Though the words were uttered pleasantly enough, it seemed to the younger man that the concluding and significant phrase was left unspoken. "Some kind of occupation to keep you out of temptation" was what Richard had meant to say—what he had withheld, from consideration, if not from humanity. While the horror of the whole situation closed over Daniel like a mental darkness, he remembered the sensitive shrinking of Lydia on the drive home, the prying, inquisitive eyes of the mulatto servant, the furtive withdrawal of the whiskey by the man who sat opposite to him. With all its attending humiliation and despair, there rushed upon him the knowledge that by the people of his own household he was regarded still as a creature to be restrained and protected at every instant. Though outwardly they had received him, instinctively they had repulsed him. The thing which stood between them and himself was neither of their making nor of his. It belonged to their very nature and was woven in with their inner fibre. It was a creation, not of the individual, but of the race, and the law by which it existed was rooted deep in the racial structure. Tradition, inheritance, instinct—these were the barriers through which he had broken and which hadclosed like the impenetrable sea-gates behind him. Though he were to live on day by day as a saint among them, they could never forget: though he were to shed his heart's blood for them, they would never believe. To convince them of his sincerity was more hopeless, he understood, than to reanimate their affection. In their very forgiveness they had not ceased to condemn him, and in the shelter which they offered him there would be always a hidden restraint. With the thought it seemed to him that he was stifling in the closeness of the atmosphere, that he must break away again, that he must find air and freedom, though it cost him all else besides. The possibility of his own weakness seemed created in him by their acceptance of it; and he felt suddenly a terror lest the knowledge of their suspicion should drive him to justify it by his future in Botetourt.
"Yes, it is better for me to work," he said aloud. "I hope that I shall be able to make myself of some small use in your office."
"There's no doubt of that, I'm sure," responded Richard, in his friendliest tone.
"It is taken for granted, then, that I shall live on here with my wife and children?"
"We have decided that it is best. But as for your wife, you must remember that she is very much of an invalid. Do not forget that she has had a sad—a most tragic life."
"I promise you that I shall not forget it—make your mind easy."
After this it seemed to Daniel that there wasnothing 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 passed at his rapid, yet dignified step out of the house.
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 nobody but you and Dick. 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'sway," remarked Dick, 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 Dick 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.
Dick 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 lustreless pallor of her skin.
"Oh, he's one of Alice's chums," returned Dick 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 nobody can do anything with her."
"Well, I can, can't I, darling?" asked Ordway, smiling in spite of a jealous pang. The appeal of thegirl 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 kinship 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 gratitude 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 shining 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 God.
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 shining 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 Dick 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 gratitude 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 passion 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 passionately 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 passion 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 pass 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, untilshe was crushed powerless against the back of the sofa on which she lay. Her whole attitude, 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 unclassed 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 passion 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 tasseled 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, helifted 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.
Back in his own room again, he asked himself desperately if this existence could be possible? Would it not be better for him to lose himself a second time—to throw in his lot with a lower class, since his own had rejected him? Flinging himself on the floor beside the window, he pressed his forehead against the white painted wood as if the outward violence could deaden the throbbing agony he felt within. Again he smelt the delicate, yet intense perfume of Lydia's chamber; again he saw her shrinking from him until she lay crushed and white against the back of the sofa; again he watched her features contract with the instinctive repulsion she could not control. The pitiful deprecating gesture with which she had murmured: "It is nothing—a moment's pain," was seared forever like the mark from a burning iron into his memory.
"No, no—it cannot be—it is impossible," he said suddenly aloud. And though he had not the strength to frame the rest of his thought into words, he knew that the impossible thing he meant was this life, this torture, this slow martyrdom day by day without hope and without end except in death. After all there was a way of escape, so why should it be closed to him? What were these people to him beside those others whom he might yet serve—the miserable, the poor, the afflicted who would take from him the gifts which his own had rejected?What duty remained? What obligation? What responsibility? Step by step he retraced the nineteen years of his marriage, and he understood for the first time, that Lydia had given him on her wedding day nothing of herself beyond the gentle, apologetic gesture which had followed that evening her involuntary repulsion. From the beginning to the end she had presided always above, not shared in his destiny. She had wanted what he could give, but not himself, and when he could give nothing more she had shown that she wanted him no longer. While he knelt there, still pressing his forehead against the window sill, the image of her part in his life rose out of the darkness of his mind, which opened and closed over it, and he saw her fixed, shining and immovable, to receive his offerings, like some heathen deity above the sacrificial altar.
