beastly road?" he demanded, "and the prodigal? Surely you haven't
forgotten the prodigal? Why, I never heard anything in my life that
impressed me more."
"You told me then distinctly that you had no intention of remaining in
Tappahannock."
"I'll tell you so again if you'd like to hear it. Will you have a
drink?"
Ordway shook his head with an angry gesture.
"What I want to know," he insisted bluntly, "is why you are here at
all?"
Wherry poured out a drink of whiskey, and adding a dash of iced water,
tossed it down at a swallow.
"I thought I told you then," he answered, "that I have a little private
business in the town. As it's purely personal I hope you'll have no
objection to my transacting it."
"You said that afternoon that your presence was, in some way, connected
with Jasper Trend's cotton mills."
Wherry gave a low whistle. "Did I?" he asked politely, "well, perhaps, I
did. I can't remember."
"I was fool enough to believe that you wanted an honest job," said
Ordway; "it did not enter my head that your designs were upon Trend's
daughter."
"Didn't it?" inquired Wherry with a smile in which his white teeth
flashed brilliantly. "Well, it might have, for I was honest enough about
it. Didn't I tell you that a woman was at the bottom of every mess I was
ever in?"
"Where is your wife?" asked Ordway.
"Dead," replied Wherry, in a solemn voice.
"If I am not mistaken, you had not less than three at the time of your
trial."
"All dead," rejoined Wherry in the same solemn tone, while he drew out
his pocket handkerchief and wiped his eyes with a flourish, "there ain't
many men that have supported such a treble affliction on the same day."
"I may as well inform you that I don't believe a word you utter."
"It's true all the same. I'll take my oath on the biggest Bible you can
find in town."
"Your oath? Pshaw!"
"Well, I always said my word was better," observed Wherry, without the
slightest appearance of offence. He wore a pink shirt which set off his
fine colouring to advantage, and as he turned aside to pour out a second
drink of whiskey, Ordway noticed that his fair hair was brushed
carefully across the bald spot in the centre of his head.
"Whether they are dead or alive," responded Ordway, "I want you to
understand plainly that you are to give up your designs upon Milly
Trend or her money."
"So you've had your eye on her yourself?" exclaimed Wherry. "I declare
I'm deuced sorry. Why, in thunder, didn't you tell me so last June?"
A mental nausea that was almost like a physical spasm seized Ordway
suddenly, and crossing to the window, he stood looking through the
half-closed shutters down into the street below, where a covered wagon
rolled slowly downhill, the driver following on foot as he offered a
bunch of fowls to the shop-keepers upon the sidewalk. Then the hot,
stale, tobacco impregnated air came up to his nostrils, and he turned
away with a sensation of disgust.
"If you'd only warned me in time--hang it--I'd have cut out and given
you the field," declared Wherry in such apparent sincerity that Ordway
resisted an impulse to kick him out into the hall. "That's my way. I
always like to play fair and square when I get the chance."
"Well, you've got the chance now, and what's more you've got to make it
good."
"And leave you the open?"
"And leave me Tappahannock--yes."
"I don't want Tappahannock. To tell the truth I'm not particularly
struck by its attractions."
"In that case you've no objection to leaving immediately, I suppose?"
"I've no objection on earth if you'll allow me a pretty woman to keep me
company. I'm a deuced lonely bird, and I can't get on by myself--it's
not in my nature."
Ordway placed his hand upon the table with a force which started the
glasses rattling on the metal tray.
"I repeat for the last time that you are to leave Milly Trend alone," he
said. "Do you understand me?"
"I'm not sure I do," rejoined Wherry, still pleasantly enough. "Would
you mind saying that over again in a lower tone?"
"What I want to make plain is that you are not to marry Milly Trend--or
any other women in this town," returned Ordway angrily.
"So there are others!" commented Wherry jauntily with his eye on the
ceiling.
The pose of his handsome head was so remarkably effective, that Ordway
felt his rage increased by the mere external advantages of the man.
"What I intend you to do is to leave Tappahannock for good and all this
very evening," he resumed, drawing a sharp breath.
The words appeared to afford Wherry unspeakable amusement.
"I can't," he responded, after a minute in which he had enjoyed his
humour to the full, "the train leaves at seven-ten and I've an
engagement at eight o'clock."
"You'll break it, that's all."
"But it wouldn't be polite--it's with a lady."
"Then I'll break it for you," returned Ordway, starting toward the
door, "for I may presume, I suppose, that the lady is Miss Trend?"
"Oh, come back, I say. Hang it all, don't get into a fury," protested
Wherry, clutching the other by the arm, and closing the door which he
had half opened. "Here, hold on a minute and let's talk things over
quietly. I told you, didn't I? that I wanted to be obliging."
"Then you will go?" asked Ordway, in a milder tone.
"Well, I'll think about it. I've a quick enough wit for little things,
but on serious matters my brain works slowly. In the first place now
didn't we promise each other that we'd play fair?"
"But you haven't--that's why I came here."
"You're dead wrong. I'm doing it this very minute. I'll keep my mouth
shut about you till Judgment Day if you'll just hold off and not pull me
back when I'm trying to live honest."
"Honest!" exclaimed Ordway, and turned on his heel.
"Well, I'd like to know what you call it, for if it isn't honesty, it
certainly isn't pleasure. My wife's dead, I swear it's a fact, and I
swear again that I don't mean the girl any harm. I was never so much
gone on a woman in my life, though a number of 'em have been pretty soft
on me. So you keep off and manage your election--or whatever it
is--while I go about my business. Great Scott! after all it ain't as if
a woman were a bank note, is it?"
"The first question was mine. Will you leave to-day or will you not?"
"And if I will not what are you going to do about it?"
"As soon as I hear your decision, I shall let you know."
"Well, say I won't. What is your next move then?"
"In that case I shall go straight to the girl's father after I leave
this room."
"By Jove you will! And what will you do when you get there?"
"I shall tell him that to the best of my belief you have a
wife--possibly several--now living."
"Then you'll lie," said Wherry, dropping for the first time his
persuasive tone.
"That remains to be proved," rejoined Ordway shortly. "At any rate if he
needs to be convinced I shall tell him as much as I know about you."
"And how much," demanded Wherry insolently, "does that happen to be?"
"Enough to stop the marriage, that is all I want."
"And suppose he asks you--as he probably will--how in the devil it came
to be any business of yours?"
For a moment Ordway looked over the whiskey bottle and through the open
window into the street below.
"I don't think that will happen," he answered slowly, "but if it does I
shall tell him the whole truth as I know it--about myself as well as
about you."
"The deuce you will!" exclaimed Wherry. "It appears that you want to
take the whole job out of my hands now, doesn't it?"
The flush from the whiskey had overspread his face, and in the midst of
the general redness his eyes and teeth flashed brilliantly in an angry
laugh. An imaginative sympathy for the man moved Ordway almost in spite
of himself, and he wondered, in the long pause, what Wherry's early life
had been and if his chance in the world were really a fair one?
"I don't want to be hard on you," said Ordway at last; "it's out of the
question that you should have Milly Trend, but if you'll give up that
idea and go away I'll do what I can to help you--I'll send you half my
salary for the next six months until you are able to find a job."
Wherry looked at him with a deliberate wink.
"So you'd like to save your own skin, after all, wouldn't you?" he
inquired.
Taking up his hat from the table, Ordway turned toward the door and laid
his hand upon the knob before he spoke.
"Is it decided then that I shall go to Jasper Trend?" he asked.
"Well, I wouldn't if I were you," said Wherry, "but that's your affair.
On the whole I think that you'll pay more than your share of the price."
"It's natural, I suppose, that you should want your revenge," returned
Ordway, without resentment, "but all the same I shall tell him as little
as possible about your past. What I shall say is that I have reason to
believe that your wife is still living."
"One or more?" enquired Wherry, with a sneer.
"One, I think, will prove quite sufficient for my purpose."
"Well, go ahead," rejoined Wherry, angrily, "but before you strike you'd
better be pretty sure you see a snake in the grass. I'd advise you for
your own sake to ask Milly Trend first if she expects to marry me."
"What?" cried Ordway, wheeling round, "do you mean she has refused you?"
"Oh, ask her--ask her," retorted Wherry airily, as he turned back to the
whiskey bottle.
In the street, a moment later, Ordway passed under the red flag, which,
inflated by the wind, swelled triumphantly above his head. From the
opposite sidewalk a man spoke to him; and then, turning, waved his
slouch hat enthusiastically toward the flag. "If he only knew," thought
Ordway, looking after him; and the words brought to his imagination what
disgrace in Tappahannock would mean in his life. As he passed the dim
vacancy of the warehouse he threw toward it a look which was almost one
of entreaty. "No, no, it can't be," he insisted, as if to reassure
himself, "it is impossible. How could it happen?" And seized by a sudden
rage against circumstances, he remembered the windy afternoon upon which
he had come for the first time to Tappahannock--the wide stretches of
broomsedge; the pale red road, which appeared to lead nowhere; his
violent hunger; and the Negro woman who had given him the cornbread at
the door of her cabin. A hundred years seemed to have passed since
then--no, not a hundred years as men count them, but a dissolution and
a resurrection. It was as if his personality--his whole inner structure
had dissolved and renewed itself again; and when he thought now of that
March afternoon it was with the visual distinctness that belongs to an
observer rather than to an actor. His point of view was detached, almost
remote. He saw himself from the outside alone--his clothes, his face,
even his gestures; and these things were as vivid to him as were the
Negro cabin, the red clay road, and the covered wagon that threw its
shadow on the path as it crawled by. In no way could he associate his
immediate personality either with the scene or with the man who had sat
on the pine bench ravenously eating the coarse food. At the moment it
seemed to him that he was released, not only from any spiritual bondage
to the past, but even from any physical connection with the man he had
been then. "What have I to do with Gus Wherry or with Daniel Ordway?" he
demanded. "Above all, what in heaven have I to do with Milly Trend?" As
he asked the question he flushed with resentment against the girl for
whom he was about to sacrifice all that he valued in his life. He
thought with disgust of her vanity, her shallowness, her insincerity;
and the course that he had planned showed in this sudden light as
utterly unreasonable. It struck him on the instant that in going to
Wherry he had been a fool. "Yes, I should have thought of that before. I
have been too hasty, for what, after all, have I to do with Milly
Trend?"
With an effort he put the question aside, and in the emotional reaction
which followed, he felt that his spirit soared into the blue October
sky. Emily, looking at him at dinner, thought that she had never seen
him so animated, so light-hearted, so boyishly unreserved. When his game
of dominoes with Beverly was over, he followed the children out into the
orchard, where they were gathering apples into great straw hampers; and
as he stood under the fragrant clustering boughs, with the childish
laughter in his ears, he felt that his perplexities, his troubles, even
his memories had dissolved and vanished into air. An irresponsible
happiness swelled in his heart while he watched the golden orchard grass
blown like a fringe upon the circular outline of the hill.
But when night fell the joy of the sunshine went from him, and it was
almost with a feeling of heaviness that he lit his lamp and sat down in
the chintz-covered chair under the faded sampler worked by Margaret,
aged nine. Without apparent cause or outward disturbance he had passed
from the exhilaration of the afternoon into a pensive, almost a
melancholy mood. The past, which had been so remote for several hours,
had leaped suddenly to life again--not only in his memory, but in every
fibre of his body as well as in every breath he drew. "No, I cannot
escape it, for is it not a part of me--it is I myself," he thought; and
he knew that he could no more free himself from his duty to Milly Trend
than he could tear the knowledge of her existence from his brain. "After
all, it is not Milly Trend," he added, "it is something larger,
stronger, far more vital than she."
A big white moth flew in from the dusk, and fluttered blindly in the
circle of light which the lamp threw on the ceiling. He heard the soft
whirring of its wings against the plaster, and gradually the sound
entered into his thoughts and became a part of his reflections. "Will
the moth fall into the flame or will it escape?" he asked, feeling
himself powerless to avert the creature's fate. In some strange way his
own destiny seemed to be whirling dizzily in that narrow circle of
light; and in the pitiless illumination that surrounded it, he saw not
only all that was passed, but all that was present as well as all that
was yet to come. At the same instant he saw his mother's face as she lay
dead with her look of joyous surprise frozen upon her lips; and the face
of Lydia when she had lowered a black veil at their last parting; and
the face of Alice, his daughter; and of the girl downstairs as he had
seen her through the gray twilight; and the face of the epileptic little
preacher, who had preached in the prison chapel. And as these faces
looked back at him he knew that the illumination in which his soul had
struggled so blindly was the light of love. "Yes, it is love," he
thought, "and that is the meaning of the circle of light into which I
have come out of the darkness."
