The Ancient Law

"Then he's a darn fool," remarked Jasper Trend from the threshold, "for if I don't get the ringleaders arrested befo' mornin' thar won't be a brick left standin' in the buildings."

"The chap I mean ain't worryin' about that," said Baxter, "provided you'll sign the agreement in the next ten minutes. He's ready to give you a hundred thousand for the mills, strikers an' all."

"Sign the agreement? I ain't got any agreement," protested Jasper, suspecting a trap, "and how do I know that the strike ain't over befo' you're making the offer?"

"Well, if you'll just step over to the window, and stick your head out, you won't have much uncertainty about that, I reckon," returned Baxter.

Crossing to the window, Ordway threw it open, waiting with his hand on the sash, while the threatening shouts from below the hill floated into the room.

"Papa, the baby can't sleep for the noise those men make down at the mills," called a peremptory voice from the landing above.

"I told you so!" groaned Banks, closing the window.

"I ain't got any agreement," repeated Jasper, in helpless irritation, as he sank back into his chair.

"Oh, I reckon Smith can draw up one for you as well as a lawyer," said Baxter, while Ordway, sitting down at a little fancy desk of Milly's in one corner, wrote out the agreement of sale on a sheet of scented note paper.

When he held the pen out to Jasper, the old man looked up at him with blinking eyes. "Is it to hold good if the damned thing burns befo' mornin'?" he asked.

"If it burns before morning – yes."

With a sigh of relief Jasper wrote his name. "How do I know if I'm to get the money?" he inquired the next instant, moved by a new suspicion.

"I shall telegraph instructions to a lawyer in Botetourt," replied Ordway, as he handed the pen to Baxter, "and you will receive an answer by twelve o'clock to-morrow. I want your signature, also, Banks," he continued, turning to the young man. "I've made two copies, you see, one of which I shall leave with Baxter."

"Then you're going away?" inquired Banks, gloomily.

Ordway nodded. "I am leaving on the midnight train," he answered.

"So you're going West?"

"Yes, I'm going West, and I've barely time to settle things at the mills before I start. God bless you, Banks. Good-bye."

Without waiting for Baxter, who was struggling into his overcoat in the hall, he broke away from the detaining hold of Banks, and opening the door, ran down the frozen walk, and out into the street, where the policeman called a "Merry Christmas!" to him as he hurried by.

When he gained the top of the hill, and descended rapidly toward the broad level beyond, where the brick buildings of the cotton mills stood in the centre of a waste of snow, the shouts grew louder and more frequent, and the black mass on the frozen ground divided itself presently into individual atoms. A few bonfires had started on the outskirts of the crowd, and by their fitful light, which fell in jagged, reddish shadows on the snow, he could see the hard faces of the men, the sharpened ones of the women, and the pinched ones of little children, all sallow from close work in unhealthy atmospheres and wan from lack of nourishing and wholesome food. As he approached one of these fires, made from a burning barrel, a young woman, with a thin, blue face, and a baby wrapped in a ragged shawl on her breast, turned and spat fiercely in his direction. "This ain't no place for swells!" she screamed, and began laughing shrilly in a half-crazed voice.

In the excitement no one noticed her, and her demented shrieks followed him while he made his way cautiously along the outskirts of the strikers, until he came to the main building, before which a few men with muskets had cleared a hollow space. They looked cowed and sullen, he saw, for their sympathies were evidently with the operatives, and he realised that the first organised attack would force them from their dangerous position.

Approaching one of the guards, whom he remembered, Ordway touched him upon the arm and asked to be permitted to mount to the topmost step. "I have a message to deliver to the men," he said.

The guard looked up with a start of fear, and then, recognising him, exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, "My God, boys, it's 'Ten Commandment Smith' or it's his ghost!"

"Let me get through to the steps," said Ordway, "I must speak to them."

"Well, you may speak all you want to, but I doubt if they'd listen to an angel from heaven if he were to talk to them about Jasper Trend. They are preparing a rush on the doors now, and when they make it they'll go through."

