2,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 2,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 2,49 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
In "The Ancient Law," Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow intricately weaves a rich narrative that explores the complex interplay between tradition and modernity in the American South. Set against the backdrop of post-Civil War Virginia, the novel delves into themes of societal expectation, moral conflict, and the evolution of personal identity. Glasgow'Äôs prose is characterized by its lyrical quality and keen psychological insight, embodying the Southern Gothic style while intricately capturing the cultural nuances of the time. The use of vivid imagery and symbolic motifs further enriches the text, making it a profound examination of the individual against a tapestry of historical legacy. Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, a prominent figure in Southern literature, often drew inspiration from her own experiences growing up in a genteel yet declining Southern society. Her acute awareness of the tension between progressive ideals and entrenched customs undoubtedly informed the thematic depth of "The Ancient Law". Glasgow's commitment to portraying the authenticity of Southern life enabled her to craft narratives that resonated with the complexities of her era, paving the way for future literary voices. For readers seeking an evocative exploration of the Southern experience, "The Ancient Law" is essential. Glasgow'Äôs ability to capture the intricate dance of change and continuity makes this novel not only a compelling historical account but also a timeless reflection on the human spirit. This work is a crucial addition to any scholarly collection on American literature and the Southern Gothic tradition.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
The Ancient Law
Table of Contents
BOOK FIRST THE NEW LIFE
CHAPTER IThe Road
THOUGH it was six days since Daniel Ordway had come out of prison, he was aware, when he reached the brow of the hill, and stopped to look back over the sunny Virginia road, that he drank in the wind as if it were his first breath of freedom. At his feet the road dropped between two low hills beyond which swept a high, rolling sea of broomsedge; and farther still—where the distance melted gradually into the blue sky—he could see not less plainly the New York streets through which he had gone from his trial and the walls of the prison where he had served five years. Between this memory and the deserted look of the red clay road there was the abrupt division which separates actual experience from the objects in a dream. He felt that he was awake, yet it seemed that the country through which he walked must vanish presently at a touch. Even the rough March wind blowing among the broomsedge heightened rather than diminished the effect of the visionary meeting of earth and sky.
As he stood there in his ill-fitting clothes, with his head bared in the sun and the red clay ground to fine dust on his coarse boots, it would have been difficult at a casual glance to have grouped him appropriately in any division of class. He might have been either a gentleman who had turned tramp or a tramp who had been born to look a gentleman. Though he was barely above medium height, his figure produced even in repose an impression of great muscular strength, and this impression was repeated in his large, regular, and singularly expressive features. His face was square with a powerful and rather prominent mouth and chin; the brows were heavily marked and the eyes were of so bright a blue that they lent an effect which was almost one of gaiety to his smile. In his dark and slightly coarsened face the colour of his eyes was intensified until they appeared to flash at times like blue lights under his thick black brows. His age was, perhaps, forty years, though at fifty there would probably be but little change recorded in his appearance. At thirty one might have found, doubtless, the same lines of suffering upon his forehead and about his mouth.
As he went on over some rotting planks which spanned a stream that had gone dry, the road he followed was visible as a faded scar in a stretch of impoverished, neutral-toned country—the least distinctive and most isolated part of what is known in Virginia as "the Southside." A bleached monotony was the one noticeable characteristic of the landscape—the pale clay road, the dried broomsedge, and even the brownish, circular-shaped cloud of smoke, which hung over the little town in the distance, each contributing a depressing feature to a face which presented at best an unrelieved flatness of colour. The single high note in the dull perspective was struck by a clump of sassafras, which, mistaking the mild weather for a genial April, had flowered tremulously in gorgeous yellow.
The sound of a wagon jolting over the rough road, reached him presently from the top of the hill, and as he glanced back, he heard a drawling curse thrown to the panting horses. A moment later he was overtaken by an open spring wagon filled with dried tobacco plants of the last season's crop. In the centre of the load, which gave out a stale, pungent odour, sat a small middle-aged countryman, who swore mild oaths in a pleasant, jesting tone. From time to time, as the stalks beneath him were jostled out of place, he would shift his seat and spread out his short legs clad in overalls of blue jean. Behind him in the road the wind tossed scattered and damaged leaves of tobacco.
When the wagon reached Ordway, he glanced over his shoulder at the driver, while he turned into the small grass-grown path amid the clumps of sassafras.
"Is that Bernardsville over there?" he asked, pointing in the direction of the cloud of smoke.
The wagon drew up quickly and the driver—who showed at nearer view to be a dirty, red-bearded farmer of the poorer class—stared at him with an expression which settled into suspicion before it had time to denote surprise.
"Bernardsville! Why, you've come a good forty miles out of your road. That thar's Tappahannock."
"Tappahannock? I hadn't heard of it."
"Mebbe you ain't, but it never knowed it."
"Anything going on there? Work, I mean?"
"The biggest shippin' of tobaccy this side o' Danville is goin' on thar. Ever heard o' Danville?"
"I know the name, but the tobacco market is about closed now, isn't it? The season's over."
The man's laugh startled the waiting horses, and lifting their heads from a budding bush by the roadside, they moved patiently toward Tappahannock.
"Closed? Bless you, it never closes—Whoa! thar, won't you, darn you? To be sure sales ain't so brisk to-day as they war a month back, but I'm jest carryin' in my leetle crop to Baxter's warehouse."
"It isn't manufactured, then—only bought and sold?"
"Oh, it's sold quick enough and bought, too. Baxter auctions the leaf off in lots and it's shipped to the factories in Richmond an' in Danville. You ain't a native of these parts, I reckon?"
"A native—no? I'm looking for work."