He looked up startled, for the white moth, after one last delirious
whirl of ecstasy, had dropped from the ceiling into the flame of the
lamp.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TURN OF THE WHEEL
At eight o'clock the next morning Ordway entered Jasper Trend's gate,
and passed up the gravelled walk between borders of white and yellow
chrysanthemums. In a window on his right a canary was singing loudly in
a gilt cage; and a moment later, the maid invited him into a room which
seemed, as he entered it, to be filled with a jubilant burst of music.
As he waited here for the man he had come to see, he felt that, in spite
of his terrible purpose, he had found no place in Tappahannock so
cheerful as this long room flooded with sunshine, in the midst of which
the canary swung back and forth in his wire cage. The furniture was
crude enough, the colours of the rugs were unharmonious, the imitation
lace of the curtains was offensive to his eyes. Yet the room was made
almost attractive by the large windows which gave on the piazza, the
borders of chrysanthemums and the smoothly shaven plot of lawn.
His back was turned toward the door when it opened and shut quickly, and
Jasper Trend came in, hastily swallowing his last mouthful of breakfast.
"You wanted to see me, Mr. Smith, I understand," he said at once,
showing in his manner a mixture of curiosity and resentment. It was
evident at the first glance that even in his own house he was unable to
overcome the political antagonism of the man of little stature. The
smallest social amenity he would probably have regarded as a kind of
moral subterfuge.
"I must ask you to overlook the intimate nature of my question," began
Ordway, in a voice which was so repressed that it sounded dull and
lifeless, "but I have heard that your daughter intends to marry Horatio
Brown. Is this true?"
At the words Jasper, who had prepared himself for a political onslaught,
fell back a step or two and stood in the merciless sunlight, blinking at
his questioner with his little, watery, pale gray eyes. Each dull red
vein in his long nose became suddenly prominent.
"Horatio Brown?" he repeated, "why, I thought you'd come about nothing
less than the nomination. What in the devil do you want anyway with
Horatio Brown. He can't vote in Tappahannock, can he?"
"I'll answer that in time," replied Ordway, "my motive is more serious
than you can possibly realise--it is a question which involves your
daughter's happiness--perhaps her life."
"Good Lord, is that so?" exclaimed Jasper, "I don't reckon you're sweet
on her yourself, are you?"
Ordway's only reply was an impatient groan which sent the other
stumbling back against a jar of goldfish on the centre table. Though he
had come fully prepared for the ultimate sacrifice, he was unable to
control the repulsion aroused in him by the bleared eyes and sunken
mouth of the man before him.
"Well, if you ain't," resumed Jasper presently, with a fresh outburst of
hilarity, "you're about the only male critter in Tappahannock that don't
turn his eyes sooner or later toward my door."
"I've barely a speaking acquaintance with your daughter," returned
Ordway shortly, "but her reputation as a beauty is certainly very well
deserved."
Mollified by the compliment, Jasper unbent so far as to make an abrupt,
jerky motion in the direction of a chair; but shaking his head, Ordway
put again bluntly the question he had asked upon the other's entrance.
"Am I to understand seriously that she means to marry Brown?" he
demanded.
Jasper twisted his scraggy neck nervously in his loose collar. "Lord,
how you do hear things!" he ejaculated. "Now, as far as I can see, thar
ain't a single word of truth in all that talk. Just between you and me I
don't believe my girl has had her mind on that fellow Brown more'n a
minute. I'm dead against it and that'll go a long way with her, you may
be sure. Why, only this morning she told me that if she had to choose
between the two of 'em, she'd stick to young Banks every time."
With the words it seemed to Ordway that the sunshine became fairly
dazzling as it fell through the windows, while the song of the canary
went up rapturously like a paean. Only by the relief which flooded his
heart like warmth could he measure the extent of the ruin he had
escaped. Even Jasper Trend's face appeared no longer hideous to him, and
as he held out his hand, the exhilaration of his release lent a note
that was almost one of affection to his voice.
"Don't let her do it--for God's sake don't let her do it," he said, and
an instant afterward he was out on the gravelled walk between the
borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums.
At the gate Milly was standing with a letter in her hand, and when he
spoke to her, he watched her face change slowly to the colour of a
flower. Never had she appeared softer, prettier, more enticing in his
eyes, and he felt for the first time an understanding of the hopeless
subjection of Banks.
"Oh, it's you, Mr. Smith!" she exclaimed, smiling and blushing as she
had smiled and blushed at Wherry the day before, "I was asking Harry
Banks yesterday what had become of you?"
"What had become of me?" he repeated in surprise, while he drew back
quickly with his hand on the latch of the gate.
"I hadn't seen you for so long," she answered, with a laugh which bore
less relation to humour than it did to pleasure. "You used to pass by
five times a day, and I got so accustomed to you that I really missed
you when you went away."
"Well, I've been in the country all summer, though that hardly counts,
for you were out of town yourself."
"Yes, I was out of town myself." She lingered over the words, and her
voice softened as she went on until it seemed to flow with the sweetness
of liquid honey, "but even when I am here, you never care to see me."
"Do you think so?" he asked gaily, and the next instant he wondered why
the question had passed his lips before it had entered into his
thoughts, "the truth is that I know a good deal more about you than you
suspect," he added; "I have the honour, you see, to be the confidant of
Harry Banks."
"Oh, Harry Banks!" she exclaimed indifferently, as she turned from the
gate, while Ordway opened it and passed out into the street.
For the next day or two it seemed to him that the lightness of his heart
was reflected in the faces of those about him--that Baxter, Mrs. Brooke,
Emily, Beverly each appeared to move in response to some hidden spring
within himself. He felt no longer either Beverly's tediousness or Mrs.
Brooke's melancholy, for these early October mornings contained a
rapture which transfigured the people with whom he lived.
With this unlooked for renewal of hope he threw himself eagerly into the
political fight for the control of Tappahannock. It was now Tuesday and
on Thursday evening he was to deliver his first speech in the town hall.
Already the preparations were made, already the flags were flying from
the galleries, and already Baxter had been trimmed for his public
appearance upon the platform.
"By George, I believe the Major's right and it's the Ten Commandment
part that has done it," said the big man, settling his person with a
shake in the new clothes he had purchased for the occasion. "I reckon
this coat's all right, Smith, ain't it? My wife wouldn't let me come
out on the platform in those old clothes I've been wearing."
"Oh, you're all right," returned Ordway, cheerfully--so cheerfully that
Baxter was struck afresh by the peculiar charm which belonged less to
manner than to temperament, "you're all right, old man, but it isn't
your clothes that make you so."
"All the same I'll feel better when I get into my old suit again," said
Baxter, "I don't know how it is, but, somehow, I seem to have left
two-thirds of myself behind in those old clothes. I just wore these down
to show 'em off, but I shan't put 'em on again till Thursday."
It was the closing hour at the warehouse, and after a few eager words on
the subject of the approaching meeting, Ordway left the office and went
out into the deserted building where the old Negro was sweeping the
floor with his twig broom. A moment later he was about to pass under the
archway, when a man, hurrying in from the street, ran straight into his
arms and then staggered back with a laugh of mirthless apology.
"My God, Smith," said the tragic voice of Banks, "I'm half crazy and I
must have a word with you alone."
Catching his arm Ordway drew him into the dim light of the warehouse,
until they reached the shelter of an old wagon standing unhitched
against the wall. The only sound which came to them here was the
scratching noise made by the twig broom on the rough planks of the
floor.
"Speak now," said Ordway, while his heart sank as he looked into the
other's face, "It's quite safe--there's no one about but old Abraham."
"I can't speak," returned Banks, preserving with an effort a decent
composure of his features, "but it's all up with me--it's worse than I
imagined, and there's nothing ahead of me but death."
"I suppose it's small consolation to be told that you look unusually
healthy at the minute," replied Ordway, "but don't keep me guessing,
Banks. What's happened now?"
"All her indifference--all her pretence of flirting was pure deception,"
groaned the miserable Banks, "she wanted to throw dust, not only in my
eyes, but in Jasper's, also."
"Why, he told me with his own lips that his daughter had given him to
understand that she preferred you to Brown."
"And so she did give him to understand--so she did," affirmed Banks, in
despair, "but it was all a blind so that he wouldn't make trouble
between her and Brown. I tell you, Smith," he concluded, bringing his
clenched fist down on the wheel of the wagon, from which a shower of
dried mud was scattered into Ordway's face, "I tell you, I don't believe
women think any more of telling a lie than we do of taking a cocktail!"
"But how do you know all this, my dear fellow? and when did you discover
it?"
"That's the awful part, I'm coming to it." His voice gave out and he
swallowed a lump in his throat before he could go on. "Oh, Smith,
Smith, I declare, if it's the last word I speak, I believe she means to
run away with Brown this very evening!"
"What?" cried Ordway, hardly raising his voice above a whisper. A
burning resentment, almost a repulsion swept over him, and he felt that
he could have spurned the girl's silly beauty if she had lain at his
feet. What was a woman like Milly Trend worth, that she should cost him,
a stranger to her, so great a price?
"Tell me all," he said sharply, turning again to his companion. "How did
you hear it? Why do you believe it? Have you spoken to Jasper?"
Banks blinked hard for a minute, while a single large round teardrop
trickled slowly down his freckled nose.
"I should never have suspected it," he answered, "but for Milly's old
black Mammy Delphy, who has lived with her ever since she was born. Aunt
Delphy came upon her this morning when she was packing her bag, and by
hook or crook, heaven knows how, she managed to get at the truth. Then
she came directly to me, for it seems that she hates Brown worse than
the devil."
"When did she come to you?"
"A half hour ago. I left her and rushed straight to you."
Ordway drew out his watch, and stood looking at the face of it with a
wondering frown.
"That must have been five o'clock," he said, "and it is now half past.
Shall I catch Milly, do you think, if I start at once?"
"You?" cried Banks, "you mean that you will stop her?"
"I mean that I must stop her. There is no question."
As he spoke he had started quickly down the warehouse, scattering as he
walked, a pile of trash which the old Negro had swept together in the
centre of the floor. So rapid were the long strides with which he moved
that Banks, in spite of his frantic haste, could barely keep in step
with him as they passed into the street. Ordway's face had changed as if
from a spasm of physical pain, and as Banks looked at it in the
afternoon light he was startled to find that it was the face of an old
man. The brows were bent, the mouth drawn, the skin sallow, and the gray
hair upon the temples had become suddenly more prominent than the dark
locks above.
"Then you knew Brown before?" asked Banks, with an accession of courage,
as they slackened their pace with the beginning of the hill.
"I knew him before--yes," replied Ordway, shortly. His reserve had
become not only a mask, but a coffin, and his companion had for a minute
a sensation that was almost uncanny as he walked by his side--as if he
were striving to keep pace uphill with a dead man. Banks had known him
to be silent, gloomy, uncommunicative before now, but he had never until
this instant seen that look of iron resolve which was too cold and still
to approach the heat of passion. Had he been furious Banks might have
shared his fury with him; had he shown bitterness of mood Banks might
have been bitter also; had he given way even to sardonic merriment,
Banks felt that it would have been possible to have feigned a mild
hilarity of manner; but before this swift, implacable pursuit of
something he could not comprehend, the wretched lover lost all
consciousness of the part which he himself must act, well or ill, in the
event to come.
At Trend's gate Ordway stopped and looked at his companion with a smile
which appeared to throw an artificial light upon his drawn features.
"Will you let me speak to her alone first," he asked, "for a few
minutes?"
"I'll take a turn up the street then," returned Banks eagerly, still
panting from his hurried walk up the long hill. "She's in the room on
the right now," he added, "I can see her feeding the canary."
