"I've brought something better than coffee to-day, Adam," replied Aunt Lucy, seating herself upon the doorstep. "This is Daniel Ordway—do you remember him?"
The old man bent forward, without moving his withered hand, which lay outstretched on the cushioned arm of the chair, and it seemed to Ordway that the smiling black eyes pierced to his heart. "Oh, I remember him, I remember him," said Crowley, "poor boy—poor boy."
"He's come back now," rejoined Aunt Lucy, raising her voice, "and he has come to see you."
"He's like his mother," remarked Crowley, almost in a whisper, "and I'm glad of that, though his father was a good man. But there are some good people who do more harm than bad ones," he added, "and I always knew that old Daniel Ordway would ruin his son." A chuckle broke from him, "but your mother: I can see her now running out bareheaded in the snow to scold me for not having on my overcoat. She was always seeing with other people's eyes, bless her, and feeling with other people's bodies."
Dropping upon the doorstep, Ordway replaced the knitted shawl which had slipped from the old man's shoulder. "I wonder how it is that you keep so happy in spite of everything?" he said.
"Happy?" repeated Crowley with a laugh. "Well,I don't know, but I am not complaining. I've seen men who hadn't an ache in their bodies, who were worse off than I am to-day. I tell you it isn't the thing that comes to you, but the way you look at it that counts, and because you've got a paralysed arm is no reason that you should have a paralysed heart as well. I've had a powerful lot of suffering, but I've had a powerful lot of happiness, too, and the suffering somehow, doesn't seem to come inside of me to stay as the happiness does. You see, I'm a great believer in the Lord, sir," he added simply, "and what I can't understand, I don't bother about, but just take on trust." All the cheerful wrinkles of his face shone peacefully as he talked. "It's true there've been times when things have gone so hard I've felt that I'd just let go and drop down to the bottom, but the wonderful part is that when you get to the bottom there's still something down below you. It's when you fall lowest that you feel most the Lord holding you up. It may be that there ain't any bottom after all but I know if there is one the Lord is surely waiting down there to catch you when you let go. He ain't only there, I reckon, but He's in all the particular hard places on earth much oftener than He's up in His heaven. He knows the poorhouse, you may be sure, and He'll be there to receive me and tell me it ain't so bad as it looks. I don't want to get there, but if I do it will come a bit easier to think that the Lord has been there before me——"
The look in his smiling, toothless face brought toOrdway, as he watched him, the memory of the epileptic little preacher who had preached in the prison chapel. Here, also, was that untranslatable rapture of the mystic, which cannot be put into words though it passes silently in its terrible joy from the heart of the speaker to the other heart that is waiting. Again he felt his whole being dissolve in the emotion which had overflowed his eyes that Sunday when he was a prisoner. He remembered the ecstasy with which he had said to himself on that day: "I have found the key!" and he knew now that this ecstasy was akin to the light that had shone for him while he sat on the stage of the town hall in Tappahannock. A chance word from the lips of a doting old man, who saw the doors of the poorhouse swing open to receive him, had restored to Ordway, with a miraculous clearness, the vision that he had lost; and he felt suddenly that the hope with which he had come out of the prison had never really suffered disappointment or failure.
AS he walked home along one of the side streets, shaded by an irregular row of flowering linden trees, it appeared to him that his life in Botetourt, so unendurable an hour before, had been rendered suddenly easy by a miracle, not in his surroundings, but in himself. His help had been asked, and in the act of giving there had flowed back into his heart the strength by which he might live his daily life. His unrest, his loneliness, his ineffectiveness, showed to him now as the result of some fatal weakness in his own nature—some failure in his personal attitude to the people among whom he lived.
Straight ahead of him a fine white dust drifted down from the blossoming lindens, lying like powder on the roughly paved street, where the wind blew it in soft swirls and eddies against the crumbling stone steps which led down from the straight doorways of the old-fashioned houses. The boughs overhead made a green arch through which the light fell, and it was under this thick tent of leaves, that, looking up presently, he saw Emily Brooke coming toward him. Not until she was so close to him that he could hear the rustle of her dress, did she lift her eyes from the pavement and meet his cry of welcome with a look of joyful surprise.
"Emily!" he cried, and at his voice, she stretched out her hand and stood smiling at him with the soft and animated gaze which, it seemed to him now, he had but dimly remembered. The thought of her had dwelt as a vision in his memory, yet he knew, as he looked into her face, that the ideal figure had lacked the charm, the radiance, the sparkling energy, of the living substance.
"So you came to Botetourt and did not send me word," he said.
"No, I did not send you word," she answered, "and now I am leaving within an hour."
"And you would have gone without seeing me?"
For an instant she hesitated, and he watched the joy in her face melt into a sorrowful tenderness. "I knew that you were well and I was satisfied. Would it have been kind to appear to you like an arisen ghost of Tappahannock?"
"The greatest kindness," he answered gravely, "that you—or anyone could do me."
She shook her head: "Kindness or not, I found that I could not do it."
"And you go in an hour?"
"My train leaves at seven o'clock. Is it nearly that?"
He drew out his watch, a mechanical action which relieved the emotional tension that stretched like a drawn cord between them. "It is not yet six. Will you walk a little way with me down this street? There is still time."
As she nodded silently, they turned and wentback along the side street, under the irregular rows of lindens, in the direction from which he had come.