The next instant the image faded and was replaced by Emily as she had looked at him on that last evening with her soft, comforting gaze. The weakness of self pity came over him, and he asked himself in the coward's luxury of hopeless questioning, what Emily would have done had she stood to him in Lydia's place? He saw her parting from him with her bright courage at the prison doors; he saw her meeting him with her smile of welcome and of forgiveness when he came out. As once before he had risen to the vision of service, so now in the agony of his humiliation he was blessed at last with the understanding of love.
For many minutes he knelt there motionless bythe open window, beyond which he could see the dimly lighted town on which a few drops of rain had begun to fall. The faint perfume of lilies came up to him from the walk below, where the broken sprays swept from the house were fading under the slow, soft rain. With the fragrance the image of Emily dissolved as in a mist to reappear the minute afterwards in a more torturing and human shape. He saw her now with her bright dark hair blown into little curls on her temples, with her radiant brown eyes that penetrated him with their soft, yet animated glance. The vigorous grace of her figure, as he had seen it outlined in her scant blue cotton gown against the background of cedars, remained motionless in his thoughts, bathed in a clear golden light that tormented his senses.
Rising from his knees with an effort, he struck a match and raised the green shade from the lamp on the table. Then while the little blue flame flickered out in his hand, he felt that he was seized by a frantic, an irresistible impulse of flight. Gathering his clothes from the bed in the darkness, he pushed them hurriedly back into the bag he had emptied, and with a last glance at the room which had become unendurable to him, opened the door and went with a rapid step down the great staircase and into the hall below. The direction of his journey, as well as the purpose of it, was obscure in his mind. Yesterday he had told himself that he could not remain in Tappahannock, and to-day he knew that it was impossible for him to live on in his father'shouse. To pass the hall door meant release—escape to him; beyond that there lay only the distance and the unknown.
The lights burned dimly on the staircase, and when he reached the bottom he could see on the carpet the thin reddish stream which issued from the closed door of the library. As he was about to pass by, a short sob fell on his ear, arresting him as authoritatively as if it had been the sound of his own name. While he stood there listening the sobs ceased and then broke out more loudly, now violent, now smothered, now followed by quick, furious steps across the floor within. Alice was shut in the room alone and suffering! With the realisation the bag fell from his hand, and turning the knob softly, he opened the door and paused for an instant upon the threshold.
At the noise of the opening door the girl made a single step forward, and as she raised her hands to conceal her distorted features, her handkerchief, torn into shreds, fell to the carpet at her feet. Around her the room showed other signs of an outbreak of anger—the chairs were pushed hurriedly out of place, the books from the centre table were lying with opened backs on the floor, and a vase of dahlias lay overturned and scattered upon the mantel.
"I don't care—I don't care," she repeated, convulsively. "Why do they always interfere with me? What right has Dick or Uncle Richard to say whom I shall see or whom I shall not? I hate them all. Mamma is always against me—so is Uncle Richard—so is everybody. They side with Dick—always—always."
A single wave of her dark hair had fallen low on her forehead, and this, with the violent colour of her mouth, gave her a look that was almost barbaric. The splendid possibilities in her beauty caused him, in the midst of his pity, a sensation of dread.
"Alice," he said softly, almost in a whisper, and closing the door after him, he came to the middle of the room and stood near her, though still without touching her quivering body.
"They side with Dick always," she repeated furiously, "and you will side with him, too—you will side with him, too!"
For a long pause he looked at her in silence, waiting until the convulsive tremors of her limbs should cease.
"I shall never side against my daughter," he said very slowly. "Alice, my child, my darling, are you not really mine?"
A last quivering sob shook through her and she grew suddenly still. "They will tell you things about me and you will believe them," she answered sternly.
"Against you, Alice? Against you?"
"You will blame me as they do."
"I love you," he returned, almost as sternly as she had spoken.
An emotional change, so swift that it startled him, broke in her look, and he saw the bright red of her mouth tremble and open like a flower in her glowing face. At the sight a sharp joy took possessionof him—a joy that he could measure only by the depth of the agony out of which he had come. Without moving from his place, he stretched out his arms and stood waiting.
"Alice, I love you," he said.
Then his arms closed over her, for with the straight flight of a bird she had flown to his breast.
AWAKING before dawn, he realised with his first conscious thought that his life had been irrevocably settled while he slept. His place was here; he could not break away from it without leaving a ragged edge; and while he had believed himself to be deciding his future actions, that greater Destiny, of which his will was only a part, had arranged them for him during the dim pause of the night. He could feel still on his arm, as if it had persisted there through his sleep, the firm, almost viselike pressure of Alice's hands, and his whole sensitive nature thrilled in response to this mute appeal to his fatherhood. Yes, his purpose, his mission, and his happiness were here in his father's house.
