The Ancient Law

"I have telephoned for Uncle Richard," she said in a subdued tone, "and he has just sent me word that after making inquiries, he learned that Geoffrey Heath went to Washington on the afternoon train."

"And Alice is with him!"

"If she is not, where is she?" Her eyes filled with tears, and sinking into a chair she dropped her face in her clasped hands. "Oh, I wish Uncle Richard would come," she moaned through her fingers.

Again he felt a smothered resentment at this implicit reliance upon Richard Ordway. "We must make sure first that she is gone," he said, "and then it will be time enough to consider ways and means of bringing her back."

Turning abruptly away from her, he went out of the library and up the staircase to Alice's room, which was situated directly across the hall from his own. At the first glance it seemed to him that nothing was missing, but when he looked at her dressing-table in the alcove, he found that it had been stripped of her silver toilet articles, and that her little red leather bag, which he had filled with banknotes a few days ago, was not in the top drawer where she kept it. Something in the girl's chamber, so familiar, so redolent of associations with her bright presence, tore at his heart with a fresh sense of loss, like a gnawing pain that fastens into a new wound. On the bed he saw her pink flannel dressing-gown, with the embroidered collar which had so delighted her when she had bought it; on the floor at one side lay her pink quilted slippers, slightly soiled from use; and between the larger pillows was the delicate, lace-trimmed baby's pillow upon which she slept. The perfume of her youth, her freshness, was still in the room, as if she had gone from it for a little while through a still open door.

At a touch on his arm he looked round startled, to find one of the servants – the single remaining slave of the past generation – rocking her aged body as she stood at his side.

"She ain' gwine come back no mo' – Yes, Lawd, she ain' gwine come back no mo'. Whut's done hit's done en hit cyarn be undone agin."

"Why, Aunt Mehaley, what do you mean?" he demanded sternly, oppressed, in spite of himself by her wailing voice and her African superstition.

"I'se seen er tur'ble heap done in my day wid dese hyer eyes," resumed the old negress, "but I ain' never seen none un um undone agin atter deys wunst been done. You kin cut down er tree, but you cyarn' mek hit grow back togedder. You kin wring de neck er a rooster, but you cyarn' mek him crow. Yes, my Lawd, hit's easy to pull down, but hit's hard to riz up. I'se ole, Marster, en I'se mos' bline wid lookin', but I ain' never seen whut's done undone agin."

She tottered out, still wailing in her half-crazed voice, and hastily shutting the drawers of the dressing-table, he went downstairs again to where Lydia awaited him in the library.

"There's no doubt, I fear, that she's gone with Heath," he said, with a constraint into which he had schooled himself on the staircase. "As he appears to have stopped at Washington, I shall take the next train there, which leaves at nine-twenty-five. If they are married – "

He broke off, struck by the pallor that overspread her face.

"But they are married! They must be married!" she cried in terror.

For an instant he stared back at her white face in a horror as great as hers. Was it the first time in his life, he questioned afterwards, that he had been brought face to face with the hideous skeletons upon which living conventions assume a semblance of truth?

"I hope to heaven that he has not married her!" he exclaimed in a passion from which she shrank back trembling. "Good God! do you want me to haggle with a cad like that to make him marry my child?"

"And if he doesn't? what then?" moaned Lydia, in a voice that seemed to fade away while she spoke.

"If he doesn't I shall be almost tempted to bless his name. Haven't you proved to me that he is a cheat and a brute and a libertine, and yet you dare to tell me that I must force him to marry Alice. Oh, if he will only have the mercy to leave her free, I may still save her!" he said.

She looked at him with dilated eyes as if rooted in fear to the spot upon which she stood. "But the consequences," she urged weakly at last in a burst of tears.

"Oh, I'll take the consequences," he retorted harshly, as he went out.

