The Ancient Law

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Why, my dear, blessed child, it's such a pleasure to have you back!" she exclaimed now with an effusion which he felt to be the outward veil of some hidden embarrassment. "You must come sometimes and let me talk to you about your mother. I knew your mother so well—I was one of her bridesmaids."

Seizing his arm in her little firm, clawlike hands, she assured him with animation of her delight at his return, alluding in a shaking voice to his mother, and urging him to come to sit with her whenever he could stand the gloom of her empty house.

"And you will give me raspberry preserves out of the blue china jar?" he asked, laughing, "and let me feed crackers to the green parrot?"

"What a boy! What a boy!" she returned. "You remember everything. The parrot is dead—my poor Polly!—but there is a second."

Her effusiveness, her volubility, which seemed to him to be the result of concealed embarrassment, produced in him presently a feeling of distrust, almost of resentment, and he remembered the next instant that, in his childhood, she had been looked upon as a creature of uncontrolled charitable impulses. Upon the occasion of his last meeting with her was she not hastening upon some ministering errand to the city gaol? At the casual recollection an unreasoning bitterness awoke in his mind; her reiterated raptures fell with a strange effect of irritation upon his ears; and he knew now that he could never bring himself to enter her house again, that he could never accept her preserved raspberries out of the blue china jar. Her reception of him, he saw, was but a part of the general reception of Botetourt. Like her the town would be voluble, unnatural, overdone in its kindness, hiding within itself a furtive constraint as if it addressed its speeches to the sensitive sufferer from some incurable malady. The very tenderness, the exaggerated sympathy in its manner would hardly have been different, he understood, if he had been recently discharged as harmless, yet half-distraught, from an asylum for the insane.

As the days went on this idea, instead of dissolving, became unalterably lodged in his brain. Gradually he retreated further and further into himself, until the spiritual isolation in which he lived appeared to him more and more like the isolation of the prison. His figure had become a familiar one in the streets of Botetourt, yet he lived bodily among the people without entering into their lives or sharing in any degree the emotions that moved their hearts. Only in periods of sorrow did he go willingly into the houses of those of his own class, though he had found a way from the beginning to reach the poor, the distressed, or the physically afflicted. His tall, slightly stooping figure, in its loose black clothes, his dark head, with the thick locks of iron gray hair upon the temples, his sparkling blue eyes, his bright, almost boyish smile, and the peculiar, unforgettable charm of his presence—these were the things which those in sickness or poverty began to recognise and to look for. In his own home he lived, except for the fitful tenderness of Alice, as much apart as he felt himself to be in the little town. They were considerate of him, but their consideration, he knew, contained an ineradicable suspicion, and in the house as outside, he was surrounded by the watchful regard that is given to the infirm or the mentally diseased. He read this in Lydia's gently averted eyes; he felt it in Richard Ordway's constrained manner; he detected it even in the silent haste with which the servants fulfilled his slightest wish.

His work in his uncle's office, he had soon found to be of the most mechanical character, a mere pretext to give him daily employment, and he told himself, in a moment of bitterness that it was convincing proof of the opinion which the older man must hold of his honesty or of his mental capacity. It became presently little more than a hopeless round to him—this morning walk through the sunny streets, past the ivied walls of the old church, to the clean, varnish scented office, where he sat, until the luncheon hour, under the hard, though not unkind, eyes of the man who reminded him at every instant of his dead father. And the bitterest part of it, after all, was that the closer he came to the character of Richard Ordway, the profounder grew his respect for his uncle's unwavering professional honour. The old man would have starved, he knew, rather than have held back a penny that was not legally his own or have owed a debt that he felt had begun to weigh, however lightly, upon his conscience. Yet this lawyer of scrupulous rectitude was the husband, his nephew suspected, of a neglected, a wretchedly unhappy wife—a small, nervous creature, whom he had married, shortly after the death of his first wife, some twenty years ago. The secret of this unhappiness Daniel had discovered almost by intuition on the day of his father's funeral, when he had looked up suddenly in the cemetery to find his uncle's wife regarding him with a pair of wonderful, pathetic eyes, which seemed to gaze at him sadly out of a blue mist. So full of sympathy and understanding was her look that the memory of it had returned to him more than a year later, and had caused him to stop at her gate one November afternoon as he was returning from his office work. After an instant's pause, and an uncertain glance at the big brick house with its clean white columns, he ascended the steps and rang the bell for the first time since his boyhood.

The house was one of the most charming in Botetourt, but as he followed the servant down the hall to the library, it seemed to him that all these high, imposing walls, with their fine white woodwork, enclosed but so much empty space to fill with loneliness. His uncle had no children, and the sad, fair-haired little wife appeared to be always alone and always suffering.

She was seated now in a low rocking-chair beside the window, and as she turned her head at his entrance, he could see, through the lace curtains, a few pale November leaves, which fluttered down from an elm tree beside the porch. When she looked at him he noticed that her eyes were large and beautiful and of a changeable misty colour which appeared now gray, now violet.

"It is so good of you, Daniel," she said, in a soft, grateful voice, removing her work-basket from the chair at her side so that he might come within the reach of her short-sighted gaze.