HE had been recommended for lodging to a certain Mrs. Twine, and at five o'clock, when the day's work at Baxter's was over, he started up the street in a bewildered search for her house, which he had been told was situated immediately beyond the first turn on the brow of the hill. When he reached the corner there was no one in sight except a small boy who sat, crying loudly, astride a little whitewashed wooden gate. Beyond the boy there was a narrow yard filled with partly dried garments hung on clothes lines, which stretched from a young locust tree near the sidewalk to the front porch, where a man with a red nose was reading the local newspaper. As the man with the red nose paid no attention to the loud lamentations of the child, Ordway stopped by the gate and inquired sympathetically if he could be of help.
"Oh, he ain't hurt," remarked the man, throwing a side glance over his paper, "he al'ays yells like that when his Ma's done scrubbed him."
"She's washed me so clean that I feel naked," howled the boy.
"Well, you'll get over that in a year's time," observed Ordway cheerfully, "so suppose you leaveoff a minute now and show me the way to Mrs. Twine's."
At his request the boy stopped crying instantly, and stared up at him while the dirty tearmarks dried slowly on his cheeks.
"Thar ain't no way," he replied solemnly, "'cause she's my ma."
"Then jump down quickly and run indoors and tell her I'd like to see her."
"'T ain't no use. She won't come."
"Well, go and ask her. I was told to come here to look for board and lodging."
He glanced inquiringly at the man on the porch, who, engrossed in the local paper, was apparently oblivious of the conversation at the gate.
"She won't come 'cause she's washin' the rest of us," returned the boy, as he swung himself to the ground, "thar're six of us an' she ain't done but two. That's Lemmy she's got hold of now. Can't you hear him holler?"
He planted his feet squarely on the board walk, looked back at Ordway over his shoulder, and departed reluctantly with the message for his mother. At the end of a quarter of an hour, when Ordway had entered the gate and sat down in the cold wind on the front steps, the door behind him opened with a jar, and a large, crimson, untidy woman, splashed with soapsuds, appeared like an embodied tempest upon the threshold.
"Canty says you've come to look at the dead gentleman's room, suh," she began in a high voice,approaching her point with a directness which lost none of its force because of the panting vehemence with which she spoke.
"Baxter told me I might find board with you," explained Ordway in her first breathless pause.
"To be sure he may have the dead gentleman's room, Mag," put in the man on the porch, folding his newspaper, with a shiver, as he rose to his feet.
"I warn't thinkin' about lettin' that room agin'," said Mrs. Twine, crushing her husband's budding interference by the completeness with which she ignored his presence. "But it's jest as well, I reckon, for a defenceless married woman to have a stranger in the house. Though for the matter of that," she concluded in a burst of domestic confidence, "the woman that ain't a match for her own husband without outside help ain't deservin' of the pleasure an' the blessin' of one." Then as the man with the red nose slunk shamefacedly into the passage, she added in an undertone to Ordway, "and now if you'll jest step inside, I'll show you the spare room that I've got to let."
She led the way indoors, scolding shrilly as she passed through the hall, and up the little staircase, where several half-dressed children were riding, with shrieks of delight, down the balustrade. "You needn't think you've missed a scrubbing because company's come," she remarked angrily, as she stooped to box the ears of a small girl lying flat on her stomach upon the landing. "Such is my taste for cleanness," she explained to Ordway, "that whenmy hands once tech the soap it's as much as I can do to keep 'em back from rubbin' the skin off. Thar 're times even when the taste is so ragin' in my breast that I can hardly wait for Saturday night to come around. Yet I ain't no friend to license whether it be in whiskey or in soap an' water. Temperance is my passion and that's why, I suppose, I came to marry a drunkard."
With this tragic confession, uttered in a matter of fact manner, she produced a key from the pocket of her blue gingham apron, and ushered Ordway into a small, poorly furnished room, which overlooked the front street and the two bared locust trees in the yard.
"I kin let you have this at three dollars a week," she said, "provided you're content to do yo' own reachin' at the table. Thar ain't any servant now except a twelve year old darkey."
"Yes, I'll take it," returned Ordway, almost cheerfully; and when he had agreed definitely as to the amount of service he was to receive, he closed the creaking door behind her, and looked about the crudely furnished apartment with a sense of ownership such as he had not felt since the afternoon upon which he had stood in his wife's sitting-room awaiting his arrest. He thought of the Florentine gilding, the rich curtains, the long mirrors, the famous bronze Mercury and the Corot landscape with the sunlight upon it—and then of the terrible oppression in which these familiar objects had seemed closing in upon him and smothering him intounconsciousness. The weight was lifted now, and he breathed freely while his gaze rested on the common pine bedstead, the scarred washstand, with the broken pitcher, the whitewashed walls, the cane chairs, the rusted scuttle, filled with cheap coal, and the unpainted table holding a glass lamp with a smoked chimney. From the hall below he could hear the scolding voice of Mrs. Twine, but neither the shrill sound nor the poor room produced in him the smothered anguish he felt even to-day at the memory of the Corot landscape bathed in sunlight.
An hour later, when he came upstairs again as an escape from the disorder of Mrs. Twine's supper table, he started a feeble blaze in the grate, which was half full of ashes, and after lighting the glass lamp, sat watching the shadows flicker to and fro on the whitewashed wall. His single possession, a photograph of his wife taken with her two children, rested against the brick chimney piece, and as he looked at it now it seemed to stand in no closer relationship to his life than did one of the brilliant chromos he had observed ornamenting the walls of Mrs. Twine's dining-room. His old life, indeed, appeared remote, artificial, conjured from unrealities—it was as if he had moved lightly upon the painted surface of things, until at last a false step had broken through the thin covering and he had plunged in a single instant against the concrete actuality. The shock had stunned him, yet he realised now that he could never return to his old sheltered outlook—tohis pleasant fiction—for he had come too close to experience ever to be satisfied again with falsehood.
The photograph upon the mantel was the single remaining link which held him to-day to his past life—to his forfeited identity. In the exquisite, still virgin face of his wife, draped for effect in a scarf of Italian lace—he saw embodied the one sacred memory to which as Daniel Smith he might still cling with honour. The face was perfect, the expression of motherhood which bent, flamelike, over the small boy and girl, was perfect also; and the pure soul of the woman seemed to him to have formed both face and expression after its own divine image. In the photograph, as in his memory, her beauty was touched always by some rare quality of remoteness, as if no merely human conditions could ever entirely compass so ethereal a spirit. The passion which had rocked his soul had left her serenity unshaken, and even sorrow had been powerless to leave its impress or disfigurement upon her features.
