The Ancient Law Part 14

"He has been very kind about it, hasn't he?"

"Lord, miss, he's been a son and a brother as far as work goes, but I declare I can't help wis.h.i.+n' he wasn't quite so shut mouthed. Every blessed sound he utters I have to drag out of him like a fox out of a burrow. He's a little cranky, too, I reckon, for he is so absent-minded that sometimes when you call his name he never even turns aroun'. But the Lord will overlook his unsociable ways, I s'pose, for he reads his Bible half the night when he sets up, jest as hard as if he was paid to do it. That's as good a recommendation, I reckon, as I need to have."

"I should think his charity would be a better one," rejoined Emily, with severity.

"Well, that's as it may be, Miss," returned Mrs. Berry, "I'm not ungrateful, I hope, and I'm much obliged for what he gives me--particularly for the coffee, which ain't as thin as it might be seein' it's a present. But when all's said I ain't so apt to jedge by things like that because charity is jest a kind of Saint Vitus dance with some folks--it's all in the muscles. Thank you, miss, yes, Kit is doin' very well."

Mounting from the step, Emily turned back into the Tappahannock road, aware as she pa.s.sed through the deserted fields that her exaltation of the morning had given way before a despondency which seemed to change the face of nature. The day was oppressive, the road ugly, Mrs. Berry more tiresome than usual--each of these things suggested itself as a possible reason for the dissatisfaction which she could not explain. Not once during her troubled mood did the name or the face of Ordway appear as the visible cause of her disturbance. So far, indeed, was his individual aspect from her reflections, that some hours later, when she rode back to school, it was with a shock of surprise that she saw him turn the corner by the new brick church, and come rapidly toward her from the brow of the long hill. That he had not at first seen her was evident, for he walked in an abstracted reverie with his eyes on the ground, and when he looked up at last, she had drawn almost within speaking distance. At sight of his face her heart beat so quickly that she dropped the reins on Major's neck, and raised her free hand to her bosom, while she felt the blood mount joyously to her cheeks; but, to her amazement, in the first instant of recognition, he turned abruptly away and entered the shop of a harness maker which happened to be immediately on his right. The action was so sudden that even as she quickened her horse's pace, there flashed into her mind the humiliating conviction that he had sought purposely to avoid her. The throbs of her heart grew faster and then seemed to die utterly away, yet even as the warm blood turned cold in her cheeks, she told herself with spirit that it was all because she "could not bear to be disliked." "Why should he dislike me?" she questioned presently; "it is very foolish of him, and what have I done?" She searched her memory for some past rudeness of which she had been guilty, but there was nothing she could recall which would justify, however slightly, his open avoidance of a chance meeting.

"Perhaps he doesn't like the colour of my hair. I've heard men were like that," she thought, "or the freckles on my face? Or the roughness of my hands?" But the instant afterward she saw how ridiculous were her surmises, and she felt angry with herself for having permitted them to appear in her mind. She remembered his blue eyes with the moonlight upon them, and she wondered why he had seemed to her more masculine than any man that she had ever known. With the memory of his eyes and his smile she smelt again the odour of the warm earth that had clung about him, and she was conscious that this and everything about him was strange and new as if she had never looked into a pair of blue eyes or smelt the odour of the soil before.

After this meeting she did not see Ordway again for several weeks, and then it was only to pa.s.s him in the road one Sunday afternoon when he had finished his sermon in the old field. As he drew back among the thistles, he spoke to her gravely, with a deference, she noticed, which had the effect of placing him apart from her as a member of the working cla.s.s. Since Kit Berry's recovery she had not gone again to Bullfinch's Hollow; and she could not fail to observe that even when an opportunity appeared, Ordway made no further effort to bridge the mere casual acquaintance which divided rather than united them. If it were possible to avoid conversation with her he did so by retiring into the background; if the event forced him into notice, he addressed her with a reserve which seemed at each meeting to widen the distance between them.

Though she hardly confessed it to herself, her heart was wounded for a month or two by his frank indifference to her presence. Then one bright afternoon in May, when she had observed him turn out of his path as she rode up the hill, she saved the situation in her mind by the final triumph of her buoyant humour.

