Was
it possible, indeed, that Mrs. Brooke should have taken him in against
her sister-in-law's inclination, or even without her knowledge? In the
supposition there was not only embarrassment, but a sympathetic
resentment; and he resolved that if such proved to be the case, he was
in honour bound to return immediately to Tappahannock. Then he
remembered the stifling little room under the tin roof with a feeling of
thankfulness for at least this one night's escape.
Awaking at dawn he lay for a while contentedly listening to the flutter
of the sparrows in the ivy, and watching the paling arch of the sky
beyond the pointed tops of the cedars. A great peace seemed to encompass
him at the moment, and he thought with gratitude of the quiet evening he
had spent with Beverly. It was dull enough probably, when one came to
think of it, yet the simple talk, the measured courtesies, returned to
him now as a part of the pleasant homeliness of his surroundings. The
soft starlight on the sheepmint and clover, the chirp of the small
insects in the trees, the refreshing moisture which had crept toward him
with the rising dew, the good-night kisses of the children, delivered
under protest and beneath Mrs. Brooke's eyes--all these trivial
recollections were attended in his thoughts by a train of pensive and
soothing associations.
Across the hall he heard the soft opening and closing of a door, and
immediately afterward the sound of rapid footsteps growing fainter as
they descended the staircase. Already the room was full of a pale golden
light, and as he could not sleep again because of the broken shutter to
the window which gave on the lawn, he rose and dressed himself with an
eagerness which recalled the early morning risings of his childhood. A
little later when he went downstairs, he found that the front door was
still barred, and removing the heavy iron fastenings, he descended the
steps into the avenue, where the faint sunbeams had not yet penetrated
the thick screen of boughs. Remembering the garden, while he stood
watching the sunrise from the steps, he turned presently into the little
footpath which led by the house, and pushing aside the lilacs, from
which the blossoms had all dropped, he leaned on the swinging gate
before the beds he had spaded on those enchanted nights. Now the rank
weeds were almost strangling the plants, and it occurred to him that
there was still work ready for his hand in the Brooke's garden. He was
telling himself that he would begin clearing the smothered rows as soon
as his morning at the warehouse was over, when the old hound ran
suddenly up to him, and turning quickly he saw Emily coming from the
springhouse with a print of golden butter in her hand.
"So it was you I heard stirring before sunrise!" he exclaimed
impulsively, as his eyes rested on her radiant face, over which the
early mist had scattered a pearly dew like the fragrant moisture upon a
rose.
"Yes, it was I. At four o'clock I remembered there was no butter for
breakfast, so I got up and betook myself to the churn."
"And this is the result?" he asked, glancing down at the delicious
creamy mould she had just worked into shape and crowned with a printed
garland of thistles. "It makes me hungry enough for my muffins upon the
minute."
"You shall have them shortly," she said, smiling, "but do you prefer
pop-overs or plain?"
He met the question with serious consideration.
"Well, if the choice is mine I think I'll have pop-overs," he replied.
Before his unbroken gravity her quick humour rippled forth.
"Then I must run to Aunt Mehitable," she responded merrily, "for I
suspect that she has already made them plain."
With a laughing nod she turned from him, and following the little path
entered the house under the honeysuckle arbour on the back porch.
CHAPTER IV
SHOWS THAT A LAUGH DOES NOT HEAL A HEARTACHE
When Emily entered the dining-room, she found that Beverly had departed
from his usual custom sufficiently to appear in time for breakfast.
"I hardly got a wink of sleep last night, my dear," he remarked, "and I
think it was due entirely to the heavy supper you insisted upon giving
us."
"But, Beverly, we must have hot things now," said Emily, as she arranged
the crocheted centrepiece upon the table. "Mr. Smith is our boarder, you
know, not our guest."
"The fact that he is a boarder," commented Beverly, with dignity,
"entirely relieves me of any feeling of responsibility upon his account.
If he were an invited guest in the house, I should feel as you do that
hot suppers are a necessity, but when a man pays for the meals he eats,
we are no longer under an obligation to consider his preferences."
"His presence in the household is a great trial to us all," observed his
wife, whose attitude of general acceptance was modified by the fact that
she accepted everything for the worst. Her sense of tragic values had
been long since obliterated by a gray wash of melancholy that covered
all.
"Well, I don't see that he is very zealous about interfering with us,"
remarked Emily, almost indignantly, "he doesn't appear to be of a
particularly sociable disposition."
"Yes, I agree with you that he is unusually depressing," rejoined Mrs.
Brooke. "It's a pity, perhaps, that we couldn't have secured a blond
person--they are said to be of a more sanguine temperament, and I
remember that the blond boarder at Miss Jennie Colton's, when I called
there once, was exceedingly lively and entertaining. But it's too late,
of course, to give advice now; I can only hope and pray that his morals,
at least, are above reproach."
As the entire arrangement with Baxter had been made by Mrs. Brooke
herself upon the day that Wilson, the grocer, had sent in his bill for
the fifth time, Emily felt that an impatient rejoinder tripped lightly
upon her tongue; but restraining her words with an effort, she observed
cheerfully an instant later that she hoped Mr. Smith would cause no
inconvenience to the family.
"Well, he seems to be a respectable enough person," admitted Beverly, in
his gracious manner, "but, of course, if he were to become offensively
presuming it would be a very simple matter to drop him a hint."
"It reminds me of a case I read of in the newspaper a few weeks ago,"
said Mrs. Brooke, "where a family in Roanoke took a stranger to board
with them and shortly afterward were all poisoned by a powder in the
soup. No, they weren't all poisoned," she corrected herself
thoughtfully, "for I am positive now that the boarder was the only one
who died. It was the cook who put the poison into the soup and the
boarder who ate all of it. I remember the Coroner remarked at the
inquest that he had saved the lives of the entire family."
"All the same I hope Mr. Smith won't eat all the soup," observed Emily.
"It terrifies me at times," murmured Amelia, "to think of the awful
power that we place so carelessly in the hands of cooks."