As the shadows flickered out on the walls, the room grew suddenly colder. Rising, he replenished the fire, and then going over to the bed, he flung himself, still dressed, under the patchwork quilt from which the wool was protruding in places. He was thinking of the morning eighteen years ago when he had first seen her as she came, with several girl companions, out of the old church in the little town of Botetourt. It was a Christmas during his last year at Harvard, when moved by a sudden interest in his Southern associations, he had gone down for two days to hischildhood's home in Virginia. Though the place was falling gradually to ruin, his maiden great-aunt still lived there in a kind of luxurious poverty; and at the sight of her false halo of gray curls, he had remembered, almost with a start of surprise, the morning when he had seen the convict at the little wayside station. The station, the country, the muddy roads, and even the town of Botetourt were unchanged, but he himself belonged now to another and what he felt to be a larger world. Everything had appeared provincial and amusing to his eyes—until as he passed on Christmas morning by the quaint old churchyard, he had seen Lydia Preston standing in the sunshine amid the crumbling tombstones of several hundred years. Under the long black feather in her hat, her charming eyes had dwelt on him kindly for a minute, and in that minute it had seemed to him that the racial ideal slumbering in his brain had responded quickly to his startled blood. Afterward they had told him that she was only nineteen, a Southern beauty of great promise, and the daughter of old Adam Preston, who had made and lost a fortune in the last ten years. But these details seemed to him to have no relation to the face he had seen under the black feather against the ivy-covered walls of the old church. The next evening they had danced together at a ball; he had carried her fan, a trivial affair of lace and satin, away in his pocket, and ten days later he had returned, flushed with passion, to finish his course at Harvard. Love had put wings to his ambition; the following year he had stood at the head of his class, and beforethe summer was over he had married her and started brilliantly in his career. There had been only success in the beginning. When had the tide turned so suddenly? he wondered, and when had he begun to drift into the great waters where men are washed down and lost?
Lying on the bed now in the firelight, he shivered and drew the quilt closer about his knees. She had loved beauty, riches, dignity, religion—she had loved her children when they came; but had she ever really loved him—the Daniel Ordway whom she had married? Were all pure women as passionless—as utterly detached—as she had shown herself to him from the beginning? And was her coldness, as he had always believed, but the outward body of that spiritual grace for which he had loved her? He had lavished abundantly out of his stormy nature; he had spent his immortal soul upon her in desperate determination to possess her utterly at her own price; and yet had she ever belonged to him, he questioned now, even in the supreme hours of their deepest union? Had her very innocence shut him out from her soul forever?
In the end the little world had closed over them both; he had felt himself slipping further—further—had made frantic efforts to regain his footing; and had gone down hopelessly at last. Those terrible years before his arrest crowded like minutes into his brain, and he knew now that there had been relief—comfort—almost tranquillity in his life in prison. The strain was lifted at last, and the days when hehad moved in dull hope or acute despair through the crowd in Wall Street were over forever. To hold a place in the little world one needed great wealth; and it had seemed to him in the time of temptation that this wealth was not a fugitive possession, but an inherent necessity—a thing which belonged to the inner structure of Lydia's nature.
A shudder ran over him, while he drew a convulsive breath like one in physical pain. The slow minutes in which he had waited for a rise in the market were still ticking in agony somewhere in his brain. Time moved on, yet those minutes never passed—his memory had become like the face of a clock where the hands pointed, motionless, day or night, to the same hour. Then hours, days, weeks, months, years, when he lived with ruin in his thoughts and the sound of merriment, which was like the pipe of hollow flutes, in his ears. At the end it came almost suddenly—the blow for which he had waited, the blow which brought something akin to relief because it ended the quivering torture of his suspense, and compelled, for the hour at least, decisive action. He had known that before evening he would be under arrest, and yet he had walked slowly along Fifth Avenue from his office to his home; he recalled now that he had even joked with a club wit, who had stopped him at the corner to divulge the latest bit of gossip. At the very instant when he felt himself to be approaching ruin in his house, he remembered that he had complained a little irritably of the breaking wrapperof his cigar. Yet he was thinking then that he must reach his home in time to prevent his wife from keeping a luncheon engagement, of which she had spoken to him at breakfast; and ten minutes later it was with a sensation of relief that he met the blank face of his butler in the hall. On the staircase his daughter ran after him, her short white, beruffled skirts standing out stiffly like the skirts of a ballet dancer. She was taking her music lesson, she cried out, and she called to him to come into the music room and hear how wonderfully she could run her scales! Her blue eyes, which were his eyes in a child's face, looked joyously up at him from under the thatch of dark curls which she had inherited from him, not from her blond mother.
"Not now, Alice," he answered, almost impatiently, "not now—I will come a little later."
Then she darted back, and the stumbling music preceded him up the staircase to the door of his wife's dressing-room. When he entered Lydia was standing before her mirror, fastening a spotted veil with a diamond butterfly at the back of her blond head; and as she turned smilingly toward him, he put out his hand with a gesture of irritation.
"Take that veil off, Lydia, I can't see you for the spots," he said.
Complaisant always, she unfastened the diamond butterfly without a word, and taking off the veil, flung it carelessly across the golden-topped bottles upon her dressing-table.
"You look ill," she said with her charming smile; "shall I ring for Marie to bring you whiskey?"
At her words he turned from her, driven by a torment of pity which caused his voice to sound harsh and constrained in his own ears.
"No—no—don't put that on again," he protested, for while she waited she had taken up the spotted veil and the diamond pin.
Something in his tone startled her into attention, and moving a step forward, she stood before him on a white bearskin rug. Her face had hardly changed, yet in some way she seemed to have put him at a distance, and he felt all at once that he had never known her.
From the room downstairs he heard Alice's music lesson go on at broken intervals, the uncertain scales she ran now stopping, now beginning violently again. The sound wrought suddenly on his nerves like anger, and he felt that his voice was querulous in spite of the torment of pity at his heart.
"There's no use putting on your veil," he said, "a warrant is out for my arrest and I must wait here till it comes."
His memory stopped now, as if it had snapped suddenly beneath the strain. After this there was a mere blank of existence upon which people and objects moved without visible impression. From that minute to this one appeared so short a time that he started up half expecting to hear Alice's scales filling Mrs.Twine's empty lodgings. Then his eyes fell on the whitewashed walls, the smoking lamp, the bare table, and the little square window with the branches of the locust tree frosted against the pane.
Rising from the bed, he fell on his knees and pressed his quivering face to the patchwork quilt.
"Give me a new life, O God—give me a new life!"
AFTER a sleepless night, he rose as soon as the dawn had broken, and sitting down before the pine table wrote a letter to Lydia, on a sheet of paper which had evidently been left in the drawer by the former lodger. "It isn't likely that you'll ever want me," he added at the end, "but if you should happen to, remember that I am yours, as I have always been, for whatever I am worth." When he had sealed the envelope and written her name above that of the town of Botetourt, he put it into his pocket and went down to the dining-room, where he found Mrs. Twine pouring steaming coffee into a row of broken cups. A little mulatto girl, with her hair plaited in a dozen fine braids, was placing a dish of fried bacon at one end of the walnut-coloured oil-cloth on the table, around which the six children, already clothed and hungry, were beating an impatient tattoo with pewter spoons. Bill Twine, the father of the family, was evidently sleeping off a drunken headache—a weakness which appeared to afford his wife endless material for admonition and philosophy.
"Thar now, Canty," she was remarking to her son, "yo' po' daddy may not be anything to be proud of as a man, but I reckon he's as big an example asyou'll ever see. He's had sermons p'inted at him from the pulpit; they've took him up twice to the police court, an' if you'll believe me, suh," she added with a kind of outraged pride to Ordway, "thar's been a time when they've had out the whole fire department to protect me."