At breakfast he found a white rosebud on his plate, and as he took it up, Alice rushed in from the garden and threw herself into his arms.
"I thought you were never, never coming down!" she exclaimed, choking with laughter, and utterly forgetful of the shadow of death which still lay over the house. "At first I was afraid you might have gone away in the night—just as you went that awful day eight years ago. Then I peeped out and saw your boots, so I went back to bed again and fell asleep.Oh, I'm so glad you've come! Why did you stay away such an age? Now, at last, I'll have somebody to take my side against mamma and Dick and Uncle Richard——"
"But why against them, Alice? Surely they love you just as I do?"
Biting her lips sharply, she bent her heavy brows in a stern and frowning expression. "Oh, they're horrid," she said angrily, "they want me to live just as mamma does—shut up all day in a hot room on a hateful sofa. She reads novels all the time, and I despise books. I want to go away and see things and to have plenty of clothes and all the fun I choose. They let Dick do just as he pleases because he's a boy, but they try to make me dull and stupid and foolish all because I'm a girl. I won't have it like that and it makes them angry——"
"Oh, well, we'll have fun together, you and I," returned Ordway, with a sinking heart, "but you must wait a bit till I catch up with you. Don't be in a precious hurry, if you please."
"Shall we have a good time, then? Shall we?" she persisted, delighted, kissing him with her warm mouth until he was dazzled by her beauty, her fascination, her ardent vitality. "And you will do just what I wish, won't you?" she whispered in his ear as she hung on his shoulder, "you will be good and kind always? and you will make them leave me alone about Geoffrey Heath?"
"About Geoffrey Heath?" he repeated, and grew suddenly serious.
"Oh, he's rich and he's fun, too," she responded irritably. "He has asked me to ride one of his horses—the most beautiful chestnut mare in the world—but mamma scolds me about it because she says he's not nice and that he did something once years ago about cards. As if I cared about cards!"
By the fear that had gripped him he could judge the strength of her hold on his heart. "Alice, be careful—promise me to be careful!" he entreated.
At his words he felt her arms relax from their embrace, and she seemed instantly to turn to marble upon his breast. "Oh, you're just like the others now. I knew you would be!" she exclaimed, as she drew away from him.
Before the coldness of her withdrawal he felt that his will went out of him; and in one despairing flight of imagination he saw what the loss of her affection would mean now in his life. An emotion which he knew to be weakness pervaded not only his heart, but his soul and his senses and the remotest fibre of his physical being. "Whatever comes I shall always stand by you, Alice," he said.
Though she appeared to be mollified by his subjection, the thin almost imperceptible furrows caused by the moment's anger, were still visible between her eyebrows. There was a certain fascination, he found, in watching these marks of age or of experience come and go on her fresh, childlike forehead, with its lustrous pallor, from which her splendid dark hair rolled back, touched with light, like a moonlit cloud. It was a singular characteristic of her beauty that itsappeal was rather to the imagination than to the eye, and the moments, perhaps, when she dazzled least were those in which she conquered most through her enigmatical charm.
"You will buy some clothes, first of all, will you not?" she said, when, having finished his breakfast, he rose from the table and went out into the hall.
He met her eyes laughing, filled with happiness at the playful authority she assumed, and yet fearful still lest some incautious word of his should bring out those fine nervous wrinkles upon her forehead.
"Give me a week and I'll promise you a fashion plate," he responded gaily, kissing his hand to her as he went down the steps, and, under the trailing rose creepers at the gate, out into the street.
Rain had fallen in the night, and the ground was covered with shining puddles beneath which a few autumn leaves showed drenched and beaten. From the golden and red maples above a damp odour was wafted down into his face by the October wind, which now rose and now died away with a gentle sound. In the pale sunshine, which had not yet drained the moisture from the bricks, a wonderful freshness seemed to emanate from the sky and the earth and the white-pillared houses.
As he approached the corner, he heard his name called in a clear emphatic voice from the opposite sidewalk, and turning his head, he saw hastening toward him, a little elderly lady in a black silk gown trimmed heavily with bugles. As she neared him, followed by a young Negro maid bearing a marketbasket filled with vegetables, he recognised her as an intimate friend of his mother's, whom he had known familiarly in his childhood as "Aunt Lucy." It seemed so long now since his mother's death that he was attacked by a ghostly sensation, as if he were dreaming over his past life, while he stood face to face with the old lady's small soldierly figure and listened to the crisp, emphatic tones in which she welcomed him back to Botetourt. He remembered his frequent visits to her solemn old house, which she kept so dark that he had always stumbled over the two embroidered ottomans on the parlour hearth. He recalled the smell of spices which had hung about her storeroom, and the raspberry preserves which she had never failed to give him out of a blue china jar.