"In that case, my dear, it might be quite a safeguard always to have a
boarder at the table," suggested Beverly, with his undaunted optimism.
"But surely, Amelia," laughed Emily, "you can't suppose that after she
has lived in the family for seventy years, Aunt Mehitable would yield at
last to a passing temptation to destroy us?"
"I imagine the poor boarder suspected nothing while he ate his soup,"
returned Mrs. Brooke. "No, I repeat that in cases like that no one is
safe, and the only sensible attitude is to be prepared for anything."
"Well, if I'm to be poisoned, I think I'd prefer to take it without
preparation," rejoined Emily. "There is Mr. Smith now in the hall, so we
may as well send Malviny to bring in breakfast."
When Ordway entered an instant later with his hearty greeting, even Mrs.
Brooke unbent a trifle from her rigid melancholy and joined affably in
the conversation. By a curious emotional paradox she was able to enjoy
him only as an affliction; and his presence in the house had served as
an excuse for a continuous parade of martyrdom. From the hour of his
arrival, she had been perfectly convinced not only that he interfered
with her customary peace of mind, but that he prevented her as surely
from receiving her supply of hot water upon rising and her ordinary
amount of food at dinner.
But as the days went by he fell so easily into his place in the family
circle that they forgot at last to remark either his presence or his
personal peculiarities. After dinner he would play his game of dominoes
with Beverly in the breezy hall, until the sunlight began to slant
across the cedars, when he would go out into the garden and weed the
overgrown rows. Emily had seen him but seldom alone during the first few
weeks of his stay, though she had found a peculiar pleasure in rendering
him the small domestic services of which he was quite unconscious. How
should he imagine that it was her hand that arranged the flowers upon
his bureau, that placed his favourite chair near the window, and that
smoothed the old-fashioned dimity coverlet upon his bed. Still less
would he have suspected that the elaborate rag carpet upon his floor was
one which she had contributed to his comfort from her own room. Had he
known these things he would probably have been melancholy enough to have
proved congenial company even to Mrs. Brooke, though, in reality, there
was, perhaps, nothing he could have offered Emily which would have
exceeded the pleasure she now found in these simple services. Ignorant
as she was in all worldly matters, in grasping this essential truth,
she had stumbled unawares upon the pure philosophy of love--whose
satisfaction lies, after all, not in possession, but in surrender.
She was still absorbed in the wonder of this discovery, when going out
into the garden one afternoon to gather tomatoes for a salad, she found
him working among the tall, green corn at the end of the long walk. As
he turned toward her in the late sunshine, which slanted across the
waving yellow tassels, she noticed that there was the same eager,
youthful look in his face that she had seen on the night when she had
come down to find him spading by the moonbeams.
In response to her smile he came out from among the corn, and went with
her down the narrow space which separated two overgrown hills of tomato
plants. He wore no coat and his striped cotton shirt was open at the
throat and wrists.
"It's delicious in the corn now," he said; "I can almost fancy that I
hear the light rustle along the leaves."
"You love the country so much that you ought to have been a farmer," she
returned, "then you might have raised tobacco."
"That reminds me that I worked yesterday in your brother's crop--but
it's too sticky for me. I like the garden better."
"Then you ought to have a garden of your own. Is all your chopping and
your digging merely for the promotion of the general good?"
"Isn't it better so?" he asked, smiling, "particularly when I share in
the results as I shall in this case? Who knows but that I shall eat this
wonderful tomato to-night at supper?"
She took it from his hand and placed it on the lettuce leaves in the
bottom of the basket upon her arm.
"You make a careful choice, I see," she observed, "it is a particularly
fine one."
"I suppose your philosophy would insist that after plucking it I should
demand the eating of it also?"
"I don't know about my philosophy--I haven't any--but my common sense
would."
"I'm not sure," he returned half seriously, "that I have much opinion of
common sense."
"But you would have," she commented gravely, "if you had happened to be
born with Beverly for a brother. I used to think that all men were
alike," she added, "but you don't remind me of Beverly in the very
least."
As she spoke she turned her face slightly toward him, and still leaning
over the luxuriant tomato row, looked up at him joyously with her
sparkling eyes. Her breath came quickly and he saw her bosom rise and
fall under the scant bodice of her blue cotton gown. Almost
unconsciously he had drifted into an association with her which
constituted for him the principal charm of his summer at Cedar Hill.
"On the other hand I've discovered many points of resemblance," he
retorted in his whimsical tone.
"Well, you're both easy to live in the house with, I admit that."
"And we're both perfectly amiable as long as everybody agrees with us
and nobody crosses us," he added.
"I shouldn't like to cross you," she said, laughing, "but then why
should I? Isn't it very pleasant as it is now?"
"Yes, it is very pleasant as it is now," he repeated slowly.
Turning away from her he stood looking in silence over the tall corn to
the amber light that fell beyond the clear outline of a distant hill.
The association was, as she had just said, very pleasant in his
thoughts, and the temptation he felt now was to drift on with the
summer, leaving events to shape themselves as they would in the future.
What harm, he demanded, could come of any relation so healthful, so
simple as this?
"I used to make dolls of ears of corn when I was little," said Emily,
laughing; "they were the only ones I had except those Beverly carved for
me out of hickory nuts. The one with yellow tassels I named Princess
Goldylocks until she began to turn brown and then I called her Princess
Fadeaway."
At her voice, which sounded as girlish in his imagination as the voice
of Alice when he had last heard it, he started and looked quickly back
from the sunset into her face.
"Has it ever occurred to you," he asked, "how little--how very little
you know of me? By you I mean all of you, especially your brother and
Mrs. Brooke."
Her glowing face questioned him for a moment.
"But what is knowledge," she demanded, "if it isn't just feeling, after
all?"
"I wonder why under heaven you took me in?" he went on, leaving her
words unanswered.
Had Mrs. Brooke stood in Emily's place, she would probably have replied
quite effectively, "because the grocer's bill had come for the fifth
time"; but the girl had learned to wear her sincerity in a less
conspicuous fashion, so she responded to his question merely by a polite
evasion.