The coffee though poor was hot, and while Ordway drank it, he listened with an attention not unmixed with sympathy to Mrs. Twine's continuous flow of speech. She was coarse and shrewish and unshapely, but his judgment was softened by the marks of anxious thought on her forehead and the disfigurements of honest labour on her hands. Any toil appeared to him now to be invested with peculiar dignity; and he felt, sitting there at her slovenly breakfast table, that he was closer to the enduring heart of humanity than he had been among the shallow refinements of his past life. Mrs. Twine was unpleasant, but at her worst he felt her to be the real thing.
"Not that I'm blamin' Bill, suh, as much as some folks," she proceeded charitably, while she helped her youngest child to gravy, "for it made me downright sick myself to hear them carryin' on over his beatin' his own wife jest as much as if he'd been beatin' somebody else's. An' I ain't one, when it comes to that, to put up with a white-livered, knock-kneed, pulin' sort of a critter, as I told the Jedge a-settin' upon his bench. When a woman is obleeged to take a strappin' thar's some real satisfaction in her feelin' that she takes it from a man—an' the kind that would lay on softly with never a broken headto show for it—well, he ain't the kind, suh, that I could have helt in any respect an' honour. And as to that, as I said to 'em right then an' thar, take the manly health an' spirit out o' Bill, an' he's jest about as decent an' law abidin' as the rest. Why, when he was laid up with malaria, he never so much as rized his hand agin me, an' it'll be my belief untwel my dyin' day that chills an' fever will keep a man moral when all the sermons sence Moses will leave him unteched. Feed him low an' work him hard, an' you kin make a saint out of most any male critter, that's my way of thinkin'."
While she talked she was busily selecting the choicest bit of bacon for Bill's plate, and as Ordway left the house a little later, he saw her toiling up the staircase with her husband's breakfast on a tin tray in her hands.
"If you think I'm goin' to set an' wait all day for you to get out o' bed, you've jest about clean lost yo' wits, Bill Twine," she remarked in furious tones, as she flung open a door on the landing above.
Out of doors Ordway found that the wind had died down, though a sharp edge of frost was still in the air. The movement of the day had already begun; and as he passed the big house on the brow of the hill he saw a pretty girl, with her hair tied back with a velvet ribbon, run along the gravelled walk to meet the postman at the gate. A little farther, when he had reached the corner, he turned back to hand his letter to the postman, and found to his surprise that the pretty girl was still gazing after him. No possibleinterest could attach to her in his thoughts; and with a careless acknowledgment of her beauty, she faded from his consciousness as rapidly as if she had been a ray of sunshine which he had admired as he passed along. Then as he turned into the main street at the corner, he saw that Emily Brooke was riding slowly up the hill on her old white horse. She still wore her red cape, which fell over the saddle on one side, and completely hid the short riding-skirt beneath. On her head there was a small knitted Tam-o'-shanter cap, and this, with the easy freedom of her seat in the saddle, gave her an air which was gallant rather than graceful. The more feminine adjective hardly seemed to apply to her at the moment; she looked brave, strong, buoyant, a creature that had not as yet become aware of its sex. Yet she was older, he discovered now, than he had at first imagined her to be. In the barn he had supposed her age to be not more than twenty years; seen in the morning light it was impossible to decide whether she was a year younger or ten years older than he had believed. The radiant energy in her look belonged, after all, less to the accident of youth than to some enduring quality of spirit.
As she neared him, she looked up from her horse's neck, rested her eyes upon him for an instant, and smiled brightly, much as a charming boy might have done. Then, just as she was about to pass on, the girth of her saddle slipped under her, and she was thrown lightly to the ground, while the old horse stopped and stood perfectly motionless above her.
"My skirt has caught in the stirrup," she said to Ordway, and while he bent to release her, he noticed that she clung, not to his arm, but to the neck of the horse for support.
To his surprise there was neither embarrassment nor amusement in her voice. She spoke with the cool authority which had impressed him during the incident of the ram's attack upon "Sis Mehitable."
"I don't think it is quite safe yet," he said, after he had drawn the rotten girth as tight as he dared. "It looks as if it wouldn't last, you see."
"Well, I dare say, it may be excused after forty years of service," she returned, smiling.
"What? this saddle? It does look a little quaint when one examines it."
"Oh, it's been repaired, but even then one must forgive an old servant for growing decrepit."
"Then you'll ride it again?" he asked, seeing that she was about to mount.
"Of course—this isn't my first tumble—but Major expects them now and he knows how to behave. So do I," she added, laughing, "you see it doesn't take me by surprise."
"Yes, I see it doesn't," he answered gaily.
"Then if you chance to be about the next time it happens, I hope it won't disturb you either," she remarked, as she rode up the hill.
The meeting lingered in Ordway's mind with a freshness which was associated less with the incident itself than with some vivid quality in the appearance of the girl. Her face, her voice, her carriage—eventhe little brown curls blowing on her temples, all united in his thoughts to form a memory in which Alice appeared to hold a place. Why should this country girl, he wondered, bring back to him so clearly the figure of his daughter?
But there was no room for a memory in his life just now, and by the time he reached Baxter's Warehouse, he had forgotten the interest aroused in him a moment before. Baxter had not yet appeared in his office, but two men, belonging evidently to the labouring class, were talking together under the brick archway. When Ordway joined them they did not interrupt their conversation, which he found, after a minute, to concern the domestic and financial troubles of the one whom he judged to be the poorer of the two. He was a meanly clad, wretched looking workman, with a shock of uncombed sandy hair, a cowed manner, and the expression of one who has been beaten into apathy rather than into submission. A sordid pathos in his voice and figure brought Ordway a step closer to his side, and after a moment's careless attention, he found his mind adjusting itself to the small financial problems in which the man had become entangled. The workman had been forced to borrow upon his pathetic personal securities; and in meeting from year to year the exorbitant rate of interest, he had paid back several times the sum of the original debt. Now his wife was ill, with an incurable cancer; he had no hope, as he advanced beyond middle age, of any increase in his earning capacity, and the debt under which he had struggledso long had become at the end an intolerable burden. His wife had begged him to consult a lawyer—but who, he questioned doggedly, would take an interest in him since he had no money for a fee? He was afraid of lawyers anyway, for he could give you a hundred cases where they had stood banded together against the poor.
As Ordway listened to the story, he felt for an instant a return of his youthful enthusiasm, and standing there amid the tobacco stems in Baxter's warehouse, he remembered a great flour trust from which he had withdrawn because it seemed to him to bear unjustly upon the small, isolated farmers. Beyond this he went back still further to his college days, when during his vacation, he had read Virginia law in the office of his uncle, Richard Ordway, in the town of Botetourt. He could see the shining rows of legal volumes in the walnut bookcases, the engraving of Latane's Burial, framed in black wood above the mantel, and against this background the silent, gray haired, self-righteous old man so like his father. Through the window, he could see still the sparrows that built in the ivied walls of the old church.
With a start he came back to the workman, who was unfolding his troubles in an abandon of misery under the archway.
"If you'll talk things over with me to-night when we get through work, I think I may be able to straighten them out for you," he said.
The man stared at him out of his dogged eyes with a helpless incredulity.
"But I ain't got any money," he responded sullenly, as if driven to the defensive.
"Well, we'll see," said Ordway, "I don't want your money."
"You want something, though—my money or my vote, and I ain't got either."
Ordway laughed shortly. "I?—oh, I just want the fun," he answered.