An hour later, when he was settled in the rushing train, it seemed to him that he was able to find comfort in the words with which he had separated from his wife. Let Alice do what she would, there was always hope for her in the thought that he might help her to bear, even if he could not remove from her, the consequences of her actions. Could so great a force as his love for her fail to avert from her young head at least a portion of her inevitable disillusionment? The recollection of her beauty, of her generosity, and of the wreck of her womanhood almost before it had begun, not only added to his suffering, but seemed in some inexplicable way to increase his love. The affection he had always felt for her was strengthened now by that touch of pity which lends a deeper tenderness to all human relations.

Upon reaching Washington he found that a shower had come up, and the pavements were already wet when he left the station. He had brought no umbrella, but he hardly heeded this in the eagerness which drove him from street to street in his search for his child. After making vain inquiries at several of the larger hotels, he had begun to feel almost hopeless, when going into the newest and most fashionable of them all, he discovered that "Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Heath" had been assigned an apartment there an hour before. In answer to his question the clerk informed him that the lady had ordered her dinner served upstairs, leaving at the same time explicit instructions that she was "not at home" to anyone who should call. But in spite of this rebuff, he drew out his card, and sat down in a chair in the brilliantly lighted lobby. He had selected a seat near a radiator in the hope of drying his damp clothes, and presently a little cloud of steam rose from his shoulders and drifted out into the shining space. As he watched the gorgeous, over-dressed women who swept by him, he remembered as one remembers a distant dream, the years when his life had been spent among such crowds in just such a dazzling glare of electric light. It appeared false and artificial to him now, but in the meantime, he reflected, while he looked on, he had been in prison.

A voice at his elbow interrupted his thoughts, and turning in response to an invitation from a buttoned sleeve, he entered an elevator and was borne rapidly aloft among a tightly wedged group of women who were loudly bewailing their absence from the theatre. It was with difficulty that he released himself at the given signal from his escort, and stepped out upon the red velvet carpet which led to Alice's rooms. In response to a knock from the boy who had accompanied him, the door flew open with a jerk, and Alice appeared before him in a bewildering effect of lace and pink satin.

"O papa, papa, you naughty darling!" she exclaimed, and was in his arms before he had time to utter the reproach on his lips.

With her head on his breast, he was conscious at first only of an irresponsible joy, like the joy of the angels for whom evil no longer exists. To know that she was alive, that she was safe, that she was in his arms, seemed sufficient delight, not only unto the day, but unto his whole future as well. Then the thought of what it meant to find her thus in her lace and satin came over him, and drawing slightly away he looked for the first time into her face.

"Alice, what does it mean?" he asked, as he kissed her.

Pushing the loosened hair back from her forehead, she met his question with a protesting pout.

"It means that you're a wicked boy to run away from home like this and be all by yourself in a bad city," she responded with a playful shake of her finger. Then she caught his hand and drew him down on the sofa beside her in the midst of the filmy train of her tea-gown. "If you promise never to do it again, I shan't tell mamma on you," she added, with a burst of light-hearted merriment.

"Where were you married, Alice? and who did it?" he asked sternly.

At his tone a ripple of laughter broke from her lips, and reaching for her little red leather bag on the table, she opened it and tossed a folded paper upon his knees. "I didn't ask his name," she responded, "but you can find it all written on that, I suppose."

"And you cared nothing for me? – nothing for my anxiety, my distress?"

"I always meant to telegraph you, of course. Geoffrey has gone down now to do it."

"But were you obliged to leave home in this way? If you had told me you loved him, I should have understood – should have sympathised."

"Oh, but mamma wouldn't, and I had to run off. Of course, I wanted a big wedding like other girls, and a lot of bridesmaids and a long veil, but I knew you'd never consent to it, so I made up my mind just to slip away without saying a word. Geoffrey is so rich that I can make up afterwards for the things I missed when I was married. This is what he gave me to-day. Isn't it lovely?"

Baring her throat she showed him a pearl necklace hidden beneath her lace collar. "We're sailing day after to-morrow," she went on, delightedly, "and we shall go straight to Paris because I am dying to see the shops. I wouldn't run away with him until he promised to take me there."