"We have certainly had no cause to regret it," was what she said.
"What I wanted to say to you in the beginning and couldn't, was just
this," he resumed, choosing his words with a deliberation which sounded
strained and unnatural, "I suppose it can't make any difference to
you--it doesn't really concern you, of course--that's what I felt--but,"
he hesitated an instant and then went on more rapidly, "my daughter's
birthday is to-day. She is fifteen years old and it is seven years since
I saw her."
"Seven years?" repeated Emily, as she bent over and carefully selected a
ripe tomato.
"Doubtless I shouldn't know her if I were to pass her in the street," he
pursued, after a minute. "But it's worse than that and it's harder--for
it's as many years since I saw my wife."
She had not lifted her head from the basket, and he felt suddenly that
her stillness was not the stillness of flesh, but of marble.
"Perhaps I ought to have told you all this before," he went on again,
"perhaps it wasn't fair to let you take me in in ignorance of this and
of much else?"
Raising her head, she stood looking into his face with her kind, brown
eyes.
"But how could these things possibly affect us?" she asked, smiling
slightly.
"No," he replied slowly, "they didn't affect you, of course--they don't
now. It made no difference to any of you, I thought. How could it make
any?"
"No, it makes no difference to any of us," she repeated quietly.
"Then, perhaps, I've been wrong in telling you this to-day?"
She shook her head. "Not in telling me, but," she drew a long breath,
"it might be as well not to speak of it to Beverly or Amelia--at least
for a while."
"You mean they would regret their kindness?"
"It would make them uncomfortable--they are very old-fashioned in their
views. I don't know just how to put it, but it seems to them--oh, a
terrible thing for a husband and wife to live apart."
"Well, I shan't speak of it, of course--but would it not be better for
me to return immediately to Tappahannock?"
For an instant she hesitated. "It would be very dreadful at Mrs.
Twine's."
"I know it," he answered, "but I'm ready to go back, this minute if you
should prefer it."
"But I shouldn't," she rejoined in her energetic manner. "Why should I,
indeed? It is much wiser for you to stay here until the end of the
summer."
When she had finished he looked at her a moment without replying. The
light had grown very faint and through the thin mist that floated up
from the fields her features appeared drawn and pallid.
"What I can't make you understand is that even though it is all my
fault--every bit my fault from the beginning--yet I have never really
wanted to do evil in my heart. Though I've done wrong, I've always
wanted to do right."
If she heard his words they made little impression upon her, for going
out into the walk, she started, without speaking, in the direction of
the house. Then, when she had moved a few steps from him, she stopped
and looked back as if she had forgotten something that had been in her
thoughts.
"I meant to tell you that I hope--I pray it will come right again," she
said.
"I thank you," he answered, and drew back into the corn so that she
might go on alone.
A moment later as Emily walked rapidly down the garden path, it seemed
to her that the distance between the gate and the house covered an
immeasurable space. Her one hope was that she might go to her room for
at least the single hour before supper, and that there, behind a locked
door with her head buried in the pillows, she might shed the hot tears
which she felt pressing against her eyelids.
Entering the hall, she had started swiftly up the staircase, with the
basket of tomatoes still on her arm, when Mrs. Brooke intercepted her by
descending like a phantom from the darkened bend.
"O Emily, I've been looking for you for twenty minutes," she cried in
despairing tones. "The biscuits refused to rise and Aunt Mehitable is in
a temper. Will you run straight out to the kitchen and beat up a few
quick muffins for supper."
Drawing back into the corner of the staircase, Emily glanced down upon
the tomatoes lying in the bottom of the basket; then without raising her
eyes she spoke in a voice which might have uttered appropriately a
lament upon the universal tragedy of her sex.
"I suppose I may as well make them plain?" she said.
CHAPTER V
TREATS OF A GREAT PASSION IN A SIMPLE SOUL
FOR several weeks in August Ordway did not go into Tappahannock, and
during his vacation from the warehouse he made himself useful in a
number of small ways upon the farm. The lawn was trimmed, the broken
fences mended, the garden kept clear of wiregrass, and even Mrs.
Brooke's "rockery" of portulaca, with which she had decorated a
mouldering stump, received a sufficient share of his attention to cause
the withered plants to grow green again and blossom in profusion. When
the long, hot days had drawn to a close, he would go out with a
watering-pot and sprinkle the beds of petunias and geraniums which Emily
had planted in the bare spots beside the steps.
"The truth is I was made for this sort of thing, you know," he remarked
to her one day. "If it went on forever I should never get bored or
tired."
Something candid and boyish in his tone caused her to look up at him
quickly with a wondering glance. Since the confession of his marriage
her manner to him had changed but little, yet she was aware, with a
strange irritation against herself, that she never heard his voice or
met his eyes without remembering instantly that he had a wife whom he
had not seen for seven years. The mystery of the estrangement was as
great to her as it had ever been, for since that afternoon in the garden
he had not referred again to the subject; and judging the marriage
relation by the social code of Beverly and Amelia, she had surmised that
some tremendous tragedy had been the prelude to a separation of so many
years. As he lifted the watering-pot he had turned a little away from
her, and while her eyes rested upon his thick dark hair, powdered
heavily with gray above the temples, and upon the strong, sunburnt
features of his profile, she asked herself in perplexity where that
other woman was and if it were possible that she had forsaken him? "I
wonder what she is like and if she is pretty or plain?" she thought. "I
almost hope she isn't pretty, and yet it's horrid of me and I wonder why
I hope so? What can it matter since he hasn't seen her for seven years,
and if he ever sees her again, she will probably be no longer young. I
suppose he isn't young, and yet I've never thought so before and somehow
it doesn't seem to matter. No, I'm sure his wife is beautiful," she
reflected a moment later, as a punishment for her uncharitable
beginning, "and she has fair hair, I hope, and a lovely white skin and
hands that are always soft and delicate. Yes, that is how it is and I am
very glad," she concluded resolutely. And it seemed to her that she
could see distinctly this woman whom she had imagined and brought to
life.