The beginning was trivial enough, the case sordid, and the client only a dull-witted labourer; but to Ordway it came as the commencement of the new life for which he had prayed—the life which would find its centre not in possession, but in surrender, which would seek as its achievement not personal happiness, but the joy of service.
THE pretty girl whom Ordway had seen on the gravelled walk was Milly Trend, the only child of the Mayor of Tappahannock. People said of Jasper Trend that his daughter was the one soft spot in a heart that was otherwise as small and hard as a silver dollar, and of Milly Trend the same people said—well, that she was pretty. Her prettiness was invariably the first and the last thing to be mentioned about her. Whatever sterner qualities she may have possessed were utterly obscured by an exterior which made one think of peach blossoms and spring sunshine. She had a bunch of curls the colour of ripe corn, which she wore tied back from her neck with a velvet ribbon; her eyes were the eyes of a baby; and her mouth had an adorable little trick of closing over her small, though slightly prominent teeth. The one flaw in her face was this projection of her teeth, and when she looked at herself in the glass it was her habit to bite her lips closely together until the irregular ivory line was lost. It was this fault, perhaps, which kept her prettiness, though it was superlative in its own degree, from ever rising to the height of beauty. In Milly's opinion it had meant the difference between theglory of a world-wide reputation and the lesser honour of reigning as the acknowledged belle of Tappahannock. She remembered that the magnificent manager of a theatrical company, a gentleman who wore a fur-lined coat and a top hat all day long, had almost lost his train while he stopped to look back at her on the crowded platform of the station. Her heart had beat quickly at the tribute, yet even in that dazzling minute she had felt a desperate certainty that her single imperfection would decide her future. But for her teeth, she was convinced to-day, that he might have returned.
If a woman cannot be a heroine in reality, perhaps the next best thing is to look as if she might have been one in the age of romance; and this was what Milly Trend's appearance suggested to perfection. Her manner of dressing, the black velvet ribbon on her flaxen curls, her wide white collars open at her soft throat, her floating sky-blue sashes and the delicate peach bloom of her cheeks and lips—all these combined to produce a poetic atmosphere about an exceedingly poetic little figure. Being plain she would probably have made currant jelly for her pastor, and have taught sedately in the infant class in Sunday school: being pretty she read extravagant romances and dreamed strange adventures of fascinating highwaymen on lonely roads.
But many a woman who has dreamed of a highwayman at eighteen has compromised with a bank clerk at twenty-two. Even at Tappahannock—the veriest prose piece of a town—romance might sometimesbud and blossom, though it usually brought nothing more dangerous than respectability to fruit. Milly had read Longfellow andLucille, and her heroic ideal had been taken bodily from one of Bulwer's novels. She had played the graceful part of heroine in a hundred imaginary dramas; yet in actual life she had been engaged for two years to a sandy-haired, freckled face young fellow, who chewed tobacco, and bought the dry leaf in lots for a factory in Richmond. From romance to reality is a hard distance, and the most passionate dreamer is often the patient drudge of domestic service.
And yet even to-day Milly was not without secret misgivings as to the wisdom of her choice. She knew he was not her hero, but in her short visits to larger cities she had met no one who had come nearer her ideal lover. To be sure she had seen this ideal, in highly coloured glimpses, upon the stage—though these gallant gentlemen in trunks had never so much as condescended to glance across the foot-lights to the little girl in the dark third row of the balcony. Then, too, all the ladies upon the stage were beautiful enough for any hero, and just here she was apt to remember dismally the fatal projection of her teeth.
So, perhaps, after all, Harry Banks was as near Olympus as she could hope to approach; and there was a mild consolation in the thought that there was probably more sentiment in the inner than in the outward man. Whatever came of it, she had learned that in a prose age it is safer to think only in prose.
On the morning upon which Ordway had firstpassed her gate, she had left the breakfast table at the postman's call, and had run down the gravelled walk to receive a letter from Mr. Banks, who was off on a short business trip for his firm. With the letter in her hand she had turned to find Ordway's blue eyes fixed in careless admiration upon her figure; and for one breathless instant she had felt her insatiable dream rise again and clutch at her heart. Some subtle distinction in his appearance—an unlikeness to the masculine portion of Tappahannock—had caught her eye in spite of his common and ill-fitting clothes. Though she had known few men of his class, the sensitive perceptions of the girl had made her instantly aware of the difference between him and Harry Banks. For a moment her extravagant fancy dwelt on his figure—on this distinction which she had noticed, on his square dark face and the singular effect of his bright blue eyes. Then turning back in the yard, she went slowly up the gravelled walk, while she read with a vague feeling of disappointment the love letter written laboriously by Mr. Banks. It was, doubtless, but the average love letter of the average plain young man, but to Milly in her rosy world of fiction, it appeared suddenly as if there had protruded upon her attention one of the great, ugly, wholesome facts of life. What was the use, she wondered, in being beautiful if her love letters were to be filled with enthusiastic accounts of her lover's prowess in the tobacco market?
At the breakfast table Jasper Trend was pouring maple syrup on the buckwheat cakes he had piled on his plate, and at the girl's entrance he spoke withoutremoving his gaze from the plated silver pitcher in his hand.
"Any letters, daughter?" he inquired, carefully running his knife along the mouth of the pitcher to catch the last drop of syrup.
"One," said Milly, as she sat down beside the coffee pot and looked at her father with a ripple of annoyance in her babyish eyes.
"I reckon I can guess about that all right," remarked Jasper with his cackling chuckle, which was as little related to a sense of humour as was the beating of a tin plate. He was a long, scraggy man, with drab hair that grew in scallops on his narrow forehead and a large nose where the prominent red veins turned purple when he became excited.
"There's a stranger in town, father," said Milly as she gave him his second cup of coffee. "I think he is boarding at Mrs. Twine's."
"A drummer, I reckon—thar're a plenty of 'em about this season."
"No, I don't believe he is a drummer—he isn't—isn't quite so sparky looking. But I wish you wouldn't say 'thar,' father. You promised me you wouldn't do it."
"Well, it ain't stood in the way of my getting on," returned Jasper without resentment. Had Milly told him to shave his head, he might have protested freely, but in the end he would have gone out obediently to his barber. Yet people outside said that he ground the wages of his workers in the cotton mills down to starvation point, and that he had been elected Mayornot through popularity, but through terror. It was rumoured even that he stood with his wealth behind the syndicate of saloons which was giving an ugly local character to the town. But whatever his public vices may have been, his private life was securely hedged about by the paternal virtues.
"I can't place him, but I'm sure he isn't a 'buyer,'" repeated Milly, after a moment's devotion to the sugar bowl.
"Well, I'll let you know when I see him," responded Jasper as he left the table and got into his overcoat, while Milly jumped up to wrap his neck in a blue spotted muffler.
When he had gone from the house, she took out her lover's letter again, but it proved, on a second trial, even more unsatisfactory than she had found it to be at her first reading. As a schoolgirl Milly had known every attribute of her divinity from the chivalry of his soul to the shining gloss upon his boots—but to-day there remained to her only the despairing conviction that he was unlike Banks. Banks appeared to her suddenly in the hard prosaic light in which he, on his own account, probably viewed his tobacco. Even her trousseau and the lace of her wedding gown ceased to afford her the shadow of consolation, since she remembered that neither of these accessories would occupy in marriage quite so prominent a place as Banks.