Ordway nodded indifferently. "I shan't be long," he said, and going
inside the gate, passed deliberately up the walk and into the room where
Milly stood at the window with her mouth close against the wires of the
gilt cage.
At his step on the threshold the girl turned quickly toward the door
with a fluttering movement. Surprise and disappointment battled for an
instant in her glance, and he gathered from his first look that he had
come at the moment when she was expecting Wherry. He noticed, too, that
in spite of the mild autumn weather, she wore a dark dress which was not
unsuitable for a long journey, and that her sailor hat, from which a
blue veil floated, lay on a chair in one corner. A deeper meaning had
entered into the shallow prettiness of her face, and he felt that she
had passed through some subtle change in which she had left her girlhood
behind her. For the first time it occurred to him that Milly Trend was
deserving not only of passion, but of sympathy.
At the withdrawal of the lips that had offered him his bit of cake, the
canary fluttered from his perch and uttered a sweet, short, questioning
note; and in Milly's face, as she came forward, there was something of
this birdlike, palpitating entreaty.
"Oh, it is you, Mr. Smith," she said, "I did not hear your ring."
"I didn't ring," responded Ordway, as he took her trembling outstretched
hand in which she still held the bit of sponge cake, "I saw you at the
window so I came straight in without sending word. What I have to say to
you is so important that I dared not lose a minute."
"And it is about me?" asked Milly, with a quiver of her eyelids.
"No, it is about someone else, though it concerns you in a measure. The
thing I have to tell you relates directly to a man whom you know as
Horatio Brown----"
He spoke so quickly that the girl divined his meaning from his face
rather than from his words.
"Then you know him?" she questioned, in a frightened whisper.
"I know more of his life than I can tell you. It is sufficient to say
that to the best of my belief he has a wife now living--that he has been
married before this under different names to at least two living
women----"
He stopped and put out his hand with an impulsive protecting gesture,
for the wounded vanity in the girl's face had pierced to his heart.
"Will you let me see your father?" he asked gently, "would it not be
better for me to speak to him instead of to you?"
"No, no!" cried Milly sharply, "don't tell him--don't dare to tell
him--for he would believe it and it is a lie--it is a lie! I tell you it
is a lie!"
"As God is my witness it is the truth," he answered, without resentment.
"Then you shall accuse him to his face. He is coming in a little while,
and you shall accuse him before me----"
She stopped breathlessly and the pity in his look made her wince sharply
and shrink away. With her movement the piece of sponge cake fell from
her loosened fingers and rolled on the floor at her feet.
"But if it were true how could you know it?" she demanded. "No, it is
not true--I don't believe it! I don't believe it!" she repeated in a
passion of terror.
At her excited voice the canary, swinging on his perch, broke suddenly
into an ecstasy of song, and Milly's words, when she spoke again, were
drowned in the liquid sweetness that flowed from the cage. For a minute
Ordway stood in silence waiting for the music to end, while he watched
the angry, helpless tremor of the girl's outstretched hands.
"Will you promise me to wait?" he asked, raising his voice in the
effort to be heard, "will you promise me to wait at least until you find
out the truth or the falsehood of what I tell you?"
"But I don't believe it," repeated Milly in the stubborn misery of
hopeless innocence.
"Ask yourself, then, what possible reason I could have in coming to
you--except to save you?"
"Wait!" cried the girl angrily, "I can't hear--wait!" Picking up a shawl
from a chair, she flung it with an impatient gesture over the cage, and
turning immediately from the extinguished bird, took up his sentence
where he had broken off.
"To save me?" she repeated, "you mean from marriage?"
"From a marriage that would be no marriage. Am I right in suspecting
that you meant to go away with him to-night?"
She bowed her head--all the violent spirit gone out of her. "I was ready
to go to-night," she answered, like a child that has been hurt and is
still afraid of what is to come.
"And you promise me that you will give it up?" he went on gently.
"I don't know--I can't tell--I must see him first," she said, and burst
suddenly into tears, hiding her face in her hands with a pathetic,
shamed gesture.
Turning away for a moment, he stood blankly staring down into the jar of
goldfish. Then, as her sobs grew presently beyond her control, he came
back to the chair into which she had dropped and looked with moist eyes
at her bowed fair head.
"Before I leave you, will you promise me to give him up?--to forget him
if it be possible?" he asked.
"But it is not possible," she flashed back, lifting her wet blue eyes to
his. "How dare you come to me with a tale like this? Oh, I hate you! I
shall always hate you! Will you go?"
Before her helpless fury he felt a compassion stronger even than the
emotion her tears had aroused.
"It is not fair that I should tell you so much and not tell you all,
Milly," he said. "It is not fair that in accusing the man you love, I
should still try to shield myself. I know that these things are true
because Brown's--Wherry is his name--trial took place immediately before
mine--and we saw each other during the terms which we served in prison."
Then before she could move or speak he turned from her and went rapidly
from the house and out into the walk.
CHAPTER IX
AT THE CROSS-ROADS
At the corner he looked down the street and saw the red flag still
swelling in the wind. A man spoke to him; the face was familiar, but he
could not recall the name, until after a few congratulatory words about
his political prospects, he remembered, with a start, that he was
talking to Major Leary.
"You may count on a clean sweep of votes, Mr. Smith--there's no doubt of
it," said the Major, beaming with his amiable fiery face.
"There's no doubt of it?" repeated Ordway, while he regarded the
enthusiastic politician with a perplexed and troubled look. The Major,
the political campaign, the waving red flag and the noisy little town
had receded to a blank distance from the moment in which he stood. He
wondered vaguely what connection he--Daniel Ordway--had ever held with
these things?
Yet his smile was still bright and cheerful as he turned away, with an
apologetic word, and passed on into the road to Cedar Hill. The impulse
which had driven him breathlessly into Milly's presence had yielded now
to the mere dull apathy of indifference, and it mattered to him no
longer whether the girl was saved or lost in the end. He thought of her
vanity, of her trivial pink and white prettiness with a return of his
old irritation. Well, he had done his part--his temperament had ruled
him at the decisive instant, and the ensuing consequences of his
confession had ceased now to affect or even to interest him. Then, with
something like a pang of thought, he remembered that he had with his own
hand burned his bridges behind him, and that there was no way out for
him except the straight way which led over the body of Daniel Smith. His
existence in Tappahannock was now finished; his victory had ended in
flight; and there was nothing ahead of him except the new beginning and
the old ending. A fresh start and then what? And afterward the few years
of quiet again and at the end the expected, the inevitable recurrence of
the disgrace which he had begun to recognise as some impersonal natural
law that followed upon his footsteps. As the future gradually unrolled
itself in his imagination, he felt that his heart sickened in the clutch
of the terror that had sprung upon him. Was there to be no end anywhere?
Could no place, no name even afford him a permanent shelter? Looking
ahead now he saw himself as an old man wandering from refuge to refuge,
pursued always by the resurrected corpse of his old life, which though
it contained neither his spirit nor his will, still triumphed by the
awful semblance it bore his outward body. Was he to be always alone? Was
there no spot in his future where he could possess himself in reality of
the freedom which was his in name?
Without seeing, without hearing, he went almost deliriously where his
road led him, for the terror in his thought had become a living presence
before which his spirit rather than his body moved. He walked rapidly,
yet it seemed to him that his feet were inert and lifeless weights which
were dragged forward by the invincible torrent of his will. In the
swiftness of his flight, he felt that he was a conscious soul chained to
a body that was a corpse.
When he came at last to the place where the two roads crossed before the
ruined gate, he stopped short, while the tumult died gradually in his
brain, and the agony through which he had just passed appeared as a
frenzy to his saner judgment. Looking up a moment later as he was about
to enter the avenue, he saw that Emily Brooke was walking toward him
under the heavy shadow of the cedars. In the first movement of her
surprise the mask which she had always worn in his presence dropped from
her face, and as she stepped from the gloom into the sunlight, he felt
that the sweetness of her look bent over him like protecting wings. For
a single instant, as her eyes gazed wide open into his, he saw reflected
in them the visions from which his soul had shrunk back formerly
abashed. Nothing had changed in her since yesterday; she was outwardly
the same brave and simple woman, with her radiant smile, her blown hair,
and her roughened hands. Yet because of that revealing look she appeared
no longer human in his eyes, but something almost unearthly bright and
distant, like the sunshine he had followed so often through the bars of
his prison cell.
"You are suffering," she said, when he would have passed on, and he felt
that she had divined without words all that he could not utter.
"Don't pity me," he answered, smiling at her question, because to smile
had become for him the easier part of habit, "I'm not above liking pity,
but it isn't exactly what I need. And besides, I told you once, you
know, that whatever happened to me would always be the outcome of my own
failure."
"Yes, I remember you told me so--but does that make it any easier to
bear?"
"Easier to bear?--no, but I don't think the chief end of things is to be
easy, do you?"
She shook her head. "But isn't our chief end just to make them easier
for others?" she asked.
The pity in her face was like an illumination, and her features were
enkindled with a beauty he had never found in them before. It was the
elemental motherhood in her nature that he had touched; and he felt as
he watched her that this ecstasy of tenderness swelled in her bosom and
overflowed her lips. Confession to her would have been for him the
supreme luxury of despair; but because his heart strained toward her, he
drew back and turned his eyes to the road, which stretched solitary and
dim beyond them.
"Well, I suppose, I've got what I deserved," he said, "the price that a
man pays for being a fool, he pays but once and that is his whole life
long."
"But it ought not to be so--it is not just," she answered.
"Just?" he repeated, bitterly, "no, I dare say, it isn't--but the facts
of life don't trouble themselves about justice, do they? Is it just, for
instance, that you should slave your youth away on your brother's farm,
while he sits and plays dominoes on the porch? Is it just that with the
instinct for luxury in your blood you should be condemned to a poverty
so terrible as this?" He reached out and touched the little red hand
hanging at her side. "Is this just?" he questioned with an ironical
smile.
"There is some reason for it," she answered bravely, "I feel it though I
cannot see it."
"Some reason--yes, but that reason is not justice--not the little human
justice that we can call by the name. It's something infinitely bigger
than any idea that we have known."
"I can trust," she said softly, "but I can't reason."
"Don't reason--don't even attempt to--let God run his world. Do you
think if we didn't believe in the meaning--in the purpose of it all that
you and I could stand together here like this? It's because we believe
that we can be happy even while we suffer."
"Then you will be happy again--to-morrow?"
"Surely. Perhaps to-night--who knows? I've had a shock. My brain is
whirling and I can't see straight. In a little while it will be over and
I shall steady down."
"But I should like to help you now while it lasts," she said.
"You are helping me--it's a mercy that you stand there and listen to my
wild talk. Do you know I was telling myself as I came along the road
just now that there wasn't a living soul to whom I should dare to say
that I was in a quake of fear."
"A quake of fear?" She looked at him with swimming eyes, and by that
look he saw that she loved him. If he had stretched out his arms, he
knew that the passion of her sorrow would have swept her to his breast;
and he felt that every fibre of his starved soul and body cried out for
the divine food that she offered. At the moment he did not stop to ask
himself whether it was his flesh or his spirit that hungered after her,
for his whole being had dissolved into the longing which drew him as
with cords to her lips. All he understood at the instant was that in his
terrible loneliness love had been offered him and he must refuse the
gift. A thought passed like a drawn sword between them, and he saw in
his imagination Lydia lowering her black veil at their last parting.
"It's a kind of cowardliness, I suppose," he went on with his eyes on
the ground, "but I was thinking that minute how greatly I needed help
and how much--how very much--you had given me. If I ever learn really to
live it will be because of you--because of your wonderful courage, your
unfailing sweetness----"
For the first time he saw in her face the consciousness of her own
unfulfilment. "If you only knew how often I wonder if it is worth
while," she answered.
At this he made a sudden start forward and then checked himself. "The
chief tragedy in my life," he said, "is that I knew you twenty years too
late."
Until his words were uttered he did not realise how much of a confession
he had put into them; and with the discovery he watched her face bloom
softly like a flower that opens its closed petals.