"I can't help believing that you would tire of it in time," she said
presently aloud.
"Do you tire of it?" he asked in a softened voice, turning his gaze upon
her.
"I?" she laughed, with a bitterness he had never heard in her tone
before, "oh, yes, but I suppose that doesn't count in the long run. Did
there ever live a woman who hasn't felt at times like railing against
the milk pans and denying the eternal necessity of ham and eggs?"
Though she spoke quite seriously the simplicity of her generalisation
brought a humorous light to his eyes; and in his imagination he saw
Lydia standing upon the white bearskin rug against the oval mirror and
the gold-topped bottles upon her dressing-table.
"Well, if I'd made as shining a success at my job as you have at yours,
I think I'd be content," was all he said.
She laughed merrily, and he saw that the natural sweetness of her temper
was proof against idle imaginings or vain desires.
"You think then that it is better to do a small thing well than a big
thing badly?" she inquired.
"But it isn't a small thing," he protested, "it's a great big
thing--it's the very biggest thing of all."
A provoking smile quivered on her lips, and he saw the dimple come and
go in her cheek.
"I am glad at least that you like my ham and eggs," she retorted
mockingly.
"I do," he answered gravely, "I like your ham and eggs, but I admire
your courage, also."
She shook her head. "It's the cheapest of the virtues."
"Not your kind, my dear child--it's the rarest and the costliest of
achievements."
"Oh, I don't know how serious you are," she answered lightly, "but it's
a little like putting a man on a desert island and saying, 'make your
bed or lie on the rocks.' He's pretty apt to make his bed, isn't he?"
"Not in the least. He usually puts up a flag of distress and then sits
down in the sand and looks out for a ship."
Her voice lost its merriment. "When my ship shows on the horizon, it
will be time enough to hoist my flag."
A reply was on his lips, but before he could utter it, she had turned
away and was moving rapidly across the lawn to the house.
The next morning Ordway went into Tappahannock, not so much on account
of the little business he found awaiting him at the warehouse, as urged
by the necessity of supplying Beverly with cigars. To furnish Beverly
three times a day with the kind of cigar he considered it "worth while
for a gentleman to smoke"--even though his choice fell, in Ordway's
opinion, upon a quite inferior brand--had become in the end a courtesy
too extravagant for him to contemplate with serenity. Yet he knew that
almost in spite of himself this tribute to Beverly was now an
established fact, and that as long as he remained at Cedar Hill he would
continue to supply with eagerness the smoke which Beverly would accept
with affability.
The town was dull enough at mid August, he remembered from the blighting
experience of last summer; and now, after a fierce drought which had
swept the country, he saw the big, fan-shaped leaves on Mrs. Twine's
evening glory hanging like dusty rags along the tin roof of the porch.
Banks was away, Baxter was away, and the only acquaintance he greeted
was Bill Twine, sitting half drunk, in his shirt sleeves and collarless,
on the front steps. There was positive relief when, at the end of an
hour, he retraced his steps, with Beverly's cigars under his right arm.
After this the summer declined slowly into autumn, and Ordway began to
count the long golden afternoons as they dropped one by one into his
memory of Cedar Hill. An appeal to Mrs. Brooke, whom he had quite won
over by his attentions to Beverly and the children, delayed his moving
back into Tappahannock until the beginning of November, and he told
himself with satisfaction that it would be possible to awake on frosty
October mornings and look out upon the red and gold of the landscape.
Late in September Banks returned from his vacation, and during his first
visit to Cedar Hill, he showed himself painfully nervous and ill at
ease. But coming out for a walk with Ordway one afternoon, he suggested
at the end of their first mile that they should sit down and have a
smoke beneath a young cherry tree upon the roadside. As he lit his pipe
he held the match in his hand until it burned his fingers; then throwing
it into the grass, he turned upon his companion as eloquently
despairing a look as it is in the power of a set of naturally cheerful
features to assume.
"Smith," he asked in a hollow voice, "do you suppose it's really any
worse to die by your own hand than by disease?"
"By Jove!" exclaimed Ordway, and the moment afterward, "Come, now, out
with it, Banks. How has she been behaving this time?"
Banks lowered his voice, while he glanced suspiciously up at the
branches of the cherry tree beneath which they sat.
"She hates the sight of me," he answered, with a groan.
"Nonsense," rejoined Ordway, cheerfully. "Love has before now worn the
mask of scorn."
"But it hasn't worn the mask of boredom," retorted the despairing Banks.
For a minute his answer appeared final even to Ordway, who stared
blankly over the ripened cornfield across the road, without, for the
life of him, being able to frame a single encouraging sentence in reply.
"If it's the last word I speak," pursued Banks, biting desperately at
the stem of his pipe, "she cannot abide the sight of me."
"But how does she show it?" demanded Ordway, relieved that he was not
expected to combat the former irrefutable statement.
"She tried to keep me away from the springs where she went, and when I
would follow her, whether or no, she hardly opened her mouth to me for
the first two days. Then if I asked her to go to walk she would say it
was too hot for walking, and if I asked her to drive she'd answer that
she didn't drive with men. As if she and I hadn't been together in a
dog-cart over every road within twenty miles of Tappahannock!"
"But perhaps the custom of the place was different?"
"No, sir, it was not custom that kept her," replied Banks, in a
bitterness that scorned deception, "for she went with others. It was the
same thing about dancing, too, for if I asked her to dance, she would
always declare that she didn't have the strength to use her fan, and the
minute after I went away, I'd see her floating round the ball-room in
somebody else's arms. Once I did get her to start, but she left off
after the first round, because, she said, we could not keep in step. And
yet I'd kept in step with her ever since we went on roller skates
together."
He broke off for an instant, knocked the cold ashes out of his pipe, and
plucking a long blade of grass, began chewing it nervously as he talked.