"What sort of work? Thar's work an' work. I saw a man once settin' out in an old field doin' a picture of a pine tree, an' he called it work. Wall, wall, if you're goin' all the way to Tappahannock, I reckon I kin give you a lift along. Mebbe you kin pick up an odd job in Baxter's warehouse—thar's a sayin' that he feeds all the crows in Tappahannock."
He drove on with a chuckle, for Ordway had declined the proffered "lift," and the little cloud of dust raised by the wagon drifted slowly in the direction of the town.
A mile farther on Ordway found that as the road approached Tappahannock, the country lost gradually its aspect of loneliness, and the colourless fields were dotted here and there with small Negro cabins, built for the most part of unbarked pine logs laid roughly cross-wise to form square enclosures. Before one of these primitive dwellings a large black woman, with a strip of checked blue and white gingham bound about her head, was emptying a pail of buttermilk into a wooden trough. When she saw Ordway she nodded to him from the end of the little path, bordered by rocks, which led from the roadside to the single stone step before her cabin door.
As he watched the buttermilk splash into the trough, Ordway remembered, with a spasm of faintness, that he had eaten nothing since the day before, and turning out of the road, he asked the woman for a share of the supper that she gave the pigs.
"Go 'way, honey, dis yer ain' fit'n fur you," she replied, resting the pail under her arm against her rolling hip, "I'se des' thowin' hit ter de hawgs."
But when he had repeated his request, she motioned to a wooden bench beside a scrubby lilac bush on which a coloured shirt hung drying, and going into the single room inside, brought him a glass of buttermilk and a piece of corn bread on a tin plate. While he ate hungrily of the coarse food a half-naked Negro baby, covered with wood ashes, rolled across the threshold and lay sprawling in the path at his feet.
After a little rambling talk the woman went back into the cabin, where she whipped up cornmeal dough in an earthenware bowl, turning at intervals to toss a scrap or two to a red and white cock that hovered, expectant, about the doorway. In the road a covered wagon crawled by, and the shadow it threw stretched along the path to the lilac bush where the coloured shirt hung drying. The pigs drank the buttermilk from the trough with loud grunts; the red and white cock ventured, alert and wary, across the threshold; and the Negro baby, after sprawling on its stomach in the warm earth, rolled over and lay staring in silence at the blue sky overhead.
There was little beauty in the scene except the beauty which belongs to all things under the open sky. Road and landscape and cabin were bare even of any chance effect of light and shadow. Yet there was life—the raw, primal life of nature—and after his forty years of wasted experience, Ordway was filled with a passionate desire for life. In his careless pursuit of happiness he had often found weariness instead, but sitting now homeless and penniless, before the negro's cabin, he discovered that each object at which he looked—the long road that led somewhere, the smoke hanging above the distant town, the deep-bosomed negro mother and the half-naked negro baby—that each of these possessed an interest to which he awakened almost with a start of wonder. And yielding to the influence of his thought, his features appeared to lose gradually their surface coarseness of line. It was as if his mouth grew vague, enveloped in shadow, while the eyes dominated the entire face and softened its expression to one of sweetness, gaiety and youth. The child that is in every man big enough to contain it looked out suddenly from his altered face.
He was thinking now of a day in his boyhood—of an early autumn morning when the frost was white on the grass and the chestnuts dropped heavily from the spreading boughs and the cider smelt strong and sweet as it oozed from the crushed winesaps. On that morning, after dressing by candlelight, he had gone into town with his maiden aunt, a lady whom he remembered chiefly by her false gray curls which she wore as if they had been a halo. At the wayside station, while they had waited for the train to the little city of Botetourt, he had seen a convict brought in, handcuffed, on his way to the penitentiary, and in response to the boy's persistent questioning, his aunt had told him that the man was wicked, though he appeared to the child's eyes to be only miserable—a thin, dirty, poorly clad labourer with a red cotton handkerchief bound tightly about his jaw. A severe toothache had evidently attacked him, for while he had stared sullenly at the bare planks of the floor, he had made from time to time a suffering, irritable movement with his head. At each gesture the guard had called out sharply: "Keep still there, won't you?" to which the convict had responded by a savage lowering of his heavy brows.
For the first time it had occurred to the child that day that there must be a strange contradiction—a fundamental injustice in the universal scheme of nature. He had always been what his father had called impatiently "a boy with ideas," and it had seemed to him then that this last "idea" of his was far the most wonderful of them all—more wonderful than any he had found in books or in his own head at night. At the moment he had felt it swell so large in his heart that a glow of happiness had spread through his body to his trembling hands. Slipping from his aunt's hold he had crossed the room to where the convict sat sullenly beside his guard.
"I'll give you all my money," he had cried out joyously, "because I am so much happier than you."
The convict had started and looked up with an angry flash in his eyes; the guard had burst into a loud laugh while he spat tobacco juice through the window; the silver had scattered and rolled under the benches on the plank floor; and the child's aunt, rustling over in her stiff brocade, had seized his arm and dragged him, weeping loudly, into the train. So his first mission had failed, yet at this day he could remember the joy with which he had stretched out his little hand and the humiliation in which he had drawn it back. That was thirty years ago, but he wondered now if the child's way had been God's way, after all?