"Why, my dear, blessed child, it's such a pleasure to have you back!" she exclaimed now with an effusion which he felt to be the outward veil of some hidden embarrassment. "You must come sometimes and let me talk to you about your mother. I knew your mother so well—I was one of her bridesmaids."
Seizing his arm in her little firm, clawlike hands, she assured him with animation of her delight at his return, alluding in a shaking voice to his mother, and urging him to come to sit with her whenever he could stand the gloom of her empty house.
"And you will give me raspberry preserves out of the blue china jar?" he asked, laughing, "and let me feed crackers to the green parrot?"
"What a boy! What a boy!" she returned. "You remember everything. The parrot is dead—my poor Polly!—but there is a second."
Her effusiveness, her volubility, which seemed to him to be the result of concealed embarrassment, produced in him presently a feeling of distrust, almost of resentment, and he remembered the next instant that, in his childhood, she had been looked upon as a creature of uncontrolled charitable impulses. Upon the occasion of his last meeting with her was she not hastening upon some ministering errand to the city gaol? At the casual recollection an unreasoning bitterness awoke in his mind; her reiterated raptures fell with a strange effect of irritation upon his ears; and he knew now that he could never bring himself to enter her house again, that he could never accept her preserved raspberries out of the blue china jar. Her reception of him, he saw, was but a part of the general reception of Botetourt. Like her the town would be voluble, unnatural, overdone in its kindness, hiding within itself a furtive constraint as if it addressed its speeches to the sensitive sufferer from some incurable malady. The very tenderness, the exaggerated sympathy in its manner would hardly have been different, he understood, if he had been recently discharged as harmless, yet half-distraught, from an asylum for the insane.
As the days went on this idea, instead of dissolving, became unalterably lodged in his brain. Gradually he retreated further and further into himself, until the spiritual isolation in which he lived appeared tohim more and more like the isolation of the prison. His figure had become a familiar one in the streets of Botetourt, yet he lived bodily among the people without entering into their lives or sharing in any degree the emotions that moved their hearts. Only in periods of sorrow did he go willingly into the houses of those of his own class, though he had found a way from the beginning to reach the poor, the distressed, or the physically afflicted. His tall, slightly stooping figure, in its loose black clothes, his dark head, with the thick locks of iron gray hair upon the temples, his sparkling blue eyes, his bright, almost boyish smile, and the peculiar, unforgettable charm of his presence—these were the things which those in sickness or poverty began to recognise and to look for. In his own home he lived, except for the fitful tenderness of Alice, as much apart as he felt himself to be in the little town. They were considerate of him, but their consideration, he knew, contained an ineradicable suspicion, and in the house as outside, he was surrounded by the watchful regard that is given to the infirm or the mentally diseased. He read this in Lydia's gently averted eyes; he felt it in Richard Ordway's constrained manner; he detected it even in the silent haste with which the servants fulfilled his slightest wish.
His work in his uncle's office, he had soon found to be of the most mechanical character, a mere pretext to give him daily employment, and he told himself, in a moment of bitterness that it was convincing proof of the opinion which the older man must holdof his honesty or of his mental capacity. It became presently little more than a hopeless round to him—this morning walk through the sunny streets, past the ivied walls of the old church, to the clean, varnish scented office, where he sat, until the luncheon hour, under the hard, though not unkind, eyes of the man who reminded him at every instant of his dead father. And the bitterest part of it, after all, was that the closer he came to the character of Richard Ordway, the profounder grew his respect for his uncle's unwavering professional honour. The old man would have starved, he knew, rather than have held back a penny that was not legally his own or have owed a debt that he felt had begun to weigh, however lightly, upon his conscience. Yet this lawyer of scrupulous rectitude was the husband, his nephew suspected, of a neglected, a wretchedly unhappy wife—a small, nervous creature, whom he had married, shortly after the death of his first wife, some twenty years ago. The secret of this unhappiness Daniel had discovered almost by intuition on the day of his father's funeral, when he had looked up suddenly in the cemetery to find his uncle's wife regarding him with a pair of wonderful, pathetic eyes, which seemed to gaze at him sadly out of a blue mist. So full of sympathy and understanding was her look that the memory of it had returned to him more than a year later, and had caused him to stop at her gate one November afternoon as he was returning from his office work. After an instant's pause, and an uncertain glance at thebig brick house with its clean white columns, he ascended the steps and rang the bell for the first time since his boyhood.