"And yet if you could only have seen her when she came down to the
ball-room in her white organdie and blue ribbons," he exclaimed
presently, in an agony of recollection.
"Well, I'm rather glad on the whole that I didn't," rejoined Ordway.
"You'd have fallen in love with her if you had--you couldn't have helped
it."
"Then, thank heaven, I escaped the test. It's a pretty enough pickle as
it is now."
"I could have stood it all," said Banks, "if it hadn't been for the
other man. She might have pulled every single strand of my hair out if
she'd wanted to, and I'd have grit my teeth and pretended that I liked
it. I didn't care how badly she treated me. What hurt me was how well
she treated the other man."
"Did she meet him for the first time last summer?" asked Ordway.
"Oh no, she's known him ever since she went North in the spring--but
it's worse now than it's ever been and, upon my word, she doesn't seem
to have eyes or ears for anybody else."
"So you're positive she means to marry him?"
"She swears she doesn't--that it's only fun, you know. But in my heart I
believe it is as good as settled between them."
"Well, if she's made up her mind to it, I don't, for the life of me, see
how you're going to stop her," returned Ordway, smiling.
"But a year ago she'd made up her mind to marry me," groaned Banks.
"If she's as variable as that, my dear boy, perhaps the wind will blow
her heart back to you again."
"I don't believe she's got one," rejoined Banks, with the merciless
dissection of the pure passion; "I sometimes think that she hasn't any
more heart than--than--I don't know what."
"In that case I'd drag myself together and let her alone. I'd go back
to my work and resolve never to give her another thought."
"Then," replied Banks, "you might have all the good sense that there is
in the business, but you wouldn't be in love. Now I love her for what
she is, and I don't want her changed even if it would make her kinder.
When she used to be sweet I thought sweetness the most fascinating thing
on earth, and now that she bangs me, I've come to think that banging
is."
"I begin to understand," remarked Ordway, laughing, "why you are not
what might be called a successful lover."
"It isn't because I don't know the way," returned Banks gloomily, "it's
because I can't practice it even after I've planned it out. Don't I lie
awake at night making up all sorts of speeches I'm going to say to her
in the morning? Oh, I can be indifferent enough when I'm dressing before
the mirror--I've even put on a purple cravat because she hated it, but
I've always taken it off again before I went downstairs to breakfast.
Then as soon as I lay my eyes upon her, I feel my heart begin to swell
as if it would burst out of my waistcoat, and instead of the flippant
speeches I've planned, I crawl and whimper just as I did the day
before."
They were seated under a cherry tree by the side of the road which led
to Tappahannock, and as Banks finished his confessions, a large, dust
covered buggy was seen approaching them from the direction of the town.
As Ordway recognised Baxter through the cloud of dust raised by the
wheels, he waved his hat with a shout of welcome, and a minute later the
buggy reached them and drew up in the patch of briars upon the roadside.
"I was just on my way to see you, Smith," said Baxter, as he let fall
the reins and held out his great dirty hand, "but I'm too heavy to get
out, and if I once sat down on the ground, I reckon it would take more
than the whole of Tappahannock to pull me up again."
"Well, go ahead to Cedar Hill," suggested Ordway, "and we'll follow you
at a brisk walk."
"No, I won't do that. I can say what I have got to say right here over
the wheel, if you'll stand awhile in the dust. Major Leary was in to see
me again this morning, and the notion he's got in his head now is that
you're the man to run for Mayor of Tappahannock."
"I!" exclaimed Ordway, drawing back slightly as he spoke. "He forgets
that I'm out of the question. I refuse, of course."
"Well, you see, he says you're the only man we've got strong enough to
defeat Jasper Trend--and he's as sure as shot that you'd have something
like a clean walk-over. He's already drawn up a big red flag with 'The
People's Candidate: Ten Commandment Smith,' upon it. I asked him why he
wouldn't put just plain 'Daniel,' but he said that little Biblical smack
alone was worth as much as a bushel of votes to you. If you drew the
line at 'Ten Commandment' he's going to substitute
'Daniel-in-the-Lions'-Den Smith' or something of that kind."
"Tell him to stop it," broke in Ordway, with a smothered anger in his
usually quiet voice, "he's said nothing to me about it, and I decline it
absolutely and without consideration!"
"You mean you won't run?" inquired Baxter, in astonishment.
"I mean I won't run--I can't run--put it any way you please."
"I thought you'd put your whole heart and soul into defeating Trend."
"I have, but not that way--where's Trenton whom we've been talking of
all summer?"
"He's out of it--consumption, the doctor says--anyway he's going South."
"Then there's but one other man," said Ordway, decisively, "and that's
Baxter."
"Me?" said Baxter softly, "you mean me, do you say?" His chuckle shook
the buggy until it creaked upon its rusty wheels. "I can't," he added,
with a burst of humour, "to tell the truth, I'm afraid."
"Afraid?" repeated Ordway, "you're afraid of Jasper Trend?"
"No," said Baxter, "it ain't Jasper--it's my wife."
He winked slowly as he caught Ordway's eyes, and then picking up the
reins, made a movement as if to turn back to Tappahannock. "So you're
dead sure then that you can't be talked over?" he asked.
"As sure as you are," returned Ordway promptly; then as the buggy
started back in the direction from which it had come, he went over to
Banks, who had risen to his feet and was leaning heavily against the
cherry tree, with the long blade of grass still between his teeth.
"What do you think of their wanting to make me Mayor, Banks?" he
inquired, with a laugh.
Banks started from his gloomy reverie. "Mayor!" he exclaimed almost with
animation. "Why, they've shown jolly good sense, that's what I think!"
"Well, you needn't begin to get excited," responded Ordway, "for I
didn't accept, and you won't have to quarrel either with me or with
Jasper Trend."
"There's one thing you may be sure of," said Banks with energy, "and
that is that I'd quarrel with Jasper every time."
"In spite of Milly?" laughed Ordway.
"In spite of Milly," repeated Banks in an awed but determined voice;
"she may manage my hair and my cravats and my life to come, but I'll be
darned if she's going to manage my vote!"