"One of the girls I used to teach sent for me when she was dying," she said presently, as if feeling the need of some explanation of her presence in Botetourt. "That was three days ago and the funeral was yesterday. It is a great loss to me, for I haven't so many friends that I can spare the few I love."
He made no answer to her remark, and in the silence that followed, he felt, with a strange ache at his heart, that the distance that separated them was greater than it had been when she was in Tappahannock and he in Botetourt. Then there had stretched only the luminous dream spaces between their souls; now they stood divided by miles and miles of an immovable reality. Was it possible that in making her a part of his intense inner life, he had lost, in a measure, his consciousness of her actual existence? Then while the vision still struggled blindly against the fact, she turned toward him with a smile which lifted her once more into the shining zone of spirits.
"If I can feel that you are happy, that you are at peace, I shall ask nothing more of God," she said.
"I am happy to-day," he answered, "but if you had come yesterday, I should have broken down in my weakness. Oh, I have been homesick for Tappahannock since I came away!"
"Yet Botetourt is far prettier to my eyes."
"To mine also—but it isn't beauty, it is usefulness that I need. For the last two years I have told myself night and day that I had no place and no purpose—that I was the stone that the builders rejected."
"And it is different now?"
"Different? Yes, I feel as if I had been shoved suddenly into a place where I fitted—as if I were meant, after all, to help hold things together. And the change came—how do you think?" he asked, smiling. "A man wanted money of me to keep him out of the poorhouse."
The old gaiety was in his voice, but as she looked at him a ray of faint sunshine fell on his face through a parting in the leaves overhead, and she saw for the first time how much older he had grown since that last evening in Tappahannock. The dark hair was all gray now, the lines of the nose were sharper, the cheek bones showed higher above the bluish hollows beneath. Yet the change which had so greatly aged him had deepened the peculiar sweetness in the curves of his mouth, and this sweetness, which was visible also in his rare smile, moved her heart to a tenderness which was but the keener agony of renouncement.
"I know how it is," she said slowly, "just as in Tappahannock you found your happiness in giving yourself to others, so you will find it here."
"If I can only be of use—perhaps."
"You can be—you will be. What you were with us you will be again."
"Yet it was different. There I had your help, hadn't I?"
"And you shall have it here," she responded, brightly, though he saw that her eyes were dim with tears.
"Will you make me a promise?" he asked, stopping suddenly before some discoloured stone steps "will you promise me that if ever you need a friend—a strong arm, a brain to think for you—you will send me word?"
She looked at him smiling, while her tears fell from her eyes. "I will make no promise that is not for your sake as well as for mine," she answered.
"But it is for my sake—it is for my happiness."
"Then I will promise," she rejoined gravely, "and I will keep it."
"I thank you," he responded, taking the hand that she held out.
At his words she had turned back, pausing a moment in her walk, as if she had caught from his voice or his look a sense of finality in their parting. "I have but a few minutes left," she said, "so I must walk rapidly back or I shall be late."
A sudden clatter of horses' hoofs on the cobblestones in the street caused them to start away from each other, and turning his head, Ordway saw Alice gallop furiously past him with Geoffrey Heath at her side.
"How beautiful!" exclaimed Emily beneath her breath, for Alice as she rode by had looked back for an instant, her glowing face framed in blown masses of hair.
"Yes, she is beautiful," he replied, and added after a moment as they walked on, "she is my daughter."
Her face brightened with pleasure. "Then you are happy—you must be happy," she said. "Why, she looked like Brunhilde."
For a moment he hesitated. "Yes," he answered at last, "she is very beautiful—and I am happy."
After this they did not speak again until they reached the iron gate before the house in which she was staying. On his side he was caught up into some ideal realm of feeling, in which he possessed her so utterly that the meeting could not bring her nearer to him nor the parting take her farther away. His longing, his unrest, and his failure, were a part of his earthly nature which he seemed to have left below him in that other life from which he had escaped. Without doubt he would descend to it again, as he had descended at moments back into the body of his sin; but in the immediate exaltation of his mood, his love had passed the bounds of personality and entered into a larger and freer world. When they parted, presently, after a casual good-bye, he could persuade himself, almost without effort, that she went on with him in the soft May twilight.
At his door he found Lydia just returning from a drive, and taking her wraps from her arm, he ascended the steps and entered the house at her side. She had changed her mourning dress for a gown of pale gray cloth, and he noticed at once that her beauty had lost in transparency and become more human.
"I thought you had gone riding with Alice," she said without looking at him, as she stooped to gather up the ends of a lace scarf which had slipped from her arm.
"No, I was not with her," he answered. "I wanted to go, but she would not let me."
"Are you sure, then, that she was not with Geoffrey Heath?"
"I am sure that she was with him, for they passed me not a half hour ago as I came up."
They had entered the library while he spoke, and crossing to the hearth, where a small fire burned, Lydia looked up at him with her anxious gaze. "I hoped at first that you would gain some influence over her," she said, in a distressed voice, "but it seems now that she is estranged even from you."
"Not estranged, but there is a difference and I am troubled by it. She is young, you see, and I am but a dull and sober companion for her."
She shook her head with the little hopeless gesture which was so characteristic of her. Only yesterday this absence of resolution, the discontented droop of her thin, red lips, had worked him into a feeling of irritation against her. But his vision of her to-day had passed through some softening lens; and he saw her shallowness, her vanity, her lack of passion, as spiritual infirmities which were not less to be pitied than an infirmity of the body.