"If I could have helped you then, why cannot I help you now?" she asked,
while the innocence in her look humbled him more than a divine fury
would have done. The larger his ideal of her became, the keener grew his
sense of failure--of bondage to that dead past from which he could never
release his living body. As he looked at her now he realised that the
supreme thing he had missed in life was the control of the power which
lies in simple goodness; and the purity of Lydia appeared to him as a
shining blank--an unwritten surface beside the passionate humanity in
the heart of the girl before him.
"You will hear things from others which I can't tell you and then you
will understand," he said.
"I shall hear nothing that will make me cease to believe in you," she
answered.
"You will hear that I have done wrong in my life and you will understand
that if I have suffered it has been by my own fault."
She met his gaze without wavering.
"I shall still believe in you," she responded.
Her eyes were on his face and she saw that the wan light of the
afterglow revealed the angularities of his brow and chin and filled in
with shadows the deeper hollows in his temples. The smile on his lips
was almost ironical as he answered.
"Those from whom I might have expected loyalty, fell away from me--my
father, my wife, my children----"
"To believe against belief is a woman's virtue," she responded, "but at
least it is a virtue."
"You mean that you would have been my friend through everything?" he
asked quickly, half blinded by the ideal which seemed to flash so
closely to his eyelids.
There was scorn in her voice as she answered: "If I had been your friend
once--yes, a thousand times."
Before his inward vision there rose the conception of a love that would
have pardoned, blessed and purified. Bending his head he kissed her
little cold hand once and let it fall. Then without looking again into
her face, he entered the avenue and went on alone.
CHAPTER X
BETWEEN MAN AND MAN
When he entered Tappahannock the following morning, he saw with surprise
that the red flag was still flying above the street. As he looked into
the face of the first man he met, he felt a sensation of relief, almost
of gratitude because he received merely the usual morning greeting; and
the instant afterward he flinched and hesitated before replying to the
friendly nod of the harness-maker, stretching himself under the hanging
bridles in the door of the little shop.
Entering the warehouse he glanced nervously down the deserted building,
and when a moment later he opened the door into Baxter's office, he grew
hot at the familiar sight of the local newspaper in his employer's
hands. The years had divided suddenly and he saw again the crowd in
Fifth Avenue as he walked home on the morning of his arrest. He smelt
the smoke of the great city; he heard the sharp street cries around him;
and he pushed aside the fading violets offered him by the crippled
flower seller at the corner. He even remembered, without effort, the
particular bit of scandal retailed to him over a cigar by the club wit
who had joined him. All his sensations to-day were what they had been
then, only now his consciousness was less acute, as if the edge of his
perceptions had been blunted by the force of the former blow.
"Howdy, Smith, is that you?" remarked Baxter, crushing the top of the
paper beneath the weight of his chin as he looked over it at Ordway.
"Did you meet Banks as you came in? He was in here asking for you not
two minutes ago."
"Banks? No, I didn't see him. What did he want?" As he put the ordinary
question the dull level of his voice surprised him.
"Oh, he didn't tell me," returned Baxter, "but it was some love-lorn
whining he had to do, I reckon. Now what I can't understand is how a man
can be so narrow sighted as only to see one woman out of the whole
bouncing sex of 'em. It would take more than a refusal--it would take a
downright football to knock out my heart. Good Lord! in this world of
fine an' middling fine women, the trouble ain't to get the one you want,
but to keep on wanting the one you get. I've done my little share of
observing in my time, and what I've learned from it is that the biggest
trial a man can have is not to want another man's wife, but to _want_ to
want his own."
A knock at the door called Ordway out into the warehouse, where he
yielded himself immediately to the persuasive voice of Banks.
"Come back here a minute, will you, out of hearing? I tried to get to
you last night and couldn't."
"Has anything gone wrong?" inquired Ordway, following the other to a
safe distance from Baxter's office. At first he had hardly had courage
to lift his eyes to Banks' face, but reassured by the quiet opening of
the conversation, he stood now with his sad gaze fixed on the beaming
freckled features of the melancholy lover.
"I only wanted to tell you that she didn't go," whispered Banks, rolling
his prominent eyes into the dusky recesses of the warehouse, "she's ill
in bed to-day, and Brown left town on the eight-forty-five this
morning."
"So he's gone for good!" exclaimed Ordway, and drew a long breath as if
he had been released from an emotional tension which had suspended,
while it lasted, the ordinary movement of life. Since he had prepared
himself for the worst was it possible that his terror of yesterday would
scatter to-day like the delusions of an unsettled brain? Had Wherry held
back in mercy or had Milly Trend? Even if he were spared now must he
still live on here unaware how widely--or how pitifully--his secret was
known? Would this ceaseless dread of discovery prove again, as it had
proved in the past, more terrible even than the discovery itself? Would
he be able to look fearlessly at Milly Trend again?--at Baxter? at
Banks? at Emily?
"Well, I've got to thank you for it, Smith?" said Banks. "How you
stopped it, I don't know for the life of me, but stop it you did."
The cheerful selfishness in such rejoicing struck Ordway even in the
midst of his own bitter musing. Though Banks adored Milly, soul and
body, he was frankly jubilant over the tragic ending of her short
romance.
"I hope there's little danger of its beginning anew," Ordway remarked
presently, with less sympathy than he would have shown his friend twelve
hours before.
"I suppose you wouldn't like to tell me what you said to her?" inquired
Banks, his customary awe of his companion swept away in the momentary
swing of his elation.
"No, I shouldn't like to tell you," returned Ordway quietly.
"Then it's all right, of course, and I'll be off to drape the town hall
in bunting for to-morrow night. We're going to make the biggest
political display for you that Tappahannock has ever seen."
At the instant Ordway was hardly conscious of the immensity of his
relief, but some hours later, after the early closing of the warehouse,
when he walked slowly back along the road to Cedar Hill, it seemed to
him that his life had settled again into its quiet monotonous spaces.
The peaceful fields on either side, with their short crop of
live-ever-lasting, in which a few lonely sheep were browsing, appeared
to him now as a part of the inward breadth and calm of the years that he
had spent in Tappahannock.
In the loneliness of the road he could tell himself that the fear of Gus
Wherry was gone for a time at least, yet the next day upon going into
town he was aware of the same nervous shrinking from the people he
passed, from the planters hanging about the warehouse, from Baxter
buried behind his local newspaper.
"They've got a piece as long as your arm about you in the Tappahannock
_Herald_, Smith," cried Baxter, chuckling; and Ordway felt himself
redden painfully with apprehension. Not until the evening, when he came
out upon the platform under the floating buntings in the town hall, did
he regain entirely the self-possession which he had lost in the presence
of Milly Trend.
In its white and red decorations, with the extravagant glare of its
gas-jets, the hall had assumed almost a festive appearance; and as
Ordway glanced at the crowded benches and doorways, he forgot the
trivial political purpose he was to serve, in the more human relation in
which he stood to the men who had gathered to hear him speak. These men
were his friends, and if they believed in him he felt a triumphant
conviction that they had seen their belief justified day by day, hour by
hour, since he had come among them. In the crowd of faces before him, he
recognised, here and there, workingmen whom he had helped--operatives in
Jasper Trend's cotton mills, or in the smaller factories which combined
with the larger to create the political situation in Tappahannock.
Closer at hand he saw the shining red face of Major Leary; the
affectionate freckled face of Banks; the massive benevolent face of
Baxter. As he looked at them an emotion which was almost one of love
stirred in his breast, and he felt the words he had prepared dissolve
and fade from his memory to reunite in an appeal of which he had not
thought until this minute. There was something, he knew now, for him to
say to-night--something so infinitely large that he could utter it only
because it rose like love or sorrow to his lips. Of all the solemn
moments when he had stood before these men, with his open Bible, in the
green field or in the little grove of pines, there was none so solemn,
he felt, as the approaching instant in which he would speak to them no
longer as a man to children, but as a man to men.
On the stage before him Baxter was addressing the house, his soft,
persuasive voice mingling with a sympathetic murmur from the floor. The
applause which had broken out at Ordway's entrance had not yet died
away, and with each mention of his name, with each allusion to his
services to Tappahannock, it burst forth again, enthusiastic,
irrepressible, overwhelming. Never before, it seemed to him, sitting
there on the platform with his roughened hands crossed on his knees, had
he felt himself to be so intimately a part of the community in which he
lived. Never before--not even when he had started this man in life, had
bought off that one's mortgage or had helped another to struggle free of
drink, had he come quite so near to the pathetic individual lives that
compose the mass. They loved him, they believed in him, and they were
justified! At the moment it seemed to him nothing--less than
nothing--that they should make him Mayor of Tappahannock. In this one
instant of understanding they had given him more than any office--than
any honour.
While he sat there outwardly so still, so confident of his success, it
seemed to him that in the exhilaration of the hour he was possessed of a
new and singularly penetrating insight into life. Not only did he see
further and deeper than he had ever seen before, but he looked beyond
the beginning of things into the causes and beyond the ending of them
into the results. He saw himself and why he was himself as clearly as he
saw his sin and why he had sinned. Out of their obscurity his father and
his mother returned to him, and as he met the bitter ironical smile of
the one and the curved black brows and red, half open mouth of the
other, he knew himself to be equally the child of each, for he
understood at last why he was a mixture of strength and weakness, of
gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion. His short, troubled
childhood rushed through his thoughts, and with that swiftness of memory
which comes so often in tragic moments, he lived over again--not
separately and in successive instants--but fully, vitally, and in all
the freshness of experience, the three events which he saw now, in
looking back, as the milestones upon his road. Again he saw his mother
as she lay in her coffin, with her curved black brows and half open
mouth frozen into a joyous look, and in that single fleeting instant he
passed through his meeting with the convict at the wayside station, and
through the long suspended minutes when he had waited in the Stock
Exchange for the rise in the market which did not come. And these things
appeared to him, not as detached and obscure remnants of his past, but
clear and delicate and vivid as if they were projected in living colours
against the illumination of his mind. They were there not to bewilder,
but to make plain; not to accuse, but to vindicate. "Everything is clear
to me now and I see it all," he thought, "and if I can only keep this
penetration of vision nothing will be harder to-morrow than it is
to-night." In his whole life there was not an incident too small for him
to remember it and to feel that it was significant of all the rest; and
he knew that if he could have seen from the beginning as clearly as he
saw to-night, his past would not have been merely different, it would
have been entirely another than his own.
Baxter had stopped, and turning with an embarrassed upheaval of his
whole body, he spoke to Ordway, who rose at his words and came slowly
forward to the centre of the stage. A hoarse murmur, followed by a
tumult of shouts, greeted him, while he stood for a moment looking
silently among those upturned faces for the faces of the men to whom he
must speak. "That one will listen because I nursed him back to life, and
that one because I brought him out of ruin--and that one and that one--"
He knew them each by name, and as his gaze travelled from man to man he
felt that he was seeking a refuge from some impending evil in the
shelter of the good deeds that he had done.
Though he held a paper in his hand, he did not look at it, for he had
found his words in that instant of illumination when, seated upon the
stage, he had seen the meaning of his whole life made plain. The present
event and the issue of it no longer concerned him; he had ceased to
fear, even to shrink from the punishment that was yet to come. In the
completeness with which he yielded himself to the moment, he felt that
he was possessed of the calm, almost of the power of necessity; and he
experienced suddenly the sensation of being lifted and swept forward on
one of the high waves of life. He spoke rapidly, without effort, almost
without consciousness of the words he uttered, until it seemed to him
presently that it was the torrent of his speech which carried him
outward and upward with that strange sense of lightness, of security.
And this lightness, this security belonged not to him, but to some
outside current of being.
* * * * *
His speech was over, and he had spoken to these factory workers as no
man had spoken before him in Tappahannock. With his last word the
silence had held tight and strained for a minute, and then the grateful
faces pressed round him and the ringing cheers passed through the open
windows out into the street. His body was still trembling, but as he
stood there with his sparkling blue eyes on the house, he looked gay and
boyish. He had made his mark, he had spoken his best speech, and he had
touched not merely the factory toilers in Tappahannock, but that common
pulse of feeling in which all humanity is made one. Then the next
instant, while he still waited, he was aware of a new movement upon the
platform behind him, and a man came forward and stopped short under the
gas jet, which threw a flickering yellow light upon his face. Though he
had seen him but once, he recognized him instantly as the short,
long-nosed, irascible manager of the cotton mills, and with the first
glance into his face he had heard already the unspoken question and the
reply.
