The Ancient Law Part 28

BETWEEN MAN AND MAN

When he entered Tappahannock the following morning, he saw with surprise that the red flag was still flying above the street. As he looked into the face of the first man he met, he felt a sensation of relief, almost of grat.i.tude because he received merely the usual morning greeting; and the instant afterward he flinched and hesitated before replying to the friendly nod of the harness-maker, stretching himself under the hanging bridles in the door of the little shop.

Entering the warehouse he glanced nervously down the deserted building, and when a moment later he opened the door into Baxter's office, he grew hot at the familiar sight of the local newspaper in his employer's hands. The years had divided suddenly and he saw again the crowd in Fifth Avenue as he walked home on the morning of his arrest. He smelt the smoke of the great city; he heard the sharp street cries around him; and he pushed aside the fading violets offered him by the crippled flower seller at the corner. He even remembered, without effort, the particular bit of scandal retailed to him over a cigar by the club wit who had joined him. All his sensations to-day were what they had been then, only now his consciousness was less acute, as if the edge of his perceptions had been blunted by the force of the former blow.

"Howdy, Smith, is that you?" remarked Baxter, crushing the top of the paper beneath the weight of his chin as he looked over it at Ordway.

"Did you meet Banks as you came in? He was in here asking for you not two minutes ago."

"Banks? No, I didn't see him. What did he want?" As he put the ordinary question the dull level of his voice surprised him.

"Oh, he didn't tell me," returned Baxter, "but it was some love-lorn whining he had to do, I reckon. Now what I can't understand is how a man can be so narrow sighted as only to see one woman out of the whole bouncing s.e.x of 'em. It would take more than a refusal--it would take a downright football to knock out my heart. Good Lord! in this world of fine an' middling fine women, the trouble ain't to get the one you want, but to keep on wanting the one you get. I've done my little share of observing in my time, and what I've learned from it is that the biggest trial a man can have is not to want another man's wife, but to _want_ to want his own."

A knock at the door called Ordway out into the warehouse, where he yielded himself immediately to the persuasive voice of Banks.

"Come back here a minute, will you, out of hearing? I tried to get to you last night and couldn't."

"Has anything gone wrong?" inquired Ordway, following the other to a safe distance from Baxter's office. At first he had hardly had courage to lift his eyes to Banks' face, but rea.s.sured by the quiet opening of the conversation, he stood now with his sad gaze fixed on the beaming freckled features of the melancholy lover.

"I only wanted to tell you that she didn't go," whispered Banks, rolling his prominent eyes into the dusky recesses of the warehouse, "she's ill in bed to-day, and Brown left town on the eight-forty-five this morning."

"So he's gone for good!" exclaimed Ordway, and drew a long breath as if he had been released from an emotional tension which had suspended, while it lasted, the ordinary movement of life. Since he had prepared himself for the worst was it possible that his terror of yesterday would scatter to-day like the delusions of an unsettled brain? Had Wherry held back in mercy or had Milly Trend? Even if he were spared now must he still live on here unaware how widely--or how pitifully--his secret was known? Would this ceaseless dread of discovery prove again, as it had proved in the past, more terrible even than the discovery itself? Would he be able to look fearlessly at Milly Trend again?--at Baxter? at Banks? at Emily?

"Well, I've got to thank you for it, Smith?" said Banks. "How you stopped it, I don't know for the life of me, but stop it you did."

The cheerful selfishness in such rejoicing struck Ordway even in the midst of his own bitter musing. Though Banks adored Milly, soul and body, he was frankly jubilant over the tragic ending of her short romance.

"I hope there's little danger of its beginning anew," Ordway remarked presently, with less sympathy than he would have shown his friend twelve hours before.

"I suppose you wouldn't like to tell me what you said to her?" inquired Banks, his customary awe of his companion swept away in the momentary swing of his elation.

"No, I shouldn't like to tell you," returned Ordway quietly.

"Then it's all right, of course, and I'll be off to drape the town hall in bunting for to-morrow night. We're going to make the biggest political display for you that Tappahannock has ever seen."

At the instant Ordway was hardly conscious of the immensity of his relief, but some hours later, after the early closing of the warehouse, when he walked slowly back along the road to Cedar Hill, it seemed to him that his life had settled again into its quiet monotonous s.p.a.ces.