"The end is not yet, though," he added cheerfully after a moment, "and she will come back to me in time when I am able really to help her."
"Meanwhile is she to be left utterly uncontrolled?"
"Not if we can do otherwise. Only we must go quietly and not frighten her too much."
Again she met his words with the resigned, hopeless movement of her pretty head in its pearl gray bonnet. "I have done all I can," she said, "and it has been worse than useless. Now you must try if your method is better than mine."
"I am trying," he answered smiling.
For an instant her gaze fluttered irresolutely over him, as if she were moved by a passing impulse to a deeper utterance. That this impulse concerned Alice he was vaguely aware, for when had his wife ever spoken to him upon a subject more directly personal? Apart from their children he knew there was no bond between them—no memories, no hopes, no ground even for the building of a common interest. Lydia adored her children, he still believed, but when there was nothing further to be said of Dick or of Alice, their conversation flagged upon the most trivial topics. Upon the few unfortunate occasions when he had attempted to surmount the barrier between them, she had appeared to dissolve, rather than to retreat, before his approach. Yet despite her soft, cloud-like exterior, he had discovered that the rigour of her repulsion had hardened to a vein of iron in her nature. What must her life be, he demanded in a sudden passion of pity, when the strongest emotion she had ever known was the aversion that she now felt to him? All the bitterness in his heart melted into compassion at the thought, and he resisted animpulse to take her into his arms and say: "I know, I understand, and I am sorry." Yet he was perfectly aware that if he were to do this, she would only shrink farther away from him, and look up at him with fear and mystification, as if she suspected him of some hidden meaning, of some strategic movement against her impregnable reserve. Her whole relation to him had narrowed into the single instinct of self-defence. If he came unconsciously a step nearer, if he accidentally touched her hand as he passed, he had grown to expect the flaring of her uncontrollable repugnance in the heightened red in her cheeks. "I know that I am repulsive to her, that when she looks at me she still sees the convict," he thought, "and yet the knowledge of this only adds to the pity and tenderness I feel."
Lydia had moved through the doorway, but turning back in the hall, she spoke with a return of confidence, as if the fact of the threshold, which she had put between them, had restored to her, in a measure, the advantage that she had lost.
"Then I shall leave Alice in your hands. I can do nothing more," she said.
"Give me time and I will do all that you cannot," he answered.
When she had gone upstairs, he crossed the hall to the closed door of the library, and stopped short on hearing Alice's voice break out into song. The girl was still in her riding habit, and the gay French air on her lips was in accord with the spirited gesture with which she turned to him as he appeared. Herbeauty would have disarmed him even without the kiss with which she hastened to avert his reproach.
"Alice, can you kiss me when you know you have broken your promise?"
"I made no promise," she answered coldly, drawing away. "You told me not to go riding with Geoffrey, but it was you that said it, not I, and you said it only because mamma made you. Oh, I knew all the time that it was she!"
Her voice broke with anger and before he could restrain her, she ran from the room and up the staircase. An instant afterward he heard a door slam violently above his head. Was she really in love with Geoffrey Heath? he asked in alarm, or was the passion she had shown merely the outburst of an undisciplined child?
AT breakfast Alice did not appear, and when he went upstairs to her room, she returned an answer in a sullen voice through her closed door. All day his heart was oppressed by the thought of her, but to his surprise, when he came home to luncheon, she met him on the steps with a smiling face. It was evident to him at the first glance that she meant to ignore both the cause and the occasion of last evening's outburst; and he found himself yielding to her determination before he realised all that his evasion of the subject must imply. But while she hung upon his neck, with her cheek pressed to his, it was impossible that he should speak any word that would revive her anger against him. Anything was better than the violence with which she had parted from him the evening before. He could never forget his night of anguish, when he had strained his ears unceasingly for some stir in her room, hoping that a poignant realisation of his love for her would bring her sobbing and penitent to his door before dawn.
Now when he saw her again for the first time, she had apparently forgotten the parting which had so tortured his heart.
"You've been working too hard, papa, and you're tired," she remarked, rubbing the furrows between his eyebrows in a vain endeavour to smooth them out. "Are you obliged to go back to that hateful office this afternoon?"
"I've some work that will keep me there until dark, I fear," he replied. "It's a pity because I'd like a ride of all things."
"It is a pity, poor dear," protested Alice, but he noticed that there was no alteration in her sparkling gaiety. Was there, indeed, almost a hint of relief in her tone? and was this demonstrative embrace but a guarded confession of her gratitude for his absence? Something in her manner—a veiled excitement in her look, a subtle change in her voice—caused him to hold her to him in a keener tenderness. It was on his lips to beg for her confidence, to remind her of his sympathy in whatever she might feel or think—to assure her even of his tolerance of Geoffrey Heath. But in the instant when he was about to speak, a sudden recollection of the look with which she had turned from him last evening, checked the impulse before it had had time to pass into words. And so because of his terror of losing her, he let her go at last in silence from his arms.
His office work that afternoon was heavier than usual, for in the midst of his mechanical copying and filing, he was abstracted by the memory of that strange, unnatural vivacity in Alice's face. Then in the effort to banish the disturbing recollection,he recalled old Adam Crowley, wrapped in his knitted shawl, on the doorstep of his cottage. A check of Richard's contributing six hundred dollars toward the purchase of a new organ for the church he attended gave Daniel his first opportunity to mention the old man to his uncle.