"May I ask you, Mr. Smith," began the little man, suddenly, "if you can
prove your right to vote or to hold office in Virginia?"
Ordway's gaze passed beyond him to rest upon Baxter and Major Leary, who
sat close together, genial, elated, rather thirsty. At the moment he
felt sorry for Baxter--not for himself.
"No," he answered with a smile which threw a humorous light upon the
question, "I cannot--can you prove yours?"
The little man cleared his throat with a sniffling sound, and when he
spoke again it was in a high nasal voice, as if he had become suddenly
very excited or very angry.
"Is your name Daniel Smith?" he asked, with a short laugh.
The question was out at last and the silence in which Ordway stood was
like the suspension between thought and thought. All at once he found
himself wondering why he had lived in hourly terror of this instant,
for now that it was upon him, he saw that it was no more tragic, no less
commonplace, than the most ordinary instant of his life. As in the past
his courage had revived in him with the first need of decisive action,
so he felt it revive now, and lifting his head, he looked straight into
the angry, little eyes of the man who waited, under the yellow gaslight,
on the platform before him.
"My name," he answered, still smiling, "is Daniel Ordway."
There was no confusion in his mind, no anxiety, no resentment. Instead
the wonderful brightness of a moment ago still shone in his thoughts,
and while he appeared to rest his sparkling gaze on the face of his
questioner, he was seeing, in reality, the road by which he had come to
Tappahannock, and at the beginning of the road the prison, and beyond
the prison the whole of his past life.
"Did you serve a term in prison before you came here?"
"Yes."
"Were you tried and convicted in New York?"
"Yes."
"Were you guilty?"
Looking over the head of the little man, Ordway's gaze travelled slowly
across the upturned faces upon the floor of the house. Hardly a man
passed under his look whom he had not assisted once at least in the hour
of his need. "I saved that one from drink," he thought almost joyfully,
"that one from beggary--I stood side by side with that other in the
hour of his shame----"
"Were you guilty?" repeated the high nasal voice in his ear.
His gaze came quickly back, and as it passed over the head of Baxter, he
was conscious again of a throb of pity.
"Yes," he answered for the last time. Then, while the silence lasted, he
turned from the platform and went out of the hall into the night.
CHAPTER XI
BETWEEN MAN AND WOMAN
He walked rapidly to the end of the street, and then slackened his pace
almost unconsciously as he turned into the country road. The night had
closed in a thick black curtain over the landscape, and the windows of
the Negroes' cabins burned like little still red flames along the
horizon. Straight ahead the road was visible as a pale, curving streak
across the darkness.
A farmer, carrying a lantern, came down the path leading from the
fields, and hearing Ordway's footsteps in the road, flashed the light
suddenly into his face. Upon recognition there followed a cheerful
"good-night!" and the offer of the use of the lantern to Cedar Hill.
"It's a black night and you'll likely have trouble in keeping straight.
I've been to look after a sick cow, but I can feel my way up to the
house in two minutes."
"Thank you," returned Ordway, smiling as the light shone full in his
face, "but my feet are accustomed to the road."
He passed on, while the farmer turned at the gate by the roadside, to
shout cheerfully after him: "Well, good-night--Mayor!"
The gate closed quickly, and the ray of the lantern darted like a pale
yellow moth across the grass.
As Ordway went on it seemed to him that the darkness became tangible,
enveloping--that he had to fight his way through it presently as through
water. The little red flames danced along the horizon until he wondered
if they were burning only in his imagination. He felt tired and dazed as
if his body had been beaten into insensibility, but the hour through
which he had just passed appeared to have left merely a fading
impression upon his brain. Not only had he ceased to care, he had ceased
to think of it. When he tried now to recall the manager of the cotton
mills, it was to remember, with aversion, his angry little eyes, his
high nasal voice, and the wart upon the end of his long nose. At the
instant these physical details were the only associations which the
man's name presented to his thoughts. The rest was something so
insignificant that it had escaped his memory. He felt in a vague way
that he was sorry for Baxter, yet this very feeling of sympathy bored
and annoyed him. It was plainly ridiculous to be sorry for a person as
rich, as fat, as well fed as his employer. Wherever he looked the little
red flames flickered and waved in the fields, and when he lifted his
eyes to the dark sky, he saw them come and go in short, scintillant
flashes, like fire struck from an anvil. They were in his brain, he
supposed, after all, and so was this tangible darkness, and so, too, was
this indescribable delicacy and lightness with which he moved.
Everything was in his brain, even his ridiculous pity for Baxter and the
angry-eyed little manager with the wart on his long nose. He could see
these things distinctly, though he had forgotten everything that had
been so clear to him while he stood on the stage of the town hall. His
past life and the prison and even the illumination in which he had
remembered them so vividly were obscured now as if they, too, had been
received into the tangible darkness.
From the road behind him the sound of footsteps reached him suddenly,
and he quickened his pace with an impulse, rather than a determination
of flight. But the faster he walked the faster came the even beat of the
footsteps, now rising, now falling with a rhythmic regularity in the
dust of the road. Once he glanced back, but he could see nothing because
of the encompassing blackness, and in the instant of his delay it seemed
to him that the pursuit gained steadily upon him, still moving with the
regular muffled beat of the footsteps in the thick dust. A horror of
recognition had come over him, and as he walked on breathlessly, now
almost running, it occurred to him, like an inspiration, that he might
drop aside into the fields and so let his pursuer pass on ahead. The
next instant he realised that the darkness could not conceal the abrupt
pause of his flight--that as those approaching footsteps fell on his
ears, so must the sound of his fall on the ears of the man behind him.
Then a voice called his name, and he stopped short, and stood, trembling
from head to foot, by the side of the road.
"Smith!" cried the voice, "if it's you, Smith, for God's sake stop a
minute!"
"Yes, it's I," he answered, waiting, and a moment afterward the hand of
Banks reached out of the night and clasped his arm.
"Hold on," said Banks, breathing hard, "I'm all blown."
His laboured breath came with a struggling violence that died gradually
away, but while it lasted the strain of the meeting, the awkwardness of
the emotional crisis, seemed suddenly put off--suspended. Now in the
silence the tension became so great that, drawing slightly away from the
detaining hold, Ordway was about to resume his walk. At his first
movement, however, Banks clung the more firmly to his arm. "Oh, damn it,
Smith!" he burst out, and with the exclamation Ordway felt that the
touch of flesh and blood had reached to the terrible loneliness in which
he stood. In a single oath Banks had uttered the unutterable spirit of
prayer.
"You followed me?" asked Ordway quietly, while the illusions of the
flight, the physical delicacy and lightness, the tangible darkness, the
little red flames in the fields, departed from him. With the first hand
that was laid on his own, his nature swung back into balance, and he
felt that he possessed at the moment a sanity that was almost sublime.
"As soon as I could get out I came. There was such a crush," said Banks,
"I thought I'd catch up with you at once, but it was so black I couldn't
see my hand before me. In a little while I heard footsteps, so I kept
straight on."
"I wish you hadn't, Banks."
"But I had to." His usually cheerful voice sounded hoarse and throaty.
"I ain't much of a chap at words, Smith, you know that, but I want just
to say that you're the best friend I ever had, and I haven't forgot
it--I haven't forgot it," he repeated, and blew his nose. "Nothing that
that darn fool of a manager said to-night can come between you and me,"
he went on laboriously after a minute. "If you ever want my help, by
thunder, I'll go to hell and back again for you without a word."
Stretching out his free hand Ordway laid it upon his friend's shoulder.
"You're a first-rate chap, Banks," he said cheerfully, at which a loud
sob burst from Banks, who sought to disguise it the instant afterward in
a violent cough.
"You're a first-rate chap," repeated Ordway gently, "and I'm glad, in
spite of what I said, that you came after me just now. I'm going away
to-morrow, you know, and it's probable that I shan't see you again."
"But won't you stay on in Tappahannock? In two weeks all this will blow
over and things will be just what they were before."
Ordway shook his head, a movement which Banks felt, though he did not
see it.
"No, I'll go away, it's best," he answered, and though his voice had
dropped to a dull level there was still a cheerful sound to it, "I'll go
away and begin again in a new place."
"Then I'll go, too," said Banks.
"What! and leave Milly? No, you won't come. Banks, you'll stay here."
"But I'll see you sometimes, shan't I?"
"Perhaps?--that's likely, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's likely," repeated Banks, and fell silent from sheer weight
of sorrow. "At least you'll let me go with you to the station?" he said
at last, after a long pause in which he had been visited by one of those
acute flashes of sympathy which are to the heart what intuition is to
the intellect.
"Why, of course," responded Ordway, more touched by the simple request
than he had been even by the greater loyalty. "You may do that, Banks,
and I'll thank you for it. And now go back to Tappahannock," he added,
"I must take the midday train and there are a few preparations I've
still to make."
"But where will you go?" demanded Banks, swinging round again after he
had turned from him.
"Where?" repeated Ordway blankly, and he added indifferently, "I hadn't
thought."
"The midday train goes west," said Banks.
"Then, I'll go west. It doesn't matter."
Banks had already started off, when turning back suddenly, he caught
Ordway's hand and wrung it in a grip that hurt. Then without speaking
again, he hurried breathlessly in the direction from which he had come.
A few steps beyond the cross-roads Ordway saw through the heavy foliage
the light in the dining-room at Cedar Hill. Then as he entered the
avenue, he lost sight of it again, until he had rounded the curve that
swept up to the front porch. At his knock Emily opened the door, with a
lamp held in her hand, and he saw her face, surrounded by dim waves of
hair, shining pale and transparent in the glimmering circle of light. As
he followed her into the dining-room, he realised that after the family
had gone upstairs to bed, she had sat at her sewing under the lamp and
waited for his knock. At the knowledge a sense of comfort, of homeliness
came over him, and he felt all at once that his misery was not so great
as he had believed it to be a moment ago.
"May I get you something?" she asked, placing the lamp upon the table
and lowering the wick that the flame might not shine on his pallid and
haggard face.
He shook his head; then as she turned from him toward the hearth, he
followed her and stood looking down at the smouldering remains of a wood
fire. Her work-basket and a pile of white ruffles which she had been
hemming were on the table, but moved by a feeling of their utter
triviality in the midst of a tragedy she vaguely understood, she swept
them hurriedly into a chair, and came over to lay her hand upon his arm.
"What can I do? Oh, what can I do?" she asked. Taking her hand from his
sleeve, he held it for an instant in his grasp, as if the pressure of
her throbbing palm against his revived some living current under the
outer deadness that enveloped him.
"I am going away from Tappahannock to-morrow, Emily," he said.
"To-morrow?" she repeated, and laid her free hand upon his shoulder with
a soothing, motherly gesture--a gesture which changed their spiritual
relations to those of a woman and a child.
"A man asked me three questions to-night," he went on quietly, yet in a
voice which seemed to feel a pang in every word it uttered. "He asked me
if my name was Daniel Smith, and I answered--no."
As he hesitated, she lifted her face and smiled at him, with a smile
which he knew to be the one expression of love, of comprehension, that
she could offer. It was a smile which a mother might have bent upon a
child that was about to pass under the surgeon's knife, and it differed
from tears only in that it offered courage and not weakness.
"He asked me if I had been in prison before I came to Tappahannock--and
I answered--yes."
His voice broke, rather than ceased, and lifting his gaze from her hands
he looked straight into her wide-open eyes. The smile which she had
turned to him a moment before was still on her lips, frozen there in the
cold pallor of her face. Her eyes were the only things about her which
seemed alive, and they appeared to him now not as eyes but as thoughts
made visible. Bending her head quickly she kissed the hand which
enclosed her own.
"I still believe," she said, and looked into his face.
"But it is true," he replied slowly.
"But it is not the whole truth," she answered, "and for that reason it
is half a lie."
"Yes, it is not the whole truth," he repeated, in his effort to catch
something of her bright courage.
"Why should they judge you by that and by nothing else?" she demanded
with passion. "If that was true, is not your life in Tappahannock true
also?"
"To you--to you," he answered, "but to-morrow everything will be
forgotten about me except the fact that because I had been in prison, I
have lived a lie."
