The Ancient Law

"I had hoped you would stay to dinner," she remarked in her listless manner to Ordway. Fate had whipped her into submission, but there was that in her aspect which never permitted one for an instant to forget the whipping. If her husband had dominated by his utter incapacity, she had found a smaller consolation in feeling that though she had been obliged to drudge she had never learned to do it well. To do it badly, indeed, had become at last the solitary proof that by right of birth she was entitled not to do it at all.

At Ordway's embarrassed excuse she made no effort to insist, but stood, smiling like a ghost of her own past prettiness, in the doorway. Behind her the bare hall and the dim staircase appeared more empty, more gloomy, more forlornly naked than they had done before.

Again Ordway reached for his hat, and prepared to pick his way carefully down the sunken steps; but this time he was arrested by the sound of smothered laughter at the side of the house, which ran back to the vegetable garden. A moment later the girl in the red cape appeared running at full speed across the lawn, pursued by several shrieking children that followed closely at her skirts. Her clear, ringing laugh – the laugh of youth and buoyant health – held Ordway motionless for an instant upon the porch; then as she came nearer he saw that she held an old, earth-covered spade in her hands and that her boots and short woollen skirt were soiled with stains from the garden beds. But the smell of the warm earth that clung about her seemed only to increase the vitality and freshness in her look. Her vivid animation, her sparkling glance, struck him even more forcibly than they had done in the street of Tappahannock.

At sight of Ordway her laugh was held back breathlessly for an instant; then breaking out again, it began afresh with redoubled merriment, and sinking with exhaustion on the lowest step, she let the spade fall to the ground while she buried her wind-blown head in her hands.

"I beg your pardon," she stammered presently, lifting her radiant brown eyes, "but I've run so fast that I'm quite out of breath." Stopping with an effort she sought in vain to extinguish her laughter in the curls of the smallest child.

"Emily," said Beverly with dignity, "allow me to present Mr. Smith."

The girl looked up from the step; and then, rising, smiled brightly upon Ordway over the spade which she had picked up from the ground.

"I can't shake hands," she explained, "because I've been spading the garden."

If she recognised him for the tramp who had slept in her barn there was no hint of it in her voice or manner.

"Do you mean, Emily," asked Beverly, in his plaintive voice, "that you have been actually digging in the ground?"

"Actually," repeated Emily, in a manner which made Ordway suspect that the traditional feminine softness was not included among her virtues, "I actually stepped on dirt and saw – worms."

"But where is Micah?"

"Micah has an attack of old age. He was eighty-two yesterday."

"Is it possible?" remarked Beverly, and the discovery appeared to afford him ground for cheerful meditation.

"No, it isn't possible, but it's true," returned the girl, with good-humoured merriment. "As there are only two able-bodied persons on the place, the mare and I, it seemed to me that one of us had better take a hand at the spade. But I had to leave off after the first round," she added to Ordway, showing him her right hand, from the palm of which the skin had been rubbed away. She was so much like a gallant boy that Ordway felt an impulse to take the hand in his own and examine it more carefully.

"Well, I'm very much surprised to hear that Micah is so old," commented Beverly, dwelling upon the single fact which had riveted his attention. "I must be making him a little present upon his birthday."

The girl's eyes flashed under her dark lashes, but remembering Ordway's presence, she turned to him with a casual remark about the promise of the spring. He saw at once that she had achieved an indignant detachment from her thriftless family, and the ardent, almost impatient energy with which she fell to labour was, in itself, a rebuke to the pleasant indolence which had hastened, if it had not brought about, the ruin of the house. Was it some temperamental disgust for the hereditary idleness which had spurred her on to take issue with the worn-out traditions of her ancestors and to place herself among the labouring rather than the leisure class? As she stood there in her freshness and charm, with the short brown curls blown from her forehead, the edge of light shining in her eyes and on her lips, and the rich blood kindling in her vivid face, it seemed to Ordway, looking back at her from the end of his forty years, that he was brought face to face with the spirit of the future rising amid the decaying sentiment of the past.

CHAPTER VIII

"Ten Commandment Smith"

WHEN Ordway had disappeared beyond the curve in the avenue, Emily went slowly up the steps, her spade clanking against the stone as she ascended.

"Did he come about the tobacco, Beverly?" she asked.

Beverly rose languidly from the bench, and stood rubbing his hand across his forehead with an exhausted air.

"My head was very painful and he talked so rapidly I could hardly follow him," he replied; "but is it possible, Emily, that you have been digging in the garden?"

"There is nobody else to do it," replied Emily, with an impatient flash in her eyes; "only half the garden has been spaded. If you disapprove so heartily, I wish you'd produce someone to do the work."

Mrs. Brooke, who had produced nothing in her life except nine children, six of whom had died in infancy, offered at this a feeble and resigned rebuke.

"I am sure you could get Salem," she replied.

"We owe him already three months' wages," returned the girl, "I am still paying him for last autumn."

"All I ask of you, Emily, is peace," remarked Beverly, in a gentle voice, as he prepared to enter the house. "Nothing – no amount of brilliant argument can take the place of peace in a family circle. My poor head is almost distracted when you raise your voice."

The three children flocked out of the dining-room and came, with a rush, to fling themselves upon him. They adored him – and there was a live terrapin which they had brought in a box for him to see! In an instant his depression vanished, and he went off, his beautiful face beaming with animation, while the children clung rapturously to his corduroy coat.

"Amelia," said Emily, lowering her voice, "don't you think it would improve Beverly's health if he were to try working for an hour every day in the garden?"

Mrs. Brooke appeared troubled by the suggestion. "If he could only make up his mind to it, I've no doubt it would," she answered, "he has had no exercise since he was obliged to give up his horse. Walking he has always felt to be ungentlemanly."