The house was one of the most charming in Botetourt, but as he followed the servant down the hall to the library, it seemed to him that all these high, imposing walls, with their fine white woodwork, enclosed but so much empty space to fill with loneliness. His uncle had no children, and the sad, fair-haired little wife appeared to be always alone and always suffering.
She was seated now in a low rocking-chair beside the window, and as she turned her head at his entrance, he could see, through the lace curtains, a few pale November leaves, which fluttered down from an elm tree beside the porch. When she looked at him he noticed that her eyes were large and beautiful and of a changeable misty colour which appeared now gray, now violet.
"It is so good of you, Daniel," she said, in a soft, grateful voice, removing her work-basket from the chair at her side so that he might come within the reach of her short-sighted gaze.
"I've wanted to come ever since I saw you for the first time after my return," he answered cheerfully. "It is strange, isn't it?—that I hardly remember you when I lived here. You were always ill, were you not?"
"Yes, ill almost always," she replied, smiling as she met his glance. "When you were married I remember I couldn't go to the wedding because Ihad been in bed for three months. But that's all over now," she added, fearing to produce in him a momentary depression. "I am well again, you see, so the past doesn't matter."
"The past doesn't matter," he repeated in a low voice, struck by the words as if they held more than their surface meaning for his ears.
She nodded gravely. "How can it matter if one is really happy at last."
"And you are happy at last?"
As he watched her it seemed to him that a pale flame burned in her face, tinging its sallow wanness with a golden light. "I am at peace and is that not happiness?" she asked.
"But you were sad once—that day in the cemetery? I felt it."
"That was while I was still struggling," she answered, "and it always hurts one to struggle. I wanted happiness—I kept on wanting it even after I ceased to believe in its existence. I fought very hard—oh, desperately hard—but now I have learned that the only way to get anything is to give it up. Happiness is like everything else, it is only when one gives it back to God that one really possesses it."
He had never seen a face in which the soul spoke so clearly, and her look rather than her words came to him like the touch of divine healing.
"When I saw you standing beside your father's grave, I knew that you were just where I had been for so many years—that you were still telling yourself that things were too hard, that they were unendurable. I had been through it all, you see, so I understood."
"But how could you know the bitterness, the shame of feeling that it was all the result of my own mistake—of my own sin."
Taking his hand in hers, she sat for a moment in silence with her ecstatic gaze fixed on his face. "I know that in spite of your sin you are better than they are," she said at last, "because your sin was on the outside—a thing to be sloughed off and left far behind, while their self-righteousness is of their very souls——"
"Oh, hush, hush," he interrupted sternly, "they have forgiven me for what I did, that is enough."
"Sixteen years ago," she returned, dropping her voice, "my husband forgave me in the same way, and he has never forgotten it."
At his start of surprise, he felt that she clung the more closely to the hand she held. "Oh, it wasn't so big a thing," she went on, "I had been married to him for five years, and I was very unhappy when I met someone who seemed to understand and to love me. For a time I was almost insane with the wonder and delight of it—I might have gone away with him—with the other—in my first rapture, had not Richard found it all out two days before. He behaved very generously—he forgave me. I should have been happier," she added a little wistfully, "if he had not."
As she broke off trembling, he lifted her handto his lips, kissing it with tenderness, almost with passion. "Then that was the beginning of your unhappiness—of your long illness!" he exclaimed.
She nodded smiling, while a tear ran slowly down her flushed cheek. "He forgave me sixteen years ago and he has never allowed me to forget it one hour—hardly a minute since."
"Then you understand how bitter—how intolerable it is!" he returned in an outbreak of anger.
"I thought I knew," she replied more firmly than he had ever heard her speak, "but I learned afterwards that it was a mistake. I see now that they are kind—that they are good in their way, and I love them for it. It isn't our way, I know, but the essence of charity, after all, is to learn to appreciate goodness in all its expressions, no matter how different they may be from our own. Even Richard is kind—he means everything for the best, and it is only his nature that is straightened—that is narrow—not his will. I felt bitterly once, but not now because I am so happy at last."
Beyond the pale outline of her head, he saw the elm leaves drifting slowly down, and beyond them the low roofs and the dim church spires of the quiet town. Was it possible that even here he might find peace in the heart of the storm?
"It is only since I have given my happiness back to God that it is really mine," she said, and it seemed to him again that her soul gathered brightness and shone in her face.
WHEN he reached home the servant who helped him out of his overcoat, informed him at the same time that his uncle awaited him in the library. With the news a strange chill came over him as if he had left something warm and bright in the November sunset outside. For an instant it seemed to him that he must turn back—that he could not go forward. Then with a gesture of assent, he crossed the hall and entered the library, where he found Lydia and the children as well as Richard Ordway.