For there had come an hour in his life when the convict of his boyhood had stood in closer relationship to his misery than the people whom he had touched in the street. His childish memories scattered like mist, and the three great milestones of his past showed bare and white, as his success, his temptation and his fall. He remembered the careless ambition of his early youth, the brilliant promise of his college years, and the day on which he had entered as a younger member the great banking house of Amos, Bonner, and Amos. Between this day and the slow minutes when he had stood in his wife's sitting-room awaiting his arrest, he could find in his thoughts no gradation of years to mark the terrible swiftness of his descent. In that time which he could not divide Wall Street had reached out and sucked him in; the fever of speculation had consumed like disease the hereditary instincts, the sentiments of honour, which had barred its way. One minute he had stood a rich man on the floor of the Stock Exchange—and was it an instant or a century afterwards that he had gone out into the street and had known himself to be a beggar and a criminal? Other men had made millions with the use of money which they held in trust; but the star of the gambler had deserted him at the critical hour; and where other men had won and triumphed, he had gone down, he told himself, dishonoured by a stroke of luck. In his office that day a mirror over the mantel had showed him his face as he entered, and he had stopped to look at it almost with curiosity—as if it were the face of a stranger which repelled him because it bore some sinister likeness to his own. After this there had come days, weeks, months, when at each sudden word, at each opening of the door, he had started, half sickened, by fear of the discovery which he knew must come. His nerves had quivered and given way under the pressure; he had grown morose, irritable, silent; and in some half-insane frenzy, he had imagined that his friends, his family, his wife, even his young children, had begun to regard him with terror and suspicion. But at last the hour had come, and in the strength with which he had risen to meet it, he had won back almost his old self—for courage, not patience, was the particular virtue of his temperament. He had stood his trial bravely, had heard his sentence without a tremor, and had borne his punishment without complaint. The world and he were quits now, and he felt that it owed him at least the room for a fair fight.
The prison, he had said once, had squared him with his destiny, yet to-day each act of his past appeared to rivet, not itself, but its result upon his life. Though he told himself that he was free, he knew that, in the reality of things, he was still a prisoner. From the lowest depths that he had touched he was reached even now by the agony of his most terrible moment when, at the end of his first hopeless month, he had found awaiting him one day a letter from his wife. It was her final good-bye, she had written; on the morrow she would leave with her two children for his father's home in Virginia; and the single condition upon which the old man had consented to provide for them was that she should separate herself entirely from her husband. "The condition is hard," she had added, "made harder, too, by the fact that you are his son and my only real claim upon him is through you—yet when you consider the failure of our life together, and that the children's education even is unprovided for, you will, I feel sure, admit that my decision has been a wise one."
The words had dissolved and vanished before his eyes, and turning away he had flung himself on his prison bed, while the hard, dry sobs had quivered like blows in his chest. Yet she was right! His judgment had acquitted her in the first agony of his reproach, and the unerring justice in her decision had convicted him with each smooth, calm sentence in her letter. As he lay there he had lost consciousness of the bare walls and the hot sunshine that fell through the grating, for the ultimate desolation had closed over him like black waters.
A little later he had gone from his cell and taken up his life again; but all that he remembered of it now was a voice that had called to him in the prison yard.
"You look so darn sunk in the mouth I'll let you have my last smoke—damn you!"
Turning sullenly he had accepted the stranger's tobacco, unaware at the moment that he was partaking of the nature of a sacrament—for while he had smoked there in his dogged misery, he had felt revive in his heart a stir of sympathy for the convict he had seen at the wayside station in Virginia. As if revealed by an inner illumination the impressions of that morning had started, clear as light, into his brain. The frost on the grass, the dropping chestnuts, the strong sweet smell of the crushed winesaps—these things surrounded in his memory the wretched figure of the man with the red cotton handkerchief bound tightly about his swollen jaw. But the figure had ceased now to stand for itself and for its own degradation alone—haunting, tragic, colossal, it had become in his thoughts the image of all those who suffer and are oppressed. So through his sin and his remorse, Ordway had travelled slowly toward the vision of service.
With a word of thanks to the woman, he rose from the bench and went down the little path and out into the road. The wind had changed suddenly, and as he emerged from the shelter of a thicket, it struck against his face with a biting edge. Where the sun had declined in the western sky, heavy clouds were driving close above the broken line of the horizon. The night promised to be cold, and he pushed on rapidly, urged by a feeling that the little town before him held rest and comfort and the new life beneath its smoking chimneys. Walking was less difficult now, for the road showed signs of travel as it approached the scattered houses, which appeared thrust into community by the surrounding isolation of the fields. At last, as he ascended a slight elevation, he found that the village, screened by a small grove of pines, lay immediately beneath the spot upon which he stood.
CHAPTER IIThe Night
THE scattered houses closed together in groups, the road descended gradually into a hollow, and emerging on the opposite side, became a street, and the street slouched lazily downhill to where a railroad track ran straight as a seam across the bare country. Quickening his steps, Ordway came presently to the station—a small wooden building newly painted a brilliant yellow—and pushed his way with difficulty through a crowd of Negroes that had gathered closely beside the waiting train.
"Thar's a good three hundred of the critters going to a factory in the North," remarked a man behind him, "an' yit they don't leave more'n a speck of white in the county. Between the crows an' the darkies I'll be blamed if you can see the colour of the soil."
The air was heavy with hot, close smells—a mingling of smoke, tobacco, dust and humanity. A wailing sound issued from the windows of the cars where the dark faces were packed tightly together, and a tall Negro, black as ebony, in a red shirt open at the throat, began strumming excitedly upon a banjo. Near him a mulatto woman lifted a shrill soprano voice, while she stood beating the air distractedly with her open palms. On the other side of the station a dog howled, and the engine uttered an angry whistle as if impatient of the delay.
