The Ancient Law

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."