"All the same I'm glad you can honestly stick to Jasper," said Ordway,
"he counts on you now, doesn't he?"
"Oh, I suppose so," returned Banks, without enthusiasm; "at any rate, I
think he'd rather she'd marry me than Brown."
There was a moment's silence in which the name brought no association
into Ordway's consciousness. Then in a single flashing instant the truth
leaped upon him, and the cornfields across the road surged up to meet
his eyes like the waves of a high sea.
"Than whom?" he demanded in so loud a tone that Banks fell back a step
and looked at him with blinking eyelids.
"Than marry whom?" asked Ordway for the second time, dropping his voice
almost to a whisper before the blank surprise in the other's face.
"Oh, his name's Brown--Horatio Brown--I thought I'd told you," answered
Banks, and he added a moment later, "you've met him, I believe."
"Yes," said Ordway, with an effort, "he's the handsome chap who came
here last June, isn't he?"
"Oh, he's handsome enough," admitted Banks, and he groaned out
presently. "You liked him, didn't you?"
Ordway smiled slightly as he met the desperation in the other's look.
"I like him," he answered quietly, "as much as I like a toad."
CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH BAXTER PLOTS
When Baxter reached the warehouse the following morning, he found Major
Leary pacing restlessly back and forth under the brick archway, with the
regular military step at which, during the four years' war, he had
marched into battle.
"Come in, sir, come in and sit down," said Baxter, leading the way into
his office, and sweeping a pile of newspapers from an armchair with a
hospitable gesture.
"Have you seen Smith? and is he all right?" were the Major's first
words, as he placed his hat upon the table and took a quick, impatient
turn about the room before throwing himself into the chair which the
other had emptied. He was a short, erect, nervous man, with a fiery
face, a pair of small gray eyes, like steel points, and a long white
moustache, discoloured where it overhung his mouth by the faint yellow
stain of tobacco.
"Oh, I've see him," answered Baxter in a soothing voice, "but he won't
run--there's no use talking. He's dead set against it."
"Won't run?" cried the Major, furiously. "Nonsense, sir, he must run.
There's no help for it. Did you tell him that we'd decided that he
should run?"
"I told him," returned Baxter, "but, somehow, it didn't look as if he
were impressed. He was so positive that he would not even let me put in
a word more on the subject. 'Are you dead sure, Smith?' I said, and he
answered, 'I'm as dead sure as you are yourself, Baxter.'"
The Major crossed his knees angrily, stretched himself back in his
chair, and began pulling nervously at the ends of his moustache.
"Well, I'll have to see him myself," he said authoritatively.
"You may see him as much as you please," replied Baxter, with a soft,
offended dignity, "but I'll be mightily surprised, sir, if you get him
to change his mind."
"Well, I reckon you're right, Bob," admitted the other, after a moment's
reflection, "what he won't do for you, it isn't likely that he'll do for
the rest of Tappahannock--but the fact remains that somebody has got to
step up and defeat Jasper Trend. Now I ask you pointblank--where'll you
get your man?"
"The Lord knows!" sighed Baxter, and he sucked hard at the stem of his
pipe.
"Then I tell you if you can't make Smith come out, it's your duty as an
honest citizen to run yourself."
Baxter relapsed into a depressed silence, in the midst of which his
thoughts were invaded not so much by the political necessity of the
occasion as by the small, but dominant figure of his wife. The big man,
who had feared neither shot nor bayonet, trembled in spirit as he
imagined the outraged authority that could express itself in a person
that measured hardly a fraction more than five feet from her shoes to
the curling gray fringe above her forehead. He remembered that once in
the early days of his marriage, he had allowed himself to be seduced by
the promise of political honours, and that for a whole miserable month
he had gone without griddle cakes and syrup for his breakfast. "No--no,
I could never tell Marthy," he thought, desperately, still seeing in
imagination the pretty, indignant face of Mrs. Baxter.
"It's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself," repeated the
Major, rapping the arm of his chair to enforce his words.
"I can't," rejoined Baxter, hopelessly, "I can't sir," and he added an
instant afterward, "you see women have got the idea somehow, that
politics ain't exactly moral."
"Women!" said the Major, in the dry, contemptuous tone in which he might
have uttered the word, "Pshaw!"
"I don't mean just 'women,'" replied Baxter, "I mean my wife."
"Oh!" said the Major, "you mean your wife would be opposed to the whole
thing?"
"She wouldn't hear of it, sir, she simply wouldn't hear a word of it."
For a long pause the Major made no answer; then rising from his chair he
began pacing with his military stride up and down the floor of the
little room. At the end of five minutes he turned upon Baxter with an
exclamation of triumph, and threw himself again into the armchair beside
the desk.
"I have it, Bob!" he said, slapping his knee until the dust flew out of
his striped trousers, "I knew I'd get it in the end and here it is. The
very thing, on my word, sir, I've discovered the very thing."
"Then I'm out of it," said Baxter, "an' I'm mighty glad of that."
"Oh, no, you aren't out of it--not just yet," said the Major, "we're to
start you in, Bob, you're to start in as a candidate; and then a week
before the nomination, something will crop up to make you fall out of
the race, and you'll turn over all your votes to Smith. It would be too
late, then, for him to back out--he'd simply have to keep in to save the
day."
In spite of the roar of delight with which the Major ended his speech,
Baxter sat unconvinced and unmoved, shaking his great head in a
voiceless protest against the plot.
"It's the only way, I tell you," urged the Major, half pleased, half
angry. "After Smith you're by long odds the most popular man in
Tappahannock, and if it isn't one of you, it's Jasper Trend and his
everlasting barrooms."
"But suppose Smith still declines," said Baxter remembering his wife.
"Oh, he won't--he isn't a blamed fool," returned the Major, "and if he
does," he added impressively, "if he does I swear to you I'll go into
the race myself."
He held out his hand and Baxter grasped it in token of good faith.
