The Ancient Law

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

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 passed 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 damnation?

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 passing 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 passed 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 assistance 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.