The Ancient Law Part 13

"What 'other thing' do you mean?"

"When I spoke I was thinking of what people have got to call 'pleasure,'" he responded, "getting what one wants in life, or trying to get it and failing in the end."

"And did you fail?" she asked, with a simplicity which saved the blunt directness of the question.

He laughed. "Do you think if I had succeeded, I'd be splitting wood in Bullfinch's Hollow?"

"And you care nothing for Kit Berry?"

"Oh, I like him--he's an under dog."

"Then you are for the under dog, right or wrong, as I am?" she responded with a radiant look.

"Well, I don't know about that," he answered, "but I have at least a fellow feeling for him. I'm an under dog myself, you see."

"But you won't stay one long?"

"That's the danger. When I come out on top I'll doubtless stop splitting wood and do something worse."

"I don't believe it," she rejoined decisively. "You have never had a chance at the real thing before."

"You're right there," he admitted, "I had never seen the real thing in my life until I came to Tappahannock."

"Do you mind telling me," she asked, after an instant's hesitation, "why you came to Tappahannock? I can't understand why anyone should ever come here."

"I don't know about the others, but I came because my road led here. I followed my road."

"Not knowing where it would end?"

He laughed again. "Not _caring_ where it would end."

Her charming boyish smile rippled across her lips.

"It isn't necessary that I should understand to be glad that you kept straight on," she said.

"But the end isn't yet," he replied, with a gaiety beneath which she saw the seriousness in his face. "It may lead me off again."

"To a better place I hope."

"Well, I suppose that would be easy to find," he admitted, as he glanced beyond the doorway, "but I like Tappahannock. It has taken me in, you know, and there's human nature even in Bullfinch's Hollow."

"Oh, I suppose it's hideous," she remarked, following his look in the direction of the town, "but I can't judge. I've seen so little else, you know--and yet my City Beautiful is laid out in my mind."

"Then you carry it with you, and that is best."

As she was about to answer the door creaked above them and Mrs. Berry came down the short flight of steps, hastily fastening her calico dress as she descended.

"Well, I declare, who'd have thought to see you at this hour, Miss Emily," she exclaimed effusively.

"I thought you might need the milk early," replied the girl, "and as Micah had an attack of rheumatism I brought it over on horseback."

While the old woman emptied the contents of the can into a cracked china pitcher, Emily held out her hand to Ordway with an impulsive gesture.

"We shall have a flouris.h.i.+ng kitchen garden," she said, "thanks to you."

Then taking the empty can from Mrs. Berry, she crossed the threshold, and remounted from the doorstep.

CHAPTER XII

A STRING OF CORAL

As Emily rode slowly up from Bullfinch's Hollow, it seemed to her that the abandoned fields had borrowed an aspect which was almost one of sentiment. In the golden light of the sunrise even the Negro hovels, the refuse heaps and the dead thistles by the roadside, were transfigured until they appeared to lose their ordinary daytime ugliness; and the same golden light was s.h.i.+ning inwardly on the swift impressions which crowded her thoughts. This strange inner illumination surrounded, she discovered now, each common fact which presented itself to her mind, and though the outward form of life was not changed, her mental vision had become suddenly enraptured. She did not stop to ask herself why the familiar events of every day appear so full of vivid interests--why the external objects at which she looked swam before her gaze in an atmosphere that was like a rainbow mist? It was sufficient to be alive to the finger tips, and to realise that everything in the great universe was alive around one--the air, the sky, the thistles along the roadside and the dust blowing before the wind, all moved, she felt, in harmony with the elemental pulse of life. On that morning she entered for the first time into the secret of immortality.

And yet--was it only the early morning hour? she asked herself, as she rode back between the stretches of dried broomsedge. Or was it, she questioned a moment later, the natural gratification she had felt in a charity so generous, so una.s.suming as that of the man she had seen at Mrs. Berry's?

"It's a pity he isn't a gentleman and that his clothes are so rough,"

she thought, and blushed the next instant with shame because she was "only a wretched sn.o.b."

"Whatever his cla.s.s he _is_ a gentleman," she began again, "and he would be quite--even very--good-looking if his face were not so drawn and thin. What strange eyes he has--they are as blue as Blair's and as young. No, he isn't exactly good-looking--not in Beverly's way, at least--but I should know his face again if I didn't see it for twenty years. It's odd that there are people one hardly knows whom one never forgets."