The peaceful fields on either side, with their short crop of live-ever-lasting, in which a few lonely sheep were browsing, appeared to him now as a part of the inward breadth and calm of the years that he had spent in Tappahannock.

In the loneliness of the road he could tell himself that the fear of Gus Wherry was gone for a time at least, yet the next day upon going into town he was aware of the same nervous shrinking from the people he pa.s.sed, from the planters hanging about the warehouse, from Baxter buried behind his local newspaper.

"They've got a piece as long as your arm about you in the Tappahannock _Herald_, Smith," cried Baxter, chuckling; and Ordway felt himself redden painfully with apprehension. Not until the evening, when he came out upon the platform under the floating buntings in the town hall, did he regain entirely the self-possession which he had lost in the presence of Milly Trend.

In its white and red decorations, with the extravagant glare of its gas-jets, the hall had a.s.sumed almost a festive appearance; and as Ordway glanced at the crowded benches and doorways, he forgot the trivial political purpose he was to serve, in the more human relation in which he stood to the men who had gathered to hear him speak. These men were his friends, and if they believed in him he felt a triumphant conviction that they had seen their belief justified day by day, hour by hour, since he had come among them. In the crowd of faces before him, he recognised, here and there, workingmen whom he had helped--operatives in Jasper Trend's cotton mills, or in the smaller factories which combined with the larger to create the political situation in Tappahannock.

Closer at hand he saw the shining red face of Major Leary; the affectionate freckled face of Banks; the ma.s.sive benevolent face of Baxter. As he looked at them an emotion which was almost one of love stirred in his breast, and he felt the words he had prepared dissolve and fade from his memory to reunite in an appeal of which he had not thought until this minute. There was something, he knew now, for him to say to-night--something so infinitely large that he could utter it only because it rose like love or sorrow to his lips. Of all the solemn moments when he had stood before these men, with his open Bible, in the green field or in the little grove of pines, there was none so solemn, he felt, as the approaching instant in which he would speak to them no longer as a man to children, but as a man to men.

On the stage before him Baxter was addressing the house, his soft, persuasive voice mingling with a sympathetic murmur from the floor. The applause which had broken out at Ordway's entrance had not yet died away, and with each mention of his name, with each allusion to his services to Tappahannock, it burst forth again, enthusiastic, irrepressible, overwhelming. Never before, it seemed to him, sitting there on the platform with his roughened hands crossed on his knees, had he felt himself to be so intimately a part of the community in which he lived. Never before--not even when he had started this man in life, had bought off that one's mortgage or had helped another to struggle free of drink, had he come quite so near to the pathetic individual lives that compose the ma.s.s. They loved him, they believed in him, and they were justified! At the moment it seemed to him nothing--less than nothing--that they should make him Mayor of Tappahannock. In this one instant of understanding they had given him more than any office--than any honour.

While he sat there outwardly so still, so confident of his success, it seemed to him that in the exhilaration of the hour he was possessed of a new and singularly penetrating insight into life. Not only did he see further and deeper than he had ever seen before, but he looked beyond the beginning of things into the causes and beyond the ending of them into the results. He saw himself and why he was himself as clearly as he saw his sin and why he had sinned. Out of their obscurity his father and his mother returned to him, and as he met the bitter ironical smile of the one and the curved black brows and red, half open mouth of the other, he knew himself to be equally the child of each, for he understood at last why he was a mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compa.s.sion. His short, troubled childhood rushed through his thoughts, and with that swiftness of memory which comes so often in tragic moments, he lived over again--not separately and in successive instants--but fully, vitally, and in all the freshness of experience, the three events which he saw now, in looking back, as the milestones upon his road. Again he saw his mother as she lay in her coffin, with her curved black brows and half open mouth frozen into a joyous look, and in that single fleeting instant he pa.s.sed through his meeting with the convict at the wayside station, and through the long suspended minutes when he had waited in the Stock Exchange for the rise in the market which did not come. And these things appeared to him, not as detached and obscure remnants of his past, but clear and delicate and vivid as if they were projected in living colours against the illumination of his mind. They were there not to bewilder, but to make plain; not to accuse, but to vindicate. "Everything is clear to me now and I see it all," he thought, "and if I can only keep this penetration of vision nothing will be harder to-morrow than it is to-night." In his whole life there was not an incident too small for him to remember it and to feel that it was significant of all the rest; and he knew that if he could have seen from the beginning as clearly as he saw to-night, his past would not have been merely different, it would have been entirely another than his own.

