The Ancient Law Part 22

"Well, I reckon you're right, Bob," admitted the other, after a moment's reflection, "what he won't do for you, it isn't likely that he'll do for the rest of Tappahannock--but the fact remains that somebody has got to step up and defeat Jasper Trend. Now I ask you pointblank--where'll you get your man?"

"The Lord knows!" sighed Baxter, and he sucked hard at the stem of his pipe.

"Then I tell you if you can't make Smith come out, it's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself."

Baxter relapsed into a depressed silence, in the midst of which his thoughts were invaded not so much by the political necessity of the occasion as by the small, but dominant figure of his wife. The big man, who had feared neither shot nor bayonet, trembled in spirit as he imagined the outraged authority that could express itself in a person that measured hardly a fraction more than five feet from her shoes to the curling gray fringe above her forehead. He remembered that once in the early days of his marriage, he had allowed himself to be seduced by the promise of political honours, and that for a whole miserable month he had gone without griddle cakes and syrup for his breakfast. "No--no, I could never tell Marthy," he thought, desperately, still seeing in imagination the pretty, indignant face of Mrs. Baxter.

"It's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself," repeated the Major, rapping the arm of his chair to enforce his words.

"I can't," rejoined Baxter, hopelessly, "I can't sir," and he added an instant afterward, "you see women have got the idea somehow, that politics ain't exactly moral."

"Women!" said the Major, in the dry, contemptuous tone in which he might have uttered the word, "Pshaw!"

"I don't mean just 'women,'" replied Baxter, "I mean my wife."

"Oh!" said the Major, "you mean your wife would be opposed to the whole thing?"

"She wouldn't hear of it, sir, she simply wouldn't hear a word of it."

For a long pause the Major made no answer; then rising from his chair he began pacing with his military stride up and down the floor of the little room. At the end of five minutes he turned upon Baxter with an exclamation of triumph, and threw himself again into the armchair beside the desk.

"I have it, Bob!" he said, slapping his knee until the dust flew out of his striped trousers, "I knew I'd get it in the end and here it is. The very thing, on my word, sir, I've discovered the very thing."

"Then I'm out of it," said Baxter, "an' I'm mighty glad of that."

"Oh, no, you aren't out of it--not just yet," said the Major, "we're to start you in, Bob, you're to start in as a candidate; and then a week before the nomination, something will crop up to make you fall out of the race, and you'll turn over all your votes to Smith. It would be too late, then, for him to back out--he'd simply have to keep in to save the day."

In spite of the roar of delight with which the Major ended his speech, Baxter sat unconvinced and unmoved, shaking his great head in a voiceless protest against the plot.

"It's the only way, I tell you," urged the Major, half pleased, half angry. "After Smith you're by long odds the most popular man in Tappahannock, and if it isn't one of you, it's Jasper Trend and his everlasting barrooms."

"But suppose Smith still declines," said Baxter remembering his wife.

"Oh, he won't--he isn't a blamed fool," returned the Major, "and if he does," he added impressively, "if he does I swear to you I'll go into the race myself."

He held out his hand and Baxter grasped it in token of good faith.

"Then I'll do it," said the big man, "provided--" he hesitated, cleared his throat, and went on bravely, "provided there's no objection to my telling my wife the scheme"--bending his ear an instant, he drew back with an embarra.s.sed and guilty face, "that's Smith's step in the warehouse. He'll be in here in less than two minutes."

The Major took up his hat, and flung back the door with a hurried movement.

"Well, good-bye, I'll see Smith later about the plans," he returned, "and meanwhile, we'll go hard to work to whip our friend Jasper."

Meeting Ordway an instant later upon the threshold, he pa.s.sed him with a flourish of his hat, and marched rapidly under the brick archway out into the street.

As his bookkeeper entered Baxter appeared to be absorbed in a newspaper which he had picked up hastily from the pile upon the floor.

"Good-morning," said Ordway, a little surprised; "it looks as if I'd put the fiery Major to flight."