After five years of prison discipline, the ugly little town appeared to Ordway to contain an alluring promise of freedom. At the instant the animation in the scene spoke to his blood as if it had been beauty, and movement seemed to him to possess some peculiar æsthetic quality apart from form or colour. The brightly dyed calicos on the Negro women; the shining black faces of the men, smooth as ebony; the tragic primitive voices, like voices imprisoned in the soil; the strumming of the rude banjo; the whistling engine and the howling dog; the odours of smoke and dust and fertilisers—all these things blended in his senses to form an intoxicating impression of life. Nothing that could move or utter sounds or lend a spot of colour appeared common or insignificant to his awakened brain. It was all life, and for five years he had been starved in every sense and instinct.
The main street—Warehouse Street, as he found later that it was called—appeared in the distance as a broad river of dust which ran from the little station to where the warehouses and small shops gave place to the larger dwellings which presided pleasantly over the neighbouring fields. As Ordway followed the board sidewalk, he began idly reading the signs over the shops he passed, until "Kelly's Saloon," and "Baker's General Store" brought him suddenly upon a dark oblong building which ran back, under a faded brick archway. Before the entrance several men were seated in cane chairs, which they had tilted conveniently against the wall, and at Ordway's approach they edged slightly away and sat regarding him over their pipes with an expression of curiosity which differed so little in the different faces that it appeared to result from some internal automatic spring.
"I beg your pardon," he began after a moment's hesitation, "but I was told that I might find work in Baxter's warehouse."
"Well, it's a first-rate habit not to believe everything you're told," responded an enormous man, in half-soiled clothes, who sat smoking in the middle of the archway. "I can't find work myself in Baxter's warehouse at this season. Ain't that so, boys?" he enquired with a good-natured chuckle of his neighbours.
"Are you Mr. Baxter?" asked Ordway shortly.
"I'm not sure about the Mister, but I'm Baxter all right." He had shifted his pipe to the extreme corner of his mouth as he spoke, and now removing it with what seemed an effort, he sat prodding the ashes with his stubby thumb. His face, as he glanced down, was overspread by a flabbiness which appeared to belong to expression rather than to feature.
"Then there's no chance for me?" enquired Ordway.
"You might try the cotton mills—they's just down the next street. If there's a job to be had in town you'll most likely run up against it there."
"It's no better than a wild goose chase you're sending him on, Baxter," remarked a smaller member of the group, whose head protruded unexpectedly above Baxter's enormous shoulder; "I was talking to Jasper Trend this morning and he told me he was turning away men every day. Whew! but this wind is getting too bitter for me, boys."
"Oh, there's no harm can come of trying," insisted the cheerful giant, pushing back his chair as the others retreated out of the wind, "if hope doesn't fill the stomach it keeps the heart up, and that's something."
His great laugh rolled out, following Ordway along the street as he went in pursuit of the fugitive opportunity which disported itself now in the cotton factory at the foot of the hill. When he reached the doors the work of the day was already over, and a crowd of operatives surged through the entrance and overflowed into the two roads which led by opposite ways into the town. Drawing to one side of the swinging doors, he stood watching the throng a moment before he could summon courage to enter the building and inquire for the office of the manager. When he did so at last it was with an almost boyish feeling of hesitation.
The manager—a small, wiry man with a wart on the end of his long nose—was hurriedly piling papers into his desk before closing the factory and going home to supper. His hands moved impatiently, almost angrily, for he remembered that he had already worked overtime and that the muffins his wife had promised him for supper would be cold. At any other hour of the day he would have received Ordway with politeness—for he was at heart a well-disposed and even a charitable person—but it happened that his dinner had been unsatisfactory (his mutton had been served half raw by a new maid of all-work) and he had particularly set his hopes upon the delicious light muffins in which his wife excelled. So when he saw Ordway standing between him and his release, his face grew black and the movements of his hands passed to jerks of frantic irritation.
"What do you want? Say it quick—I've no time to talk," he began, as he pushed the last heap of papers inside, and let the lid of his desk fall with a bang.
"I'm looking for work," said Ordway, "and I was told at Baxter's warehouse——"
"Darn Baxter. What kind of work do you want?"
"I'll take anything—I can do bookkeeping or——"
"Well, I don't want a bookkeeper."
He locked his desk, and turning to take down his hat, was incensed further by discovering that it was not on the hook where he had placed it when he came in. Finding it at last on a heap of reports in the corner, he put it on his head and stared at Ordway, with his angry eyes.
"You must have come a long way—haven't you? Mostly on foot?"
"A good distance."
"Why did you select Tappahannock? Was there any reason?"
"I wanted to try the town, that was all."
"Well, I tell you what, my man," concluded the manager, while his rage boiled over in the added instants of his delay; "there have been a blamed sight too many of your kind trying Tappahannock of late—and the best thing you can do is to move on to a less particular place. When we want bookkeepers here we don't pick 'em up out of the road."
Ordway swallowed hard, and his hands clinched in a return of one of his boyish spasms of temper. His vision of the new life was for an instant defaced and clouded; then as he met the angry little eyes of the man before him, he felt that his rage went out of him as suddenly as it had come. Turning without a word, he passed through the entrance and out into the road, which led back, by groups of negro hovels, into the main street of the town.
