The Ancient Law

"She shall never do it," said Ordway, losing his temper. Then as he uttered the words, he remembered Lydia's warning and added more quietly, "she shall never do it if I can help it."

"It makes precious little difference to me," repeated Geoffrey, "but she'll be a blamed fool if she doesn't, and for all her foolishness, she isn't so big a fool as you think her."

"She has been wrong in her extravagance, as I said before, but she is very young, and her childishness is no excuse for your brutality."

Rage, or the brandy, or both together, flamed up hotly in Geoffrey's face.

"I'd like to know what right you have to talk about brutality?" he sneered.

"I've the right of any man to keep another from ill-treating his daughter."

"Well, you're a nice one with your history to put on these highfaluting, righteous airs, aren't you?"

For an instant the unutterable disgust in Ordway's mind was like physical nausea. What use was it, after all, to bandy speeches, he questioned, with a mere drunken animal? His revulsion of feeling had moved him to take a step toward the door, when the sound of the words Geoffrey uttered caused him to stop abruptly and stand listening.

"Much good you'll do her when she hears about that woman you've been keeping down at Tappahannock. As if I didn't know that you'd been running back there again after that Brooke girl – "

The words were choked back in his throat, for before they had passed his lips Ordway had swung quickly round and struck him full in the mouth.

With the blow it seemed to Daniel that all the violence in his nature was loosened. A sensation that was like the joy of health, of youth, of manhood, rushed through his veins, and in the single exalted instant when he looked down on Geoffrey's prostrate figure, he felt himself to be not only triumphant, but immortal. All that his years of self-sacrifice had not done for him was accomplished by that explosive rush of energy through his arm.

There was blood on his hand and as he glanced down, he saw that Geoffrey, with a bleeding mouth, was struggling, dazed and half drunk, to his feet. Ordway looked at him and laughed – the laugh of the boastful and victorious brute. Then turning quickly, he took up his hat and went out of the house and down into the street.

The physical exhilaration produced by the muscular effort was still tingling through his body, and while it lasted he felt younger, stronger, and possessed of a courage that was almost sublime. When he reached home and entered the library where Lydia and Alice were sitting together, there was a boyish lightness and confidence in his step.

"Oh, papa!" cried Alice, standing up, "tell me about it. What did he do?"

Ordway laughed again, the same laugh with which he had looked down on Geoffrey lying half stunned at his feet.

"I didn't wait to see," he answered, "but I rather think he got up off the floor."

"You mean you knocked him down?" asked Lydia, in an astonishment that left her breathless.

"I cut his mouth, I'm sure," he replied, wiping his hand from which the blood ran, "and I hope I knocked out one or two of his teeth."

Then the exhilaration faded as quickly as it had come, for as Lydia looked up at him, while he stood there wiping the blood from his bruised knuckles, he saw, for the first time since his return to Botetourt, that there was admiration in her eyes. So it was the brute, after all, and not the spirit that had triumphed over her.

CHAPTER V

The House of Dreams

From that night there was a new element in Lydia's relation to him, an increased consideration, almost a deference, as if, for the first time, he had shown himself capable of commanding her respect. This change, which would have pleased him, doubtless, twenty years before, had only the effect now of adding to his depression, for he saw in it a tribute from his wife not to his higher, but to his lower nature. All his patient ideals, all his daily self-sacrifice, had not touched her as had that one instant's violence; and it occurred to him, with a growing recognition of the hopeless inconsistency of life, that if he had treated her with less delicacy, less generosity, if he had walked roughshod over her feminine scruples, instead of yielding to them, she might have entertained for him by this time quite a wholesome wifely regard. Then the mere possibility disgusted him, and he saw that to have compromised with her upon any lower plane would have been always morally repugnant to him. After all, the dominion of the brute was not what he was seeking.

On the morning after his scene with Geoffrey, Alice came to him and begged for the minutest particulars of the quarrel. She wanted to know how it had begun? If Geoffrey had been really horrible? And if he had noticed the new bronze dragon she had bought for the hall? Upon his replying that he had not, she seemed disappointed, he thought, for a minute.