"Everybody is privileged to be a little fool," she said with a laugh, "but when there's the danger of becoming a great big one, it's time to stop short and turn round. Now, Emily, my dear, you're to stop short from this minute. I hope you understand me."

That the Emily she addressed understood her very clearly was proved a little later in the afternoon, when going upstairs to her bedroom, she unfastened the coral beads and laid them away again among the mourning brooches and the hair bracelets in the leather case.

BOOK SECOND

THE DAY OF RECKONING

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH A STRANGER APPEARS

On a bright June morning, when Ordway had been more than two years at Tappahannock, he came out upon Mrs. Twine's little porch as soon as breakfast was over, and looked down the board walk for Harry Banks, who had fallen into the habit of accompanying him to the warehouse. From where he stood, under the hanging blossoms of the locust trees, he could see the painted tin roofs and the huddled chimneys of the town, flanked by the brazen sweep of the cornfields along the country roads. As his eyes rested on the familiar scene, they softened unconsciously with an affection which was almost paternal--for in the last two years Tappahannock had become a different place from the Tappahannock he had entered as a tramp on that windy afternoon in March. The town as it stood to-day was the town which he had helped to make, and behind each roll of progress there had been the informing purpose of his mind, as well as the strength of his shoulder at the wheel. Behind the law which had closed the disreputable barrooms; behind the sentiment for decency which had purified the filthy hollows; behind the spirit of charity which had organised and opened, not only a reading room for the factory workers, but an industrial home for the poorer cla.s.ses--behind each of these separate movements there had been a single energy to plan and act.

In two years he had watched the little town cover the stretch of ten years' improvement; in two years he had aroused and vitalised the community into which he had come a stranger. Tappahannock was the child of his brain--the life that was in her to-day he had given her out of himself, and the love he felt for her was the love that one bestows upon one's own. Standing there his eyes followed the street to the ugly brick church at the corner, and then as his mental vision travelled down the long, hot hill which led to the railroad, he could tell himself, with a kind of exultation, that there was hardly a dwelling along the way which had not some great or little reason to bless his name. Even Kelly, whose saloon he had closed, had been put upon his feet again and started, with a fair chance, in the tobacco market. Yes, a new life had been given him, and he had made good his promise to himself. The clothes he wore to-day were as rough as those in which he had chopped wood in Bullfinch's Hollow; the room he lived in was the same small, bare lodging of Mrs. Twine's; for though his position at Baxter's now a.s.sured him a comfortable income, he had kept to his cramped manner of life in order that he might contribute the more generously to the lives of others. Out of his little he had given abundantly, and he had gained in return the happiness which he had ceased to make the object of his search. In looking back over his whole life, he could honestly tell himself that his happiest years since childhood were the ones that he had spent in Tappahannock.

The gate closed with a slam, and Banks came up the short brick walk inside, mopping his heated face with a pink bordered handkerchief.

"I'm a minute late," he said, "but it doesn't matter, does it? The Trends asked me to breakfast."

"It doesn't matter in the least if you spent that minute with Milly,"

replied Ordway, with a laugh, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and descended the steps. "The hot weather has come early, hasn't it?"

"Oh, we're going in for a scorcher," responded Banks, indifferently.

There was a heavy gloom in his manner which was hardly to be accounted for by the temperature in which he moved, and as they closed the gate behind them and pa.s.sed under the shade of the locust trees on the board walk, he turned to Ordway in an outburst which was little short of desperation.

"I don't know how it is--or whether it's just a woman's way," he said, "but I never can be sure of Milly for ten minutes at a time. A month ago I was positive that she meant to marry me in the autumn, but now I'm in a kind of blue funk about her doing it at all. She's never been the same since she went North in April."

"My dear chap, these things will vary, I suppose--though, mind you, I make no claim to exact knowledge of the s.e.x."

"It isn't the s.e.x," said Banks, "it's Milly."

"Well, I certainly can't claim any particular knowledge of Milly. It would be rather presumptuous if I did, considering I've only seen her about a dozen times--mostly at a distance."