"I saw Crowley the other day," he began abruptly, "the man who was my father's clerk for forty years, and whose place," he added smiling, "I seem to have filled."
"Ah, indeed," remarked Richard quietly. "So he is still living?"
"His right arm has been paralysed, as you know, and he is very poor. All his savings were lost in some investments he made by my father's advice."
"So I have heard—it was most unfortunate."
"He had always been led to believe, I understand, that he would be provided for by my father's will."
Richard laid down his pen and leaned thoughtfully back in his chair. "He has told me so," he rejoined, "but we have only his word for it, as there was no memorandum concerning him among my brother's papers."
"But surely it was well known that father had given him a pension. Aunt Lucy was perfectly aware of it—they talked of it together."
"During his lifetime he did pay Crowley a small monthly allowance in consideration of his past services. But his will was an extremely careful document—his bequests are all made in a perfectly legal form."
"Was not this will made some years ago, however, before the old man became helpless and lost his money?"
Richard nodded: "I understood as much from Crowley when he came to me with his complaint. But, as I reminded him, it would have been a perfectly simple matter for Daniel to have made such a bequest in a codicil—as he did in your case," he concluded deliberately.
The younger man met his gaze without flinching. "The will, I believe, was written while I was in prison," he observed.
"Upon the day following your conviction. By a former will, which he then destroyed, he had bequeathed to you his entire estate. You understand, of course," he pursued, after a pause in which he had given his nephew full time to possess himself of the information, as well as of the multiplied suggestions that he had offered, "that the income you receive now comes from money that is legally your own. If it should ever appear advisable for me to do so, I am empowered to make over to you the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in securities. The principal is left in my hands merely because it is to your interest that I should keep an eye on the investments."
"Yes, I understand, and I understand, too, that but for your insistence my father would probably have left me nothing."
"I felt very strongly that he had no right to disinherit you," returned Richard. "In my eyeshe made a grave mistake in refusing to lend you support at your trial——"
"As you did, I acknowledge gratefully," interrupted Daniel, and wondered why the fact had aroused in him so little appreciation. As far as the observance of the conventional virtues were concerned, Richard Ordway, he supposed, was, and had been all his life, a good man, yet something in his austere excellence froze instantly all the gentler impulses in his nephew's heart. It was impossible after this to mention again the subject of Crowley, so going back to his work, he applied himself to his copying until Richard put down his papers and left the office. Then he locked his desk wearily and followed his uncle out into the street.
A soft May afternoon was just closing, and the street lamps glimmered, here and there, like white moths out of the mist which was fragrant with honeysuckle and roses. An old lamplighter, who was descending on his ladder from a tall lamppost at the corner, looked down at Ordway with a friendly and merry face.
"The days will soon be so long that you won't be needing us to light you home," he remarked, as he came down gingerly, his hands grasping the rungs of the ladder above his head. When he landed at Daniel's side he began to tell him in a pleasant, garrulous voice about his work, his rheumatism and the strange sights that he had seen in his rounds for so many years. "I've seen wonders in my day, you may believe it," he went on, chuckling, "I've seenbabies in carriages that grew up to be brides in orange blossoms, and then went by me later as corpses in hearses. I've seen this town when it warn't mo'n a little middlin' village, and I've seen soldiers dyin' in blood in this very street." A train went by with a rush along the gleaming track that ran through the town. "An' I've known the time when a sight like that would have skeered folks to death," he added.
For a minute Ordway looked back, almost wistfully, after the flying train. Then with a friendly "good-bye!" he parted from the lamplighter and went on his way.
When he reached home he half expected to find Alice waiting for him in the twilight on the piazza, but, to his surprise, Lydia met him as he entered the hall and asked him, in a voice which sounded as if she were speaking in the presence of servants, to come with her into the library. There she closed the door upon him and inquired in a guarded tone:
"Has Alice been with you this afternoon? Have you seen or heard anything of her?"
"Not since luncheon. Why, I thought that she was at home with one of the girls."
"It seems she left the house immediately after you. She wore her dark blue travelling dress, and one of the servants saw her at the railway station at three o'clock."
For an instant the room swam before his eyes. "You believe, then, that she has gone off?" he asked in an unnatural voice, "that she has gone off with Geoffrey Heath?"
In the midst of his own hideous anguish he was impressed by the perfect decency of Lydia's grief—by the fact that she wore her anxiety as an added grace.
"I have telephoned for Uncle Richard," she said in a subdued tone, "and he has just sent me word that after making inquiries, he learned that Geoffrey Heath went to Washington on the afternoon train."
"And Alice is with him!"
"If she is not, where is she?" Her eyes filled with tears, and sinking into a chair she dropped her face in her clasped hands. "Oh, I wish Uncle Richard would come," she moaned through her fingers.
Again he felt a smothered resentment at this implicit reliance upon Richard Ordway. "We must make sure first that she is gone," he said, "and then it will be time enough to consider ways and means of bringing her back."