The next day Ordway passed at the same hour, still on the opposite side of the street. After this she began to watch regularly for his figure, looking forit when it appeared on Mrs. Twine's little porch, and following it wistfully until it was lost beyond the new brick church at the corner. She was not aware of cultivating a facile sentiment about the stranger, but place a riotous imagination in an empty house and it requires little effort to weave a romance from the opposite side of the street. Distance, that subtle magnifier of attachments, had come to her aid now as it had failed her in the person of Harry Banks. Even from across the street it was impossible to invest Mr. Banks with any quality which might have suggested an historic background or a mysterious past. He was flagrantly, almost outrageously himself; in no fictitious circumstances could he have appeared as anything except the unvarnished fact that he was. No legendary light could have glorified his features or improved the set of his trousers—which had taken their shape and substance from the legs within. With these features and in these trousers, she felt that he must usurp the sacred precincts where her dream had dwelt. "It would all be so easy if one could only be born where one belongs," she cried out hopelessly, in the unconscious utterance of a philosophy larger than her own.
And so as the week went by, she allowed her rosy fancies to surround the figure that passed three times daily along the sidewalk across the way. In the morning he walked by with a swinging stride; at midday he passed rapidly, absorbed in thought; in the evening he came back slowly, sometimes stopping to watch the sunset from the brow of thehill. Not since the first morning had he turned his blue eyes toward Milly's gate.
At the end of the month Mr. Banks returned to Tappahannock from a business trip through the tobacco districts. He was an ugly, freckled face, sandy-haired young fellow—an excellent judge of tobacco—with a simple soul that attired itself in large checks, usually of a black and white variety. On the day of his first visit to Milly he wore a crimson necktie pierced by a scarf-pin bearing a turtle-dove in diamonds.
"Who's that fellow over there?" he inquired as Ordway came up the hill to his dinner. "I wonder if he's the chap Hudge was telling me about at breakfast?"
"Oh, I don't know," answered Milly, in a voice that sounded flat in her own ears. "Nobody knows anything about him, father says. But what was Hudge telling you?" she asked, impelled by a devouring yet timid curiosity.
"Well, if he's the man I mean, he seems to be a kind of revivalist out of a job—or something or other queer. Hudge says he broke up a fight last Saturday evening in Kelly's saloon—that's the place you've never heard the name of, I reckon," he added hesitatingly, "it's where all the factory hands gather after work on Saturday to drink up their week's wages."
For once Milly's interest was stronger than her modesty.
"And did he fight?" she demanded in a suspense that was almost breathless.
"He wasn't there, you know—only passing along the street outside, at least that's what they say—when the rumpus broke out. Then he went in through the window and——"
"And?" repeated Milly, with an entrancing vision of heroic blows, for beneath her soft exterior the blood of the primitive woman flowed.
"And preached!" finished Banks, with a prodigious burst of merriment.
"Preached?" gasped Milly, "do you mean a sermon?"
"Not a regular sermon, but he spoke just like a preacher for a solid hour. Before he'd finished the men who were drunk were crying like babies and the men who weren't were breaking their necks to sign the pledge—at any rate that's something like the tale they tell. There was never such speaking (Hudge says he was there) heard before in Tappahannock, and Kelly is as mad as a hornet because he swears the town is going dry."
"And he didn't strike a single blow?" asked Milly, with a feeling of disappointment.
"Why, he had those drunken fools all blubbering like kids," said Banks, "and then when it was over he got hold of Kit Berry (he started the row, you know) and carried him all the way home to the little cottage in the hollow across the town where Kit lives with his mother. Next Sunday if it's fine there's going to be an open air meeting in Baxter's field."
There was a sore little spot in Milly's heart, a vaguesentiment of disenchantment. Her house of dreams, which she had reared so patiently, stood cold and tenantless once more.
"Did you ever find out his name?" she asked, with a last courageous hope.
"Smith," replied Banks, with luminous simplicity. "The boys have nick-named him 'Ten Commandment Smith.'"
"Ten Commandment Smith?" echoed Milly in a lifeless voice. Her house of dreams had tottered at the blow and fallen from its foundation stone.
ON the morning after the episode in the barroom which Banks had described to Milly, Ordway found Baxter awaiting him in a condition which in a smaller person would have appeared to be a flutter of excitement.
"So you got mixed up in a barroom row last night, I hear, Smith?"
"Well, hardly that," returned Ordway, smiling as he saw the other's embarrassment break out in drops of perspiration upon his forehead. "I was in it, I admit, but I can't exactly say that I was 'mixed up.'"
"You got Kit Berry out, eh?—and took him home."
"Nothing short of a sober man could have done it. He lives on the other side of the town in Bullfinch's Hollow."
"Oh, I've been there," said Baxter, "I've taken him home myself."
The boyish sparkle had leaped to Ordway's eyes which appeared in the animation of the moment to lend an expression of gaiety to his face. As Baxter looked at him he felt something of the charm which had touched the drunken crowd in the saloon.
"His mother was at my house before breakfast," he said, in a tone that softened as he went on until it sounded as if his whole perspiring person had melted into it. "She was in a great state, poor creature, for it seemed that when Kit woke up this morning he promised her never to touch another drop."
"Well, I hope he'll keep his word, but I doubt it," responded Ordway. He thought of the bare little room he had seen last night, of the patched garments drying before the fire, of the scant supper spread upon the table, and of the gray-haired, weeping woman who had received his burden from him.
"He may—for a week," commented Baxter, and he added with a big, shaking laugh, "they tell me you gave 'em a sermon that was as good as a preacher's."
"Nonsense. I got angry and spoke a few words, that's all."
"Well, if they were few, they seem to have been pretty pointed. I hear Kelly closed his place two hours before midnight. Even William Cotton went home without falling once, he said."
"There was a good reason for that. I happened to have some information Cotton wanted."
"I know," said Baxter, drawing out the words with a lingering emphasis while his eyes searched Ordway's face with a curiosity before which the younger man felt himself redden painfully. "Cotton told me you got him out of a scrape as well as a lawyer could have done."
"I remembered the law and wrote it down for him, that's all."
"Have you ever practised law in Virginia?"
"I've never practised anywhere, but I intended to when—" he was going to add "when I finished college," but with a sudden caution, he stopped short and then selected his words more carefully, "when I was a boy. I read a good deal then and some of it still sticks in my memory."
"I see," commented Baxter. His heart swelled until he became positively uncomfortable, and he coughed loudly in the effort to appear perfectly indifferent. What was it about the chap, he questioned, that had pulled at him from the start? Was it only the peculiar mingling of pathos and gaiety in his look?
"Well, I wouldn't set about reforming things too much if I were you," he said at last, "it ain't worth it, for even when people accept the reforms they are pretty likely to reject the reformer. A man's got to have a mighty tough stomach to be able to do good immoderately. But all the same," he concluded heartily, "you're the right stuff and I like you. I respect pluck no matter whether it comes out in preaching or in blows. I reckon, by the way, if you'd care to turn bookkeeper, you'd be worth as good as a hundred a month to me."