Passing him in silence, Ordway mounted the steps, and stood with his back against the doors of the main building, in which, when he had last entered it, the great looms had been at work. Before him the dark mass heaved back and forth, and farther away, amid the bonfires in the waste of frozen snow, he could hear the shrill, mocking laughter of the half-crazed woman.

"We won't hear any talk," cried a spokesman in the front ranks of the crowd. "It's too late to haggle now. We'll have nothin' from Jasper Trend unless he gives us what we ask."

"And if he says he'll give it who will believe him?" jeered a woman, farther back, holding a crying child above her head. "He killed the father and he's starvin' the children."

"No – no, we'll have no damned words. We'll burn out the scabs!" shouted a man, lifting a torch he had just lit at a bonfire. As the torch rose in a splendid blaze, it lighted up the front of the building, and cast a yellow flame upon Ordway's face.

"I have nothing to do with Jasper Trend!" he called out, straightening himself to his full height. "He has no part in the mills from to-night! I have bought them from him!"

With the light on his face, he stood there an instant before them, while the shouts changed in the first shock of recognition from anger to surprise. The minute afterward the crowd was rocked by a single gigantic emotion, and it hurled itself forward, bearing down the guards in its efforts to reach the steps. As it swayed back and forth its individual members – men, women and children – appeared to float like straws on some cosmic undercurrent of feeling.

"From to-night the mills belong to me!" he cried in a voice which rang over the frozen ground to where the insane woman was laughing beside a bonfire. "Your grievances after to-night are not against Jasper Trend, but against me. You shall have fair pay, fair hours and clean rooms, I promise you – "

He went on still, but his words were drowned in the oncoming rush of the crowd, which rolled forward like great waters, surrounding him, overwhelming him, sweeping him off his feet, and bearing him out again upon its bosom. The cries so lately growls of anger had changed suddenly, and above all the din and rush he heard rising always the name which he had made honoured and beloved in Tappahannock. It was the one great moment of his life, he knew, when on the tremendous swell of feeling, he was borne like a straw up the hillside and back into the main street of Tappahannock.

An hour later, bruised, aching and half stunned, he entered the station and telegraphed twice to Richard Ordway before he went out upon the platform to take the train. He had left his instructions with Baxter, from whom he had just parted, and now, as he walked up and down in the icy darkness, broken by the shivering lights of the station, it seemed to him that he was like a man, who having been condemned to death, stands looking back a little wistfully at life from the edge of the grave. He had had his great moment, and ahead of him there was nothing.

A freight train passed with a grating noise, a station hand, holding a lantern ran hurriedly along the track, a whistle blew, and then again there was stillness. His eyes were wearily following the track, when he felt a touch on his arm, and turning quickly, saw Banks, in a fur-lined overcoat, looking up at him with an embarrassed air.

"Smith," he said, strangling a cough, "I've seen Baxter, and neither he nor I like your going West this way all by yourself and half sick. If you don't mind, I've arranged to take a little holiday and come along. To tell the truth, it's just exactly the chance I've been looking for. I haven't been away from Milly twenty-four hours since I married her, and a change does anybody good."

"No, you can't come, Banks, I don't want you. I'd rather be alone," replied Ordway, almost indignantly.

"But you ain't well," insisted Banks stubbornly. "We don't like the looks of you, Baxter and I."

"Well, you can't come, that's all," retorted Ordway, as the red eyes of the engine pierced the darkness. "There, go home, Banks," he added, as he held out his hand, "I'm much obliged to you. You're a first-rate chap. Good-bye."

"Then good-bye," returned Banks hastily turning away.

A minute afterward, as Ordway swung himself on the train, he heard the bells of a church, ringing cheerfully in the frosty air, and remembered, with a start, that it was Christmas morning.

CHAPTER VIII

The End Of The Road

IN the morning, after a short sleep on the hard plush seat, he awoke with a shooting pain in his head. When the drowsiness of exhaustion had overcome him, he remembered, he had been idly counting the dazzling electric lights of a town through which they were passing. By the time he had reached "twenty-one" he had dropped off into unconsciousness, though it seemed to him that a second self within him, wholly awake, had gone on through the night counting without pause, "twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five – " Still in his brain the numbers went on, and still the great globular lights flashed past his eyes.