Turning abruptly away from her, he went out of the library and up the staircase to Alice's room, which was situated directly across the hall from his own. At the first glance it seemed to him that nothing was missing, but when he looked at her dressing-table in the alcove, he found that it had been stripped of her silver toilet articles, and that her little red leather bag, which he had filled with banknotes a few days ago, was not in the top drawer where she kept it. Something in the girl's chamber, so familiar, so redolent of associations with her bright presence, tore at his heart with a fresh sense ofloss, like a gnawing pain that fastens into a new wound. On the bed he saw her pink flannel dressing-gown, with the embroidered collar which had so delighted her when she had bought it; on the floor at one side lay her pink quilted slippers, slightly soiled from use; and between the larger pillows was the delicate, lace-trimmed baby's pillow upon which she slept. The perfume of her youth, her freshness, was still in the room, as if she had gone from it for a little while through a still open door.
At a touch on his arm he looked round startled, to find one of the servants—the single remaining slave of the past generation—rocking her aged body as she stood at his side.
"She ain' gwine come back no mo'—Yes, Lawd, she ain' gwine come back no mo'. Whut's done hit's done en hit cyarn be undone agin."
"Why, Aunt Mehaley, what do you mean?" he demanded sternly, oppressed, in spite of himself by her wailing voice and her African superstition.
"I'se seen er tur'ble heap done in my day wid dese hyer eyes," resumed the old negress, "but I ain' never seen none un um undone agin atter deys wunst been done. You kin cut down er tree, but you cyarn' mek hit grow back togedder. You kin wring de neck er a rooster, but you cyarn' mek him crow. Yes, my Lawd, hit's easy to pull down, but hit's hard to riz up. I'se ole, Marster, en I'se mos' bline wid lookin', but I ain' never seen whut's done undone agin."
She tottered out, still wailing in her half-crazedvoice, and hastily shutting the drawers of the dressing-table, he went downstairs again to where Lydia awaited him in the library.
"There's no doubt, I fear, that she's gone with Heath," he said, with a constraint into which he had schooled himself on the staircase. "As he appears to have stopped at Washington, I shall take the next train there, which leaves at nine-twenty-five. If they are married——"
He broke off, struck by the pallor that overspread her face.
"But they are married! They must be married!" she cried in terror.
For an instant he stared back at her white face in a horror as great as hers. Was it the first time in his life, he questioned afterwards, that he had been brought face to face with the hideous skeletons upon which living conventions assume a semblance of truth?
"I hope to heaven that he hasnotmarried her!" he exclaimed in a passion from which she shrank back trembling. "Good God! do you want me to haggle with a cad like that to make him marry my child?"
"And if he doesn't? what then?" moaned Lydia, in a voice that seemed to fade away while she spoke.
"If he doesn't I shall be almost tempted to bless his name. Haven't you proved to me that he is a cheat and a brute and a libertine, and yet you dare to tell me that I must force him to marry Alice. Oh, if he will only have the mercy to leave her free, I may still save her!" he said.
She looked at him with dilated eyes as if rooted in fear to the spot upon which she stood. "But the consequences," she urged weakly at last in a burst of tears.
"Oh, I'll take the consequences," he retorted harshly, as he went out.
An hour later, when he was settled in the rushing train, it seemed to him that he was able to find comfort in the words with which he had separated from his wife. Let Alice do what she would, there was always hope for her in the thought that he might help her to bear, even if he could not remove from her, the consequences of her actions. Could so great a force as his love for her fail to avert from her young head at least a portion of her inevitable disillusionment? The recollection of her beauty, of her generosity, and of the wreck of her womanhood almost before it had begun, not only added to his suffering, but seemed in some inexplicable way to increase his love. The affection he had always felt for her was strengthened now by that touch of pity which lends a deeper tenderness to all human relations.
Upon reaching Washington he found that a shower had come up, and the pavements were already wet when he left the station. He had brought no umbrella, but he hardly heeded this in the eagerness which drove him from street to street in his search for his child. After making vain inquiries at several of the larger hotels, he had begun to feel almost hopeless, when going into the newest and most fashionable of them all, he discovered that "Mr. and Mrs. GeoffreyHeath" had been assigned an apartment there an hour before. In answer to his question the clerk informed him that the lady had ordered her dinner served upstairs, leaving at the same time explicit instructions that she was "not at home" to anyone who should call. But in spite of this rebuff, he drew out his card, and sat down in a chair in the brilliantly lighted lobby. He had selected a seat near a radiator in the hope of drying his damp clothes, and presently a little cloud of steam rose from his shoulders and drifted out into the shining space. As he watched the gorgeous, over-dressed women who swept by him, he remembered as one remembers a distant dream, the years when his life had been spent among such crowds in just such a dazzling glare of electric light. It appeared false and artificial to him now, but in the meantime, he reflected, while he looked on, he had been in prison.
A voice at his elbow interrupted his thoughts, and turning in response to an invitation from a buttoned sleeve, he entered an elevator and was borne rapidly aloft among a tightly wedged group of women who were loudly bewailing their absence from the theatre. It was with difficulty that he released himself at the given signal from his escort, and stepped out upon the red velvet carpet which led to Alice's rooms. In response to a knock from the boy who had accompanied him, the door flew open with a jerk, and Alice appeared before him in a bewildering effect of lace and pink satin.
"O papa, papa, you naughty darling!" she exclaimed, and was in his arms before he had time to utter the reproach on his lips.
