The Ancient Law Part 12

"I'm sorry to see you down, Kit. Can I do anything to help you?" he asked.

Kit opened his eyes with a start of recognition, and reaching out, gripped Ordway's wrist with his burning hand, while he threw off the ragged patchwork quilt upon the bed.

"I've something on my mind, and I want to get it off," he answered.

"When it's once off I'll be better and get back my wits."

"Then get it off. I'm waiting."

"Do you remember the night in the bar-room?" demanded the boy in a whisper, "the time you came in through the window and took me home?"

"Go on," said Ordway.

"Well, I'd walked up the street behind you that afternoon when you left Baxter's, and I got drunk that night on a dollar I stole from you."

"But I didn't speak to you. I didn't even see you."

"Of course you didn't. If you had I couldn't have stolen it, but Baxter had just paid you and when you put your hand into your pocket to get out something, a dollar bill dropped on the walk."

"Go on."

"I picked it up and got drunk on it, there's nothing else. It was a pretty hard drunk, but before I got through you came in and dragged me home. Twenty cents were left in my pockets. Mother found the money and bought a fish for breakfast.

"Well, I did that much good at least," observed Ordway with a smile, "have you finished, Kit?"

"It's been on my mind," repeated Kit deliriously, "and I wanted to get it off."

"It's off now, my boy," said Ordway, picking up the ragged quilt from the floor and laying it across the other's feet, "and on the whole I'm glad you told me. You've done the straight thing, Kit, and I am proud of you."

"Proud of me?" repeated Kit, and fell to crying like a baby.

In a minute he grew delirious again, and Ordway, after bathing the boy's face and hands from a basin of water on a chair at the bedside, went into the kitchen in search of Mrs. Berry, whom he found weeping over a pair of baby's knitted shoes. The pathos of her grief bordered so closely upon the ridiculous that while he watched her he forced back the laugh upon his lips.

"Kit is worse again," he said. "Do you give him any medicine?"

Mrs. Berry struggled with difficulty to her feet, while her sobs changed into a low whimpering sound.

"Did you sit up with him last night?" asked Ordway, following her to the door.

"I've been up for three nights, sir. He has to have his face and hands bathed every hour."

"What about medicine and food?"

"The doctor gives him his medicine free, every drop of it, an' they let me have a can of milk every day from Cedar Hill. I used to live there as a girl, you know, my father was overseer in old Mr. Brooke's time--before he married Miss Emily's mother----"

Ordway cut short her reminiscences.

"Well, you must sleep to-night," he said authoritatively, "I'll come back in an hour and sit up with Kit. Where is your room?"

She pointed to a rickety flight of stairs which led to the attic above.

"Kit slept up there until he was taken ill," she answered. "He's been a hard son to me, sir, as his father was a hard husband because of drink, but to save the life of me I can't forgit how good he used to be when he warn't more'n a week old. Never fretted or got into tempers like other babies----"

Again Ordway broke in drily upon her wandering recollections.

"Now I'll go for an hour," he said abruptly, "and by the way, have you had supper or shall I bring you some groceries when I come?"

"There was a little milk left in the pitcher and I had a piece of cornbread, but--oh, Mr. Smith," her small black eyes snapped fiercely into his, "there are times when my mouth waters for a cup of coffee jest as po' Kit's does for whiskey."

"Then put the kettle on," returned Ordway, smiling, as he left the room.

It was past sunset when he returned, and he found Kit sleeping quietly under the effect of the medicine the doctor had just given him. Mrs.

Berry had recovered sufficient spirit, not only to put the kettle on the stove, but to draw the kitchen table into the square of faint light which entered over the doorstep. The preparations for her supper had been made, he saw, with evident eagerness, and as he placed his packages upon the table, she fell upon them with an excited, childish curiosity.