Struggling awake in the gray dawn, he lay without changing his position, until the mist gave place slowly to the broad daylight. Then he found that they were approaching another town, which appeared from a distant view to resemble a single gigantic factory, composed chiefly of a wilderness of chimneys. When he looked at his watch, he saw that it was eight o'clock; and the conductor passing through the coach at the instant, informed the passengers generally that they must change cars for the West. The name of the town Ordway failed to catch, but it made so little difference to him that he followed the crowd mechanically, without inquiring where it would lead him. The pain in his head had extended now to his chest and shoulders, and presently it passed into his lower limbs, with a racking ache that seemed to take from him the control of his muscles. Yet all the while he felt a curious drowsiness, which did not in the least resemble sleep, creeping over him like the stealthy effect of some powerful drug. After he had breathed the fresh air outside, he felt it to be impossible that he should return to the overheated car, and pushing his way through the crowded station, where men were rushing to the luncheon counter in one corner, he started along a broad street, which looked as if it led to an open square at the top of a long incline. On either side there were rows of narrow tenements, occupied evidently by the operatives in the imposing factories he had observed from the train. Here and there a holly wreath suspended from a cheap lace curtain, reminded him again that it was Christmas morning, and by some eccentricity of memory, he recalled vividly a Christmas before his mother's death, when he had crept on his bare feet, in the dawn, to peep into the bulging stocking before her fireplace.

At the next corner a small eating house had hung out its list of Christmas dainties, and going inside he sat down at one of the small deserted tables and asked for a cup of coffee. When it was brought he swallowed it in the hope that it might drive away the heaviness in his head, but after a moment of relief the stupor attacked him again more oppressively than ever. He felt that even the growing agony in his forehead and shoulders could not keep him awake if he could only find a spot in which to lie down and rest.

After he came out into the street again he felt stronger and better, and it occurred to him that his headache was due probably to the fact that he had eaten nothing since breakfast the day before. He remembered now that he had missed his luncheon because of his long walk into the country, and the recollection of this trivial incident seemed to make plain all the subsequent events. Everything that had been so confused a moment ago stood out quite clearly now. His emotions, which had been benumbed when he left Botetourt, revived immediately in the awakening of his memory; and he was seized with a terrible longing to hold Alice in his arms and to say to her that he forgave her and loved her still. It seemed to him impossible that he should have come away after a single indifferent kiss, without glancing back – and her face rose before him, not convulsed and haggard as he had last seen it, but glowing and transfigured, with her sparkling blue eyes and her lips that were too red and too full for beauty. Then, even while he looked at her with love, the old numbness crept back, and his feeling for her died utterly away. "No, I have ceased to care," he thought indifferently. "It does not matter to me whether I see her again or not. I must eat and lie down, nothing else is of consequence."

He had reached the open space at the end of the long graded hill, and as he stopped to look about him he saw that a small hotel, frequented probably by travelling salesmen, stood directly across the square, which was now deep in snow. Following the pavement to the open door of the lobby, he went inside and asked for a room, after which he passed into the restaurant and drank a second cup of coffee. Then turning away from his untasted food, he went upstairs to the large, bare apartment, with a broken window pane, which they had assigned him, and throwing himself upon the unmade bed, fell heavily asleep.

When he awoke the pain was easier, and feeling oppressed by the chill vacancy of the room, he went downstairs and out into the open square. Though it was a dull gray afternoon, the square was filled with children, dragging bright new sleds over the snow. One of them, a little brown-haired girl, was trundling her Christmas doll and as she passed him, she turned and smiled into his face with a joyful look. Something in her smile was vaguely familiar to him, and he remembered, after a minute, that Emily had looked at him like that on the morning when he had met her for the first time riding her old white horse up the hill in Tappahannock. "Yes, it was that look that made me love her," he thought dispassionately, as if he were reviewing some dimly remembered event in a former life, "and it is because I loved her that I was able to do these things. If I had not loved her, I should not have saved Milly Trend, nor gone back to Botetourt, nor sacrificed myself for Alice. Yes, all these have come from that," he added, "and will go back, I suppose, to that in the end." The little girl ran by again, still trundling her doll, and again he saw Emily in her red cape on the old horse.