With her head on his breast, he was conscious at first only of an irresponsible joy, like the joy of the angels for whom evil no longer exists. To know that she was alive, that she was safe, that she was in his arms, seemed sufficient delight, not only unto the day, but unto his whole future as well. Then the thought of what it meant to find her thus in her lace and satin came over him, and drawing slightly away he looked for the first time into her face.
"Alice, what does it mean?" he asked, as he kissed her.
Pushing the loosened hair back from her forehead, she met his question with a protesting pout.
"It means that you're a wicked boy to run away from home like this and be all by yourself in a bad city," she responded with a playful shake of her finger. Then she caught his hand and drew him down on the sofa beside her in the midst of the filmy train of her tea-gown. "If you promise never to do it again, I shan't tell mamma on you," she added, with a burst of light-hearted merriment.
"Where were you married, Alice? and who did it?" he asked sternly.
At his tone a ripple of laughter broke from her lips, and reaching for her little red leather bag on the table, she opened it and tossed a folded paper upon his knees. "I didn't ask his name," she responded, "but you can find it all written on that, I suppose."
"And you cared nothing for me?—nothing for my anxiety, my distress?"
"I always meant to telegraph you, of course. Geoffrey has gone down now to do it."
"But were you obliged to leave home in this way? If you had told me you loved him, I should have understood—should have sympathised."
"Oh, but mamma wouldn't, and I had to run off. Of course, I wanted a big wedding like other girls, and a lot of bridesmaids and a long veil, but I knew you'd never consent to it, so I made up my mind just to slip away without saying a word. Geoffrey is so rich that I can make up afterwards for the things I missed when I was married. This is what he gave me to-day. Isn't it lovely?"
Baring her throat she showed him a pearl necklace hidden beneath her lace collar. "We're sailing day after to-morrow," she went on, delightedly, "and we shall go straight to Paris because I am dying to see the shops. I wouldn't run away with him until he promised to take me there."
There was no regret in her mind, no misgiving, no disquietude. The thought of his pain had not marred for an instant the pleasure of her imaginary shopping. "O papa, I am happy, so happy!" she sang aloud, springing suddenly to her full height and standing before him in her almost barbaric beauty—from the splendid hair falling upon her shoulders to the little feet that could not keep still for sheer joy of living. He saw her red mouth glow and tremble as she bent toward him. "To think thatI'm really and truly out of Botetourt at last!" she cried.
"Then you've no need of me and I may as well go home?" he said a little wistfully as he rose.
At this she hung upon his neck for a minute with her first show of feeling. "I'd rather you wouldn't stay till Geoffrey comes back," she answered, abruptly releasing him, "because it would be a surprise to him and he's always so cross when he's surprised. He has a perfectly awful temper," she confided in a burst of frankness, "but I've learned exactly how to manage him, so it doesn't matter. Then he's so handsome, too. I shouldn't have looked at him twice if he hadn't been handsome. Now, go straight home and take good care of yourself and don't get fat and bald before I come back."
She kissed him several times, laughing in little gasps, while she held him close in her arms. Then putting him from her, she pushed him gently out into the hall. As the door closed on her figure, he felt that it shut upon all that was living or warm in his heart.
ON the day that he returned to Botetourt, it seemed to Ordway that the last vestige of his youth dropped from him; and one afternoon six months later, as he passed some schoolboys who were playing ball in the street, he heard one of them remark in an audible whisper: "Just wait till that old fellow over there gets out of the way." Since coming home again his interests, as well as his power of usefulness, had been taken from him; and the time that he had spent in prison had aged him less than the three peaceful years which he had passed in Botetourt. All that suffering and experience could not destroy had withered and died in the monotonous daily round which carried him from his home to Richard's office and back again from Richard's office to his home.
Outwardly he had grown only more quiet and gentle, as people are apt to do who approach the middle years in a position of loneliness and dependence. To Richard and to Lydia, who had never entirely ceased to watch him, it appeared that he had at last "settled down," that he might be, perhaps, trusted to walk alone; and it was with a sensation of relief that his wife observed the intense youthful beamfade from his blue eyes. When his glance grew dull and lifeless, and his features fell gradually into the lines of placid repose which mark the body's contentment rather than the spirit's triumph, it seemed to her that she might at last lay aside the sleepless anxiety which had been her marriage portion.
"He has become quite like other people now," she said one day to Richard, "do you know that he has grown to take everything exactly as a matter of course, and I really believe he enjoys what he eats."
"I'm glad of that," returned Richard, "for I've noticed that he is looking very far from well. I advised him several weeks ago to take care of that cough, but he seems to have some difficulty in getting rid of it."
"He hasn't been well since Alice's marriage," observed Lydia, a little troubled. "You know he travelled home from Washington in wet clothes and had a spell of influenza afterward. He's had a cold ever since, for I hear him coughing a good deal after he first goes to bed."
"You'd better make him attend to it, I think, though with his fine chest there's little danger of anything serious."
"Do you suppose Alice's marriage could have sobered him? He's grown very quiet and grave, and I dare say it's a sign that his wildness has gone out of him, poor fellow. You remember how his laugh used to frighten me? Well, he never laughslike that now, though he sometimes stares hard at me as if he were looking directly through me, and didn't even know that he was doing it."
As she spoke she glanced out of the window and her eyes fell on Daniel, who came slowly up the gravelled walk, his head bent over an armful of old books he carried.
