The Ancient Law Part 36

At first he told himself in a kind of rapture that success was apparent in his earliest and slightest efforts. For weeks Alice appeared to find interest and animation in his presence. She flattered, scolded, caressed and tyrannised, but with each day, each hour, she grew nearer his heart and became more firmly interwoven into his life.

Then suddenly a change came over her, and one day when she had been kissing him with "b.u.t.terfly kisses" on his forehead, he felt her suddenly grow restless and draw back impatiently as if seeking a fresh diversion. A bored look had come into her eyes and he saw the three little wrinkles gather between her eyebrows.

"Alice," he said, alarmed by the swift alteration, "are you tired of the house? Shall we ride together?"

She shook her head, half pettishly, half playfully, "I can't--I've an engagement," she responded.

"An engagement?" he repeated inquiringly. "Why, I thought we were always to ride when it was fair."

"I promised one of the girls to go to tea with her," she repeated, after a minute. "It isn't a real tea, but she wanted to talk to me, so I said I would go."

"Well, I'm glad you did--don't give up the girls," he answered, relieved at once by the explanation.

In the evening when she returned, shortly after dark, "one of the girls"

as she called laughingly from the library, had come home for the night with her. Ordway heard them chatting gayly together, but, when he went in for a moment before going upstairs to dress, they lapsed immediately into an embarra.s.sed silence. Alice's visitor was a pretty, gray-eyed, flaxen-haired young woman named Jenny Lane, who smiled in a frightened way and answered "Yes--no," when he spoke to her, as if she offered him the choice of his favourite monosyllable from her lips. Clearly the subject which animated them was one in which, even as Alice's father, he could have no share.

For weeks after this it seemed to him that a silence fell gradually between them--that silence of the heart which is so much more oppressive than the mere outward silence of the lips. It was not, he told himself again and again, that there had come a perceptible change in her manner. She still met him at breakfast with her flower and her caress, still flung herself into his arms at unexpected moments, still coaxed and upbraided in her pa.s.sionate, childish voice. Nevertheless, the difference was there, and he recognised it with a pang even while he demanded of himself in what breathless suspension of feeling it could consist? Her caresses were as frequent, but the fervour, the responsiveness, had gone out of them; and he was brought at last face to face with the knowledge that her first vivid delight in him had departed forever. The thing which absorbed her now was a thing in which he had no share, no recognition; and true to her temperament, her whole impulsive being had directed itself into this new channel. "She is young and it is only natural that she should wish to have her school friends about her,"

he thought with a smile.

In the beginning it had been an easy matter to efface his personality and stand out of the way of Alice's life, but as the weeks drew on into months and the months into a year, he found that he had been left aside not only by his daughter, but by the rest of the household as well. In his home he felt himself to exist presently in an ignored, yet obvious way like a familiar piece of household furniture, which is neither commented upon nor wilfully overlooked. It would have occasioned, he supposed, some vague exclamations of surprise had he failed to appear in his proper place at the breakfast table, but as long as his accustomed seat was occupied all further use for his existence seemed at an end.

He was not necessary, he was not even enjoyed, but he was tolerated.

Before this pa.s.sive indifference, which was worse to him than direct hostility, he found that his sympathies, his impulses, and even his personality, were invaded by an apathy that paralysed the very sources of his will. He beheld himself as the cause of the gloom, the suspicion, the sadness, that surrounded him, and as the cause, too, of Alice's wildness and of the pathetic loneliness in which Lydia lived. But for him, he told himself, there would have been no shadow upon the household; and his wife's pensive smile was like a knife in his heart whenever he looked up from his place at the table and met it unawares.

At Tappahannock he had sometimes believed that his past was a skeleton which he had left behind; here he had grown, as the years went by, to think of it as a coffin which had shut over him and from which there was no escape. And with the realisation of this, a blighting remorse, a painful humbleness awoke in his soul, and was revealed outwardly in his face, in his walk, in his embarra.s.sed movements. As he pa.s.sed up and down the staircase, he went softly lest the heavy sound of his footsteps should become an annoyance to Lydia's sensitive ears. His manner lost its boyish freedom and grew awkward and nervous, and when he gave an order to the servants it seemed to him that a dreadful timidity sounded in his voice. He began to grow old suddenly in a year, before middle age had as yet had time to soften the way.

Looking in the gla.s.s one morning, when he had been less than three years in Botetourt, he discovered that the dark locks upon his forehead had turned almost white, and that his shoulders were losing gradually their youthful erectness of carriage. And it seemed to him that the courage with which he might have once broken away and begun anew had departed from him in this new and paralysing humility, which was like the humility of a helpless and burdensome old age.

After a day of peculiar loneliness, he was returning from Richard's office on this same afternoon, when a voice called to him from beneath the fringed linen cover of a little phaeton which had driven up to the crossing. Turning in surprise he found Aunt Lucy holding the reins over a fat pony, while she sat very erect, with her trim, soldierly figure emerging from a mountain of brown-paper parcels.

"This is the very chance I've been looking for, Daniel Ordway!" she exclaimed, in her emphatic voice. "Do you know, sir, that you have not entered my house once in the last three years?"