Her bare hands were on Major's neck, and as she looked at them a displeased frown gathered her brows. She wondered why she had never noticed before that they were ugly and unwomanly, and it occurred to her that Aunt Mehitable had once told her that "ole Miss" washed her hands in b.u.t.termilk to keep them soft and white. "They're almost as rough as Mr. Smith's," she thought, "perhaps he noticed them." The idea worried her for a minute, for she hated, she told herself, that people should not think her "nice"--but the golden light was still flooding her thoughts and these trivial disturbances scattered almost before they had managed to take shape. Nothing worried her long to-day, and as she dismounted at the steps, and ran hurriedly into the dining-room, she remembered Beverly and Amelia with an affection which she had not felt for years. It was as if the mere external friction of personalities had dissolved before the fundamental relation of soul to soul; even poor half-demented Aunt Mehitable wore in her eyes, at the minute, an immortal aspect.

A little later when she rode in to the public school at Tappahannock, she discovered that the golden light irradiated even the questions in geography and arithmetic upon the blackboard; and coming out again, she found that it lay like suns.h.i.+ne on the newly turned vegetable rows in the garden. That afternoon for the first time she planted in a discarded pair of buck-skin gloves, and as soon as her work was over, she went upstairs to her bedroom, and regarded herself wistfully by the light from a branched candlestick which she held against the old greenish mirror. Her forehead was too high, she admitted regretfully, her mouth was too wide, her skin certainly was too brown. The blue cotton dress she wore appeared to her suddenly common and old-fas.h.i.+oned, and she began looking eagerly through her limited wardrobe in the hopeless quest for a gown that was softened by so much as a fall of lace about the throat. Then remembering the few precious trinkets saved from the bartered heirlooms of her dead mother, she got out the old black leather jewel case and went patiently over the family possessions. Among the mourning brooches and hair bracelets that the box contained there was a necklace of rare pink coral, which she had meant to give Bella upon her birthday--but as her gaze was arrested now by the cheerful colour, she sat for a moment wondering if she might not honestly keep the beads for her own. Still undecided she went to the bureau again and fastened the string of coral around her firm brown throat.

"I may wear it for a week or two at least," she thought. "Why not?" It seemed to her foolish, almost unfeminine that she had never cared or thought about her clothes until to-day. "I've gone just like a boy--I ought to be ashamed to show my hands," she said; and at the same instant she was conscious of the vivid interest, of the excitement even, which attached to this new discovery of the importance of one's appearance.

Before going downstairs she brushed the tangles out of her thick brown hair, and spent a half hour arranging it in a becoming fas.h.i.+on upon her neck.

The next day Micah was well enough to carry the milk to Mrs. Berry's, but three mornings afterward, when she came from the dairy with the can, the old negro was not waiting for her on the porch, and she found, upon going to his cabin, that the attack of rheumatism had returned with violence. There was nothing for her to do but carry the milk herself, so after leading Major from his stall, she mounted and rode, almost with a feeling of shyness, in the direction of Bullfinch's Hollow.

The door was closed this morning, and in answer to her knock, Mrs. Berry appeared, rubbing her eyes, beyond the threshold.

"I declare, Miss Emily, you don't look like yourself at all," she exclaimed at the girl's entrance, "it must be them coral beads you've got on, I reckon. They always was becomin' things--I had a string once myself that I used to wear when my po' dead husband was courtin' me.

Lord! Lord!" she added, bursting into sobs, "who'd have thought when I wore those beads that I'd ever have come to this? My po' ma gave 'em to me herself--they were her weddin' present from her first husband, and when she made up her mind to marry again, she kind of thought it warn't modest to go aroun' wearin' what she'd got from her first marriage. She was always powerful sensitive to decency, was po' ma. I've seen her scent vulgarity in the most harmless soundin' speech you ever heard--such as when my husband asked her one day if she was afflicted with the budges in her knee, and she told me afterward that he had made a sneakin' allusion to her leg. Ten years from that time, when all my trouble came upon me, she held that over me as a kind of warnin'. 'If you'd listened to me, Sarindy,' she used to say, 'you'd never have got into this sc.r.a.pe of marryin' a man who talked free befo' women. For a man who is indecent in his language can't be decent in his life,' she said."

As she talked she was pouring the milk into the cracked pitcher, and Emily breaking in at the first pause, sought to hasten the was.h.i.+ng of the can, by bringing the old woman's rambling attention back to Kit.

"Has he had a quiet night?" she asked.

"Well, yes, miss, in a way, but then he always was what you might call a quiet sleeper from the very hour that he was born. I remember old Aunt Jemima, his monthly nurse, tellin' me that she had never in all her experience brought a more reliable sleeper into the world. He never used to stir, except to whimper now and then for his sugar rag when it slipped out of his mouth."

Hurriedly seizing the half-washed can, Emily caught up her skirt and moved toward the door.

"Did you sit up with him last night?" she asked, turning upon the step.

"That was Mr. Smith's night, miss--he's taken such a fancy to Kit that he comes every other night to watch by him--but he gets up and leaves now a little before daybreak. I heard him choppin' wood before the sun was up."