"He visits a great deal among the poor," remarked Richard, "and I think that's good for him, provided, of course, that he does it with discretion."
"I suppose it is," said Lydia, though she added immediately, "but aren't the poor often very immoral?"
A reply was on Richard's lips, but before he could utter it, the door opened and Daniel entered with the slow, almost timid, step into which he had schooled himself since his return to Botetourt. As he saw Richard a smile—his old boyish smile of peculiar sweetness—came to his lips, but without speaking, he crossed to the table and laid down the books he carried.
"If those are old books, won't you remember to take them up to your room, Daniel?" said Lydia, in her tone of aggrieved sweetness. "They make such a litter in the library."
He started slightly, a nervous affection which had increased in the last months, and looked at her with an apologetic glance. As he stood there she had again that singular sensation of which she had spoken to Richard, as if he were gazing through her and not at her.
"I beg your pardon," he answered, "I remember now that I left some here yesterday."
"Oh, it doesn't matter, of course," she responded pleasantly, "it's only that I like to keep the house tidy, you know."
"They do make rather a mess," he admitted, and gathering them up again, he carried them out of the room and up the staircase.
They watched his bent gray head disappear between the damask curtains in the doorway, and then listened almost unconsciously for the sound of his slow gentle tread on the floor above.
"There was always too much of the dreamer about him, even as a child," commented Richard, when the door was heard to close over their heads, "but he seems contented enough now with his old books, doesn't he?"
"Contented? Yes, I believe he is even happy. I never say much to him because, you see, there is so very little for us to talk about. It is a dreadful thing to confess," she concluded resolutely, "but the truth is I've been always a little afraid of him since—since——"
"Afraid?" he looked at her in astonishment.
"Well, not exactly afraid—but nervous with a kind of panic shudder at times—a dread of his coming close to me, of his touching me, of his wanting things of me." A shiver ran through her and she bit her lip as if to hide the expression of horror upon her face. "There's nobody else on earth that I would say it to, but when he first came back I usedto have nightmares about it. I could never get it out of my mind a minute and if they left me alone with him, I wanted almost to scream with nervousness. It's silly I know, and I can't explain it even to you, but there were times when I shrieked aloud in my sleep because I dreamed that he had come into my room and touched me. I felt that I was wrong and foolish, but I couldn't help it, and I tried—tried—oh, so hard to bear things and to be brave and patient."
The tears fell from her eyes on her clasped hands, but her attitude of sorrow only made more appealing the Madonna-like loveliness of her features.
"You've been a saint, Lydia," he answered, patting her drooping shoulder as he rose to his feet. "Poor girl, poor girl! and no daughter of my own could be dearer to me," he added in his austere sincerity of manner.
"I have tried to do right," replied Lydia, lifting her pure eyes to his in an overflow of religious emotion.
Meanwhile the harmless object of their anxiety sat alone in his room under a green lamp, with one of the musty books he had bought open upon his knees. He was not reading, for his gaze was fixed on the opposite wall, and there was in his eyes something of the abstracted vision which Lydia dreaded. It was as if his intellect, forced from the outward experience back into the inner world of thought, had ended by projecting an image of itself into the space at which he looked. While he sat there thepatient, apologetic smile with which he had answered to his wife was still on his lips.
"I suppose it's because I'm getting old that people and things no longer make me suffer," he said to himself, "it's because I'm getting old that I can look at Lydia unmoved, that I can feel tenderness for her even while I see the repulsion creep into her eyes. It isn't her fault, after all, that she loathes me, nor is it mine. Yes, I'm certainly an old fellow, the boy was right. At any rate, it's pleasanter, on the whole, than being young."
Closing the book, he laid it on the table, and leaned forward with his chin on his hands. "But if I'd only known when I was young!" he added, "if I'd only known!" His past life rose before him as a picture that he had seen, rather than as a road along which he had travelled; and he found himself regarding it almost as impersonally as he might have regarded the drawing upon the canvas. The peril of the inner life had already begun to beset him—that mysterious power of reliving one's experience with an intensity which makes the objective world appear dull and colourless by contrast. It was with an effort at times that he was able to detach his mind from the contemplative habit into which he had fallen. Between him and his surroundings there existed but a single bond, and this was the sympathy which went out of him when he was permitted to reach the poor and the afflicted. To them he could still speak, with them he could still be mirthful; but from his wife, his uncle, andthe members of his own class, he was divided by that impenetrable wall of social tradition. In his home he had ceased to laugh, as Lydia had said; but he could still laugh in the humbler houses of the poor. They had received him as one of themselves, and for this reason alone he could remember how to be merry when he was with them. To the others, to his own people, he felt himself to be always an outsider, a reclaimed castaway, a philanthropic case instead of an individual; and he knew that if there was one proof the more to Lydia that he was in the end a redeemed character, it was the single fact that he no longer laughed in her presence. It was, he could almost hear her say, unbecoming, if not positively improper, that a person who had spent five years in prison should be able to laugh immoderately afterward; and the gravity of his lips was in her eyes, he understood, the most satisfactory testimony to the regeneration of his heart.
And yet Lydia, according to her vision, was a kind, as well as a conscientious woman. The pity of it was that if he were to die now, three years after his homecoming, she would probably reconstruct an imaginary figure of him in her memory, and wear crape for it with appropriate grace and dignity. The works of the imagination are manifold, he thought with a grim humour, even in a dull woman.