There was a round coffee stain, freshly spilled at breakfast, on his cravat, and Ordway's eyes were fixed upon it with a kind of fascination during the whole of his speech. The very slovenliness of theman—the unshaven cheeks, the wilted collar, the spotted necktie, the loosely fitting alpaca coat he wore, all seemed in some inexplicable way, to emphasise the large benignity of his aspect. Strangely enough his failures as a gentleman appeared to add to his impressiveness as a man. One felt that his faults were merely virtues swelled to abnormal proportions—as the carelessness in his dress was but a degraded form of the lavish generosity of his heart.
"To tell the truth, I'd hoped for that all along," said Ordway, withdrawing his gaze with an effort from the soiled cravat. "Do you want me to start in at the books to-day?"
For an instant Baxter hesitated; then he coughed and went on as if he found difficulty in selecting the words that would convey his meaning.
"Well, if you don't mind there's a delicate little matter I'd like you to attend to first. Being a stranger I thought it would be easier for you than for me—have you ever heard anybody speak of Beverly Brooke?"
The interest quickened in Ordway's face.
"Why, yes. I came along the road one day with a farmer who gave me his whole story—Adam Whaley, I heard afterward, was his name."
Baxter whistled. "Oh, I reckon, he hardly told you the whole story—for I don't believe there's anybody living except myself who knows what a darn fool Mr. Beverly is. That man has never done an honest piece of work in his life; he's spent every red cent of his wife's money, and his sister's too, insome wild goose kind of speculation—and yet, bless my soul, he has the face to strut in here any day and lord it over me just as if he were his grandfather's ghost or George Washington. It's queer about those old families, now ain't it? When they begin to peter out it ain't just an ordinary petering, but a sort of mortal rottenness that takes 'em root and branch."
"And so I am to interview this interesting example of degeneration?" asked Ordway, smiling.
"You've got to make him understand that he can't ship me any more of his worthless tobacco," exclaimed Baxter in an outburst of indignation. "Do you know what he does, sir?—Well, he raises a lazy, shiftless, worm-eaten crop of tobacco in an old field—plants it too late, tops it too late, cuts it too late, cures it too late, and then lets it lie around in some leaky smokehouse until it isn't fit for a hog to chew. After he has left it there to rot all winter, he gathers the stuff up on the first pleasant day in spring and gets an old nigger to cart it to me in an open wagon. The next day he lounges in here with his palavering ways, and demands the highest price in the market—and I give it to him! That's the damned outrage of it, I give it to him!" concluded Baxter with an excitement in which his huge person heaved like a shaken mountain. "I've bought his trash for twenty years and ground it into snuff because I was afraid to refuse a Brooke—but Brooke or no Brooke there's an end to it now," he turned and waved his hand furiously to a pile of tobacco lying on the warehousefloor, "there's his trash and it ain't fit even for snuff!"
He led Ordway back into the building, picked up several leaves from the pile, smelt them, and threw them down with a contemptuous oath. "Worm-eaten, frost-bitten, mildewed. I want you to go out to Cedar Hill and tell the man that his stuff ain't fit for anything but fertiliser," he went on. "If he wants it he'd better come for it and haul it away."
"And if he refuses?"
"He most likely will—then tell him I'll throw it into the ditch."
"Oh, I'll tell him," responded Ordway, and he was aware of a peculiar excitement in the prospect of an encounter with the redoubtable Mr. Beverly. "I'll do my best," he added, going through the archway, while Baxter followed him with a few last words of instruction and advice. The big man's courage had evidently begun to ebb, for as Ordway passed into the street, he hurried after him to suggest that he should approach the subject with as much delicacy as he possessed. "I wouldn't butt at Mr. Beverly, if I were you," he cautioned, "just edge around and work in slowly when you get the chance."
But the advice was wasted upon Ordway, for he had started out in an impatience not unmixed with anger. Who was this fool of a Brooke? he wondered, and what power did he possess that kept Tappahannock in a state of slavery? He was glad that Baxter had sent him on the errand, and the nextminute he laughed aloud because the big man had been too timid to come in person.
He had reached the top of the hill, and was about to turn into the road he had taken his first night in Tappahannock, when a woman, wrapped in a shawl, hurried across the street from one of the smaller houses fronting upon the green.
"I beg your pardon, sir, but are you the man that helped William Cotton?"
Clearly William Cotton was bringing him into notice. At the thought Ordway looked down upon his questioner with a sensation that was almost one of pleasure.
"He needed business advice and I gave it, that was all," he answered.
"But you wrote down the whole case for him so that he could understand it and speak for himself," she said, catching her breath in a sob, as she pulled her thin shawl together. "You got him out of his troubles and asked nothing, so I hoped you might be willing to do as much by me. I am a widow with five little children, and though I've paid every penny I could scrape together for the mortgage, the farm is to be sold over our heads and we have nowhere to go."
Again the glow that was like the glow of pleasure illuminated Ordway's mind.
"There's not one chance in a hundred that I can help you," he said; "in the case of William Cotton it was a mere accident. Still if you will tell me where you live, I will come to you this evening and talkmatters over. If I can help you, I promise you I will with pleasure."
"And for nothing? I am very poor."
He shook his head with a laugh. "Oh, I get more fun out of it than you could understand!"
After writing down the woman's name in his notebook, he passed into the country road and bent his thoughts again upon the approaching visit to Mr. Beverly.
When he reached Cedar Hill, which lay a sombre shadow against the young green of the landscape, he saw that the dead cedars still lay where they had fallen across the avenue. Evidently the family temper had assumed an opposite, though equally stubborn form, in the person of the girl in the red cape, and she had, he surmised, refused to allow Beverly to profit by his desecration even to the extent of selling the trees he had already cut down. Was it from a sentiment, or as a warning, he wondered, that she left the great cedars barring the single approach to the house? In either case the magnificent insolence of her revenge moved him to an acknowledgment of her spirit and her justice.
In the avenue a brood of young turkeys were scratching in the fragrant dust shed by the trees; and at his approach they scattered and fled before him. It was long evidently since a stranger had penetrated into the melancholy twilight of the cedars; for the flutter of the turkeys, he discovered presently, was repeated in an excited movement he felt rather than saw as he ascended the stone steps and knocked at the door.The old hound he had seen the first night rose from under a bench on the porch, and came up to lick his hand; a window somewhere in the right wing shut with a loud noise; and through the bare old hall, which he could see from the half open door, a breeze blew dispersing an odour of hot soapsuds. The hall was dim and empty except for a dilapidated sofa in one corner, on which a brown and white setter lay asleep, and a rusty sword which clanked against the wall with a regular, swinging motion. In response to his repeated knocks there was a sound of slow steps on the staircase, and a handsome, shabbily dressed man, holding a box of dominoes, came to the door and held out his hand with an apologetic murmur.
"I beg your pardon, but the wind makes such a noise I did not hear your knock. Will you come inside or do you prefer to sit on the porch where we can get the view?"
As he spoke he edged his way courteously across the threshold and with a hospitable wave of his hand, sat down upon one of the pine benches against the decaying railing. In spite of the shabbiness of his clothes he presented a singularly attractive, even picturesque appearance, from the abundant white hair above his forehead to his small, shapely feet encased now in an ancient pair of carpet slippers. His figure was graceful and well built, his brown eyes soft and melancholy, and the dark moustache drooping over his mouth had been trained evidently into an immaculate precision. His moustache, however, was the one immaculate feature of his person, foreven his carpet slippers were dirty and worn threadbare in places. Yet his beauty, which was obscured in the first view by what in a famous portrait might have been called "the tone of time," produced, after a closer and more sympathetic study, an effect which, upon Ordway at least, fell little short of the romantic. In his youth Beverly had been, probably, one of the handsomest men of his time, and this distinction, it was easy to conjecture, must have been the occasion, if not the cause, of his ruin. Even now, pompous and slovenly as he appeared, it was difficult to resist a certain mysterious fascination which he still possessed. When he left Tappahannock Ordway had felt only a humorous contempt for the owner of Cedar Hill, but sitting now beside him on the hard pine bench, he found himself yielding against his will to an impulse of admiration. Was there not a certain spiritual kinship in the fact that they were both failures in life?
