The Ancient Law

"Oh, no, you wouldn't," protested Baxter softly, "not when he'd ruin himself for you to-morrow if you were to walk out and ask him."

"But he couldn't," insisted Ordway with the brutality of the naked fact, "he did that little job on his own account too long ago."

"But that ain't the point, Smith," replied Baxter in an awed and solemn accent. "The point ain't that he couldn't, but that he would. As I make it out that's the point which has cost me money on him for the last thirty years."

"Oh, well, I suppose it's a charity like any other, only the old fool is so pompous about his poverty that it wears me out."

"It does at Tappahannock, but it won't when you get out to Cedar Hill, that's the difference between Mr. Beverly in the air and Mr. Beverly in the flesh. The one wears you out, the other rests you for all his darnation foolishness. Now, you can board out there for twenty-five dollars a month and put a little ready money where it ought to be in Mrs. Brooke's pocket."

"Of course I'd like it tremendously," said Ordway, after a moment in which the perfume of the lilacs filled his memory. "It would be like stepping into heaven after that stifling little room under the tin roof at Mrs. Twine's. Do you know I slept out in the fields every hot night last summer?"

"You see you ain't a native of these parts," remarked Baxter with a large resigned movement of his palm leaf fan, "and your skin ain't thick enough to keep out the heat. I'll speak to 'em at Cedar Hill this very day, and if you like, I reckon, you can move out at the beginning of the week. I hope if you do, Smith, that you'll bear with Mr. Beverly. There's nothing in the universe that he wouldn't do for me if he had the chance. It ain't his fault, you see, that he's never had it."

"Oh, I promise you I'll bear with him," laughed Ordway, as he left the office and went out into the warehouse.

The knot of men was still in the centre of the building, and as Ordway walked down the long floor in search of Catesby and Frazier, he saw that a stranger had drifted in during his half hour in Baxter's office. With his first casual glance all that he observed of the man was a sleek fair head, slightly bald in the centre, and a pair of abnormally flat shoulders in a light gray coat, which had evidently left a clothing shop only a day or two before. Then as Frazier – a big, loud voiced planter – turned toward him with the exclamation, "here's Smith, himself, now!" – he saw the stranger wheel round abruptly and give vent the next instant to a sharp whistle of surprise.

"Well, I'll be damned!" he said.

For a minute the tobacco dust filled Ordway's throat and nostrils, and he felt that he was stifling for a breath of air. The dim length of the warehouse and the familiar shadowy figures of the planters receded before his eyes, and he saw again the bare walls of the prison chapel, with the rows of convicts seated in the pale, greenish light. With his recognition of the man before him, it seemed to him suddenly that the last year in Tappahannock was all a lie. The prison walls, the grated windows, and the hard benches of the shoe shop were closer realities than were the open door of the warehouse and the free, hot streets of the little town.

"I am very happy to meet you, Mr. Smith," said the stranger, as he held out his hand with a good-humoured smile.

"I beg your pardon," returned Ordway quietly, "but I did not catch your name."

At the handshake a chill mounted from his finger tips to his shoulder, but drawing slightly away he stood his ground without so much as the perceptible flicker of an eyelash.

"My name is Brown – Horatio Brown, very much at your service," answered the other, with a manner like that of a successful, yet obsequious commercial traveller.

It was on Ordway's tongue to retort: "You lie – it's Gus Wherry!" – but checking the impulse with a frown, he turned on his heel and asked the two men for whom he was looking to come with him to settle their disagreement in Baxter's office. As he moved down the building an instant later, it was with an effort that he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead through the archway, for he was aware that every muscle in his body pricked him to turn back and follow Wherry to the end. That the man would be forced, in self-defence, to keep his secret for a time at least, he had caught in the smiling insolence of his glance; but that it was possible to enter into a permanent association or even a treaty with Gus Wherry, he knew to be a supposition that was utterly beyond the question. The crime for which the man had been sentenced he could not remember; but he had a vague recollection that something morbidly romantic in his history had combined with his handsome face to give him an ephemeral notoriety as the Adonis of imaginative shop-girls. Even in prison Wherry had attained a certain prominence because of his beauty, which at the time when Ordway first saw him had been conspicuous in spite of his convict's clothes. In the years since then his athletic figure had grown a trifle too heavy, and his fair hair had worn a little thin on the crown of his head; yet these slight changes of time had left him, Ordway admitted reluctantly, still handsome in the brawny, full-blooded style, which had generally made fools of women. His lips were still as red, his features as severely classic, and his manner was not less vulgar, and quite as debonnair as in the days when the newspapers had clamoured for his pictures. Even the soft, girlish cleft in his smooth-shaven chin, Ordway remembered now, with a return of the instinctive aversion with which it had first inspired him. Yet he was obliged to confess, as he walked ahead of Catesby and Frazier down the dusty floor of the warehouse, that if Wherry had been less of an uncompromising rascal, he would probably have made a particularly amiable acquaintance.