But as there was not likely to occur anything so dramatic, in the immediate present, as his death, he wondered vaguely what particular form of aversion his wife's attitude would next express. Orcould it be that since he had effaced himself so utterly, he hardly dared to listen to the sound of his footsteps in the house, she had grown to regard him with a kind of quiet tolerance, as an object which was unnecessary, perhaps, yet entirely inoffensive? He remembered now that during those terrible first years in prison he had pursued the thought of her with a kind of hopeless violence, yet to-day he could look back upon her desertion of him in his need with a compassion which forgave the weakness that it could not comprehend. That, too, he supposed was a part of the increasing listlessness of middle age. In a little while he would look forward, it might be, to the coming years without dread—to the long dinners when he sat opposite to her with the festive bowl of flowers between them, to the quiet evenings when she lingered for a few minutes under the lamp before going to her room—those evenings which are the supreme hours of love or of despair. Oh, well, he would grow indifferent to the horror of these things, as he had already grown indifferent to the soft curves of her body. Yes, it was a thrice blessed thing, this old age to which he was coming!
Then another memory flooded his heart with the glow of youth, and he saw Emily, as she had appeared to him that night in the barn more than six years ago, when she had stood with the lantern held high above her head and the red cape slipping back from her upraised arm. A sharp pain shot through him, and he dropped his eyes as if he had met a blow.That was youth at which he had looked for one longing instant—that was youth and happiness and inextinguishable desire.
For a moment he sat with bent head; then with an effort he put the memory from him, and opened his book at the page where he had left off. As he did so there was a tap at his door, and when he had spoken, Lydia came in timidly with a letter in her hand.
"This was put into Uncle Richard's box by mistake," she said, "and he has just sent it over."
He took it from her and seeing that it was addressed in Baxter's handwriting, laid it, still unopened, upon the table. "Won't you sit down?" he asked, pushing forward the chair from which he had risen.
A brief hesitation showed in her face; then as he turned away from her to pick up some scattered papers from the floor, she sat down with a tentative, nervous manner.
"Are you quite sure that you're well, Daniel?" she inquired. "Uncle Richard noticed to-day that you coughed a good deal in the office. I wonder if you get exactly the proper kind of food?"
He nodded, smiling. "Oh, I'm all right," he responded, "I'm as hard as nails, you know, and always have been."
"Even hard people break down sometimes. I wish you would take a tonic or see a doctor."
Her solicitude surprised him, until he remembered that she had never failed in sympathy forpurely physical ailments. If he had needed bodily healing instead of mental, she would probably have applied it with a conscientious devotedness.
"I am much obliged to you, but I'm really not sick," he insisted, "it is very good of you, however."
"It is nothing more than my duty," she rejoined, sweetly.
"Well, that may be, but there's nothing to prevent my being obliged to you for doing your duty."
Puzzled as always by his whimsical tone, she sat looking at him with her gentle, uncomprehending glance. "I wish, all the same," she murmured, "that you would let me send you a mustard plaster to put on your chest."
He shook his head without replying in words to her suggestion.
"Do you know it is three months since we had a letter from Alice," he said, "and six since she went away?"
"Oh, it's that then? You have been worrying about Alice?"
"How can I help it? We hardly know even that she is living."
"I've thought of her day and night since her marriage, though it's just as likely, isn't it, that she's taken up with the new countries and her new clothes?"
"Oh, of course, it may be that, but it is the awful uncertainty that kills."
With a sigh she looked down at her slippered feet."I was thinking to-day what a comfort Dick is to me—to us all," she said, "one is so sure of him and he is doing so splendidly at college."
"Yes," he agreed, "Dick is a comfort. I wish poor Alice was more like him."
"She was always wild, you remember, never like other children, and it was impossible to make her understand that some things were right and some wrong. Yet I never thought that she would care for such a loud, vulgar creature as Geoffrey Heath."
"Did she care for him?" asked Daniel, almost in a whisper, "or was it only that she wanted to see Paris?"
"Well, she may have improved him a little—at least let us hope so," she remarked as if she had not heard his question. "He has money, at any rate, and that is what she has always wanted, though I fear even Geoffrey's income will be strained by her ceaseless extravagance."
As she finished he thought of her own youth, which she had evidently forgotten, and it seemed to him that the faults she blamed most in Alice were those which she had overcome patiently in her own nature.
"I could stand anything better than this long suspense," he said gently.
"It does wear one out," she rejoined. "I am very, very sorry for you."
Some unaccustomed tone in her voice—a more human quality, a deeper cadence, made him wonder in an impulse of self-reproach if, after all, the breach between them was in part of his own making?Was it still possible to save from the ruin, if not love, at least human companionship?
"Lydia," he said, "it isn't Alice, it is mostly loneliness, I think."
Rising from her chair she stood before him with her vague, sweet smile playing about her lips.
"It is natural that you should feel depressed with that cough," she remarked, "I really wish you would let me send you a mustard plaster."
As the cough broke out again, he strangled it hilariously in a laugh. "Oh, well, if it's any comfort to you, I don't mind," he responded.
When she had gone he picked up Baxter's letter from the table and opened it with trembling fingers. What he had expected to find, he hardly knew, but as he read the words, written so laboriously in Baxter's big scrawling writing, he felt that his energy returned to him with the demand for action—for personal responsibility.