His anger gave place to helplessness; and it seemed to him, when he reached presently the larger dwellings upon the hill, and walked slowly past the squares of light that shone through the unshuttered windows, that he was more absolutely alone than if he had stood miles away from any human habitation. The outward nearness had become in his thoughts the measure of the inner distance. He felt himself to be detached from humanity, yet he knew that in his heart there existed a stronger bond than he had ever admitted in the years of his prosperity. The generous impulses of his youth were still there, but had not sorrow winnowed them from all that was base or merely selfish? Was the lesson that he had learned in prison to be wholly lost? Did the knowledge he had found there count for nothing in his life—the bitterness of shame, the agony of remorse, the companionship with misery? He remembered a Sunday in the prison when he had listened to a sermon from a misshapen little preacher, whose face was drawn sideways by a burn which he had suffered during an epileptic seizure in his childhood. In spite of his grotesque features the man had drawn Ordway by some invisible power which he had felt even then to be the power of faith. Crippled, distorted, poorly clad, the little preacher, he felt, had found the great possession which he was still seeking—this man believed with a belief that was larger than the external things which he had lost. When he shut his eyes now he could still see the rows of convicts in the chapel, the pale, greenish light in which each face resembled the face of a corpse, the open Bible in its black leather binding, and beside it the grotesque figure of the little preacher who had come, like his Master, to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.
The sun had dropped like a ball below the gray horizon, and the raw March wind, when it struck him now, brought no longer the exhilaration of the afternoon. A man passed him, comfortable, well-fed, wheezing slightly, with his fat neck wrapped in a woollen muffler, and as he stopped before a whitewashed gate, which opened into the garden surrounding a large, freshly painted house, Ordway touched his arm and spoke to him in a voice that had fallen almost to a whisper.
At his words, which were ordinary enough, the man turned on him a face which had paled slightly from surprise or fear. In the twilight Ordway could see his jaw drop while he fumbled awkwardly with his gloved hands at the latch of the gate.
"I don't know what you mean—I don't know" he repeated in a wheezing voice, "I'm sorry, but I really don't know," he insisted again as if in a helpless effort to be understood. Once inside the garden, he closed the gate with a bang behind him, and went rapidly up the gravelled walk to the long piazza where the light of a lamp under a red shade streamed through the open door.
Turning away Ordway followed the street to the end of the town, where it passed without distinct change of character into the country road. On this side the colour of the soil had paled until it looked almost blanched under the rising moon. Though the twilight was already in possession of the fields a thin red line was still visible low in the west, and beneath this the scattered lights in negro cabins shone like obscure, greenish glow-worms, hidden among clumps of sassafras or in stretches of dried broomsedge. As Ordway looked at these humble dwellings, it seemed to him that they might afford a hospitality denied him by the more imposing houses of the town. He had already eaten of the Negro's charity, and it was possible that before dawn he might be compelled to eat of it again.
Beneath his feet the long road called to him as it wound a curving white line drawn through the vague darkness of the landscape. Somewhere in a distant pasture a bull bellowed, and the sound came to him like the plaintive voice of the abandoned fields. While he listened the response of his tired feet to the road appeared to him as madness, and stopping short, he turned quickly and looked back in the direction of Tappahannock. But from the spot on which he stood the lights of the town offered little promise of hospitality, so after an uncertain glance, he moved on again to a bare, open place where two roads met and crossed at the foot of a blasted pine. A few steps farther he discovered that a ruined gate stood immediately on his right, and beyond the crumbling brick pillars, he made out dimly the outlines of several fallen bodies, which proved upon nearer view to be the prostrate forms of giant cedars. An avenue had once led, he gathered, from the gate to a house situated somewhere at the end of the long curve, for the great trees lying across the road must have stood once as the guardians of an estate of no little value. Whether the cedars had succumbed at last to age or to the axe of the destroyer, it was too dark at the moment for him to ascertain; but the earth had claimed them now, magnificent even in their ruin, while under the dim tent of sky beyond, he could still discern their living companions of a hundred years. So impressive was the past splendour of this approach that the house seemed, when he reached it, almost an affront to the mansion which his imagination had reared. Broad, low, built of brick, with two long irregular wings embedded in English ivy, and a rotting shingled roof that sloped over dormered windows, its most striking characteristic as he first perceived it under the moonlight was the sentiment which is inevitably associated with age and decay. Never imposing, the dwelling was now barely habitable, for the roof was sagging in places over the long wings, a chimney had fallen upon one of the moss-covered eaves, the stone steps of the porch were hollowed into dangerous channels, and the ground before the door was strewn with scattered chips from a neighbouring wood pile.
The air of desolation was so complete that at first Ordway supposed the place to be uninhabited, but discovering a light presently in one of the upper windows, he ascended the steps and beat with the rusted knocker on the panel of the door. For several minutes there was no answer to his knock. Then the sound of shuffling footsteps reached him from the distance, drawing gradually nearer until they stopped immediately beyond the threshold.
"I ain' gwine open dis yer do' ef'n hits oner dem ole hants," said a voice within, while a sharp point of light pierced through the keyhole.
An instant later, in response to Ordway's assurance of his bodily reality, the bolt creaked back with an effort and the door opened far enough to admit the slovenly head and shoulders of an aged negress.
"Miss Meely she's laid up en she cyar'n see ner comp'ny, Marster," she announced with the evident intention of retreating as soon as her message was delivered.
Her purpose, however, was defeated, for, slipping his heavy boot into the crack of the door, Ordway faced her under the lamp which she held high above her head. In the shadows beyond he could see dimly the bare old hall and the great winding staircase which led to the painted railing of the gallery above.
"Can you give me shelter for the night?" he asked, "I am a stranger in the county, and I've walked thirty miles to-day."
"Miss Meely don' wan'ner comp'ny," replied the negress, while her head, in its faded cotton handkerchief, appeared to swing like a pendulum before his exhausted eyes.
"Who is Miss Meely?" he demanded, laying his hand upon her apron as she made a sudden terrified motion of flight.
"Miss Meely Brooke—Marse Edward's daughter. He's daid."
"Well, go and ask her. I'll wait here on the porch until you return."
