The Ancient Law Part 32

"I promise you that I shall not forget it--make your mind easy."

After this it seemed to Daniel that there was nothing further to be said; but before rising from his chair, the old man sat for a moment with his thin lips tightly folded and a troubled frown ruffling his forehead. In the dim twilight the profile outlined against the leather chair appeared to have been ground rather than roughly hewn out of granite.

"About the disposition of the estate, there were some changes made shortly before your father's death," remarked Richard presently. "In the will itself you were not mentioned; a provision was made for your wife and the bulk of the property left to your two children. But in a codicil, which was added the day before your father died, he directed that you should be given a life interest in the house as well as in investments to the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

This is to be paid you in the form of a quarterly allowance, which will yield you a personal income of about six thousand a year."

"I understand," replied the younger man, without emotion, almost without surprise. At the moment he was wondering by what name his father had alluded to him in his will. Had he spoken of him as "my son," or merely as "Daniel Ordway"?

"That is all, I think," remarked the other, with a movement which expressed, in spite of him, a sensation of relief. With a smile which appeared to be little more than a muscular contraction of his mouth, he held out his hand and stood for a moment, vainly searching for a phrase or a word that would fit the delicate requirements of the occasion.

"Well, I shall never cease to be thankful that you were with us at the cemetery," he said at last in a tone which was a patent admission that he had failed. Then, with a kindly inclination of his head, he released the hand he held and pa.s.sed at his rapid, yet dignified step out of the house.

CHAPTER III

THE OUTWARD PATTERN

The front door had hardly closed when a breath of freshness blew into the library with the entrance of Alice, and a moment afterwards the butler rolled back the mahogany doors of the dining-room and they saw the lighted candles and the chrysanthemums upon the dinner table.

"We hardly ever dress," said Alice, slipping her hand through his arm, "I wish we did."

"Well, if you'll only pardon these clothes to-night I'll promise to call on the tailor before breakfast," he returned, smiling, conscious that he watched in anxiety lest the look of delight in his presence should vanish from her face.

"Oh, it doesn't matter now, because we're in the deepest grief--aren't we?--and mamma isn't coming down. She wants to see you, by the way, just for a minute when you go upstairs. It is to be just for a minute, I was to be very particular about that, as she is broken down. I wonder why they have put so many covers. There is n.o.body but you and d.i.c.k. I asked Uncle Richard, but he said that he wouldn't stay. It's just as well he didn't--he's so dreadfully dull, isn't he, papa?"

"All I wish is that I were dull in Uncle Richard's way," remarked d.i.c.k, with his boyish air of superiority, "I'd be the greatest lawyer in the state then, when my turn came."

"And you'd be even more tiresome than you are now," retorted the girl with a flash of irritation which brought out three fine, nervous wrinkles on her delicate forehead.

"Well, I shouldn't have your temper anyway," commented d.i.c.k imperturbably, as he ate his soup. "Do you remember, papa, how Alice used to bite and scratch as a baby? She'd like to behave exactly that way now if she weren't so tall."

"Oh, I know Alice better than you do," said Ordway, in a voice which he tried to make cheerful. The girl sat on his right, and while she choked back her anger, he reached out and catching her hand, held it against his cheek. "We stand together, Alice and I," he said softly--"Alice and I."

As he repeated the words a wave of joy rose in his heart, submerging the disappointment, the bitterness, the hard despair, of the last few hours.

Here also, as well as in Tappahannock, he found awaiting him his appointed task.

d.i.c.k laughed pleasantly, preserving always the unshakable self-possession which reminded his father of Richard Ordway. He was a good boy, Daniel knew, upright, honest, manly, all the things which his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been before him.

"Then you'll have to stand with Geoffrey Heath," he said jestingly, "and, by Jove, I don't think I'd care for his company."

"Geoffrey Heath?" repeated Ordway inquiringly, with his eyes on his daughter, who sat silent and angry, biting her lower lip. Her mouth, which he had soon discovered to be her least perfect feature, was at the same time her most expressive one. At her slightest change of mood, he watched it tremble into a smile or a frown, and from a distance it was plainly the first thing one noticed about her face. Now, as she sat there, with her eyes on her plate, her vivid lips showed like a splash of carmine in the l.u.s.treless pallor of her skin.

"Oh, he's one of Alice's chums," returned d.i.c.k with his merciless youthful sneer, "she has a pretty lot of them, too, though he is by long odds the worst."

"Well, he's rich enough anyway," protested Alice defiantly, "he keeps beautiful horses and sends me boxes of candy, and I don't care a bit for the rest."

"Who is he, by the way?" asked Daniel. "There was a family of Heaths who lived near us in the country when I was a boy. Is he one of these?"

"He's the son of old Rupert Heath, who made a million out of some panic in stocks. Uncle Richard says the father was all right, but he's tried his best to break up Alice's craze about Geoffrey. But let her once get her nose to the wind and n.o.body can do anything with her."

"Well, I can, can't I, darling?" asked Ordway, smiling in spite of a jealous pang. The appeal of the girl to him was like the appeal of the finer part of his own nature. Her temptations he recognised as the old familiar temptations of his youth, and the kins.h.i.+p between them seemed at the moment something deeper and more enduring than the tie of blood.

Yet the thought that she was his daughter awoke in him a grat.i.tude that was almost as acute as pain. The emptiness of his life was filled suddenly to over-flowing, and he felt again that he had found here as he had found at Tappahannock both his mission and his reward.