"You are wrong--oh, believe me, you are wrong," she said softly, while
her tears broke forth and streamed down her white face.
"No," he returned patiently, as if weighing her words in his thoughts,
"I am right, and my life here is wasted now from the day I came. All
that I do from this moment will be useless. I must go away."
"But where?" she questioned passionately, as Banks had questioned before
her.
"Where?" he echoed, "I don't know--anywhere. The midday train goes
west."
"And what will you do in the new place?" she asked through her tears.
He shook his head as if the question hardly concerned him.
"I shall begin again," he answered indifferently at last.
She was turning hopelessly from him, when her eyes fell upon a slip of
yellow paper which Beverly had placed under a vase on the mantel, and
drawing it out, she glanced at the address before giving it into
Ordway's hands.
"This must have come for you in the afternoon," she said, "I did not see
it."
Taking the telegram from her, he opened it slowly, and read the words
twice over.
"Your father died last night. Will you come home?
"RICHARD ORDWAY."
BOOK THIRD
THE LARGER PRISON
CHAPTER I
THE RETURN TO LIFE
As the train rounded the long curve, Ordway leaned from the window and
saw spread before him the smiling battlefields that encircled Botetourt.
From the shadow and sunlight of the distance a wind blew in his face,
and he felt suddenly younger, fresher, as if the burden of the years had
been lifted from him. The Botetourt to which he was returning was the
place of his happiest memories; and closing his eyes to the landscape,
he saw Lydia standing under the sparrows that flew out from the ivied
walls of the old church. He met her pensive gaze; he watched her faint
smile under the long black feather in her hat.
"His death was unexpected," said a strange voice in his ear, "but for
the past five years I've seen that he was a failing man."
The next instant his thoughts had scattered like startled birds, and
without turning his head, he sat straining his ears to follow the
conversation that went on, above the roar of the train, in the seat
behind him.
"Had a son, didn't he?" inquired the man who had not spoken. "What's
become of him, I'd like to know? I mean the chap who went to smash
somewhere in the North."
"Oh, he misappropriated trust funds and got found out and sent to
prison. When he came out, he went West, I heard, and struck a gold mine,
but, all the same, he left his wife and children for the old man to look
after. Ever seen his wife? Well, she's a downright saint, if there ever
lived one."
"And yet he went wrong, the more's the pity."
"It's a funny thing," commented the first speaker, who was evidently of
a philosophic bent, "but I've often noticed that a good wife is apt to
make a bad husband. It looks somehow as if male human nature, like the
Irish members, is obliged to sit on the Opposition bench. The only
example that ever counts with it, is an example that urges the other
way."
"Well, what about this particular instance? I hope at least that she has
come into the old man's money?"
"Nobody can tell, but it's generally believed that the two children will
get the most of it. The son left a boy and a girl when he went to
prison, you know."
"Ah, that's rather a pity, isn't it?"
"Well, I can't say--they've got good blood as well as bad, when it comes
to that. My daughter went to school with the girl, and she was said to
be, by long odds, the most popular member of her class. She graduated
last spring, and people tell me that she has turned out to be the
handsomest young woman in Botetourt."
"Like the mother?"
"No, dark and tall, with those snapping blue eyes of her
grandmother's----"
* * * * *
So Alice was no longer the little girl in short white skirts,
outstanding like a ballet dancer's! There was a pang for him in the
thought, and he tried in vain to accustom himself to the knowledge that
she would meet him to-night as a woman, not as a child. He remembered
the morning when she had run out, as he passed up the staircase, to beg
him to come in to listen to her music lesson; and with the sound of the
stumbling scales in his ears, he felt again that terrible throbbing of
his pulses and the dull weight of anguish which had escaped at last in
an outburst of bitterness.
With a jolting motion the train drew up into the little station, and
following the crowd that pressed through the door of the car, he emerged
presently into the noisy throng of Negro drivers gathered before the
rusty vehicles which were waiting beside the narrow pavement. Pushing
aside the gaily decorated whips which encircled him at his approach, he
turned, after a moment's hesitation, into one of the heavily shaded
streets, which seemed to his awakened memory to have remained unaltered
since the afternoon upon which he had left the town almost twenty years
ago. The same red and gold maples stirred gently above his head; the
same silent, green-shuttered houses were withdrawn behind glossy
clusters of microphylla rose-creepers. Even the same shafts of sunshine
slanted across the roughly paved streets, which were strewn thickly
with yellowed leaves. It was to Ordway as if a pleasant dream had
descended upon the place, and had kept unchanged the particular golden
stillness of that autumn afternoon when he had last seen it. All at once
he realised that what Tappahannock needed was not progress, but age; and
he saw for the first time that the mellowed charm of Botetourt was
relieved against the splendour of an historic background. Not the
distinction of the present, but the enchantment of the past, produced
this quality of atmosphere into which the thought of Tappahannock
entered like a vulgar discord. The dead, not the living, had built these
walls, had paved these streets, had loved and fought and starved beneath
these maples; and it was the memory of such solemn things that steeped
the little town in its softening haze of sentiment. A thrill of
pleasure, more intense than any he had known for months, shot through
his heart, and the next instant he acknowledged with a sensation of
shame that he was returning, not only to his people, but to his class.
Was this all that experience, that humiliation, could do for one--that
he should still find satisfaction in the refinements of habit, in the
mere external pleasantness of life? As he passed the old church he saw
that the sparrows still fluttered in and out of the ivy, which was full
of twittering cries like a gigantic bird's nest, and he had suddenly a
ghostly feeling as if he were a moving shadow under shadowy trees and
unreal shafts of sunlight. A moment later he almost held his breath
lest the dark old church and the dreamy little town should vanish before
his eyes and leave him alone in the outer space of shadows.
Coming presently under a row of poplars to the street in which stood his
father's house--a square red brick building with white Doric columns to
the portico--he saw with a shock of surprise that the funeral carriages
were standing in a solemn train for many blocks. Until that moment it
had not occurred to him that he might come in time to look on the dead
face of the man who had not forgiven him while he was alive; and at
first he shivered and shrank back as if hesitating to enter the door
that had been so lately closed against him. An old Negro driver, who sat
on the curbing, wiping the broad black band on his battered silk hat
with a red bandanna handkerchief, turned to speak to him with mingled
sympathy and curiosity.
"Ef'n you don' hurry up, you'll miss de bes' er hit, marster," he
remarked. "Dey's been gwine on a pow'ful long time, but I'se been
a-lisenin' wid all my years en I ain' hyearn nairy a sh'ut come thoo' de
do'. Lawd! Lawd! dey ain' mo'n like I mo'n, caze w'en dey buried my
Salviny I set up sech a sh'uttin' dat I bu'st two er my spar ribs clean
ter pieces."
Still muttering to himself he fell to polishing his old top hat more
vigorously, while Ordway quickened his steps with an effort, and
entering the gate, ascended the brick walk to the white steps of the
portico. A wide black streamer hung from the bell handle, so pushing
open the door, which gave noiselessly before him, he entered softly into
the heavy perfume of flowers. From the room on his right, which he
remembered dimly as the formal drawing-room in the days of his earliest
childhood, he heard a low voice speaking as if in prayer; and looking
across the threshold, he saw a group of black robed persons kneeling in
the faint light which fell through the chinks in the green shutters. The
intense odour of lilies awoke in him a sharp anguish, which had no
association in his thoughts with his father's death, and which he could
not explain until the incidents of his mother's funeral crowded, one by
one, into his memory. The scent of lilies was the scent of death in his
nostrils, and he saw again the cool, high-ceiled room in the midst of
which her coffin had stood, and through the open windows the wide green
fields in which spring was just putting forth. That was nearly thirty
years ago, yet the emotion he felt at this instant was less for his
father who had died yesterday than for his mother whom he had lost while
he was still a child.
At his entrance no one had observed him, and while the low prayer went
on, he stood with bowed head searching among the veiled figures about
the coffin for the figure of his wife. Was that Lydia, he wondered,
kneeling there in her mourning garments with her brow hidden in her
clasped hands? And as he looked at her it seemed to him that she had
never lifted the black veil which she had lowered over her face at
their last parting. Though he was outwardly now among his own people,
though the physical distance which divided him from his wife and
children was barely a dozen steps, the loneliness which oppressed him
was like the loneliness of the prison; and he understood that his real
home was not here, but in Tappahannock--that his true kinship was with
the labourers whose lives he had shared and whose bitter poverty he had
lessened. In the presence of death he was conscious of the space, the
luxury, the costly funeral wreaths that surrounded him; and these
external refinements of living produced in him a sensation of shyness,
as if he had no longer a rightful place in the class in which he had
been born. Against his will he grew ashamed of his coarse clothes and
his roughened hands; and with this burning sense of humiliation a wave
of homesickness for Tappahannock swept over him--for the dusty little
town, with its hot, close smells and for the blue tent of sky which was
visible from his ivied window at Cedar Hill. Then he remembered, with a
pang, that even from Tappahannock he had been cast out. For the second
time since his release from prison, he felt cowed and beaten, like an
animal that is driven to bay. The dead man in his coffin was more
closely woven into his surroundings than was the living son who had
returned to his inheritance.
As the grave faces looked back at him at the end of the prayer, he
realised that they belonged to branches, near or distant, of the Ordway
connections. With the first glimpse of his figure in the doorway there
came no movement of recognition; then he observed a slight start of
surprise--or was it dismay? He knew that Lydia had seen him at last,
though he did not look at her. It appeared to him suddenly that his
return was an insult to her as well as to the dead man who lay there,
helpless yet majestic, in the centre of the room. Flight seemed to him
at the instant the only amendment in his power, and he had made an
impulsive start back from the threshold, when the strained hush was
broken by a word that left him trembling and white as from a blow.
"Father!" cried a voice, in the first uncontrollable joy of recognition;
and with an impetuous rush through the crowd that surrounded her, Alice
threw herself into his arms.
A mist swam before his eyes and he lost the encircling faces in a blur
of tears; but as she clung to his breast and he held her close, he was
conscious of a fierce joy that throbbed, like a physical pain, in his
throat. The word which she had uttered had brought his soul up from the
abyss as surely as if it were lifted by the hands of angels; and with
each sobbing breath of happiness she drew, he felt that her nature was
knit more firmly into his. The repulse he had received the moment before
was forgotten, and while he held her drawn apart in the doorway, the
silence of Lydia, and even the reproach of the dead man, had ceased to
affect him. In that breathless, hysterical rush to his embrace Alice
saved him to-day as Emily's outstretched hand had saved him three years
before.
"They did not tell me! Oh, why, did they not tell me?" cried the girl,
lifting her head from his breast, and the funeral hush that shrouded the
room could not keep back the ecstasy in her voice. Even when after the
first awkward instant the others gathered around him, nervous, effusive,
friendly, Alice still clung to his hands, kissing first one and then the
other and then both together, with the exquisite joyous abandonment of a
child.
Lydia had kissed him, weeping softly under her long black veil, and
hiding her pale, lovely face the moment afterwards in her clasped hands.
Dick, his son, had touched his cheek with his fresh young mouth; Richard
Ordway, his father's brother, had shaken him by the hand; and the
others, one and all, kinsmen and kinswomen, had given him their
embarrassed, yet kindly, welcome. But it was on Alice that his eyes
rested, while he felt his whole being impelled toward her in a recovered
rapture that was almost one of worship. In her dark beauty, with her
splendid hair, her blue, flashing Ordway eyes, and her lips which were
too red and too full for perfection, she appeared to him the one vital
thing among the mourning figures in this house of death. Her delight
still ran in little tremors through her limbs, and when a moment later,
she slipped her hand through his arm, and followed Lydia and Richard
Ordway down the steps, and into one of the waiting carriages, he felt
that her bosom quivered with the emotion which the solemn presence of
his father had forced back from her lips.
CHAPTER II
HIS OWN PLACE
Some hours later when he sat alone in his room, he told himself that he
could never forget the drive home from the cemetery in the closed
carriage. Lydia had raised her veil slightly, as if in a desire for air,
and as she sat with her head resting against the lowered blind, he could
trace the delicate, pale lines of her mouth and chin, and a single wisp
of her ash blond hair which lay heavily upon her forehead. Not once had
she spoken, not once had she met his eyes of her own accord, and he had
discovered that she leaned almost desperately upon the iron presence of
Richard Ordway. Had his sin, indeed, crushed her until she had not power
to lift her head? he asked passionately, with a sharper remorse than he
had ever felt.
