The Ancient Law

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

A farmer, carrying a lantern, came down the path leading from the fields, and hearing Ordway's footsteps in the road, flashed the light suddenly into his face. Upon recognition there followed a cheerful "good-night!" and the offer of the use of the lantern to Cedar Hill. "It's a black night and you'll likely have trouble in keeping straight. I've been to look after a sick cow, but I can feel my way up to the house in two minutes."

"Thank you," returned Ordway, smiling as the light shone full in his face, "but my feet are accustomed to the road."

He passed on, while the farmer turned at the gate by the roadside, to shout cheerfully after him: "Well, good-night—Mayor!"

The gate closed quickly, and the ray of the lantern darted like a pale yellow moth across the grass.

As Ordway went on it seemed to him that the darkness became tangible, enveloping—that he had to fight his way through it presently as through water. The little red flames danced along the horizon until he wondered if they were burning only in his imagination. He felt tired and dazed as if his body had been beaten into insensibility, but the hour through which he had just passed appeared to have left merely a fading impression upon his brain. Not only had he ceased to care, he had ceased to think of it. When he tried now to recall the manager of the cotton mills, it was to remember, with aversion, his angry little eyes, his high nasal voice, and the wart upon the end of his long nose. At the instant these physical details were the only associations which the man's name presented to his thoughts. The rest was something so insignificant that it had escaped his memory. He felt in a vague way that he was sorry for Baxter, yet this very feeling of sympathy bored and annoyed him. It was plainly ridiculous to be sorry for a person as rich, as fat, as well fed as his employer. Wherever he looked the little red flames flickered and waved in the fields, and when he lifted his eyes to the dark sky, he saw them come and go in short, scintillant flashes, like fire struck from an anvil. They were in his brain, he supposed, after all, and so was this tangible darkness, and so, too, was this indescribable delicacy and lightness with which he moved. Everything was in his brain, even his ridiculous pity for Baxter and the angry-eyed little manager with the wart on his long nose. He could see these things distinctly, though he had forgotten everything that had been so clear to him while he stood on the stage of the town hall. His past life and the prison and even the illumination in which he had remembered them so vividly were obscured now as if they, too, had been received into the tangible darkness.

From the road behind him the sound of footsteps reached him suddenly, and he quickened his pace with an impulse, rather than a determination of flight. But the faster he walked the faster came the even beat of the footsteps, now rising, now falling with a rhythmic regularity in the dust of the road. Once he glanced back, but he could see nothing because of the encompassing blackness, and in the instant of his delay it seemed to him that the pursuit gained steadily upon him, still moving with the regular muffled beat of the footsteps in the thick dust. A horror of recognition had come over him, and as he walked on breathlessly, now almost running, it occurred to him, like an inspiration, that he might drop aside into the fields and so let his pursuer pass on ahead. The next instant he realised that the darkness could not conceal the abrupt pause of his flight—that as those approaching footsteps fell on his ears, so must the sound of his fall on the ears of the man behind him. Then a voice called his name, and he stopped short, and stood, trembling from head to foot, by the side of the road.

"Smith!" cried the voice, "if it's you, Smith, for God's sake stop a minute!"

"Yes, it's I," he answered, waiting, and a moment afterward the hand of Banks reached out of the night and clasped his arm.

"Hold on," said Banks, breathing hard, "I'm all blown."

His laboured breath came with a struggling violence that died gradually away, but while it lasted the strain of the meeting, the awkwardness of the emotional crisis, seemed suddenly put off—suspended. Now in the silence the tension became so great that, drawing slightly away from the detaining hold, Ordway was about to resume his walk. At his first movement, however, Banks clung the more firmly to his arm. "Oh, damn it, Smith!" he burst out, and with the exclamation Ordway felt that the touch of flesh and blood had reached to the terrible loneliness in which he stood. In a single oath Banks had uttered the unutterable spirit of prayer.