The lamps were unlit, and the mellow light of the sunset fell through the interlacing half-bared boughs of the golden poplar beyond the window. This light, so rich, so vivid, steeped the old mahogany furniture and the faded family portraits in a glow which seemed to Daniel to release, for the first time, some latent romantic spirit that had dwelt in the room. In the midst of this glamor of historic atmosphere, the four figures, gathered so closely together against the clear space of the window, with its network of poplar leaves beyond the panes, borrowed for the moment a strange effectiveness of pose, a singular intensity of outline. Not only the figures, but the very objects by which they were surrounded appeared to vibrate in response to a tragic impulse.
Richard Ordway was standing upon the hearthrug, his fine head and profile limned sharply against the pale brown wall at his side. His right hand was on Lydia's shoulder, who sat motionless, as if she had fallen there, with her gentle, flower-like head lying upon the arm of her son. Before them, as before her judges, Alice was drawn to her full height, her girlish body held tense and quivering, her splendid hair loosened about her forehead, her trembling mouth making a violent contrast to the intense pallor of her face.
Right or wrong Ordway saw only that she was standing alone, and as he crossed the threshold, he turned toward her and held out his hand.
"Alice," he said softly, as if the others were not present. Without raising her eyes, she shrank from him in the direction of Richard Ordway, as if shielding herself behind the iron fortitude of the man whom she so bitterly disliked.
"Alice has been out driving alone with Geoffrey Heath all the afternoon," said Lydia in her clear, calm voice. "We had forbidden it, but she says that you knew of it and did not object to her going."
With the knowledge of the lie, Ordway grew red with humiliation, while his gaze remained fastened on the figure in the carpet at Alice's feet. He could not look at her, for he felt that her shame was scorching him like a hot wind. To look at her at the moment meant to convict her, and this his heart told him he could never do. He was conscious of the loud ticking of the clock, of the regular tappingof Richard's fingers upon the marble mantel-piece, of the fading light on the poplar leaves beyond the window, and presently of the rapid roll of a carriage that went by in the street. Each of these sounds produced in him a curious irritation like a physical smart, and he felt again something of the dumb resentment with which he had entered his wife's dressing-room on the morning of his arrest. Then a smothered sob reached his ear, and Alice began to tremble from head to foot at his side. Lifting his eyes at last, he made a step forward and drew her into his arms.
"Was it so very wrong? I am sorry," he said to Lydia over the bowed head of their child. Until the words were uttered, and he felt Alice's tense body relax in his arms, he had not realised that in taking sides with her, he was not only making himself responsible for her fault, he was, in truth, actually sharing in the lie that she had spoken. The choice was an unconscious one, yet he knew even in the ensuing moment of his clearer judgment that it had been inevitable—that from the first instant, when he had paused speechless upon the threshold, there had been open to him no other course.
"I am sorry if it was wrong," he repeated, turning his glance now upon Richard Ordway.
"Do you know anything of Geoffrey Heath? Have you heard him spoken of by decent people since you have been in Botetourt?" asked the old man sternly.
"I have heard little of him," answered Daniel,"and that little was far from good. We are sorry, Alice, are we not? It must not happen again if we can help it."
"It has happened before," said Lydia, lifting her head from Dick's arm, where it had lain. "It was then that I forbade her to see him alone."
"I did not know," responded Daniel, "but she will do as you wish hereafter. Will you not, Alice?"
"How does it concern them? What have they to do with me?" demanded Alice, turning in his arms to face her mother with a defiant and angry look, "they have never cared for me—they have always preferred Dick—always, even when I was a little child."
He saw Lydia grow white and hide her drooping face again on Dick's shoulder. "You are unjust to your mother, Alice," he said gravely, "she has loved you always, and I have loved you."
"Oh, you are different—I would die for you!" she exclaimed passionately, as she wept on his breast.
While he stood there holding her in his arms, it seemed to him that he could feel like an electric current the wave of feeling which had swept Alice and himself together. The inheritance which was his had descended to her also with its keen joys and its sharp anguish. Even the road which he had travelled so lately in weariness was the one upon which her brave young feet were now set. Not his alone, but his child's also, was this mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion.
"If you will leave me alone with her, I think I can make her understand what you wish," he said, lifting his eyes from the dark head on his breast to Lydia, who had risen and was standing before him with her pensive, inquiring gaze fixed on his face. "She is like me," he added abruptly, "in so many ways."
"Yes, she is like you, I have always thought so," returned Lydia, quietly.
"And for that reason, perhaps, you have never quite understood her," he responded.
She bowed her head as if too polite or too indifferent to dissent from his words; and then slipping her hand through Richard Ordway's arm, she stood waiting patiently while the old man delivered his last bit of remonstrance.