"It's very fine," she said, "I bought it from what's-his-name, that famous man in Paris? If I ever have money enough I shall get the match to it, so there'll be the pair of them." Then seeing his look of astonishment, she hastened to correct the impression she had made. "Of course, I mean that I'd like to have done it, if I had been going to live there."

"It would take more than a bronze dragon, or a pair of them, to make that house a home, dear," was his only comment.

"But it's very handsome," she remarked after a moment, "everything in it is so much more costly than the things here." He made no rejoinder, and she added with vehemence, "but of course, I wouldn't go back, not even if it were a palace!"

Then a charming merriment seized her, and she clung to him and kissed him and called him a dozen silly pet names. "No, she won't ever, ever play in that horrid old house again," she sang gaily between her kisses.

For several days these exuberant spirits lasted, and then he prepared himself to meet the inevitable reaction. Her looks drooped, she lost her colour and grew obviously bored, and in the end she complained openly that there was nothing for her to do in the house, and that she couldn't go out of doors because she hadn't the proper clothes. To his reminder that it was she herself who had prevented his sending for her trunks, she replied that there was plenty of time, and that "besides nobody could pack them unless she was there to overlook it."

"If anybody is obliged to go back there, for heaven's sake, let me be the one," he urged desperately at last.

"To knock out more of poor Geoffrey's teeth? Oh, you naughty, naughty, papa!" – she cried, lifting a reproving finger. The next instant her laughter bubbled out at the delightful picture of "papa in the midst of her Paris gowns. I'd be so afraid you'd roll up Geoffrey in my precious laces," she protested, half seriously.

For a week nothing more was said on the subject, and then she remarked irritably that her room was cold and she hadn't her quilted silk dressing-gown. When he asked her to ride with him, she declared that her old habit was too tight for her and her new one was at the other house. When he suggested driving instead, she replied that she hadn't her fur coat and she would certainly freeze without it. At last one bright, cold day, when he came up to luncheon, Lydia told him, with her strange calmness, that Alice had gone back to her husband.

"I knew it would come in time," she said, and he bowed again before her unerring prescience.

"Do you mean to tell me that she's willing to put up with Heath for the sake of a little extra luxury?" he demanded.

"Oh, that's a part of it. She likes the newness of the house and the air of costliness about it, but most of all, she feels that she could never settle down to our monotonous way of living. Geoffrey promised her to take her to Europe again in the summer and I think she began to grow restless when it appeared that she might have to give it up."

"But one of us could have taken her to Europe, if that's all she wanted. You could have gone with her."

"Not in Alice's way, we could never have afforded it. She told me this when I offered to go with her if she would definitely separate from Geoffrey."

"Then you didn't want her to go back? You didn't encourage it?"

"I encouraged her to behave with decency – and this isn't decent."

"No, I admit that. It decidedly is not."

"Yet we have no assurance that she won't fly in upon us at dinner to-night, with all the servants about," she reflected mournfully.

His awful levity broke out as it always did whenever she invoked the sanctity of convention.

"In that case hadn't we better serve ourselves until she has made up her mind?" he inquired.

But the submission of the martyr is proof even against caustic wit, and she looked at him, after a minute, with a smile of infinite patience.

"For myself I can bear anything," she answered, "but I feel that for her it is shocking to make things so public."

It was shocking. In spite of his flippancy he felt the vulgarity of it as acutely as she felt it; and he was conscious of something closely akin to relief, when Richard Ordway dropped in after dinner to tell them that Alice and Geoffrey had come to a complete reconciliation.

"But will it last?" Lydia questioned, in an uneasy voice.

"We'll hope so at all events," replied the old man, "they appeared certainly to be very friendly when I came away. Whatever happens it is surely to Alice's interest that she should be kept out of a public scandal."

They were still discussing the matter, after Richard had gone, when the girl herself ran in, bringing Geoffrey, and fairly brilliant with life and spirits.

"We've decided to forget everything disagreeable," she said, "we're going to begin over again and be nice and jolly, and if I don't spend too much money, we are going to Egypt in April."

"If you're happy, then I'm satisfied," returned Ordway, and he held out his hand to Geoffrey by way of apology.