"I am glad that you were able to come in time," Richard Ordway remarked
in his cold, even voice; and after this the rattle of the wheels on the
cobblestones in the street was the only sound which broke the death-like
stillness in which they sat. No, he could never forget it, nor could he
forget the bewildering effect of the sunshine when they opened the
carriage door. Beside the curbing a few idle Negroes were left of the
crowd that had gathered to watch the coffin borne through the gate, and
the pavement was thick with dust, as if many hurrying feet had tramped
by since the funeral had passed. As they entered the house the scent of
lilies struck him afresh with all the agony of its associations. The
shutters were still closed, the chairs were still arranged in their
solemn circle, the streamer of crape, hurriedly untied from the bell
handle, still lay where it had been thrown on the library table; and as
he crossed the threshold, he trod upon some fading lilies which had
fallen, unnoticed, from a funeral wreath. Then, in the dining-room,
Richard Ordway poured out a glass of whiskey, and in the very instant
when he was about to raise it to his lips, he put it hurriedly down and
pushed the decanter aside with an embarrassed and furtive movement.
"Do you feel the need of a cup of coffee, Daniel?" he asked in a
pleasant, conciliatory tone, "or will you have only a glass of seltzer?"
"I am not thirsty, thank you," Daniel responded shortly, and the next
moment he asked Alice to show him the room in which he would stay.
With laughing eagerness she led him up the great staircase to the
chamber in which he had slept as a boy.
"It's just next to Dick's," she said, "and mother's and mine are
directly across the hall. At first we thought of putting you in the red
guest-room, but that's only for visitors, so we knew you would be sure
to like this better."
"Yes, I'll like this better," he responded, and then as she would have
moved away, he caught her, with a gesture of anguish, back to his arms.
"You remember me, Alice, my child? you have not forgotten me?"
She laughed merrily, biting her full red lips the moment afterward to
check the sound.
"Why, how funny of you! I was quite a big girl--don't you
remember?--when you went away. It was so dull afterwards that I cried
for days, and that was why I was so overjoyed when mamma told me you
would come back. It was never dull when you lived at home with us,
because you would always take me to the park or the circus whenever I
grew tired of dolls. Nobody did that after you went away and I used to
cry and kick sometimes thinking that they would tell you and bring you
back."
"And you remembered me chiefly because of the park and the circus?" he
asked, smiling for joy, as he kissed her hand which lay on his sleeve.
"Oh, I never forget anything, you know. Mamma even says that about me. I
remember my first nurse and the baker's boy with red cheeks who used to
bring me pink cakes when I was three years old. No, I never forget--I
never forget," she repeated with vehemence.
Animation had kindled her features into a beauty of colour which made
her eyes bluer and brighter and softened the too intense contrast of her
full, red lips.
"All these years I've hoped that you would come back and that things
would change," she said impulsively, her words tripping rapidly over
one another. "Everything is so dreadfully grave and solemn here.
Grandfather hated noise so that he would hardly let me laugh if he was
in the house. Then mamma's health is wrecked, and she lies always on the
sofa, and never goes out except for a drive sometimes when it is fair."
"Mamma's health is wrecked?" he repeated inquiringly, as she paused.
"Oh, that's what everybody says about her--her health is wrecked. And
Uncle Richard is hardly any better, for he has a wife whose health is
wrecked also. And Dick--he isn't sick, but he might as well be, he is so
dull and plodding and over nice----"
"And you Alice?"
"I? Oh, I'm not dull, but I'm unhappy--awfully--you'll find that out. I
like fun and pretty clothes and new people and strange places. I want to
marry and have a home of my own and a lot of rings like mamma's, and a
carriage with two men on the box, and to go to Europe to buy things
whenever I please. That's the way Molly Burridge does and she was only
two classes ahead of me. How rough your hands are, papa, and what a
funny kind of shirt you have on. Do people dress like that where you
came from? Well, I don't like it, so you'll have to change."
She had gone out at last, forgetting to walk properly in her mourning
garments, tripping into a run on the threshold, and then checking
herself with a prim, mocking look over her shoulder. Not until the door
had closed with a slam behind her black skirt, did Ordway's gaze turn
from following her and fix itself on the long mirror between the
windows, in which he could see, as Alice had seen the moment before, his
roughened hands, his carelessly trimmed hair and his common clothes. He
was dressed as the labourers dressed on Sundays in Tappahannock; though,
he remembered now, that in that crude little town he had been
conspicuous for the neatness, almost the jauntiness, of his attire. As
he laid out presently on the bed his few poor belongings, he told
himself, with determination, that for Alice's sake even this must be
changed. He was no longer of the class of Baxter, of Banks, of Mrs.
Twine. All that was over, and he must return now into the world in which
his wife and his children had kept a place. To do Alice honour--at least
not to do her further shame--would become from this day, he realised,
the controlling motive of his life. Then, as he looked down at the
coarse, unshapely garments upon the delicate counterpane, he knew that
Daniel Smith and Daniel Ordway were now parted forever.
He was still holding one of the rough blue shirts in his hand, when a
servant entered to inquire if there was anything that he might need. The
man, a bright young mulatto, was not one of the old family slaves; and
while he waited, alert and intelligent, upon the threshold, Ordway was
seized by a nervous feeling that he was regarded with curiosity and
suspicion by the black rolling eyes.
"Where is uncle Boaz? He used to wait upon me," he asked.
"He's daid, suh. He drapped down daid right on de do' step."
"And Aunt Mirandy?"
"She's daid, too, en' I'se her chile."
"Oh, you are, are you?" said Ordway, and he had again the sensation that
he was watched through inquisitive eyes. "That is all now," he added
presently, "you may go," and it was with a long breath of relief that he
saw the door close after the figure of Aunt Mirandy's son.
When a little later he dressed himself and went out into the hall, he
found, to his annoyance, that he walked with a cautious and timid step
like that of a labourer who has stumbled by accident into surroundings
of luxury. As he descended the wide curving staircase, with his hand on
the mahogany balustrade, the sound of his footsteps seemed to
reverberate disagreeably through the awful funereal silence in which he
moved. If he could only hear Alice's laugh, Dick's whistle, or even the
garrulous flow of the Negro voices that he had listened to in his
childhood. With a pang he recalled that Uncle Boaz was dead, and his
heart swelled as he remembered how often he had passed up and down this
same staircase on the old servant's shoulder. At that age he had felt no
awe of the shining emptiness and the oppressive silence. Then he had
believed himself to be master of all at which he looked; now he was
conscious of that complete detachment from his surroundings which
produces almost a sense of the actual separation of soul and body.
Reaching the hall below, he found that some hurried attempt had been
made to banish or to conceal the remaining signs of the funeral. The
doors and windows were open, the shreds of crape had disappeared from
the carpet, and the fading lilies had been swept out upon the graveled
walk in the yard. Upon entering the library, which invited him by its
rows of calf-bound books, he discovered that Richard Ordway was
patiently awaiting him in the large red leather chair which had once
been the favourite seat of his father.
"Before I go home, I think it better to have a little talk with you,
Daniel," began the old man, as he motioned to a sofa on the opposite
side of the Turkish rug before the open grate. "It has been a peculiar
satisfaction to me to feel that I was able to bring you back in time for
the service."
"I came," replied Daniel slowly, "as soon as I received your telegram."
He hesitated an instant and then went on in the same quiet tone in which
the other had spoken, "Do you think, though, that he would have wished
me to come at all?"
After folding the newspaper which he had held in his hand, Richard laid
it, with a courteous gesture upon the table beside him. As he sat there
with his long limbs outstretched and relaxed, and his handsome, severe
profile resting against the leather back of his chair, the younger man
was impressed, as if for the first time, by the curious mixture of
strength and refinement in his features. He was not only a cleverer man
than his brother had been, he was gentler, smoother, more distinguished
on every side. In spite of his reserve, it was evident that he had
wished to be kind--that he wished it still; yet this kindness was so
removed from the ordinary impulse of humanity that it appeared to his
nephew to be in a way as detached and impersonal as an abstract virtue.
The very lines of his face were drawn with the precision, the finality,
of a geometrical figure. To imagine that they could melt into tenderness
was as impossible as to conceive of their finally crumbling into dust.
"He would have wished it--he did wish it," he said, after a minute. "I
talked with him only a few hours before his death, and he told me then
that it was necessary to send for you--that he felt that he had
neglected his duty in not bringing you home immediately after your
release. He saw at last that it would have been far better to have acted
as I strongly advised at the time."
"It was his desire, then, that I should return?" asked Daniel, while a
stinging moisture rose to his eyes at the thought that he had not looked
once upon the face of the dead man. "I wish I had known."
A slight surprise showed in the other's gesture of response, and he
glanced hastily away as he might have done had he chanced to surprise
his nephew while he was still without his boots or his shirt.
"I think he realised before he died that the individual has no right to
place his personal pride above the family tie," he resumed quietly,
ignoring the indecency of emotion as he would have ignored, probably,
the unclothed body. "I had said much the same thing to him eight years
ago, when I told him that he would realise before his death that he was
not morally free to act as he had done with regard to you. As a matter
of fact," he observed in his trained, legal voice, "the family is, after
all, the social unit, and each member is as closely related as the eye
to the ear or the right arm to the left. It is illogical to speak of
denying one's flesh and blood, for it can't be done."
So this was why they had received him. He turned his head away, and his
gaze rested upon the boughs of the great golden poplar beyond the
window.
"It is understood, then," he asked "that I am to come back--back to this
house to live?"
When he had finished, but not until then, Richard Ordway looked at him
again with his dry, conventional kindness. "If you are free," he began,
altering the word immediately lest it should suggest painful
associations to his companion's mind, "I mean if you have no other
binding engagements, no decided plans for the future."
"No, I have made no other plans. I was working as a bookkeeper in a
tobacco warehouse in Tappahannock."
"As a bookkeeper?" repeated Richard, as he glanced down inquiringly at
the other's hands.
"Oh, I worked sometimes out of doors, but the position I held was that
of confidential clerk."
The old man nodded amiably, accepting the explanation with a readiness
for which the other was not prepared. "I was about to offer you some
legal work in my office," he remarked. "Dry and musty stuff, I fear it
is, but it's better--isn't it?--for a man to have some kind of
occupation----"
Though the words were uttered pleasantly enough, it seemed to the
younger man that the concluding and significant phrase was left
unspoken. "Some kind of occupation to keep you out of temptation" was
what Richard had meant to say--what he had withheld, from consideration,
if not from humanity. While the horror of the whole situation closed
over Daniel like a mental darkness, he remembered the sensitive
shrinking of Lydia on the drive home, the prying, inquisitive eyes of
the mulatto servant, the furtive withdrawal of the whiskey by the man
who sat opposite to him. With all its attending humiliation and despair,
there rushed upon him the knowledge that by the people of his own
household he was regarded still as a creature to be restrained and
protected at every instant. Though outwardly they had received him,
instinctively they had repulsed him. The thing which stood between them
and himself was neither of their making nor of his. It belonged to their
very nature and was woven in with their inner fibre. It was a creation,
not of the individual, but of the race, and the law by which it existed
was rooted deep in the racial structure. Tradition, inheritance,
instinct--these were the barriers through which he had broken and which
had closed like the impenetrable sea-gates behind him. Though he were
to live on day by day as a saint among them, they could never forget:
though he were to shed his heart's blood for them, they would never
believe. To convince them of his sincerity was more hopeless, he
understood, than to reanimate their affection. In their very forgiveness
they had not ceased to condemn him, and in the shelter which they
offered him there would be always a hidden restraint. With the thought
it seemed to him that he was stifling in the closeness of the
atmosphere, that he must break away again, that he must find air and
freedom, though it cost him all else besides. The possibility of his own
weakness seemed created in him by their acceptance of it; and he felt
suddenly a terror lest the knowledge of their suspicion should drive him
to justify it by his future in Botetourt.