Her eyelids flickered in the lamplight, and he saw the whites of her eyes leap suddenly into prominence. Then the door closed again, the bolt shot back into place, and the shuffling sound grew fainter as it passed over the bare floor. A cold nose touched Ordway's hand, and looking down he saw that an old fox-hound had crept into the porch and was fawning with pleasure at his feet. He was conscious of a thrill of gratitude for the first demonstrative welcome he had received at Tappahannock; and while he stood there with the hound leaping upon his chest, he felt that, in spite of "Miss Meely," hidden somewhere behind the closed door, the old house had not lost utterly the spirit of hospitality. His hand was still on the dog's head when the bolt creaked again and the negress reappeared upon the threshold.
"Miss Meely she sez she's moughty sorry, suh, but she cyarn' hev ner strange gent'mun spendin' de night in de house. She reckons you mought sleep in de barn ef'n you wanter."
As the door opened wider, her whole person, clad in a faded woollen dress, patched brightly in many colours, emerged timidly and followed him to the topmost step.
"You des go roun' ter de back en den thoo' de hole whar de gate used ter be, en dar's de barn. Nuttin' ain' gwine hu't you lessen hits dat ar ole ram 'Lejab."
"Well, he shall not find me unprepared," responded Ordway, with a kind of desperate gaiety, and while the old hound still leaped at his side, he found his way into a little path which led around the corner of the house, and through the tangled garden to the barn just beyond the fallen gateposts. Here the dog deserted him, running back to the porch, where a woman's voice called; and stumbling over a broken ploughshare or two, he finally reached the poor shelter which Miss Meely's hospitality afforded.
It was very dark inside, but after closing the door to shut out the wind, he groped his way through the blackness to a pile of straw in one corner. The place smelt of cattle, and opposite to the spot on which he lay, he distinguished presently a soft, regular sound which he concluded to be caused by the breathing of a cow. Evidently the barn was used as a cattleshed also, though his observation of the mansion did not lead him to suppose that "Miss Meely" possessed anything approaching a herd. He remembered the old negress's warning allusion to the ram, but so far at least the darkness had revealed nothing that could prove hostile to his company. His head ached and his will seemed suddenly benumbed, so stretching himself at full length in the straw he fell, after a few troubled moments, into the deep and dreamless sleep of complete physical exhaustion.
An instant afterwards, it seemed to him, he was aroused by a light which flashed into his face from the opening door. A cold wind blew over him, and as he struggled almost blindly back into consciousness, he saw that a girl in a red cape stood holding a lantern above her head in the centre of the barn. At his first look the red cape warmed him as if it had been flame; then he became aware that a voice was speaking to him in a peculiar tone of cheerful authority. And it seemed to him that the red cape and the rich voice expressed the same dominant quality of personality.
"I thought you must be hungry," said the voice with energy, "so I've brought your supper."
Even while he instinctively grasped the tray she held out, he observed with quickened attention that the hands which offered him the food had toiled out of doors in good and bad weather—though small and shapely they were chapped from cold and roughened by marks of labour.
"You'd better drink your coffee while it's hot," said the voice again.
The practical nature of her advice put him immediately at his ease.
"It's the first hot thing I've had for a week," he responded.
"Then it will be all the better for you," replied the girl, while she reached up to hang the lantern from a rusted nail in the wall.
As the light fell over her, the red cape slipped a little from her shoulder and she put up her hand to catch it together on her bosom. The movement, slight as it was, gave Ordway a chance to observe that she possessed a kind of vigorous grace, which showed in the roundness of her limbs and in the rebellious freedom of her thick brown hair. The airy little curls on her temples stood out, he noticed, as if she had been walking bareheaded in the wind. At his first look it did not occur to him that she was beautiful; what impressed him most was the quality of radiant energy which revealed itself in every line of her face and figure—now sparkling in her eyes, now dimpling in her cheek, now quickening her brisk steps across the floor, and now touching her eyes and mouth like an edge of light. It may have been merely the effect of the red cape on a cold night, but as she moved back and forth into the dark corners of the barn, she appeared to him to gather both warmth and animation out of the gloom.
As she did not speak again during her work, he found himself forced to observe the same friendly silence. The ravenous hunger of the afternoon had returned to him with the odour of the food, and he ate rapidly, sitting up on his straw bed, while she took up a bucket and a piece of wood sharpened at one end and prepared a bran mash for the cow quartered in a stall in one corner. When a little later she gathered up an armful of straw to replenish the animal's bed, Ordway pushed the tray aside and made a movement as if to assist her; but stopping an instant in her task, she waved him aside with the easy dignity of perfect capability.
"I can do it myself, thank you," she said, smiling; and then, glancing at his emptied plate, she added carelessly, "I'll send back presently for the tray and lantern—good-night!"
Her tone had changed perceptibly on the last word, for its businesslike authority had given place to the musical Southern drawl so familiar to his ears in childhood. In that simple phrase, accompanied by the gracious bend of her whole person, she had put unconsciously generations of social courtesy—of racial breeding.
"Thank you—good-night," he answered, rising, and drawing back with his hand on the heavy latch.
Then before she could reach the door and pass through, a second lantern flashed there out of the blackness beyond, and the terrified face of a Negro urchin was thrust into the full glare of light.
"Fo' de good Lawd, Miss Em'ly, dat ar ole ram done butt Sis Mehitable clean inter de smoke 'us."
Perfectly unruffled by the news the girl looked at Ordway, and then held out her small, strong hand for the lantern.
"Very well, I'll come and shut him up," she responded quietly, and holding the red cape together on her bosom, she stepped over the threshold and followed the Negro urchin out into the night.