"Then I'll do it," said the big man, "provided--" he hesitated, cleared
his throat, and went on bravely, "provided there's no objection to my
telling my wife the scheme"--bending his ear an instant, he drew back
with an embarrassed and guilty face, "that's Smith's step in the
warehouse. He'll be in here in less than two minutes."
The Major took up his hat, and flung back the door with a hurried
movement.
"Well, good-bye, I'll see Smith later about the plans," he returned,
"and meanwhile, we'll go hard to work to whip our friend Jasper."
Meeting Ordway an instant later upon the threshold, he passed him with a
flourish of his hat, and marched rapidly under the brick archway out
into the street.
As his bookkeeper entered Baxter appeared to be absorbed in a newspaper
which he had picked up hastily from the pile upon the floor.
"Good-morning," said Ordway, a little surprised; "it looks as if I'd put
the fiery Major to flight."
"Smith," said Baxter, dropping his paper, and lifting his big, simple
face to the younger man, "Smith, you've got me into a hole, and I want
you to pull me out again."
"A hole?" repeated Ordway; then as light broke on him, he laughed aloud
and held out his hand. "Oh, I see, he's going to make you Mayor of
Tappahannock!"
With a groan Baxter prodded fresh tobacco into his pipe, and applying a
match, sat for several minutes brooding in silence amid the cloud of
smoke.
"He says it's got to be either you or me," he pursued presently, without
noticing Ordway's ejaculation, "and on my word, Smith, seeing I've got a
wife who's all against it, I think it would be but fair to me to let me
off. You're my friend now, ain't you? Well, I'm asking you, Smith, as
friend to friend."
A flush passed slowly over Ordway's face, and the unusual colour lent a
peculiar animation to his glance. As Baxter met his eyes, he was
conscious that they pierced through him, bright blue, sparkling, as
incisive as a blade.
"To tell the truth, the thing is all but impossible," said Ordway, after
a long pause. "You don't know, I suppose, that I've never even touched
politics in Tappahannock."
"That ain't the point, Smith--it's going on three years since you came
here--am I right?"
"Yes--three years next March, and it seems a century."
"Well, anyway, you've as good a right as I to be Mayor, and a long sight
better one than Jasper Trend has. Come, now, Smith, if you don't get me
out of this hole I'm in, heaven knows how I 'm going to face the Major."
"Give me time," said Ordway, quickly, "give me time--a week from
to-morrow I am to make my first speech in the town hall. May I have till
then?"
"Till Thursday week? Oh, I say, Smith, you've got to give in in the
end--and a week sooner or later, what's the difference?"
Without replying, Ordway walked slowly to the window and stood looking
out upon the steep street that crawled up from the railroad track, where
an engine whistled. He had held out till now, but with Baxter's last
words he had heard in his thoughts a question larger and older than any
of which his employer had dreamed. "Why not?" he asked himself again as
he looked out upon the sunshine. "Why should not Daniel Smith, for a
good purpose, resume the rights which Daniel Ordway has forfeited?" And
it appeared to him while he stood there that his decision involved not
himself alone, and that the outcome had ceased to be merely an election
to the highest office in Tappahannock. Infinitely deep and wide, the
problem belonged not only to his individual life, but to the lives of
all those who had sinned and paid the penalty of sin and asked of
humanity the right and the freedom to begin anew. The impulsive daring
which he had almost lived down stirred for an instant in his pulses, and
turning quickly he looked at Baxter with a boyish laugh.
"If I go in, Baxter, I go in to win!" he cried.
At the moment it had seemed to him that he was obliging rather than
ambitious in the choice that he had made; but several days later, when
he came out of the warehouse to find the Major's red flag flying in the
street, he felt the thrill of his youthful enthusiasm quicken in his
blood. There was a strangely martial air about the red flag in the
sunshine, and the response in his pulses was not unlike the ardour of
battle.
"After all the world is no smaller here than it is in New York," he
thought, "only the littleness of the one is different from the
littleness of the other. In either place success would have meant
nothing in itself, but in Tappahannock I can be more than successful, I
can be useful." With the words it seemed to him that his heart dissolved
in happiness, and as he looked now on the people who passed him in the
street--on the old Negro midwife waddling down the board walk; on the
Italian who kept a fruit stand at the corner; on the pretty girl
flirting in the door of the harness shop; and on the rough-coated,
soft-eyed country horses--he felt that one and all of these must
recognise and respond to the goodwill that had overflowed his thoughts.
So detached from personal bitterness, indeed, was even his fight against
Jasper Trend that he went out of his way at the top of the hill to pick
up a small whip which the Mayor had dropped from horseback as he rode
by. The scowling thanks with which Jasper received the courtesy puzzled
him for a moment until he remembered that by the man in the harness shop
they were regarded probably as enemies. At the recollection he stopped
short in his walk and laughed aloud--no, he was not interested in
fighting anything so small, so insignificant as Jasper Trend. It was the
injustice, the social disease he combated and not the man. "I wonder if
he really hates me?" he thought, for it seemed to him absurd and
meaningless that one man should waste his strength in hating another.
"If he'd been five years in prison he would have learned how foolish it
all is," he added; and an instant afterward he asked himself almost with
terror if his punishment had been, in reality, the greatest good that
had come to him in life? Without that terrible atonement would he have
gone on like Jasper Trend from fraud to fraud, from selfishness to
damnation?
Looking round him in the perfect October weather, he felt that the
emotion in his heart swelled suddenly to rapture. Straight ahead the
sunshine sifted in drops through the red and yellow trees that bordered
the roadside, while in the field on his right the brown cornricks
crowded in even rows to where the arch of the hill was outlined against
the deep blue sky. Here was not only peace, but happiness, and his old
life, as he glanced back upon it, appeared hollow, futile, a corpse
without breath or animation. That was the mere outward form and body of
existence; but standing here in the deserted road, with his eyes on the
brilliant October fields, he could tell himself that he had come at last
into the ways and the understanding of faith. As he had once walked by
sight alone and stumbled, so he moved now blindly like a child that is
led step by step through the dark.