"Smith," said Baxter, dropping his paper, and lifting his big, simple face to the younger man, "Smith, you've got me into a hole, and I want you to pull me out again."

"A hole?" repeated Ordway; then as light broke on him, he laughed aloud and held out his hand. "Oh, I see, he's going to make you Mayor of Tappahannock!"

With a groan Baxter prodded fresh tobacco into his pipe, and applying a match, sat for several minutes brooding in silence amid the cloud of smoke.

"He says it's got to be either you or me," he pursued presently, without noticing Ordway's e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, "and on my word, Smith, seeing I've got a wife who's all against it, I think it would be but fair to me to let me off. You're my friend now, ain't you? Well, I'm asking you, Smith, as friend to friend."

A flush pa.s.sed slowly over Ordway's face, and the unusual colour lent a peculiar animation to his glance. As Baxter met his eyes, he was conscious that they pierced through him, bright blue, sparkling, as incisive as a blade.

"To tell the truth, the thing is all but impossible," said Ordway, after a long pause. "You don't know, I suppose, that I've never even touched politics in Tappahannock."

"That ain't the point, Smith--it's going on three years since you came here--am I right?"

"Yes--three years next March, and it seems a century."

"Well, anyway, you've as good a right as I to be Mayor, and a long sight better one than Jasper Trend has. Come, now, Smith, if you don't get me out of this hole I'm in, heaven knows how I 'm going to face the Major."

"Give me time," said Ordway, quickly, "give me time--a week from to-morrow I am to make my first speech in the town hall. May I have till then?"

"Till Thursday week? Oh, I say, Smith, you've got to give in in the end--and a week sooner or later, what's the difference?"

Without replying, Ordway walked slowly to the window and stood looking out upon the steep street that crawled up from the railroad track, where an engine whistled. He had held out till now, but with Baxter's last words he had heard in his thoughts a question larger and older than any of which his employer had dreamed. "Why not?" he asked himself again as he looked out upon the sunshine. "Why should not Daniel Smith, for a good purpose, resume the rights which Daniel Ordway has forfeited?" And it appeared to him while he stood there that his decision involved not himself alone, and that the outcome had ceased to be merely an election to the highest office in Tappahannock. Infinitely deep and wide, the problem belonged not only to his individual life, but to the lives of all those who had sinned and paid the penalty of sin and asked of humanity the right and the freedom to begin anew. The impulsive daring which he had almost lived down stirred for an instant in his pulses, and turning quickly he looked at Baxter with a boyish laugh.

"If I go in, Baxter, I go in to win!" he cried.

At the moment it had seemed to him that he was obliging rather than ambitious in the choice that he had made; but several days later, when he came out of the warehouse to find the Major's red flag flying in the street, he felt the thrill of his youthful enthusiasm quicken in his blood. There was a strangely martial air about the red flag in the sunshine, and the response in his pulses was not unlike the ardour of battle.

"After all the world is no smaller here than it is in New York," he thought, "only the littleness of the one is different from the littleness of the other. In either place success would have meant nothing in itself, but in Tappahannock I can be more than successful, I can be useful." With the words it seemed to him that his heart dissolved in happiness, and as he looked now on the people who pa.s.sed him in the street--on the old Negro midwife waddling down the board walk; on the Italian who kept a fruit stand at the corner; on the pretty girl flirting in the door of the harness shop; and on the rough-coated, soft-eyed country horses--he felt that one and all of these must recognise and respond to the goodwill that had overflowed his thoughts.

So detached from personal bitterness, indeed, was even his fight against Jasper Trend that he went out of his way at the top of the hill to pick up a small whip which the Mayor had dropped from horseback as he rode by. The scowling thanks with which Jasper received the courtesy puzzled him for a moment until he remembered that by the man in the harness shop they were regarded probably as enemies. At the recollection he stopped short in his walk and laughed aloud--no, he was not interested in fighting anything so small, so insignificant as Jasper Trend. It was the injustice, the social disease he combated and not the man. "I wonder if he really hates me?" he thought, for it seemed to him absurd and meaningless that one man should waste his strength in hating another.