"You are visiting Tappahannock, then?" asked Beverly with his engaging smile; "I go in seldom or I should perhaps have seen you. When a man gets as old and as much of an invalid as I am, he usually prefers to spend his days by the fireside in the bosom of his family."
The bloom of health was in his cheeks, yet as he spoke he pressed his hand to his chest with the habitual gesture of an invalid. "A chronic trouble which has prevented my taking an active part in the world's affairs," he explained, with a sad, yet cheerful dignity as of one who could enliven tragedy with acomic sparkle. "I had my ambitions once, sir," he added, "but we will not speak of them for they are over, and at this time of my life I can do little more than try to amuse myself with a box of dominoes."
As he spoke he placed the box on the bench between them and began patiently matching the little ivory blocks. Ordway expressed a casual sympathy, and then, forgetting Baxter's warning, he attempted to bring the conversation to a practical level.
"I am employed now at Baxter's warehouse," he began, "and the object of my call is to speak with you about your last load of tobacco."
"Ah!" said Beverly, with warming interest, "it is a sufficient recommendation to have come from Robert Baxter—for that man has been the best, almost the only, friend I have had in life. It is impossible to overestimate either his character or my admiration. He has come to my assistance, sir, when I hardly knew where to turn for help. If you are employed by him, you are indeed to be envied."
"I am entirely of your opinion," observed Ordway, "but the point this morning——"
"Well, we'll let that rest a while now," interrupted Beverly, pushing the dominoes away, and turning his beautiful, serious face upon his companion. "When there is an opportunity for me to speak of Baxter's generosity, I feel that I cannot let it escape me. Something tells me that you will understand and pardon my enthusiasm. There is no boy like an old boy, sir."
His voice broke, and drawing a ragged handkerchief from the pocket of his corduroy coat, he blew his nose and wiped away two large teardrops from his eyes. After such an outburst of sentiment it seemed a positive indecency to inform him that Baxter had threatened to throw his tobacco into a ditch.
"He regrets very much that your crop was a failure this year," said Ordway, after what he felt to be a respectable pause.
"And yet," returned Beverly, with his irrepressible optimism, "if things had been worse it might even have rotted in the ground. As it was, I never saw more beautiful seedlings—they were perfect specimens. Had not the tobacco worms and the frost and the leak in the smokehouse all combined against me, I should have raised the most splendid crop in Virginia, sir." The spectacle of this imaginary crop suffused his face with a glow of ardour. "My health permits me to pay little attention to the farm," he continued in his eloquent voice, "I see it falling to rains about me, and I am fortunate in being able to enjoy the beauty of its decay. Yes, my crop was a failure, I admit," he added, with a touching cheerfulness, "it lay several months too long in the barn before I could get it sent to the warehouse—but this was my misfortune, not my fault, as I am sure Robert Baxter will understand."
"He will find it easier to understand the case than to sell the tobacco, I fancy."
"However that may be, he is aware that I place theutmost confidence in his judgment. What he does will be the right thing, sir."
This confession of artless trust was so overpowering that for a moment Ordway hung back, feeling that any ground would be dangerous ground upon which to proceed. The very absorption in which Beverly arranged the dominoes upon the bench added to the childlike simplicity of his appearance. Then a sudden irritation against the man possessed him, for he remembered the girl in the red cape and the fallen cedars. From where he sat now they were hidden by the curve of the avenue, but the wonderful trees, which shed their rich gloom almost upon the roof of the house, made him realise afresh the full extent of Beverly's folly. In the fine spring sunshine whatever beauties were left in the ruined place showed in an intenser and more vernal aspect. Every spear of grass on the lawn was tipped with light, and the young green leaves on the lilacs stood out as if illuminated on a golden background. In one of the ivy-covered eaves a wren was building, and he could see the flutter of a bluebird in an ancient cedar.
"It is a beautiful day," remarked Beverly, pensively, "but the lawn needs trimming." His gaze wandered gently over the tangled sheep mint, orchard grass and Ailantus shoots which swept from the front steps to the fallen fence which had once surrounded the place, and he added with an outburst of animation, "I must tell Micah to turn in the cattle."
Remembering the solitary cow he had seen in a sheltered corner of the barn, Ordway bit back a smile as he rose and held out his hand.
"After all, I haven't delivered my message," he said, "which was to the effect that the tobacco is practically unfit for use. Baxter told me to request you to send for it at your convenience."
Beverly gathered up his dominoes, and rising with no appearance of haste, turned upon him an expression of suffering dignity.
"Such an act upon my part," he said, "would be a reflection upon Baxter's ability as a merchant, and after thirty years of friendship I refuse to put an affront upon him. I would rather, sir, lose every penny my tobacco might bring me."
His sincerity was so admirable, that for a moment it obscured even in Ordway's mind the illusion upon which it rested. When a man is honestly ready to sacrifice his fortune in the cause of friendship, it becomes the part of mere vulgarity to suggest to him that his affairs are in a state of penury.
"Then it must be used for fertilisers or thrown away," said Ordway, shortly.
"I trust myself entirely in Baxter's hands," replied Beverly, in sad but noble tones, "whatever he does will be the best that could be done under the circumstances. You may assure him of this with my compliments."
"Well, I fear, there's nothing further to be said," remarked Ordway; and he was about to make hisfinal good-bye, when a faded lady, wrapped in a Paisley shawl, appeared in the doorway and came out upon the porch.
"Amelia," said Beverly, "allow me to present Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith, Mrs. Brooke."
Mrs. Brooke smiled at him wanly with a pretty, thin-lipped mouth and a pair of large rather prominent eyes, which had once been gray but were now washed into a cloudy drab. She was still pretty in a hopeless, depressed, ineffectual fashion; and though her skirt was frayed about the edges and her shoes run down at the heel, her pale, fawn-coloured hair was arranged in elaborate spirals and the hand she held out to Ordway was still delicately fine and white. She was like a philosopher, who, having sunk into a universal pessimism of thought, preserves, in spite of himself, a small belief or so in the minor pleasures of existence. Out of the general wreck of her appearance she had clung desperately to the beauties of her hair and hands.
"I had hoped you would stay to dinner," she remarked in her listless manner to Ordway. Fate had whipped her into submission, but there was that in her aspect which never permitted one for an instant to forget the whipping. If her husband had dominated by his utter incapacity, she had found a smaller consolation in feeling that though she had been obliged to drudge she had never learned to do it well. To do it badly, indeed, had become at last the solitary proof that by right of birth she was entitled not to do it at all.
At Ordway's embarrassed excuse she made no effort to insist, but stood, smiling like a ghost of her own past prettiness, in the doorway. Behind her the bare hall and the dim staircase appeared more empty, more gloomy, more forlornly naked than they had done before.