"Try to curb her impulses, Daniel, or you will regret it."
He went out, still holding Lydia's hand, and a moment afterwards, when Daniel looked up at the sound of the hall door closing quickly, he saw that Dick also had vanished, and that he was alone in the library with Alice, who still sobbed on his breast.
A few moments before it had seemed to him that he needed only to be alone with her to make all perfectly clear between them. But when the others had passed out, and the door had closed at last on the empty silence in which they stood, he found that the words which he had meant to utter had vanished hopelessly from his mind. He had said to Lydia that Alice was like himself, but there had neverbeen an hour in his life when his hatred of a lie had not been as intense, as uncompromising, as it was to-day. And this lie which she had spoken appeared to divide them now like a drawn sword.
"Alice," he said, breaking with an effort through the embarrassment which had held him speechless, "will you give me your word of honour that you will never tell me a falsehood again?"
She stirred slightly in his arms, and he felt her body grow soft and yielding. "I didn't to you," she answered, "oh, I wouldn't to you."
"Not to the others then. Will you promise?"
Her warm young arm tightened about his neck. "I didn't mean to—I didn't mean to," she protested between her sobs, "but they forced me to do it. It was more than half their fault—they are so—so hateful! I tried to think of something else, but there was nothing to say, and I knew you would stand by me——"
"You have almost broken my heart," he answered, "for you have lied, Alice, you have lied."
She lifted her head and the next instant he felt her mouth on his cheek, "I wish I were dead! I have hurt you and I wish I were dead!" she cried.
"It is not hurting me that I mind—you may do that and welcome. It is hurting yourself, my child, my Alice," he answered; and pressing her upturned face back on his arm, he bent over her in an ecstasy of emotion, calling her his daughter, his darling, the one joy of his life. The iron in his nature had melted beneath her warm touch, and he felt againthe thrill, half agony, half rapture, with which he had received her into his arms on the day of her birth. That day was nearer to him now than was the minute in which he stood, and he could trace still the soft, babyish curves in the face which nestled so penitently on his arm. His very fear for her moved him into a deeper tenderness, and the appeal she made to him now was one with the appeal of her infancy, for its power lay in her weakness, not in her strength.
"Be truthful with me, Alice," he said, "and remember that nothing can separate me from you."
An hour later when he parted from her and went upstairs, he heard Lydia's voice calling to him through her half open door, and turning obediently, he entered her bedroom for the first time since the night of his return. Now as then the luxury, the softness, of his wife's surroundings produced in him a curious depression, an enervation of body; and he stood for an instant vainly striving to close his nostrils against the delicious perfume which floated from her lace-trimmed dressing-table.
Lydia, still in her light mourning gown, was standing, when he entered, before a little marquetry desk in one corner, her eyes on an open letter which she appeared to have left partially unread.
"I wanted to tell you, Daniel," she began at once, approaching the point with a directness which left him no time to wonder as to the purpose of her summons, "that Alice's intimacy with Geoffrey Heath has already been commented upon in Botetourt.Cousin Paulina has actually written to me for an explanation."
"Cousin Paulina?" he repeated vaguely, and remembered immediately that the lady in question was his wife's one rich relation—an elderly female who was greatly respected for her fortune, which she spent entirely in gratifying her personal passion for trinkets. "Oh, yes," he added flippantly, "the old lady who used to look like a heathen idol got up for the sacrifice."
He felt that his levity was out of place, yet he went on rashly because he knew that he was doomed forever to appear at a disadvantage in Lydia's presence. She would never believe in him—his best motives would wear always to her the covering of hypocrisy; and the very hopelessness of ever convincing her goaded him at times into the reckless folly of despair.
"She writes me that people are talking of it," she resumed, sweetly, as if his untimely mirth had returned still-born into the vacancy from which it emerged.
"Who is this Geoffrey Heath you speak of so incessantly?" he demanded. "There was a Heath, I remember, who had a place near us in the country, and kept a barroom or a butcher's shop or something in town."
"That was the father," replied Lydia, with a shudder which deepened the slightly scornful curve of her lip. "He was a respectable old man, I believe, and made his fortune quite honestly, howeverit was. It was only after his son began to grow up that he became socially ambitious——"
"And is that all you have against him?"
"Oh, there's nothing against the old man—nothing at least except the glaring bad taste he showed in that monstrous house he built in Henry Street. He's dead now, you know."
"Then the son has all the money and the house, too, hasn't he?"
"All he hasn't wasted, yes."