For several hours he sat there in the frozen square, hardly feeling the cold wind that blew over him. But when he rose presently to go into the hotel, he found that his limbs were stiff, and the burning pain had returned with violence to his head and chest. The snow in the square seemed to roll toward him as he walked, and it was with difficulty that he dragged himself step by step along the pavement to the entrance of the hotel. After he was in his room again he threw himself, still dressed, upon the bed, and fell back into the stupor out of which he had come.

When he opened his eyes after an hour, he was hardly sure, for the first few minutes, whether he was awake or asleep. The large, bare room in which he had lost consciousness had given place, when he awoke, to his prison cell. The hard daylight came to him through the grated windows, and from a nail in the wall he saw his gray prison coat, with the red bars, won for good behaviour, upon the sleeve. Then while he looked at it, the red bars changed quickly to the double stripes of a second term, and the double stripes became three, and the three became four, until it seemed to him that he was striped from head to foot so closely that he knew that he must have gone on serving term after term since the beginning of the world. "No, no, that is not mine. I am wearing the red bars!" he cried out, and came back to himself with a convulsive shudder.

As he looked about him the hallucination vanished, and he felt that he had come out of an eternity of unconsciousness into which he should presently sink back again. The day before appeared to belong to some other life that he had lived while he was still young, yet when he opened his eyes the same gray light filled the windows, the same draught blew through the broken pane, the same vague shadows crawled back and forth on the ceiling. The headache was gone now, but the room had grown very cold, and from time to time, when he coughed, long shivers ran through his limbs and his teeth chattered. He had thrown his overcoat across his chest as a coverlet, but the cold from which he suffered was an inward chill, which was scarcely increased by the wind that blew through the broken pane. There was no confusion in his mind now, but a wonderful lucidity, in which he saw clearly all that had happened to him last night in Tappahannock. "Yes, that was my good moment," he said "and after such a moment there is nothing, but death. If I can only die everything will be made entirely right and simple." As he uttered the words the weakness of self pity swept over him, and with a sudden sense of spiritual detachment, he was aware of a feeling of sympathy for that other "I," who seemed so closely related to him, and yet outside of himself. The real "I" was somewhere above amid the crawling shadows on the ceiling, but the other – the false one – lay on the bed under the overcoat; and he saw, when he looked down that, though he himself was young, the other "I" was old and haggard and unshaven. "So there are two of us, after all," he thought, "poor fellows, poor fellows."

But the minute afterward the perception of his dual nature faded as rapidly as the hallucination of his prison cell. In its place there appeared the little girl, who had passed him, trundling her Christmas doll, in the square below. "I have seen her before – she is vaguely familiar," he thought, troubled because he could not recall the resemblance. From this he passed to the memory of Alice when she was still a child, and she came back to him, fresh and vivid, as on the day when she had run out to beg him to come in to listen to her music. The broken scales ran in his head again, but there was no love in his heart.

His gaze dropped from the ceiling and turned toward the door, for in the midst of his visions, he had seen it open softly and Banks come into the room on tiptoe and stop at the foot of the bed, regarding him with his embarrassed and silly look "What in the devil, am I dreaming about Banks for?" he demanded aloud, with an impatient movement of his feet, as if he meant to kick the obtruding dream away from his bed.

At the kick the dream stopped rolling its prominent pale eyes and spoke. "I hope you ain't sick, Smith," it said, and with the first words he knew that it was Banks in the familiar flesh and not the disembodied spirit.

"No I'm not sick, but what are you doing here?" he asked.

"Enjoying myself," replied Banks gloomily.

"Well, I wish you'd chosen to enjoy yourself somewhere else."

"I couldn't. If you don't mind I'd like to stuff the curtain into that window pane."

"Oh, I don't mind. When did you get here?"

"I came on the train with you."

"On the train with me? Where did you get on? I didn't see you."