CHAPTER II

Ordway Compromises With The Past

WHEN Ordway came out of Baxter's office, he found that Gus Wherry had left the warehouse, but the effect upon him of the man's appearance in Tappahannock was not to be overcome by the temporary withdrawal of his visible presence. Not only the town, but existence itself seemed altered, and in a way polluted, by the obtrusion of Wherry's personality upon the scene. Though he was not in the building, Ordway felt an angry conviction that he was in the air. It was impossible to breathe freely lest he might by accident draw in some insidious poison which would bring him under the influence of his past life and of Gus Wherry.

As he went along the street at one o'clock to his dinner at Mrs. Twine's, he was grateful for the intensity of the sun, which rendered him, while he walked in it, almost incapable of thought. There was positive relief in the fact that he must count the uneven lengths of board walk which it was necessary for him to traverse, and the buzzing of the blue flies before his face forced his attention, at the minute, from the inward to the outward disturbance.

When he reached the house, Mrs. Twine met him at the door and led him, with an inquiry as to his susceptibility to sunstroke, into the awful gloom of her tightly shuttered parlour.

"I declar' you do look well nigh in yo' last gasp," she remarked cheerfully, bustling into the dining-room for a palm leaf fan. "Thar, now, come right in an' set down an' eat yo' dinner. Hot or cold, glad or sorry, I never saw the man yit that could stand goin' without his dinner at the regular hour. Sech is the habit in some folks that I remember when old Mat Fawling's second wife died he actually hurried up her funeral an hour earlier so as to git back in time for dinner. 'It ain't that I'm meanin' any disrespect to Sary, Mrs. Twine,' he said to me right whar I was layin' her out, 'but the truth is that I can't even mourn on an empty stomach. The undertaker put it at twelve,' he said, 'but I reckon we might manage to git out to the cemetery by eleven.'"

"All the same if you'll give me a slice of bread and a glass of milk, I'll take it standing," remarked Ordway. "I'm sorry to leave you, Mrs. Twine, even for a few months," he added, "but I think I'll try to get board outside the town until the summer is over."

"Well, I'll hate to lose you, suh, to be sure," responded Mrs. Twine, dealing out the fried batter with a lavish hand despite his protest, "for I respect you as a fellow mortal, though I despise you as a sex."

Her hard eyes softened as she looked at him; but his gaze was on the walnut coloured oilcloth, where the flies dispersed lazily before the waving elm branch in the hands of the small Negro, and so he did not observe the motherly tenderness which almost beautified her shrewish face.

"You've been very kind to me," he said, as he put his glass and plate down, and turned toward the door. "Whatever happens I shall always remember you and the children with pleasure."

She choked violently, and looking back at the gasping sound, he saw that her eyes had filled suddenly with tears. Lifting a corner of her blue gingham apron, she mopped her face in a furious effort to conceal the cause of her unaccustomed emotion.

"I declar' I'm all het up;" she remarked in an indignant voice, "but if you should ever need a friend in sickness, Mr. Smith," she added, after a moment in which she choked and coughed under the shelter of her apron, "you jest send for me an' I'll drop every thing I've got an' go. I'll leave husband an' children without a thought, suh, an' thar's nothin' I won't do for you with pleasure, from makin' a mustard plaster to layin' out yo' corpse. When I'm a friend, I'm a friend, if I do say it, an' you've had a way with me from the very first minute that I clapped eyes upon you. 'He may not have sech calves as you've got,' was what I said to Bill, 'but he's got a manner of his own, an' I reckon it's the manner an' not the calves that is the man.' Not that I'm meaning any slur on yo' shape, suh," she hastened to explain.

"Well, I'll come to see you now and then," said Ordway, smiling, "and I shan't forget to take the children for a picnic as I promised." But with the words he remembered Gus Wherry, as he had seen him standing in the centre of Baxter's warehouse, and it seemed to him that even his promise to the children was rendered vain and worthless.

The next day was Sunday, and immediately after dinner he walked over to Baxter's house, where he learned that Mrs. Brooke had expressed her willingness to receive him upon the following afternoon.