There was no regret in her mind, no misgiving, no disquietude. The thought of his pain had not marred for an instant the pleasure of her imaginary shopping. "O papa, I am happy, so happy!" she sang aloud, springing suddenly to her full height and standing before him in her almost barbaric beauty – from the splendid hair falling upon her shoulders to the little feet that could not keep still for sheer joy of living. He saw her red mouth glow and tremble as she bent toward him. "To think that I'm really and truly out of Botetourt at last!" she cried.

"Then you've no need of me and I may as well go home?" he said a little wistfully as he rose.

At this she hung upon his neck for a minute with her first show of feeling. "I'd rather you wouldn't stay till Geoffrey comes back," she answered, abruptly releasing him, "because it would be a surprise to him and he's always so cross when he's surprised. He has a perfectly awful temper," she confided in a burst of frankness, "but I've learned exactly how to manage him, so it doesn't matter. Then he's so handsome, too. I shouldn't have looked at him twice if he hadn't been handsome. Now, go straight home and take good care of yourself and don't get fat and bald before I come back."

She kissed him several times, laughing in little gasps, while she held him close in her arms. Then putting him from her, she pushed him gently out into the hall. As the door closed on her figure, he felt that it shut upon all that was living or warm in his heart.

BOOK FOURTH

LIBERATION

CHAPTER I

The Inward Light

ON the day that he returned to Botetourt, it seemed to Ordway that the last vestige of his youth dropped from him; and one afternoon six months later, as he passed some schoolboys who were playing ball in the street, he heard one of them remark in an audible whisper: "Just wait till that old fellow over there gets out of the way." Since coming home again his interests, as well as his power of usefulness, had been taken from him; and the time that he had spent in prison had aged him less than the three peaceful years which he had passed in Botetourt. All that suffering and experience could not destroy had withered and died in the monotonous daily round which carried him from his home to Richard's office and back again from Richard's office to his home.

Outwardly he had grown only more quiet and gentle, as people are apt to do who approach the middle years in a position of loneliness and dependence. To Richard and to Lydia, who had never entirely ceased to watch him, it appeared that he had at last "settled down," that he might be, perhaps, trusted to walk alone; and it was with a sensation of relief that his wife observed the intense youthful beam fade from his blue eyes. When his glance grew dull and lifeless, and his features fell gradually into the lines of placid repose which mark the body's contentment rather than the spirit's triumph, it seemed to her that she might at last lay aside the sleepless anxiety which had been her marriage portion.

"He has become quite like other people now," she said one day to Richard, "do you know that he has grown to take everything exactly as a matter of course, and I really believe he enjoys what he eats."

"I'm glad of that," returned Richard, "for I've noticed that he is looking very far from well. I advised him several weeks ago to take care of that cough, but he seems to have some difficulty in getting rid of it."

"He hasn't been well since Alice's marriage," observed Lydia, a little troubled. "You know he travelled home from Washington in wet clothes and had a spell of influenza afterward. He's had a cold ever since, for I hear him coughing a good deal after he first goes to bed."

"You'd better make him attend to it, I think, though with his fine chest there's little danger of anything serious."

"Do you suppose Alice's marriage could have sobered him? He's grown very quiet and grave, and I dare say it's a sign that his wildness has gone out of him, poor fellow. You remember how his laugh used to frighten me? Well, he never laughs like that now, though he sometimes stares hard at me as if he were looking directly through me, and didn't even know that he was doing it."

As she spoke she glanced out of the window and her eyes fell on Daniel, who came slowly up the gravelled walk, his head bent over an armful of old books he carried.

"He visits a great deal among the poor," remarked Richard, "and I think that's good for him, provided, of course, that he does it with discretion."

"I suppose it is," said Lydia, though she added immediately, "but aren't the poor often very immoral?"

A reply was on Richard's lips, but before he could utter it, the door opened and Daniel entered with the slow, almost timid, step into which he had schooled himself since his return to Botetourt. As he saw Richard a smile – his old boyish smile of peculiar sweetness – came to his lips, but without speaking, he crossed to the table and laid down the books he carried.