"I wish you knew her better, perhaps you could help me," returned Banks in a voice of melancholy. "To save the life of me I don't see how it is--I've done my best--I swear I've done my best--yet nothing somehow seems to suit her. She wants to make me over from the skin and even that doesn't satisfy her. When my hair is short she wants it long, and when it's long she says she wants it short. She can't stand me in coloured cravats and when I put on a black tie she calls me an undertaker. I had to leave off my turtle-dove scarf-pin and this morning," he rolled his innocent blue eyes, like pale marbles, in the direction of Ordway, "she actually got into a temper about my stockings."

"It seems to be a case for sympathy," commented Ordway seriously, "but hardly, I should say, for marriage. Imagine, my dear Banks, what a h.e.l.l you'd make out of your domesticity. Suppose you give her up and bear it like a man?"

"Give her up? to what?"

"Well, to her own amiability, we'll say."

"I can't," said Banks, waving his pink bordered handkerchief before his face in an effort either to disperse the swarming blue flies or to conceal the working of his emotion. "I'd die--I'd kill myself--that's the awful part of it. The more she bangs me over the head, the more I feel that I can't live without her. Is that natural, do you s'pose?" he inquired uneasily, "or have I gone clean crazy?"

Checking his smile severely, Ordway turned and slipped his left arm affectionately through his companion's.

"I've heard of similar cases," he remarked, "though I confess, they sounded a little strained."

"Do you think I'd better see a doctor? I will if you say so."

"By no means. Go off on a trip."

"And leave Milly here? I'd jump out of the train--and, I reckon, she'd bang my head off for doing it."

"But if it's as bad as that, you couldn't be much more miserable without her."

"I know it," replied Banks obstinately, "but it would be a different sort of miserableness, and that happens to be the sort that I can't stand."

"Then I give it up," said Ordway, cheerfully, "there's no hope but marriage."

With his words they turned under the archway of Baxter's warehouse, and Banks's pa.s.sionate confidences were extinguished in the odour of tobacco.

A group of men stood talking loudly in the centre of the building, and as Ordway approached, Baxter broke away, with his great rolling laugh, and came to join him at the door of his private office.

"Catesby and Frazier have got into a squabble about that lot of tobacco they brought in last February," he said, "and they have both agreed to accept your decision in the matter."

Ordway nodded, without replying, as he followed the other through the doorway. Such judicial appeals to him were not uncommon, and his power of pacification, as his employer had once remarked, was one of his princ.i.p.al qualifications for the tobacco market.

"Shall I hear them now? or would it be as well to give them time to cool off?" he asked presently, while Baxter settled his great person in a desk chair that seemed a size too small to contain it.

"If they can cool off on a day like this they're lucky dogs," returned Baxter, with a groan, "however, I reckon you might as well get it over and let 'em go home and stew in peace. By the way, Smith, I forgot to tell you that Major Leary--he's the president of the Southside Bank, you know, was asking me yesterday if I could tell him anything about you before you came to work for me."

"Of the Southside Bank," repeated Ordway, while his hand closed tightly over a paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, which lay on Baxter's desk. With the words he was conscious only of the m.u.f.fled drumming of his pulses, and above the discord in his ears, the cheerful tones of Baxter sounded like an echo rather than a real voice. At the instant he was back again in his room in the great banking house of Amos, Bonner & Amos, in the midst of the pale brown walls, the black oak furniture and the s.h.i.+ning leather covered volumes behind the gla.s.s doors of the bookcases. With peculiar vividness he remembered the eccentric little bird on the bronze clock on the mantel, which had hopped from its swinging perch to strike the hour with its beak; and through the open windows he could hear still the din of traffic in the street below and the ceaseless, irregular tread of footsteps upon the pavement.

"Oh, I didn't mean to raise your hopes too high," remarked Baxter, rising from his chair to slap him affectionately upon the shoulder, "he isn't going to make you president of the bank, but of the Citizen's Improvement League, whose object is to oust Jasper Trend, you know, in the autumn. The Major told me before he left that you'd done as much for Tappahannock in two years as any other man had done in a lifetime. I said I thought he'd hit the nail pretty squarely, which is something he doesn't generally manage to do."

"So I'm to fight Jasper Trend, am I?" asked Ordway, with sudden interest. The sound of his throbbing arteries was no longer in his ears, and as he spoke, he felt that his past life with his old ident.i.ty had departed from him. In the swift renewal of his confidence he had become again "Ten Commandment Smith" of Tappahannock.