The Ancient Law

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"I'll take anything—I can do bookkeeping or——"

"Well, I don't want a bookkeeper."

He locked his desk, and turning to take down his hat, was incensed further by discovering that it was not on the hook where he had placed it when he came in. Finding it at last on a heap of reports in the corner, he put it on his head and stared at Ordway, with his angry eyes.

"You must have come a long way—haven't you? Mostly on foot?"

"A good distance."

"Why did you select Tappahannock? Was there any reason?"

"I wanted to try the town, that was all."

"Well, I tell you what, my man," concluded the manager, while his rage boiled over in the added instants of his delay; "there have been a blamed sight too many of your kind trying Tappahannock of late—and the best thing you can do is to move on to a less particular place. When we want bookkeepers here we don't pick 'em up out of the road."

Ordway swallowed hard, and his hands clinched in a return of one of his boyish spasms of temper. His vision of the new life was for an instant defaced and clouded; then as he met the angry little eyes of the man before him, he felt that his rage went out of him as suddenly as it had come. Turning without a word, he passed through the entrance and out into the road, which led back, by groups of negro hovels, into the main street of the town.

His anger gave place to helplessness; and it seemed to him, when he reached presently the larger dwellings upon the hill, and walked slowly past the squares of light that shone through the unshuttered windows, that he was more absolutely alone than if he had stood miles away from any human habitation. The outward nearness had become in his thoughts the measure of the inner distance. He felt himself to be detached from humanity, yet he knew that in his heart there existed a stronger bond than he had ever admitted in the years of his prosperity. The generous impulses of his youth were still there, but had not sorrow winnowed them from all that was base or merely selfish? Was the lesson that he had learned in prison to be wholly lost? Did the knowledge he had found there count for nothing in his life—the bitterness of shame, the agony of remorse, the companionship with misery? He remembered a Sunday in the prison when he had listened to a sermon from a misshapen little preacher, whose face was drawn sideways by a burn which he had suffered during an epileptic seizure in his childhood. In spite of his grotesque features the man had drawn Ordway by some invisible power which he had felt even then to be the power of faith. Crippled, distorted, poorly clad, the little preacher, he felt, had found the great possession which he was still seeking—this man believed with a belief that was larger than the external things which he had lost. When he shut his eyes now he could still see the rows of convicts in the chapel, the pale, greenish light in which each face resembled the face of a corpse, the open Bible in its black leather binding, and beside it the grotesque figure of the little preacher who had come, like his Master, to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.