"If those are old books, won't you remember to take them up to your room, Daniel?" said Lydia, in her tone of aggrieved sweetness. "They make such a litter in the library."

He started slightly, a nervous affection which had increased in the last months, and looked at her with an apologetic glance. As he stood there she had again that singular sensation of which she had spoken to Richard, as if he were gazing through her and not at her.

"I beg your pardon," he answered, "I remember now that I left some here yesterday."

"Oh, it doesn't matter, of course," she responded pleasantly, "it's only that I like to keep the house tidy, you know."

"They do make rather a mess," he admitted, and gathering them up again, he carried them out of the room and up the staircase.

They watched his bent gray head disappear between the damask curtains in the doorway, and then listened almost unconsciously for the sound of his slow gentle tread on the floor above.

"There was always too much of the dreamer about him, even as a child," commented Richard, when the door was heard to close over their heads, "but he seems contented enough now with his old books, doesn't he?"

"Contented? Yes, I believe he is even happy. I never say much to him because, you see, there is so very little for us to talk about. It is a dreadful thing to confess," she concluded resolutely, "but the truth is I've been always a little afraid of him since – since – "

"Afraid?" he looked at her in astonishment.

"Well, not exactly afraid – but nervous with a kind of panic shudder at times – a dread of his coming close to me, of his touching me, of his wanting things of me." A shiver ran through her and she bit her lip as if to hide the expression of horror upon her face. "There's nobody else on earth that I would say it to, but when he first came back I used to have nightmares about it. I could never get it out of my mind a minute and if they left me alone with him, I wanted almost to scream with nervousness. It's silly I know, and I can't explain it even to you, but there were times when I shrieked aloud in my sleep because I dreamed that he had come into my room and touched me. I felt that I was wrong and foolish, but I couldn't help it, and I tried – tried – oh, so hard to bear things and to be brave and patient."

The tears fell from her eyes on her clasped hands, but her attitude of sorrow only made more appealing the Madonna-like loveliness of her features.

"You've been a saint, Lydia," he answered, patting her drooping shoulder as he rose to his feet. "Poor girl, poor girl! and no daughter of my own could be dearer to me," he added in his austere sincerity of manner.

"I have tried to do right," replied Lydia, lifting her pure eyes to his in an overflow of religious emotion.

Meanwhile the harmless object of their anxiety sat alone in his room under a green lamp, with one of the musty books he had bought open upon his knees. He was not reading, for his gaze was fixed on the opposite wall, and there was in his eyes something of the abstracted vision which Lydia dreaded. It was as if his intellect, forced from the outward experience back into the inner world of thought, had ended by projecting an image of itself into the space at which he looked. While he sat there the patient, apologetic smile with which he had answered to his wife was still on his lips.

"I suppose it's because I'm getting old that people and things no longer make me suffer," he said to himself, "it's because I'm getting old that I can look at Lydia unmoved, that I can feel tenderness for her even while I see the repulsion creep into her eyes. It isn't her fault, after all, that she loathes me, nor is it mine. Yes, I'm certainly an old fellow, the boy was right. At any rate, it's pleasanter, on the whole, than being young."

Closing the book, he laid it on the table, and leaned forward with his chin on his hands. "But if I'd only known when I was young!" he added, "if I'd only known!" His past life rose before him as a picture that he had seen, rather than as a road along which he had travelled; and he found himself regarding it almost as impersonally as he might have regarded the drawing upon the canvas. The peril of the inner life had already begun to beset him – that mysterious power of reliving one's experience with an intensity which makes the objective world appear dull and colourless by contrast. It was with an effort at times that he was able to detach his mind from the contemplative habit into which he had fallen. Between him and his surroundings there existed but a single bond, and this was the sympathy which went out of him when he was permitted to reach the poor and the afflicted. To them he could still speak, with them he could still be mirthful; but from his wife, his uncle, and the members of his own class, he was divided by that impenetrable wall of social tradition. In his home he had ceased to laugh, as Lydia had said; but he could still laugh in the humbler houses of the poor. They had received him as one of themselves, and for this reason alone he could remember how to be merry when he was with them. To the others, to his own people, he felt himself to be always an outsider, a reclaimed castaway, a philanthropic case instead of an individual; and he knew that if there was one proof the more to Lydia that he was in the end a redeemed character, it was the single fact that he no longer laughed in her presence. It was, he could almost hear her say, unbecoming, if not positively improper, that a person who had spent five years in prison should be able to laugh immoderately afterward; and the gravity of his lips was in her eyes, he understood, the most satisfactory testimony to the regeneration of his heart.

