The Ancient Law

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Whatever his class he is a gentleman," she began again, "and he would be quite—even very—good-looking if his face were not so drawn and thin. What strange eyes he has—they are as blue as Blair's and as young. No, he isn't exactly good-looking—not in Beverly's way, at least—but I should know his face again if I didn't see it for twenty years. It's odd that there are people one hardly knows whom one never forgets."

Her bare hands were on Major's neck, and as she looked at them a displeased frown gathered her brows. She wondered why she had never noticed before that they were ugly and unwomanly, and it occurred to her that Aunt Mehitable had once told her that "ole Miss" washed her hands in buttermilk to keep them soft and white. "They're almost as rough as Mr. Smith's," she thought, "perhaps he noticed them." The idea worried her for a minute, for she hated, she told herself, that people should not think her "nice"—but the golden light was still flooding her thoughts and these trivial disturbances scattered almost before they had managed to take shape. Nothing worried her long to-day, and as she dismounted at the steps, and ran hurriedly into the dining-room, she remembered Beverly and Amelia with an affection which she had not felt for years. It was as if the mere external friction of personalities had dissolved before the fundamental relation of soul to soul; even poor half-demented Aunt Mehitable wore in her eyes, at the minute, an immortal aspect.

A little later when she rode in to the public school at Tappahannock, she discovered that the golden light irradiated even the questions in geography and arithmetic upon the blackboard; and coming out again, she found that it lay like sunshine on the newly turned vegetable rows in the garden. That afternoon for the first time she planted in a discarded pair of buck-skin gloves, and as soon as her work was over, she went upstairs to her bedroom, and regarded herself wistfully by the light from a branched candlestick which she held against the old greenish mirror. Her forehead was too high, she admitted regretfully, her mouth was too wide, her skin certainly was too brown. The blue cotton dress she wore appeared to her suddenly common and old-fashioned, and she began looking eagerly through her limited wardrobe in the hopeless quest for a gown that was softened by so much as a fall of lace about the throat. Then remembering the few precious trinkets saved from the bartered heirlooms of her dead mother, she got out the old black leather jewel case and went patiently over the family possessions. Among the mourning brooches and hair bracelets that the box contained there was a necklace of rare pink coral, which she had meant to give Bella upon her birthday—but as her gaze was arrested now by the cheerful colour, she sat for a moment wondering if she might not honestly keep the beads for her own. Still undecided she went to the bureau again and fastened the string of coral around her firm brown throat.

"I may wear it for a week or two at least," she thought. "Why not?" It seemed to her foolish, almost unfeminine that she had never cared or thought about her clothes until to-day. "I've gone just like a boy—I ought to be ashamed to show my hands," she said; and at the same instant she was conscious of the vivid interest, of the excitement even, which attached to this new discovery of the importance of one's appearance. Before going downstairs she brushed the tangles out of her thick brown hair, and spent a half hour arranging it in a becoming fashion upon her neck.

The next day Micah was well enough to carry the milk to Mrs. Berry's, but three mornings afterward, when she came from the dairy with the can, the old negro was not waiting for her on the porch, and she found, upon going to his cabin, that the attack of rheumatism had returned with violence. There was nothing for her to do but carry the milk herself, so after leading Major from his stall, she mounted and rode, almost with a feeling of shyness, in the direction of Bullfinch's Hollow.

The door was closed this morning, and in answer to her knock, Mrs. Berry appeared, rubbing her eyes, beyond the threshold.

"I declare, Miss Emily, you don't look like yourself at all," she exclaimed at the girl's entrance, "it must be them coral beads you've got on, I reckon. They always was becomin' things—I had a string once myself that I used to wear when my po' dead husband was courtin' me. Lord! Lord!" she added, bursting into sobs, "who'd have thought when I wore those beads that I'd ever have come to this? My po' ma gave 'em to me herself—they were her weddin' present from her first husband, and when she made up her mind to marry again, she kind of thought it warn't modest to go aroun' wearin' what she'd got from her first marriage. She was always powerful sensitive to decency, was po' ma. I've seen her scent vulgarity in the most harmless soundin' speech you ever heard—such as when my husband asked her one day if she was afflicted with the budges in her knee, and she told me afterward that he had made a sneakin' allusion to her leg. Ten years from that time, when all my trouble came upon me, she held that over me as a kind of warnin'. 'If you'd listened to me, Sarindy,' she used to say, 'you'd never have got into this scrape of marryin' a man who talked free befo' women. For a man who is indecent in his language can't be decent in his life,' she said."

As she talked she was pouring the milk into the cracked pitcher, and Emily breaking in at the first pause, sought to hasten the washing of the can, by bringing the old woman's rambling attention back to Kit.

"Has he had a quiet night?" she asked.

"Well, yes, miss, in a way, but then he always was what you might call a quiet sleeper from the very hour that he was born. I remember old Aunt Jemima, his monthly nurse, tellin' me that she had never in all her experience brought a more reliable sleeper into the world. He never used to stir, except to whimper now and then for his sugar rag when it slipped out of his mouth."