"Yes, it is better for me to work," he said aloud. "I hope that I shall
be able to make myself of some small use in your office."
"There's no doubt of that, I'm sure," responded Richard, in his
friendliest tone.
"It is taken for granted, then, that I shall live on here with my wife
and children?"
"We have decided that it is best. But as for your wife, you must
remember that she is very much of an invalid. Do not forget that she has
had a sad--a most tragic life."
"I promise you that I shall not forget it--make your mind easy."
After this it seemed to Daniel that there was nothing further to be
said; but before rising from his chair, the old man sat for a moment
with his thin lips tightly folded and a troubled frown ruffling his
forehead. In the dim twilight the profile outlined against the leather
chair appeared to have been ground rather than roughly hewn out of
granite.
"About the disposition of the estate, there were some changes made
shortly before your father's death," remarked Richard presently. "In the
will itself you were not mentioned; a provision was made for your wife
and the bulk of the property left to your two children. But in a
codicil, which was added the day before your father died, he directed
that you should be given a life interest in the house as well as in
investments to the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
This is to be paid you in the form of a quarterly allowance, which will
yield you a personal income of about six thousand a year."
"I understand," replied the younger man, without emotion, almost without
surprise. At the moment he was wondering by what name his father had
alluded to him in his will. Had he spoken of him as "my son," or merely
as "Daniel Ordway"?
"That is all, I think," remarked the other, with a movement which
expressed, in spite of him, a sensation of relief. With a smile which
appeared to be little more than a muscular contraction of his mouth, he
held out his hand and stood for a moment, vainly searching for a phrase
or a word that would fit the delicate requirements of the occasion.
"Well, I shall never cease to be thankful that you were with us at the
cemetery," he said at last in a tone which was a patent admission that
he had failed. Then, with a kindly inclination of his head, he released
the hand he held and passed at his rapid, yet dignified step out of the
house.
CHAPTER III
THE OUTWARD PATTERN
The front door had hardly closed when a breath of freshness blew into
the library with the entrance of Alice, and a moment afterwards the
butler rolled back the mahogany doors of the dining-room and they saw
the lighted candles and the chrysanthemums upon the dinner table.
"We hardly ever dress," said Alice, slipping her hand through his arm,
"I wish we did."
"Well, if you'll only pardon these clothes to-night I'll promise to call
on the tailor before breakfast," he returned, smiling, conscious that he
watched in anxiety lest the look of delight in his presence should
vanish from her face.
"Oh, it doesn't matter now, because we're in the deepest grief--aren't
we?--and mamma isn't coming down. She wants to see you, by the way, just
for a minute when you go upstairs. It is to be just for a minute, I was
to be very particular about that, as she is broken down. I wonder why
they have put so many covers. There is nobody but you and Dick. I asked
Uncle Richard, but he said that he wouldn't stay. It's just as well he
didn't--he's so dreadfully dull, isn't he, papa?"
"All I wish is that I were dull in Uncle Richard's way," remarked Dick,
with his boyish air of superiority, "I'd be the greatest lawyer in the
state then, when my turn came."
"And you'd be even more tiresome than you are now," retorted the girl
with a flash of irritation which brought out three fine, nervous
wrinkles on her delicate forehead.
"Well, I shouldn't have your temper anyway," commented Dick
imperturbably, as he ate his soup. "Do you remember, papa, how Alice
used to bite and scratch as a baby? She'd like to behave exactly that
way now if she weren't so tall."
"Oh, I know Alice better than you do," said Ordway, in a voice which he
tried to make cheerful. The girl sat on his right, and while she choked
back her anger, he reached out and catching her hand, held it against
his cheek. "We stand together, Alice and I," he said softly--"Alice and
I."
As he repeated the words a wave of joy rose in his heart, submerging the
disappointment, the bitterness, the hard despair, of the last few hours.
Here also, as well as in Tappahannock, he found awaiting him his
appointed task.
Dick laughed pleasantly, preserving always the unshakable
self-possession which reminded his father of Richard Ordway. He was a
good boy, Daniel knew, upright, honest, manly, all the things which his
grandfather and his great-grandfather had been before him.
"Then you'll have to stand with Geoffrey Heath," he said jestingly,
"and, by Jove, I don't think I'd care for his company."
"Geoffrey Heath?" repeated Ordway inquiringly, with his eyes on his
daughter, who sat silent and angry, biting her lower lip. Her mouth,
which he had soon discovered to be her least perfect feature, was at the
same time her most expressive one. At her slightest change of mood, he
watched it tremble into a smile or a frown, and from a distance it was
plainly the first thing one noticed about her face. Now, as she sat
there, with her eyes on her plate, her vivid lips showed like a splash
of carmine in the lustreless pallor of her skin.
"Oh, he's one of Alice's chums," returned Dick with his merciless
youthful sneer, "she has a pretty lot of them, too, though he is by long
odds the worst."
"Well, he's rich enough anyway," protested Alice defiantly, "he keeps
beautiful horses and sends me boxes of candy, and I don't care a bit for
the rest."
"Who is he, by the way?" asked Daniel. "There was a family of Heaths who
lived near us in the country when I was a boy. Is he one of these?"
"He's the son of old Rupert Heath, who made a million out of some panic
in stocks. Uncle Richard says the father was all right, but he's tried
his best to break up Alice's craze about Geoffrey. But let her once get
her nose to the wind and nobody can do anything with her."
"Well, I can, can't I, darling?" asked Ordway, smiling in spite of a
jealous pang. The appeal of the girl to him was like the appeal of the
finer part of his own nature. Her temptations he recognised as the old
familiar temptations of his youth, and the kinship between them seemed
at the moment something deeper and more enduring than the tie of blood.
Yet the thought that she was his daughter awoke in him a gratitude that
was almost as acute as pain. The emptiness of his life was filled
suddenly to over-flowing, and he felt again that he had found here as he
had found at Tappahannock both his mission and his reward.
When dinner was over he left the boy and girl in the library and went
slowly, and with a nervous hesitation, upstairs to the room in which
Lydia was lying on her couch, with a flower-decked tray upon the little
inlaid table beside her. As he entered the room something in the
luxurious atmosphere--in the amber satin curtains, the white bearskin
rugs, the shining mirrors between the windows--recalled the early years
of his marriage, and as he remembered them, he realised for the first
time the immensity of the change which divided his present existence
from his past. The time had been when he could not separate his inner
life from his surroundings, and with the thought he saw in his memory
the bare cleanliness of the blue guest-room at Cedar Hill--with its
simple white bed, its rag carpet, its faded sampler worked in blue
worsteds. That place had become as a sanctuary to him now, for it was
there that he had known his most perfect peace, his completest
reconciliation with God.
As he entered the room Lydia raised herself slightly upon her elbow, and
without turning her head, nervously pushed back a white silk shawl which
she had thrown over her knees. A lamp with an amber shade cast its light
on her averted profile, and he noticed that its perfect outline, its
serene loveliness, was untouched by suffering. Already he had discovered
those almost imperceptible furrows between Alice's eyebrows, but when
Lydia looked up at him at last, he saw that her beautiful forehead,
under its parting of ash blond hair, was as smooth as a child's. Was it
merely the Madonna-like arrangement of her hair, after all, he wondered,
not without bitterness, that had bestowed upon her that appealing
expression of injured innocence?
"You wished to speak to me, Alice said," he began with an awkward
gesture, acutely conscious, as he stood there, of the amber light in the
room, of the shining waves of her hair, of the delicate perfume which
floated from the gold-topped boxes upon her dressing-table. An oval
mirror above the mantel gave back to him the reflection of his own
roughly clad figure, and the violent contrast between himself and his
surroundings stung him into a sense of humiliation that was like a
physical smart.
"I thought it better to speak to you--Uncle Richard and Dick advised me
to----" she broke off in a gentle confusion, lifting her lovely, pensive
eyes for the first time to his face.
"Of course it is better, Lydia," he answered gravely. "You must let me
know what you wish--you must tell me quite frankly just what you would
rather that I should do----"
The look of gratitude in her face gave him a sudden inexplicable pang.
"I am hardly more than an invalid," she said in a voice that had grown
firm and sweet, "Uncle Richard will tell you----"
Her reliance upon Richard Ordway aroused in him a passion of resentment,
and for an instant the primitive man in him battled hotly against the
renunciation his lips had made.
"I know, I understand," he said hurriedly at last. "I appreciate it all
and I shall do whatever is in my power to make it easier for you." As he
looked at her bowed head a wave of remorse rose in his breast and swept
down, one by one, the impulses of anger, of pride, of self-righteousness.
"O my dear, my dear, don't you think I know what I have done to you?" he
asked, and going a step toward her, he fell on his knees beside the
couch and kissed passionately the hand that lay in her lap. "Don't you
think I know that I have ruined your life?"
For a moment her eyes dwelt thoughtfully upon his, and she let her hand
lie still beneath his remorseful kisses, until her withdrawal of it had
lost any appearance of haste or of discourtesy.
"Then you will not object to my living on in this way? You will not seek
to change anything? You will----" She hesitated and broke off, not
impulsively, but with the same clear, sweet voice in which she had put
her question.
Lifting his head, he looked up at her from his knees, and the dumb
loneliness in his eyes caused her at last to drop her own to the rug
upon which he knelt.
"If you will only let me care for you--serve you--work for you," he
implored brokenly. "If you will only let me make up, however poorly,
something of what you have suffered."
A vague discomfort, produced in her by the intensity of his gaze, moved
her to draw slightly away from him, while she turned restlessly on her
pillows. At the first shade of perplexity, of annoyance, that showed in
her face, he felt, with a terrible power of intuition, that she was
seeking in vain to estimate each of his heartbroken words at its full
value--to read calmly by the light of experience the passion for
atonement to which his lips had tried hopelessly to give expression. The
wall of personality rose like a visible object between them. He might
beat against it in desperation until his strength was gone, yet he knew
that it would remain forever impenetrable, and through its thickness
there would pass only the loud, unmeaning sound of each other's voice.
"Have you lost all love for me, Lydia?" he asked. "Have you even
forgotten that I am the father of your children?"
As soon as his words were uttered, he stumbled to his feet, horrified by
the effect upon her. A change that was like a spasm of physical nausea
had shaken her limbs, and he felt rather than saw that she had shrunk
from him, convulsed and quivering, until she was crushed powerless
against the back of the sofa on which she lay. Her whole attitude, he
realised, was the result, not of a moral judgment, but of a purely
physical antipathy. Her horror of him had become instinctive, and she
was no more responsible for its existence than a child is responsible
for the dread aroused in it by the goblins of nursery rhymes. His life
as a convict had not only unclassed him in her eyes, it had put him
entirely outside and below the ordinary relations of human beings. To
his wife he must remain forever an object of pity, perhaps, but of
intense loathing and fear also.
The wave of remorse turned to bitterness on his lips, and all the
tenderer emotions he had felt when he knelt by her side--the
self-reproach, the spiritual yearning, the passion for goodness, all
these were extinguished in the sense of desolation which swept over him.
"Don't be afraid," he said coldly, "I shall not touch you."
"It was nothing--a moment's pain," she answered, in a wistful,
apologetic voice.
She was playing nervously with the fringe of the silk shawl, and he
stood for a minute in silence while he watched her long, slender fingers
twine themselves in and out of the tasseled ends. Then turning aside she
pushed away the coffee service on the little table as if its fragrance
annoyed her.
"Is it in your way? Do you wish it removed?" he inquired, and when she
had nodded in reply, he lifted the tray and carried it in the direction
of the door. "Don't be afraid. It is all right," he repeated as he went
out.
Back in his own room again, he asked himself desperately if this
existence could be possible? Would it not be better for him to lose
himself a second time--to throw in his lot with a lower class, since his
own had rejected him? Flinging himself on the floor beside the window,
he pressed his forehead against the white painted wood as if the outward
violence could deaden the throbbing agony he felt within. Again he smelt
the delicate, yet intense perfume of Lydia's chamber; again he saw her
shrinking from him until she lay crushed and white against the back of
the sofa; again he watched her features contract with the instinctive
repulsion she could not control. The pitiful deprecating gesture with
which she had murmured: "It is nothing--a moment's pain," was seared
forever like the mark from a burning iron into his memory.