"We had to talk Mr. Beverly over," said Baxter, chuckling. "At first he didn't like the idea because of some notion he'd got out of his great-grandfather's head about the sacredness of the family circle. However, he's all right now, though if you take my advice, Smith, you'll play a game of dominoes with him occasionally just to keep him kind of soft. The chief thing he has against you is your preachin' in the fields, for he told me he could never bring himself to countenance religion out of doors. He seems to think that it ought to be kept shut up tight."

"Well, I'm glad he doesn't have to listen to me," responded Ordway. "By the way, you know I'm speaking in Catlett's grove of pines now. It's pleasanter away from the glare of the sun." Then as Baxter pressed him to come back to supper, he declined the oppressive hospitality and went back to Mrs. Twine's.

That afternoon at five o'clock he went out to the grove of pines on the Southern edge of the town, to find his congregation gathered ahead of him on the rude plank benches which had been placed among the trees. The sunshine fell in drops through the tent of boughs overhead, and from the southwest a pleasant breeze had sprung up, blowing the pine needles in eddies about his feet. At sight of the friendly faces gathered so closely around him, he felt his foreboding depart as if it had been blown from him by the pure breeze; and beginning his simple discourse, he found himself absorbed presently in the religious significance of his subject, which chanced to be an interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son. Not until he was midway of his last sentence did he discover that Gus Wherry was standing just beyond the little wildrose thicket on the edge of the grove.

In the instant of recognition the words upon his lips sounded strangely hollow and meaningless in his ears, and he felt again that the appearance of the man had given the lie, not only to his identity, but to his life. He knew himself at the instant to have changed from Daniel Smith to Daniel Ordway, and the name that he had worn honestly in Tappahannock showed to him suddenly as a falsehood and a cheat. Even his inward motive was contemptible in his eyes, and he felt himself dragged back in a single minute to the level upon which Wherry stood. As he appeared to Wherry, so he saw himself now by some distorted power of vision, and even his religion seemed but a convenient mask which he had picked up and used. When he went on a moment later with his closing words, he felt that the mockery of his speech must be evident to the ears of the congregation that knew and loved him.

The gathering broke up slowly, but after speaking to several men who stood near him, Ordway turned away and went out into the road which led from Tappahannock in the direction of Cedar Hill. Only after he had walked rapidly for a mile, did the sound of footsteps, following close behind him, cause him to wheel round abruptly with an impatient exclamation. As he did so, he saw that Wherry had stopped short in the road before him.

"I wanted to tell you how much obliged I am for your talk, Mr. Smith," he said, with a smile which appeared to flash at the same instant from his eyes and his teeth. "I declare you came pretty near converting me – by Jove, you did. It wouldn't be convenient to listen to you too often."

Whatever might be said of the effusive manner of his compliments, his good humour was so evident in his voice, in his laugh, and even in his conspicuously flashing teeth, that Ordway, who had been prepared for a quarrel, was rendered almost helpless by so peaceable an encounter. Turning out of the road, he stepped back among the tall weeds growing in the corner of the old "worm" fence, and rested his tightly clinched hand on the topmost rail.

"If you have anything to say to me, you will do me a favour by getting it over as soon as possible," he rejoined shortly.

Wherry had taken off his hat and the red disc of the setting sun made an appropriate frame for his handsome head, upon which his fair hair grew, Ordway noticed, in the peculiar waving circle which is found on the heads of ancient statues.

"Well, I can't say that I've anything to remark except that I congratulate you on your eloquence," he replied, with a kind of infernal amiability. "If this is your little game, you are doing it with a success which I envy from my boots up."

"Since this is your business with me, there is no need for us to discuss it further," returned Ordway, at white heat.

"Oh, but I say, don't hurry – what's the use? You're afraid I'm going to squeeze you, now, isn't that it?"

"You'll get nothing out of me if you try."

"That's as much as I want, I guess. Have I asked you for as much as a darned cent? Haven't I played the gentleman from the first minute that I spotted you?"

Ordway nodded. "Yes, I suppose you've been as fair as you knew how," he answered, "I'll do you the justice to admit that."

"Well, I tell you now," said Wherry, growing confidential as he approached, "my object isn't blackmail, it's human intercourse. I want a decent word or two, that's all, on my honour."

"But I won't talk to you. I've nothing further to say, that's to be understood."

"You're a confounded bully, that's what you are," observed Wherry, in the playful tones which he might have used to a child or an animal. "Now, I don't want a blooming cent out of you, that's flat – all I ask for is a pleasant word or two just as from man to man."

"Then why did you follow me? And what are you after in Tappahannock?"

Wherry laughed hilariously, while his remarkably fine teeth became the most prominent feature in his face.