A few moments later the aroma of boiling coffee floated past him where he sat on the doorstep smoking his last pipe before going into the sick-room for the night. Turning presently he watched the old woman in amazement while she sat smacking her thin lips and jerking her shrivelled little hands over her fried bacon; and as he looked into her ecstatic face, he realised something of the intensity which enters into the scant enjoyments of the poor. The memory of his night in the Brookes' barn returned to him with the aroma of the coffee, and he understood for the first time that it is possible to a.s.sociate a rapture with meat and drink. Then, in spite of his resolve to keep his face turned toward his future, he found himself contrasting the squalid shanty at his back with the luxurious surroundings amid which he had last watched all night by a sick-bed. He could see the rich amber-coloured curtains, the bowls of violets on the inlaid table between the open windows, the exquisite embroidered coverlet upon the bed, and the long pale braid of Lydia's hair lying across the lace ruffles upon her nightgown. Before his eyes was the sunken field filled with Negro hovels and refuse heaps in which lean dogs prowled snarling in search of bones; but his inward vision dwelt, in a luminous mist, on the bright room, scented with violets, where Lydia had slept with her baby cradled within her arm. He could see her arm still under the falling lace, round and lovely, with delicate blue veins showing beneath the inside curve.

In the midst of his radiant memory the acrid voice of Mrs. Berry broke with a shock, and turning quickly he found that his dream took instant flight before the aggressive actuality which she presented.

"I declare I believe I'd clean forgot how good things tasted," she remarked in the cheerful tones of one who is full again after having been empty.

Picking up a chip from the ground, Ordway began sc.r.a.ping carelessly at the red clay on his boots. "It smells rather nice anyway," he rejoined good-humouredly, and rising from the doorstep, he crossed the kitchen and sat down in the sagging split-bottomed chair beside the pallet.

At sunrise he left Kit, sleeping peacefully after a delirious night, and going out of doors for a breath of fresh air, stood looking wearily on the dismal prospect of Bullfinch's Hollow. The disorderly road, the dried herbage of the field, the Negro hovels, with pig pens for backyards, and the refuse heaps piled with tin cans, old rags and vegetable rinds, appeared to him now to possess a sordid horror which had escaped him under the merciful obscurity of the twilight. Even the sun, he thought, looked lean and shrunken, as it rose over the slovenly landscape.

With the first long breath he drew there was only dejection in his mental outlook; then he remembered the enraptured face of Mrs. Berry as she poured out her coffee, and he told himself that there were pleasures hardy enough to thrive and expand even in the atmosphere of Bullfinch's Hollow.

As there was no wood in the kitchen, he shouldered an old axe which he found leaning in one corner, and going to a wood-pile beyond the doorstep, split up the single rotting log lying upon a heap of mould.

Returning with his armful of wood, he knelt on the hearth and attempted to kindle a blaze before the old woman should make her appearance from the attic. The sticks had just caught fire, when a shadow falling over him from the open door caused him to start suddenly to his feet.

"I beg your pardon," said a voice, "but I've brought some milk for Mrs.

Berry."

At the words his face reddened as if from shame, and drawing himself to his full height, he stood, embarra.s.sed and silent, in the centre of the room, while Emily Brooke crossed the floor and placed the can of milk she had brought upon the table.

"I didn't mean to interrupt you," she added cheerfully, "but there was no one else to come, so I had to ride over before breakfast. Is Kit better?"

"Yes," said Ordway, and to his annoyance he felt himself flush painfully at the sound of his own voice.

"You spent last night with him?" she inquired in her energetic tones.

"Yes."

As he stood there in his cheap clothes, with his dishevelled hair and his unwashed hands, she was struck by some distinction of personality, before which these surface roughnesses appeared as mere incidental things. Was it in his spare, weather-beaten face? Or was it in the peculiar contrast between his gray hair and his young blue eyes? Then her gaze fell on his badly made working clothes, worn threadbare in places, on his clean striped shirt, frayed slightly at the collar and cuffs, on his broken fingernails, and on the red clay still adhering to his country boots.

"I wonder why you do these things?" she asked so softly that the words hardly reached him. "I wonder why?"

Though she had expected no response to her question, to her surprise he answered almost impulsively as he stooped to pick up a bit of charred wood from the floor.

"Well, one must fill one's life, you know," he said. "I tried the other thing once but it didn't count--it was hardly better than this, when all is said."