"If he'd been five years in prison he would have learned how foolish it all is," he added; and an instant afterward he asked himself almost with terror if his punishment had been, in reality, the greatest good that had come to him in life? Without that terrible atonement would he have gone on like Jasper Trend from fraud to fraud, from selfishness to d.a.m.nation?

Looking round him in the perfect October weather, he felt that the emotion in his heart swelled suddenly to rapture. Straight ahead the sunshine sifted in drops through the red and yellow trees that bordered the roadside, while in the field on his right the brown cornricks crowded in even rows to where the arch of the hill was outlined against the deep blue sky. Here was not only peace, but happiness, and his old life, as he glanced back upon it, appeared hollow, futile, a corpse without breath or animation. That was the mere outward form and body of existence; but standing here in the deserted road, with his eyes on the brilliant October fields, he could tell himself that he had come at last into the ways and the understanding of faith. As he had once walked by sight alone and stumbled, so he moved now blindly like a child that is led step by step through the dark.

From the road behind him a happy laugh struck on his ears, and turning quickly he saw that a dog-cart was rolling rapidly from Tappahannock. As he stepped back upon the roadside to avoid the dust raised by the wheels, he lifted his eyes to the face of Milly Trend, who sat, flushed and smiling, under a pink sunshade. She bowed joyfully; and it was not until a moment afterward, when the cart had gone by, that Ordway realised, almost with the force of a blow struck unawares, that he had acknowledged the obsequious greeting of Gus Wherry.

After the pink sunshade had vanished, Milly's laugh was still blown back to him on the rising wind. With the happy sound of it in his ears, he watched the dust settle again in the road, the tall golden poplars close like a screen after the pa.s.sing wheels, and the distance resume its aspect of radiant loneliness. Nothing was changed at which he looked, yet he was conscious that the rapture had pa.s.sed from his thoughts and the beauty from the October landscape. The release that he had won appeared to him as an illusion and a cheat, and lifting his face to the sunshine, he watched, like a prisoner, the flight of the swallows across the sky.

At dinner Beverly noticed his abstraction, and recommended a mint julep, which Emily went out immediately to prepare.

"The blood is easily chilled at this season," he said, "and care should be taken to keep it warm by means of a gentle stimulant. I am not a great drinker, sir, as you may have remarked, but in cases either of sickness or sorrow, I have observed that few things are more efficacious than a thimbleful of whiskey taken at the proper time. When I had the misfortune to break to my uncle Colonel Algernon Brooke the distressing news of the death of his wife by drowning, I remember that, though he was one of the most abstemious men alive, his first articulate words were: 'bring the whiskey jug.'"

Even with the cheering a.s.sistance of the mint julep, however, it was impossible for Ordway to eat his dinner; and making an excuse presently, he rose from the table and went out into the avenue, where he walked slowly up and down in the shadow of the cedars. At the end of his last restless turn, he went indoors for his hat, and coming out again started rapidly toward Tappahannock. With his first decisive step he felt that the larger share of his burden had fallen from him.

The Tappahannock Hotel was a low, whitewashed frame building, withdrawn slightly from the street, where several dejected looking horses, with saddle-bags attached to them, were usually fastened to the iron rings in the hitching-rail upon the sidewalk. The place was the resort chiefly of commercial travellers or of neighbouring farmers, who drove in with wagon loads of garden produce or of sun-cured tobacco; and the number of loungers reclining on the newly painted green benches upon the porch made Ordway aware that the fall trade was already beginning to show signs of life.

In answer to his questions, the proprietor an unctuous person, whose mouth was distorted by a professional habit of welcome--informed him that a gentleman by the name of Brown had registered there the evening before, and that he was, to the best of his belief, upstairs in number eighteen at the present moment.