When dinner was over he left the boy and girl in the library and went slowly, and with a nervous hesitation, upstairs to the room in which Lydia was lying on her couch, with a flower-decked tray upon the little inlaid table beside her. As he entered the room something in the luxurious atmosphere--in the amber satin curtains, the white bearskin rugs, the s.h.i.+ning mirrors between the windows--recalled the early years of his marriage, and as he remembered them, he realised for the first time the immensity of the change which divided his present existence from his past. The time had been when he could not separate his inner life from his surroundings, and with the thought he saw in his memory the bare cleanliness of the blue guest-room at Cedar Hill--with its simple white bed, its rag carpet, its faded sampler worked in blue worsteds. That place had become as a sanctuary to him now, for it was there that he had known his most perfect peace, his completest reconciliation with G.o.d.

As he entered the room Lydia raised herself slightly upon her elbow, and without turning her head, nervously pushed back a white silk shawl which she had thrown over her knees. A lamp with an amber shade cast its light on her averted profile, and he noticed that its perfect outline, its serene loveliness, was untouched by suffering. Already he had discovered those almost imperceptible furrows between Alice's eyebrows, but when Lydia looked up at him at last, he saw that her beautiful forehead, under its parting of ash blond hair, was as smooth as a child's. Was it merely the Madonna-like arrangement of her hair, after all, he wondered, not without bitterness, that had bestowed upon her that appealing expression of injured innocence?

"You wished to speak to me, Alice said," he began with an awkward gesture, acutely conscious, as he stood there, of the amber light in the room, of the s.h.i.+ning waves of her hair, of the delicate perfume which floated from the gold-topped boxes upon her dressing-table. An oval mirror above the mantel gave back to him the reflection of his own roughly clad figure, and the violent contrast between himself and his surroundings stung him into a sense of humiliation that was like a physical smart.

"I thought it better to speak to you--Uncle Richard and d.i.c.k advised me to----" she broke off in a gentle confusion, lifting her lovely, pensive eyes for the first time to his face.

"Of course it is better, Lydia," he answered gravely. "You must let me know what you wish--you must tell me quite frankly just what you would rather that I should do----"

The look of grat.i.tude in her face gave him a sudden inexplicable pang.

"I am hardly more than an invalid," she said in a voice that had grown firm and sweet, "Uncle Richard will tell you----"

Her reliance upon Richard Ordway aroused in him a pa.s.sion of resentment, and for an instant the primitive man in him battled hotly against the renunciation his lips had made.

"I know, I understand," he said hurriedly at last. "I appreciate it all and I shall do whatever is in my power to make it easier for you." As he looked at her bowed head a wave of remorse rose in his breast and swept down, one by one, the impulses of anger, of pride, of self-righteousness.

"O my dear, my dear, don't you think I know what I have done to you?" he asked, and going a step toward her, he fell on his knees beside the couch and kissed pa.s.sionately the hand that lay in her lap. "Don't you think I know that I have ruined your life?"

For a moment her eyes dwelt thoughtfully upon his, and she let her hand lie still beneath his remorseful kisses, until her withdrawal of it had lost any appearance of haste or of discourtesy.

"Then you will not object to my living on in this way? You will not seek to change anything? You will----" She hesitated and broke off, not impulsively, but with the same clear, sweet voice in which she had put her question.

Lifting his head, he looked up at her from his knees, and the dumb loneliness in his eyes caused her at last to drop her own to the rug upon which he knelt.

"If you will only let me care for you--serve you--work for you," he implored brokenly. "If you will only let me make up, however poorly, something of what you have suffered."

A vague discomfort, produced in her by the intensity of his gaze, moved her to draw slightly away from him, while she turned restlessly on her pillows. At the first shade of perplexity, of annoyance, that showed in her face, he felt, with a terrible power of intuition, that she was seeking in vain to estimate each of his heartbroken words at its full value--to read calmly by the light of experience the pa.s.sion for atonement to which his lips had tried hopelessly to give expression. The wall of personality rose like a visible object between them. He might beat against it in desperation until his strength was gone, yet he knew that it would remain forever impenetrable, and through its thickness there would pa.s.s only the loud, unmeaning sound of each other's voice.

"Have you lost all love for me, Lydia?" he asked. "Have you even forgotten that I am the father of your children?"

As soon as his words were uttered, he stumbled to his feet, horrified by the effect upon her. A change that was like a spasm of physical nausea had shaken her limbs, and he felt rather than saw that she had shrunk from him, convulsed and quivering, until she was crushed powerless against the back of the sofa on which she lay. Her whole att.i.tude, he realised, was the result, not of a moral judgment, but of a purely physical antipathy. Her horror of him had become instinctive, and she was no more responsible for its existence than a child is responsible for the dread aroused in it by the goblins of nursery rhymes. His life as a convict had not only uncla.s.sed him in her eyes, it had put him entirely outside and below the ordinary relations of human beings. To his wife he must remain forever an object of pity, perhaps, but of intense loathing and fear also.

The wave of remorse turned to bitterness on his lips, and all the tenderer emotions he had felt when he knelt by her side--the self-reproach, the spiritual yearning, the pa.s.sion for goodness, all these were extinguished in the sense of desolation which swept over him.

"Don't be afraid," he said coldly, "I shall not touch you."

"It was nothing--a moment's pain," she answered, in a wistful, apologetic voice.

She was playing nervously with the fringe of the silk shawl, and he stood for a minute in silence while he watched her long, slender fingers twine themselves in and out of the ta.s.seled ends. Then turning aside she pushed away the coffee service on the little table as if its fragrance annoyed her.

"Is it in your way? Do you wish it removed?" he inquired, and when she had nodded in reply, he lifted the tray and carried it in the direction of the door. "Don't be afraid. It is all right," he repeated as he went out.