"You didn't look," replied Banks, from the window, where he was stuffing the red velveteen curtain into the broken pane. "I was in the last seat in the rear coach."

"So you followed me," said Ordway indignantly. "I told you not to. Why did you do it?"

Banks came back and stood again at the foot of the bed, looking at him with his sincere and kindly smile.

"Well, the truth is, I wanted an outing," he answered, "it's a good baby as babies go, but I get dog-tired of playing nurse."

"You might have gone somewhere else. There are plenty of places."

"I couldn't think of 'em, and, besides, this seems a nice town. The're a spanking fine lot of factories. But I hope you ain't sick Smith? What are you doing in bed?"

"Oh, I've given up," replied Ordway gruffly. "Every man has a right to give up some time, hasn't he?"

"I don't know about every man," returned Banks, stolidly, "but you haven't, Smith."

"Well, I've done it anyway," retorted Ordway, and turned his face to the wall.

As he lay there with closed eyes, he had an obscure impression that Banks – Banks, the simple; Banks, the impossible – was in some way operating the forces of destiny. First he heard the bell ring, then the door open and close, and a little later, the bleak room was suffused with a warm rosy light in which the vague shadows melted into a shimmering background. The crackling of the fire annoyed him because it suggested the possibility of physical comfort, and he no longer wanted to be comfortable.

"Smith," said Banks, coming over to the bed and pulling off the overcoat, "I've got a good fire here and a chair. I wish you'd get up. Good Lord, your hands are as hot as a hornet's nest. When did you eat anything?"

"I had breakfast in Botetourt," replied Ordway, as he rose from the bed and came over to the chair Banks had prepared. "I can't remember when it was, but it must have been since the creation of the world, I suppose." The fire grew suddenly black before him, "I'd rather lie down," he added, "my head is splitting and I can't see."

"Oh, you'll see all right in a minute. Wait till I light this candle, so the electric light won't hurt your eyes. The boy's gone for a little supper, and as soon as you've swallowed a mouthful you'll begin to feel better."

"But I'm not hungry. I won't eat," returned Ordway, with an irritable feeling that Banks was looming into a responsibility. Anything that pulled one back to life was what he wanted to escape, and even the affection of Banks might prove, he thought, tenaciously clinging. One resolution he had made in the beginning – he would not take up his life again for the sake of Banks.

"Yes, you must, Smith," remonstrated the other, with an angelic patience which gave him, if possible, a more foolish aspect. "It's after six o'clock and you haven't had a bite since yesterday at eight. That's why your head's so light and you're in a raging fever."

"It isn't that, Banks, it's because I've got to die," he answered. "If they don't hush things up with money, I may have to go back to prison." As he said the words he saw again the prison coat, with the double stripes of a second term, as in the instant of his hallucination.

"I know," said Banks, softly, as he bent over to poke the fire. "There was a line or two about it in a New York paper. But they'll hush it up, and besides they said it was just suspicion."

"You knew all the time and yet you wanted me to go back to Tappahannock?"

"Oh, they don't read the papers much there, except the Tappahannock Herald, and it won't get into that. It was just a silly little slip anyway, and not two dozen people will be likely to know what it meant."

"And you, Banks? What do you think?" he asked with a mild curiosity.

Banks shook his head. "Why, what's the use in your asking?" he replied. "Of course, I know that you didn't do it, and if you had done it, it would have been just because the other man ought to have written his name and wouldn't," he concluded, unblushingly.

For a moment Ordway looked at him in silence. "You're a good chap, Banks," he said at last in a dull voice. Again he felt, with an awakened irritation, that the absurd Banks was pulling him back to life. Was it impossible, after all, that a man should give up, as long as there remained a soul alive who believed in him? It wasn't only the love of women, then, that renewed courage. He had loved both Emily and Alice, and yet they were of less importance in his life at this hour than was Banks, whom he had merely endured. Yet he had thought the love of Emily a great thing and that of Banks a small one.

His gaze went back to the flames, and he did not remove it when a knock came at the door, and supper was brought in and placed on a little table before the fire.