The Ancient Law Part 37

"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 to Ordway, 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 pa.s.ses 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.

CHAPTER VII

THE VISION AND THE FACT

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 att.i.tude 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 went back 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 s.p.a.ces 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 G.o.d," 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 ma.s.ses 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."