"Yes," he replied, "I know--but the fact is that I have hardly been anywhere since I came back."

"And why is that?" she demanded sharply.

He shook his head, "I don't know. Perhaps you can tell me."

"Yes, I can tell you," she snapped back, with a rudeness which, in some singular way, seemed to him kinder than the studied politeness that he had met. "It's because, in spite of all you've gone through, you are still more than half a fool, Daniel Ordway."

"Oh, you're right, I dare say," he acknowledged bitterly.

With a frown, which struck him curiously as the wrong side of a smile, she nodded her head while she made room for him among the brown-paper parcels on the low linen covered seat of the phaeton. "Come in here, I want to talk to you," she said, "there's a little matter about which I should like your help."

"My help?" he repeated in astonishment, as a sensation of pleasure shot through his heart. It was so seldom that anybody asked his help in Botetourt. "Is the second green parrot dead, and do you want me to dig the grave?" he inquired, checking his unseemly derision as he met her warning glance.

"Polly is perfectly well," she returned, rapping him smartly upon the knee with her little tightly closed black fan which she carried as if it were a baton, "but I do not like Richard Ordway."

The suddenness of her announcement, following so inappropriately her comment upon the health of the green parrot, caused him to start from his seat in the amazement with which he faced her. Then he broke into an echo of his old boyish merriment. "You don't?" he retorted flippantly.

"Well, Lydia does."

Her eyes blinked rapidly in the midst of her wrinkled little face, and bending over she flicked the back of the fat pony gently with the end of the whip. "Oh, I'm not sure I like Lydia," she responded, "though, of course, Lydia is a saint."

"Yes, Lydia is a saint," he affirmed.

"Well, I'm not talking about Lydia," she resumed presently, "though there's something I've always had a burning curiosity to find out." For an instant she held back, and then made her charge with a kind of desperate courage. "Is she really a saint?" she questioned, "or is it only the way that she wears her hair?"

Her question was so like the spoken sound of his own dreadful suspicion that it took away his breath completely, while he stared at her with a gasp that was evenly divided between a laugh and a groan.

"Oh, she's a saint, there's no doubt of that," he insisted loyally.

"Then I'll let her rest," she replied, "and I'm glad, heaven knows, to have my doubts at an end. But where do you imagine that I am taking you?"

"For a drive, I hope," he answered, smiling.

"It's not," she rejoined grimly, "it's for a visit."

"A visit?" he repeated, starting up with the impulse to jump over the moving wheel, "but I never visit."

She reached out her wiry little fingers, which clung like a bird's claw, and drew him by force back upon the seat.

"I am taking you to see Adam Crowley," she explained, "do you remember him?"

"Crowley?" he repeated the name as he searched his memory. "Why, yes, he was my father's clerk for forty years, wasn't he? I asked when I came home what had become of him. So he is still living?"

"He was paralysed in one arm some years ago, and it seems he has lost all his savings in some investment your father had advised him to make.

Of course, there was no legal question of a debt to him, but until the day your father died he had always made ample provision for the old man's support. Crowley had always believed that the allowance would be continued--that there would be a mention made of him in the will."

"And there was none?"

"It was an oversight, Crowley is still convinced, for he says he had a distinct promise."

"Then surely my uncle will fulfil the trust? He is an honourable man."

She shook her head. "I don't know that he is so much 'honourable' as he is 'lawful.' The written obligation is the one which binds him like steel, but I don't think he cares whether a thing is right or wrong, just or unjust, as long as it is the law. The letter holds him, but I doubt if he has ever even felt the motion of the spirit. If he ever felt it," she concluded with grim humour, "he would probably try to drive it out with quinine."

"Are we going there now--to see Crowley, I mean?"

"If you don't mind. Of course there may be nothing that you can do--but I thought that you might, perhaps, speak to Richard about it."

He shook his head, "No, I can't speak to my uncle, though I think you are unjust to him," he answered, after a pause in which the full joy of her appeal had swept through his heart, "but I have an income of my own, you know, and out of this, I can help Crowley."

For an instant she did not reply, and he felt her thin, upright little figure grow rigid at his side. Then turning with a start, she laid her hand, in its black lace mitten, upon his knee.

"O my boy, you are your mother all over again!" she said.

After this they drove on in silence down one of the shaded streets, where rows of neat little houses, packed together like pasteboard boxes, were divided from the unpaved sidewalks by low whitewashed fences. At one of these doors the phaeton presently drew up, and dropping the reins on the pony's back, Aunt Lucy alighted with a bound between the wheels, and began with Ordway's help, to remove the paper parcels from the seat.

When their arms were full, she pushed open the gate, and led him up the short walk to the door where an old man, wearing a knitted shawl, sat in an invalid's chair beyond the threshold. At the sound of their footsteps Crowley turned on them a cheerful wrinkled face which was brightened by a pair of twinkling black eyes that gave him an innocent and merry look.

"I knew you'd come around," he said, smiling with his toothless mouth like an amiable infant. "Matildy has been complaining that the coffee gave out at breakfast, but I said 'twas only a sign that you were coming. Everything bad is the sign of something good, that's what I say."