And yet Lydia, according to her vision, was a kind, as well as a conscientious woman. The pity of it was that if he were to die now, three years after his homecoming, she would probably reconstruct an imaginary figure of him in her memory, and wear crape for it with appropriate grace and dignity. The works of the imagination are manifold, he thought with a grim humour, even in a dull woman.

But as there was not likely to occur anything so dramatic, in the immediate present, as his death, he wondered vaguely what particular form of aversion his wife's attitude would next express. Or could it be that since he had effaced himself so utterly, he hardly dared to listen to the sound of his footsteps in the house, she had grown to regard him with a kind of quiet tolerance, as an object which was unnecessary, perhaps, yet entirely inoffensive? He remembered now that during those terrible first years in prison he had pursued the thought of her with a kind of hopeless violence, yet to-day he could look back upon her desertion of him in his need with a compassion which forgave the weakness that it could not comprehend. That, too, he supposed was a part of the increasing listlessness of middle age. In a little while he would look forward, it might be, to the coming years without dread – to the long dinners when he sat opposite to her with the festive bowl of flowers between them, to the quiet evenings when she lingered for a few minutes under the lamp before going to her room – those evenings which are the supreme hours of love or of despair. Oh, well, he would grow indifferent to the horror of these things, as he had already grown indifferent to the soft curves of her body. Yes, it was a thrice blessed thing, this old age to which he was coming!

Then another memory flooded his heart with the glow of youth, and he saw Emily, as she had appeared to him that night in the barn more than six years ago, when she had stood with the lantern held high above her head and the red cape slipping back from her upraised arm. A sharp pain shot through him, and he dropped his eyes as if he had met a blow. That was youth at which he had looked for one longing instant – that was youth and happiness and inextinguishable desire.

For a moment he sat with bent head; then with an effort he put the memory from him, and opened his book at the page where he had left off. As he did so there was a tap at his door, and when he had spoken, Lydia came in timidly with a letter in her hand.

"This was put into Uncle Richard's box by mistake," she said, "and he has just sent it over."

He took it from her and seeing that it was addressed in Baxter's handwriting, laid it, still unopened, upon the table. "Won't you sit down?" he asked, pushing forward the chair from which he had risen.

A brief hesitation showed in her face; then as he turned away from her to pick up some scattered papers from the floor, she sat down with a tentative, nervous manner.

"Are you quite sure that you're well, Daniel?" she inquired. "Uncle Richard noticed to-day that you coughed a good deal in the office. I wonder if you get exactly the proper kind of food?"

He nodded, smiling. "Oh, I'm all right," he responded, "I'm as hard as nails, you know, and always have been."

"Even hard people break down sometimes. I wish you would take a tonic or see a doctor."

Her solicitude surprised him, until he remembered that she had never failed in sympathy for purely physical ailments. If he had needed bodily healing instead of mental, she would probably have applied it with a conscientious devotedness.

"I am much obliged to you, but I'm really not sick," he insisted, "it is very good of you, however."

"It is nothing more than my duty," she rejoined, sweetly.

"Well, that may be, but there's nothing to prevent my being obliged to you for doing your duty."

Puzzled as always by his whimsical tone, she sat looking at him with her gentle, uncomprehending glance. "I wish, all the same," she murmured, "that you would let me send you a mustard plaster to put on your chest."

He shook his head without replying in words to her suggestion.

"Do you know it is three months since we had a letter from Alice," he said, "and six since she went away?"