CHAPTER IIIThe Return To Tappahannock
AT sunrise he came out of the barn, and washed his face and hands at the well, where he found a coarse towel on the moss-covered trough. The day was breaking clear, but in the fine golden light the house and lawn appeared even more desolate than they had done under the full moon. Before the war the place had been probably a comfortable, unpretentious country mansion. Some simple dignity still attached to its bowers of ivy and its ancient cedars, but it was easy to imagine that for thirty years no shingle had been added to its crumbling roof, and hardly a ship gathered from the littered walk before the door. At the end of the avenue six great trees had fallen a sacrifice, he saw now, to the mere lust for timber—for freshly cut and still odorous with sap, the huge trunks lay directly across the approach over which they had presided through the tragic history of the house. Judged by what it must have been in a fairly prosperous past, the scene was sad enough even to the eyes of a stranger; and as Ordway walked slowly down the dim, fragrant curve of the avenue, he found it difficult to place against so sombre a background, a figure as full of life and animation as that of the girl he had seen in the barn on the evening before. She appeared to his imagination as the embodiment of youth amid surroundings whose only remaining beauties were those of age.
Though he had resolved yesterday not to return to Tappahannock, he found himself presently retracing, almost without an effort of will, the road which he had travelled so heavily in the night. Something between sunrise and sunset had renewed his courage and altered his determination. Was it only the wasted strength which had returned to him in his sleep? Or was it—he hesitated at the thought—the flush of shame which had burned his face when the girl's lantern had flashed over him out of the darkness? In that pitiless illumination it was as if not only his roughened surface, but his secret sin was laid bare; and he had felt again all the hideous publicity that had touched him and put him as one apart in the court-room. Though he had outgrown the sin, he knew now that he must carry the scar of it until his death; and he knew, also, that the reality of his punishment had been in the spirit and not in the law.
For a while he walked rapidly in the direction of Tappahannock; then sitting down in the sunshine upon the roadside, he ate the piece of cornbread he had saved last night from his supper. It would be several hours at least before he might hope to find the warehouses open for the day, so he sat patiently eating his bread under the bared boughs of a young peach-tree, while he watched the surface of the long white road which appeared to hold for him as much despondency as freedom. A farmer driving a spotted cow to market spoke to him presently in a friendly voice; and rising to his feet, he overtook the man and fell into the jogging pace which was rendered necessary by the reluctance of the animal to proceed.
"I declar' the sense in them thar critters do beat all," remarked the farmer, after an ineffectual tug at the rope he held. "She won't be drove no more 'n a woman will—her head is what she wants no matter whar it leads her."
"Can you tell me," inquired Ordway, when they had started again upon the advance, "the name of the old house I passed a mile or so along the road?"
"Oh, you mean Cedar Hill, I reckon!—thar now, Betsey, that thar toad ain't a turnip!"
"Cedar Hill, is it? Well, they appear to be doing their level best to get rid of the cedars."
"Mr. Beverly did that—not Miss Em'ly. Miss Em'ly dotes on them trees jest the same as if they were made of flesh and blood."
"But the place belongs to Mr. Beverly, I presume?"
"If thar's a shingle of it that ain't mortgaged, I reckon it does—though for that matter Miss Em'ly is overseer and manager, besides teachin' every day in the public school of Tappahannock. Mr. Beverly's got a soft heart in his body—all the Brookes had that they say—but the Lord who made him knows that he ain't overblessed with brains. He used to speculate with most of the family money, but as luck would have it he always speculated wrong. Then he took to farmin', but he's got such a slow gentlemanly way about him that nothin' he puts in the ground ever has spirit enough to come up agin. His wife's just like him—she was Miss Amelia Meadows, his second cousin from the up-country, and when the children kept on comin' so thick and fast, as is the Lord's way with po' folks, people said thar warn't nothin' ahead of 'em but starvation. But Miss Em'ly she come back from teachin' somewhar down South an' undertook to run the whole place single-handed. Things are pickin' up a little now, they say—she's got a will of her own, has Miss Em'ly, but thar ain't anybody in these parts that wouldn't work for her till they dropped. She sent for me last Monday to help her mend her henhouse, and though I was puttin' a new roof over my wife's head, I dropped everything I had and went. That was the day Mr. Beverly cut down the cedars."
"So Miss Emily didn't know of it?"
"She was in school, suh—you see she teaches in Tappahannock from nine till three, so Mr. Beverly chose that time to sell the avenue to young Tom Myers. He's a sly man, is Mr. Beverly, for all his soft, slow ways, and if Young Tom had been on time he'd have had half the avenue belted before Miss Em'ly got back from school. But he got in some mess or other at the store, and he was jest hewin' like thunder at his sixth cedar, when up come Miss Em'ly on that old white horse she rides. Good Lord! I hope I'll never see anybody turn so white agin as she did when her eyes lighted on them fallen trees. 'Beverly,' she called out in a loud, high voice, 'have you dared to sell the cedars?' Mr. Beverly looked a little sick as if his stomach had gone aginst him of a sudden, but he stood right up on the trunk of a tree, and mumbled something about presarvin' useless timber when the children had no shoes an' stockings to thar feet. Then Miss Em'ly gave him a look that scorched like fire, and she rode straight up to Myers on her old horse and said as quiet as death: 'Put up your axe, Tom, I'll give you back your money. How much have you paid him down?' When Young Tom looked kind of sheepish and said: 'a hundred dollars,' I saw her eyelids flicker, but she didn't hesitate an instant. 'You shall have it within an hour on my word of honour,' she answered, 'can you wait?' 'I reckon I can wait all day, Miss,' said Young Tom—and then she jumped down from her horse, and givin' me the bridle, caught up her skirt and ran indoors. In a minute she came flying out agin and before we had time to catch our breath she was ridin' for dear life back to town. 'You'd better go on with yo' work,' said Mr. Beverly in his soft way, but Young Tom picked up his axe, and sat down on the big stump behind him. 'I reckon I can take her word better 'n yours, Mr. Beverly,' he answered, 'an' 'I reckon you can, too, Young Tom,' said I——."