Baxter had stopped, and turning with an embarra.s.sed upheaval of his whole body, he spoke to Ordway, who rose at his words and came slowly forward to the centre of the stage. A hoa.r.s.e murmur, followed by a tumult of shouts, greeted him, while he stood for a moment looking silently among those upturned faces for the faces of the men to whom he must speak. "That one will listen because I nursed him back to life, and that one because I brought him out of ruin--and that one and that one--"

He knew them each by name, and as his gaze travelled from man to man he felt that he was seeking a refuge from some impending evil in the shelter of the good deeds that he had done.

Though he held a paper in his hand, he did not look at it, for he had found his words in that instant of illumination when, seated upon the stage, he had seen the meaning of his whole life made plain. The present event and the issue of it no longer concerned him; he had ceased to fear, even to shrink from the punishment that was yet to come. In the completeness with which he yielded himself to the moment, he felt that he was possessed of the calm, almost of the power of necessity; and he experienced suddenly the sensation of being lifted and swept forward on one of the high waves of life. He spoke rapidly, without effort, almost without consciousness of the words he uttered, until it seemed to him presently that it was the torrent of his speech which carried him outward and upward with that strange sense of lightness, of security.

And this lightness, this security belonged not to him, but to some outside current of being.

His speech was over, and he had spoken to these factory workers as no man had spoken before him in Tappahannock. With his last word the silence had held tight and strained for a minute, and then the grateful faces pressed round him and the ringing cheers pa.s.sed through the open windows out into the street. His body was still trembling, but as he stood there with his sparkling blue eyes on the house, he looked gay and boyish. He had made his mark, he had spoken his best speech, and he had touched not merely the factory toilers in Tappahannock, but that common pulse of feeling in which all humanity is made one. Then the next instant, while he still waited, he was aware of a new movement upon the platform behind him, and a man came forward and stopped short under the gas jet, which threw a flickering yellow light upon his face. Though he had seen him but once, he recognized him instantly as the short, long-nosed, irascible manager of the cotton mills, and with the first glance into his face he had heard already the unspoken question and the reply.

"May I ask you, Mr. Smith," began the little man, suddenly, "if you can prove your right to vote or to hold office in Virginia?"

Ordway's gaze pa.s.sed beyond him to rest upon Baxter and Major Leary, who sat close together, genial, elated, rather thirsty. At the moment he felt sorry for Baxter--not for himself.

"No," he answered with a smile which threw a humorous light upon the question, "I cannot--can you prove yours?"

The little man cleared his throat with a sniffling sound, and when he spoke again it was in a high nasal voice, as if he had become suddenly very excited or very angry.

"Is your name Daniel Smith?" he asked, with a short laugh.

The question was out at last and the silence in which Ordway stood was like the suspension between thought and thought. All at once he found himself wondering why he had lived in hourly terror of this instant, for now that it was upon him, he saw that it was no more tragic, no less commonplace, than the most ordinary instant of his life. As in the past his courage had revived in him with the first need of decisive action, so he felt it revive now, and lifting his head, he looked straight into the angry, little eyes of the man who waited, under the yellow gaslight, on the platform before him.

"My name," he answered, still smiling, "is Daniel Ordway."

There was no confusion in his mind, no anxiety, no resentment. Instead the wonderful brightness of a moment ago still shone in his thoughts, and while he appeared to rest his sparkling gaze on the face of his questioner, he was seeing, in reality, the road by which he had come to Tappahannock, and at the beginning of the road the prison, and beyond the prison the whole of his past life.

"Did you serve a term in prison before you came here?"

"Yes."

"Were you tried and convicted in New York?"

"Yes."

"Were you guilty?"

Looking over the head of the little man, Ordway's gaze travelled slowly across the upturned faces upon the floor of the house. Hardly a man pa.s.sed under his look whom he had not a.s.sisted once at least in the hour of his need. "I saved that one from drink," he thought almost joyfully, "that one from beggary--I stood side by side with that other in the hour of his shame----"

"Were you guilty?" repeated the high nasal voice in his ear.

His gaze came quickly back, and as it pa.s.sed over the head of Baxter, he was conscious again of a throb of pity.

"Yes," he answered for the last time. Then, while the silence lasted, he turned from the platform and went out of the hall into the night.

CHAPTER XI