The Ancient Law

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Contented? Yes, I believe he is even happy. I never say much to him because, you see, there is so very little for us to talk about. It is a dreadful thing to confess," she concluded resolutely, "but the truth is I've been always a little afraid of him since—since——"

"Afraid?" he looked at her in astonishment.

"Well, not exactly afraid—but nervous with a kind of panic shudder at times—a dread of his coming close to me, of his touching me, of his wanting things of me." A shiver ran through her and she bit her lip as if to hide the expression of horror upon her face. "There's nobody else on earth that I would say it to, but when he first came back I used to have nightmares about it. I could never get it out of my mind a minute and if they left me alone with him, I wanted almost to scream with nervousness. It's silly I know, and I can't explain it even to you, but there were times when I shrieked aloud in my sleep because I dreamed that he had come into my room and touched me. I felt that I was wrong and foolish, but I couldn't help it, and I tried—tried—oh, so hard to bear things and to be brave and patient."

The tears fell from her eyes on her clasped hands, but her attitude of sorrow only made more appealing the Madonna-like loveliness of her features.

"You've been a saint, Lydia," he answered, patting her drooping shoulder as he rose to his feet. "Poor girl, poor girl! and no daughter of my own could be dearer to me," he added in his austere sincerity of manner.

"I have tried to do right," replied Lydia, lifting her pure eyes to his in an overflow of religious emotion.

Meanwhile the harmless object of their anxiety sat alone in his room under a green lamp, with one of the musty books he had bought open upon his knees. He was not reading, for his gaze was fixed on the opposite wall, and there was in his eyes something of the abstracted vision which Lydia dreaded. It was as if his intellect, forced from the outward experience back into the inner world of thought, had ended by projecting an image of itself into the space at which he looked. While he sat there the patient, apologetic smile with which he had answered to his wife was still on his lips.

"I suppose it's because I'm getting old that people and things no longer make me suffer," he said to himself, "it's because I'm getting old that I can look at Lydia unmoved, that I can feel tenderness for her even while I see the repulsion creep into her eyes. It isn't her fault, after all, that she loathes me, nor is it mine. Yes, I'm certainly an old fellow, the boy was right. At any rate, it's pleasanter, on the whole, than being young."

Closing the book, he laid it on the table, and leaned forward with his chin on his hands. "But if I'd only known when I was young!" he added, "if I'd only known!" His past life rose before him as a picture that he had seen, rather than as a road along which he had travelled; and he found himself regarding it almost as impersonally as he might have regarded the drawing upon the canvas. The peril of the inner life had already begun to beset him—that mysterious power of reliving one's experience with an intensity which makes the objective world appear dull and colourless by contrast. It was with an effort at times that he was able to detach his mind from the contemplative habit into which he had fallen. Between him and his surroundings there existed but a single bond, and this was the sympathy which went out of him when he was permitted to reach the poor and the afflicted. To them he could still speak, with them he could still be mirthful; but from his wife, his uncle, and the members of his own class, he was divided by that impenetrable wall of social tradition. In his home he had ceased to laugh, as Lydia had said; but he could still laugh in the humbler houses of the poor. They had received him as one of themselves, and for this reason alone he could remember how to be merry when he was with them. To the others, to his own people, he felt himself to be always an outsider, a reclaimed castaway, a philanthropic case instead of an individual; and he knew that if there was one proof the more to Lydia that he was in the end a redeemed character, it was the single fact that he no longer laughed in her presence. It was, he could almost hear her say, unbecoming, if not positively improper, that a person who had spent five years in prison should be able to laugh immoderately afterward; and the gravity of his lips was in her eyes, he understood, the most satisfactory testimony to the regeneration of his heart.

And yet Lydia, according to her vision, was a kind, as well as a conscientious woman. The pity of it was that if he were to die now, three years after his homecoming, she would probably reconstruct an imaginary figure of him in her memory, and wear crape for it with appropriate grace and dignity. The works of the imagination are manifold, he thought with a grim humour, even in a dull woman.