As she spoke she subsided into a chair, with a graceful, eddying motion of her black chiffon draperies, and continued the conversation with an expression of smiling weariness. All her attitudes were effective, and he was struck, while he stood, embarrassed and awkward, before her, by the plaintive grace that she introduced into her smallest gesture. Though he was aware that he saw her now too clearly for passion, the appeal of her delicate fairness went suddenly to his head.
"Then there's not much to be said for the chap, I suppose?" he asked abruptly, fearing the prolonged strain of the silence.
"Very little for him, but a good deal about him, according to Cousin Paulina. It seems that three years ago he was sent away from the University for something disgraceful—cheating at cards, I believe; and since then he has been conspicuous chiefly because of his low associations. How Alice met him, I could never understand—I can't understand now."
"And do you think she cares for him—that sheeven imagines that she does?" he demanded, while his terror rose in his throat and choked back his words.
"She will not confess it—how could she?" replied Lydia wearily, "I believe it is only wildness, recklessness, lack of discipline that prompts her. Yet he is good-looking—in a vulgar way," she added in disgust, "and Alice has always seemed to like vulgar things."
Her eyes rested on him, not directly, but as if they merely included him in their general pensive survey of the world; yet he read the accusation in her gentle avoidance of his gaze as plainly as she had uttered in it her clear, flute-like tones.
"It is very important," she went on, "that she should be curbed in her impulses, in her extravagance. Already her bills are larger than mine and yet she is never satisfied with the amount of her allowance. We can do nothing with her, Uncle Richard and I, but she seems to yield, in a measure, to your influence, and we thought—we hoped——"
"I will—I will," he answered. "I will give my life to help her if need be. But Lydia," he broke out more earnestly, "you must stand by and aid me for her sake, for the sake of our child, we must work together——"
Half rising in her chair, she looked at him fixedly a moment, while he saw her pupils dilate almost as if she were in physical fear.
"But what can I do? I have done all I could," she protested, with an injured look. By this look,without so much as a gesture, she put the space of the whole room between them. The corners of her mouth quivered and drooped, and he watched the pathos creep back into her light blue eyes. "I have given up my whole life to the children since—since——"
She broke off in a frightened whisper, but the unfinished sentence was more expressive than a volley of reproaches would have been. There was something in her thoughts too horrible to put into words, and this something of which she could not bring herself to speak, would have had no place in her existence except for him. He felt cowed suddenly, as if he had been physically beaten and thrust aside.
"You have been very brave—I know—I appreciate it all," he said, and while he spoke he drew away from her until he stood with his back against one of the amber satin curtains. Instinctively he put out his hand for support, and as it closed over the heavy draperies, he felt that the hard silken texture made his flesh creep. The physical sensation, brief as it was, recalled in some strange way the effect upon him of Lydia's smooth and shining surface when he had knelt before her on the night of his homecoming. Yet it was with difficulty even now that he could free himself from the conviction that her emotional apathy was but one aspect of innocence. Would he admit to-day that what he had once worshipped as purity of soul was but the frost of an unnatural coldness of nature? All at once, as he looked at her, he found himself reminded by her calmforehead, her classic features, of the sculptured front of a marble tomb which he had seen in some foreign gallery. Was there death, after all, not life hidden for him in her plaintive beauty? The next instant, as he watched her, he told himself that such questions belonged to the evil promptings of his own nature.
"I realise all that you have been, all that you have suffered," he said at last, aware that his words sounded hysterical in the icy constraint which surrounded them.
When his speech was out, his embarrassment became so great that he found himself presently measuring the distance which divided him from the closed door. With a last effort of will, he went toward her and stretched out his hand in a gesture that was almost one of entreaty.
"Lydia," he asked, "is it too painful for you to have me here? Would it be any better for you if I went away?"
As he moved toward her she bent over with a nervous, mechanical movement to arrange her train, and before replying to his question, she laid each separate fold in place. "Why, by no means," she answered, looking up with her conventional smile. "It would only mean—wouldn't it?—that people would begin to wonder all over again?"
AS the days went on it seemed to him that his nature, repressed in so many other directions, was concentrated at last in a single channel of feeling. The one outlet was his passion for Alice, and nothing that concerned her was too remote or too trivial to engross him—her clothes, her friendships, the particular chocolate creams for which she had once expressed a preference. To fill her life with amusements that would withdraw her erring impulses from Geoffrey Heath became for a time his absorbing purpose.
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 "butterfly 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 embarrassed 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 perceptiblechange 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 passionate, 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. Hewas not necessary, he was not even enjoyed, but he was tolerated.
Before this passive 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 embarrassed movements. As he passed 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 glass 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 gonethrough, 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 flickedthe 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 searchedhis 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."