From the road behind him a happy laugh struck on his ears, and turning
quickly he saw that a dog-cart was rolling rapidly from Tappahannock. As
he stepped back upon the roadside to avoid the dust raised by the
wheels, he lifted his eyes to the face of Milly Trend, who sat, flushed
and smiling, under a pink sunshade. She bowed joyfully; and it was not
until a moment afterward, when the cart had gone by, that Ordway
realised, almost with the force of a blow struck unawares, that he had
acknowledged the obsequious greeting of Gus Wherry.
After the pink sunshade had vanished, Milly's laugh was still blown back
to him on the rising wind. With the happy sound of it in his ears, he
watched the dust settle again in the road, the tall golden poplars close
like a screen after the passing wheels, and the distance resume its
aspect of radiant loneliness. Nothing was changed at which he looked,
yet he was conscious that the rapture had passed from his thoughts and
the beauty from the October landscape. The release that he had won
appeared to him as an illusion and a cheat, and lifting his face to the
sunshine, he watched, like a prisoner, the flight of the swallows across
the sky.
At dinner Beverly noticed his abstraction, and recommended a mint julep,
which Emily went out immediately to prepare.
"The blood is easily chilled at this season," he said, "and care should
be taken to keep it warm by means of a gentle stimulant. I am not a
great drinker, sir, as you may have remarked, but in cases either of
sickness or sorrow, I have observed that few things are more efficacious
than a thimbleful of whiskey taken at the proper time. When I had the
misfortune to break to my uncle Colonel Algernon Brooke the distressing
news of the death of his wife by drowning, I remember that, though he
was one of the most abstemious men alive, his first articulate words
were: 'bring the whiskey jug.'"
Even with the cheering assistance of the mint julep, however, it was
impossible for Ordway to eat his dinner; and making an excuse presently,
he rose from the table and went out into the avenue, where he walked
slowly up and down in the shadow of the cedars. At the end of his last
restless turn, he went indoors for his hat, and coming out again started
rapidly toward Tappahannock. With his first decisive step he felt that
the larger share of his burden had fallen from him.
* * * * *
The Tappahannock Hotel was a low, whitewashed frame building, withdrawn
slightly from the street, where several dejected looking horses, with
saddle-bags attached to them, were usually fastened to the iron rings in
the hitching-rail upon the sidewalk. The place was the resort chiefly of
commercial travellers or of neighbouring farmers, who drove in with
wagon loads of garden produce or of sun-cured tobacco; and the number of
loungers reclining on the newly painted green benches upon the porch
made Ordway aware that the fall trade was already beginning to show
signs of life.
In answer to his questions, the proprietor an unctuous person, whose
mouth was distorted by a professional habit of welcome--informed him
that a gentleman by the name of Brown had registered there the evening
before, and that he was, to the best of his belief, upstairs in number
eighteen at the present moment.
"To tell the truth I can't quite size him up," he concluded
confidentially. "He don't seem to hev' come either to sell or to buy an'
thar's precious little else that ever brings a body to Tappahannock."
"Please add that I wish particularly to see him in private," said
Ordway.
Without turning his head the proprietor beckoned, by a movement of his
thumb delivered backward over his left shoulder, to a Negro boy, who sat
surreptitiously eating peanuts out of a paper bag in his pocket.
"Tell the gentleman in number eighteen, Sol, that Mr. Smith, the
people's candidate for Mayor, would like to have a little talk with him
in private. I'm mighty glad to see you out in the race, suh," he added,
turning again to Ordway, as the Negro disappeared up the staircase.
"Thank you," replied Ordway, with a start, which brought him back from
his approaching interview with Gus Wherry to the recollection that he
was fighting to become the Mayor of Tappahannock.
"Thar's obleeged to be a scrummage, I reckon," resumed the loquacious
little man, when he had received Ordway's acknowledgments--"but I s'pose
thar ain't any doubt as to who'll come off with the scalps in the end."
His manner changed abruptly, and he looked round with a lurking
curiosity in his watery eyes. "You knew Mr. Brown, didn't you say,
suh?--before you came here?"
Ordway glanced up quickly.
"Did you tell me he got here yesterday?" he asked.
"Last night on the eight-forty-five, which came in two hours after
time."
"An accident on the road, wasn't it?"
"Wreck of a freight--now, Mr. Brown, as I was saying----"
At this instant, to Ordway's relief, the messenger landed with a bound
on the floor of the hall, and picking himself up, announced with a
cheerful grin, that "the gentleman would be powerful pleased to see Mr.
Smith upstairs in his room."
Nodding to the proprietor, Ordway followed the Negro up to the first
landing, and knocked at a half open door at the end of the long, dark
hall.
CHAPTER VII
SHOWS THAT POLITENESS, LIKE CHARITY, IS AN ELASTIC MANTLE
When Ordway entered the room, he turned and closed the door carefully
behind him, before he advanced to where Wherry stood awaiting him with
outstretched hand.
"I can't begin to tell you how I appreciate the honour, Mr. Smith. I
didn't expect it--upon my word, I didn't," exclaimed Wherry, with the
effusive amiability which made Ordway bite his lip in anger.
"I don't know that I mean it for an honour, but I hope we can get
straight to business," returned Ordway shortly.
"Ah, then there's business?" repeated the other, as if in surprise. "I
had hoped that you were paying me merely a friendly call. To tell the
truth I've the very worst head in the world for business, you know, and
I always manage to dodge it whenever I get half a chance."
"Well, you can't dodge it this time, so we may as well have it out."
"Then since you insist upon that awful word 'business,' I suppose you
mean that you've come formally to ratify the treaty?" asked Wherry,
smiling.
"The treaty? I made no treaty," returned Ordway gravely.
Laughing pleasantly, Wherry invited his visitor to be seated. Then
turning away for an instant, he flung himself into a chair beside a
little marble topped table upon which stood a half-emptied bottle of rye
whiskey and a pitcher of iced water on a metal tray.