"But how did she raise the money?" inquired Ordway.
"That's what nobody knows, suh, except her and one other. Some say she sold a piece of her mother's old jewelry—a locket or something she had put by—and some believe still that she borrowed it from Robert Baxter or Jasper Trend. Whichever way it was, she came ridin' up within the hour on her old white horse with the notes twisted tight in her handkerchief. She was mighty quiet, then, but when it was over, great Lord, what a temper she was in. I declar' she would have struck Mr. Beverly with the sour gum twig she used for a whip if I hadn't slipped in between 'em an' caught her arm. Then she lashed him with her tongue till he seemed to wither and shrink all over."
"And served him right, God bless her!" said Ordway.
"That's so, suh, but Mr. Beverly ain't a bad man—he's jest soft."
"Yet your Miss Emily still sticks to him, it seems?"
"If she didn't the farm wouldn't hold together a week. What she makes from teachin' is about all they have to live on in my opinion. Last summer, too, she started raisin' garden things an' poultry, an' she'd have got quite a thrivin' business if she had had any kind of help. Then in July she tried her hand at puttin' up preserves and jellies to send to them big stores in the North."
Ordway remembered the cheerful authority in her voice, the little cold red hands that had offered him his supper; and his heart contracted as it did at the memory of his daughter Alice. Yet it was not pity alone that moved him, for mingled with the appeal to his sympathy there was something which awoke in him the bitter agony of remorse. So the girl in the red cape could endure poverty such as this with honour! At the thought his past sin and his present disgrace appeared to him not only as crime but as cowardliness. He recalled the angry manager of the cotton mills, but there was no longer resentment in his mind either against the individual or against society. Instead it seemed to him that all smaller emotions dissolved in a tenderness which placed this girl and Alice apart with the other good and inspiring memories of his life. As he walked on in silence a little incident of ten years before returned to his thoughts, and he remembered the day he had found his child weeping beside a crippled beggar on his front steps.
When, a little later, they reached Tappahannock, the farmer turned with his reluctant cow into one of the smaller paths which led across the common on the edge of the town. As it was still too early to apply for work, Ordway sat down on a flat stone before an iron gate and watched the windows along the street for any signs of movement or life within. At length several frowsy Negro maids leaned out while the wooden shutters swung slowly back against the walls; then a milk wagon driven by a small boy clattered noisily round the corner, and in response to the shrill whistle of the driver, the doors opened hurriedly and the Negro maids rushed, with outstretched pitchers, down the gravelled walks to the iron gates. Presently an appetising odour of bacon reached Ordway's nostrils; and in the house across the street a woman with her hair done up on pins, came to the window and began grinding coffee in a wooden mill. Not until eight o'clock did the town open its gates and settle itself to the day's work.
When the doors of the warehouses were fastened back, Ordway turned into the main street again, and walked slowly downhill until he came to the faded brick archway where the group of men had sat smoking the evening before. Now there was an air of movement in the long building which had appeared as mere dim vacancy at the hour of sunset. Men were passing in and out of the brick entrance, from which a thin coat of whitewash was peeling in splotches; covered wagons half filled with tobacco were standing, unhitched, along the walls; huge bags of fresh fertilisers were thrown carelessly in corners; and in the centre of the great floor, an old Negro, with a birch broom tied together with coloured string, was sweeping into piles the dried stems left after yesterday's sales. As he swept, a little cloud of pungent dust rose before the strokes of his broom and floated through the brick archway out into the street.
This morning there was even less attention paid to Ordway's presence than there had been at the closing hour. Planters hurried back and forth preparing lots for the opening sale; a wagon drove into the building, and the driver got down over the muddy wheel and lifted out several willow crates through which Ordway could catch a glimpse of the yellow sun-cured leaf. The old Negro swept briskly, piling the trash into heaps which would finally be ground into snuff or used as a cheap grade of fertiliser. Lean hounds wandered to and fro, following the covered wagons and sniffing suspiciously at the loose plants arranged in separate lots in the centre of the floor.
"Is Baxter here this morning?" Ordway asked presently of a countryman who lounged on a pile of bags near the archway.
"I reckon you'll find him in his office," replied the man, as he spat lazily out into the street; "that thar's his door," he added, pointing to a little room on the right of the entrance—"I seed him go in an' I ain't seed him come out."
Nodding his thanks for the information, Ordway crossed the building and rapped lightly on the door. In response to a loud "come in," he turned the knob and stood next instant face to face with the genial giant of the evening before.
"Good-morning, Mr. Baxter, I've come back again," he said.
"Good-morning!" responded Baxter, "I see you have."
In the full daylight Baxter appeared to have increased in effect if not in quantity, and as Ordway looked at him now, he felt himself to be in the presence less of a male creature than of an embodied benevolent impulse. His very flabbiness of feature added in a measure to the expansive generosity of mouth and chin; and slovenly, unwashed, half-shaven as he was, Baxter's spirit dominated not only his fellow men, but the repelling effect of his own unkempt exterior. To meet his glance was to become suddenly intimate; to hear him speak was to feel that he had shaken you by the hand.
"I hoped you might have come to see things differently this morning," said Ordway.