Again Ordway reached for his hat, and prepared to pick his way carefully down the sunken steps; but this time he was arrested by the sound of smothered laughter at the side of the house, which ran back to the vegetable garden. A moment later the girl in the red cape appeared running at full speed across the lawn, pursued by several shrieking children that followed closely at her skirts. Her clear, ringing laugh—the laugh of youth and buoyant health—held Ordway motionless for an instant upon the porch; then as she came nearer he saw that she held an old, earth-covered spade in her hands and that her boots and short woollen skirt were soiled with stains from the garden beds. But the smell of the warm earth that clung about her seemed only to increase the vitality and freshness in her look. Her vivid animation, her sparkling glance, struck him even more forcibly than they had done in the street of Tappahannock.
At sight of Ordway her laugh was held back breathlessly for an instant; then breaking out again, it began afresh with redoubled merriment, and sinking with exhaustion on the lowest step, she let the spade fall to the ground while she buried her wind-blown head in her hands.
"I beg your pardon," she stammered presently, lifting her radiant brown eyes, "but I've run so fast that I'm quite out of breath." Stopping with an effort she sought in vain to extinguish her laughter in the curls of the smallest child.
"Emily," said Beverly with dignity, "allow me to present Mr. Smith."
The girl looked up from the step; and then, rising, smiled brightly upon Ordway over the spade which she had picked up from the ground.
"I can't shake hands," she explained, "because I've been spading the garden."
If she recognised him for the tramp who had slept in her barn there was no hint of it in her voice or manner.
"Do you mean, Emily," asked Beverly, in his plaintive voice, "that you have been actually digging in the ground?"
"Actually," repeated Emily, in a manner which made Ordway suspect that the traditional feminine softness was not included among her virtues, "I actually stepped on dirt and saw—worms."
"But where is Micah?"
"Micah has an attack of old age. He was eighty-two yesterday."
"Is it possible?" remarked Beverly, and the discovery appeared to afford him ground for cheerful meditation.
"No, it isn't possible, but it's true," returned the girl, with good-humoured merriment. "As there are only two able-bodied persons on the place, the mare and I, it seemed to me that one of us had better takea hand at the spade. But I had to leave off after the first round," she added to Ordway, showing him her right hand, from the palm of which the skin had been rubbed away. She was so much like a gallant boy that Ordway felt an impulse to take the hand in his own and examine it more carefully.
"Well, I'm very much surprised to hear that Micah is so old," commented Beverly, dwelling upon the single fact which had riveted his attention. "I must be making him a little present upon his birthday."
The girl's eyes flashed under her dark lashes, but remembering Ordway's presence, she turned to him with a casual remark about the promise of the spring. He saw at once that she had achieved an indignant detachment from her thriftless family, and the ardent, almost impatient energy with which she fell to labour was, in itself, a rebuke to the pleasant indolence which had hastened, if it had not brought about, the ruin of the house. Was it some temperamental disgust for the hereditary idleness which had spurred her on to take issue with the worn-out traditions of her ancestors and to place herself among the labouring rather than the leisure class? As she stood there in her freshness and charm, with the short brown curls blown from her forehead, the edge of light shining in her eyes and on her lips, and the rich blood kindling in her vivid face, it seemed to Ordway, looking back at her from the end of his forty years, that he was brought face to face with the spirit of the future rising amid the decaying sentiment of the past.
WHEN Ordway had disappeared beyond the curve in the avenue, Emily went slowly up the steps, her spade clanking against the stone as she ascended.
"Did he come about the tobacco, Beverly?" she asked.
Beverly rose languidly from the bench, and stood rubbing his hand across his forehead with an exhausted air.
"My head was very painful and he talked so rapidly I could hardly follow him," he replied; "but is it possible, Emily, that you have been digging in the garden?"
"There is nobody else to do it," replied Emily, with an impatient flash in her eyes; "only half the garden has been spaded. If you disapprove so heartily, I wish you'd produce someone to do the work."
Mrs. Brooke, who had produced nothing in her life except nine children, six of whom had died in infancy, offered at this a feeble and resigned rebuke.
"I am sure you could get Salem," she replied.
"We owe him already three months' wages," returned the girl, "I am still paying him for last autumn."
"All I ask of you, Emily, is peace," remarkedBeverly, in a gentle voice, as he prepared to enter the house. "Nothing—no amount of brilliant argument can take the place of peace in a family circle. My poor head is almost distracted when you raise your voice."
The three children flocked out of the dining-room and came, with a rush, to fling themselves upon him. They adored him—and there was a live terrapin which they had brought in a box for him to see! In an instant his depression vanished, and he went off, his beautiful face beaming with animation, while the children clung rapturously to his corduroy coat.
"Amelia," said Emily, lowering her voice, "don't you think it would improve Beverly's health if he were to try working for an hour every day in the garden?"
Mrs. Brooke appeared troubled by the suggestion. "If he could only make up his mind to it, I've no doubt it would," she answered, "he has had no exercise since he was obliged to give up his horse. Walking he has always felt to be ungentlemanly."
She spoke in a softly tolerant voice, though she herself drudged day and night in her anxious, tearful, and perfectly ineffectual manner. For twenty years she had toiled patiently without, so far as one could perceive, achieving a single definite result—for by some unfortunate accident of temperament, she was doomed to do badly whatever she undertook to do at all. Yet her intention was so admirable that she appeared forever apologising in her heart for the incompetence of her hands.
Emily placed the spade in the corner of the porch, and desisting from her purpose, went upstairs to wash her hands before going in to dinner. As she ascended the wide, dimly lighted staircase, upon which the sun shone with a greenish light from the gallery above, she stopped twice to wonder why Beverly's visitor had slept in the barn like a tramp only six weeks ago. Before her mirror, a minute later, she put the same question to herself while she braided her hair.
The room was large, cool, high-ceiled, with a great brick fireplace, and windows which looked out on the garden, where purple and white lilacs were blooming beside the gate. On the southern side the ivy had grown through the slats of the old green shutters, until they were held back, crumbling, against the house, and in the space between one of the cedars brushed always, with a whispering sound, against the discoloured panes. In Emily's absence a curious melancholy descended on the old mahogany furniture, the greenish windows and the fireless hearth; but with the opening of the door and the entrance of her vivid youth, there appeared also a light and gracious atmosphere in her surroundings. She remembered the day upon which she had returned after ten years' absence, and how as she opened the closed shutters, the gloom of the place had resisted the passage of the sunshine, retreating stubbornly from the ceiling to the black old furniture and then across the uncarpeted floor to the hall where it still held control. For months after her return it hadseemed to her that the fight was between her spirit and the spirit of the past—between hope and melancholy, between growth and decay. The burden of debt, of poverty, of hopeless impotence had fallen upon her shoulders, and she had struggled under it with impetuous gusts of anger, but with an energy that never faltered. To keep the children fed and clothed, to work the poor farm as far as she was able, to stay clear of any further debts, and to pay off the yearly mortgage with her small income, these were the things which had filled her thoughts and absorbed the gallant fervour of her youth. Her salary at the public school had seemed to Beverly, though he disapproved of her position, to represent the possibility of luxury; and in some loose, vague way he was never able to understand why the same amount could not be made to serve in several opposite directions at the same time.