She spoke in a softly tolerant voice, though she herself drudged day and night in her anxious, tearful, and perfectly ineffectual manner. For twenty years she had toiled patiently without, so far as one could perceive, achieving a single definite result – for by some unfortunate accident of temperament, she was doomed to do badly whatever she undertook to do at all. Yet her intention was so admirable that she appeared forever apologising in her heart for the incompetence of her hands.

Emily placed the spade in the corner of the porch, and desisting from her purpose, went upstairs to wash her hands before going in to dinner. As she ascended the wide, dimly lighted staircase, upon which the sun shone with a greenish light from the gallery above, she stopped twice to wonder why Beverly's visitor had slept in the barn like a tramp only six weeks ago. Before her mirror, a minute later, she put the same question to herself while she braided her hair.

The room was large, cool, high-ceiled, with a great brick fireplace, and windows which looked out on the garden, where purple and white lilacs were blooming beside the gate. On the southern side the ivy had grown through the slats of the old green shutters, until they were held back, crumbling, against the house, and in the space between one of the cedars brushed always, with a whispering sound, against the discoloured panes. In Emily's absence a curious melancholy descended on the old mahogany furniture, the greenish windows and the fireless hearth; but with the opening of the door and the entrance of her vivid youth, there appeared also a light and gracious atmosphere in her surroundings. She remembered the day upon which she had returned after ten years' absence, and how as she opened the closed shutters, the gloom of the place had resisted the passage of the sunshine, retreating stubbornly from the ceiling to the black old furniture and then across the uncarpeted floor to the hall where it still held control. For months after her return it had seemed to her that the fight was between her spirit and the spirit of the past – between hope and melancholy, between growth and decay. The burden of debt, of poverty, of hopeless impotence had fallen upon her shoulders, and she had struggled under it with impetuous gusts of anger, but with an energy that never faltered. To keep the children fed and clothed, to work the poor farm as far as she was able, to stay clear of any further debts, and to pay off the yearly mortgage with her small income, these were the things which had filled her thoughts and absorbed the gallant fervour of her youth. Her salary at the public school had seemed to Beverly, though he disapproved of her position, to represent the possibility of luxury; and in some loose, vague way he was never able to understand why the same amount could not be made to serve in several opposite directions at the same time.

"That fifty dollars will come in very well, indeed, my dear," he would remark, with cheerfulness, gloating over the unfamiliar sight of the bank notes, "it's exactly the amount of Wilson's bill which he's been sending in for the last year, and he refuses to furnish any groceries until the account is settled. Then there's the roof which must be repaired – it will help us there – then we must all have a supply of shoes, and the wages of the hands are due to-morrow, I overlooked that item."

"But if you pay it all to Wilson," Emily would ask, as a kind of elementary lesson in arithmetic, "how is the money going to buy all the other things?"

"Ah, to be sure," Beverly would respond, as if struck by the lucidity of the idea, "that is the question."

And it was likely to remain the question until the end of Beverly – for he had grown so accustomed to the weight of poverty upon his shoulders that he would probably have felt a sense of loss if it had been suddenly removed. But it was impossible to live in the house with him, to receive his confidences and meet his charming smile and not to entertain a sentiment of affection for him in one's heart. His unfailing courtesy was his defence, though even this at times worked in Emily an unreasonable resentment. He had ruined his family, and she felt that she could have forgiven him more easily if he had ruined it with a less irreproachable demeanour.

After her question he had said nothing further about the tobacco, but a chance meeting with Adam Whaley, as she rode into Tappahannock on the Sunday after Ordway's visit, made clear to her exactly what the purpose of that visit had been.

"It's a pity Mr. Beverly let his tobacco spoil, particular' arter his wheat turned out to be no account," remarked Adam. "I hope you don't mind my sayin', Miss Em'ly, that Mr. Beverly is about as po' a farmer as he is a first rate gentleman."

"Oh, no, I don't mind in the least, Adam," said Emily. "Do you know," she asked presently, "any hands that I can get to work the garden this week?"

Whaley shook his head. "They get better paid at the factories," he answered; "an' them that ain't got thar little patch to labour in, usually manage to git a job in town."

Emily was on her old horse – an animal discarded by Mr. Beverly on account of age – and she looked down at his hanging neck with a feeling that was almost one of hopelessness. Beverly, who had never paid his bills, had seldom paid his servants; and of the old slave generation that would work for its master for a song, there were only Micah and poor half-demented Aunt Mehitable now left.

"The trouble with Mr. Beverly," continued Adam, laying his hand on the neck of the old horse, "is that he was born loose-fingered jest as some folks are born loose-moraled. He's never held on to anything sense he came into the world an' I doubt if he ever will. Why, bless yo' life, even as a leetle boy he never could git a good grip on his fishin' line. It was always a-slidin' an' slippin' into the water."

They had reached Tappahannock in the midst of Adam's philosophic reflection; and as they were about to pass an open field on the edge of the town, Emily pointed to a little crowd which had gathered in the centre of the grass-grown space.

"Is it a Sunday frolic, do you suppose?" she inquired.

"That? Oh no – it's 'Ten Commandment Smith,' as they call him now. He gives a leetle talk out thar every fine Sunday arternoon."

"A talk? About what?"

"Wall, I ain't much of a listener, Miss, when it comes to that. My soul is willin' an' peart enough, but it's my hands an' feet that make the trouble. I declar' I've only got to set down in a pew for 'em to twitch untwel you'd think I had the Saint Vitus dance. It don't look well to be twitchin' the whole time you are in church, so that's the reason I'm obleeged to stay away. As for 'Ten Commandment Smith,' though, he's got a voice that's better than the doxology, an' his words jest boom along like cannon."

"And do the people like it?"