Not Under the Law

by Grace Livingston Hill

There was more to it. There was a kind of recoiling in horror from himself as he suddenly saw that in what he had been doing he had been untrue to himself and to his code. He had respected himself for the way he had kept to his self-made laws, and now his self-respect was broken. He could not go on and any more take satisfaction in what he had been doing.

He stood there in the darkness with bowed head and went over it all again, as he had gone over it a thousand times since that night when he had seen her go from him into the dark, and the thought of her had driven him forth on this quest. Then, still, with bowed head he went on down the road.

A strange thing happened to him. He seemed to think as she must have been thinking, to know at each turn of the road what she would have done, which way she would have turned.

He knew that she had slept in the hammock, for he had sent his colleagues away, and taking another way about to overtake her, had seen her enter the gate, and watched her through the night until she stole away in the gray of the morning. So far he knew her way and could follow the trail.

But when he reached the streets of the little town beyond and must choose between houses and turning corners it was not so plain. Yet he had resolved to leave no clue unfollowed, no spot where she might have turned unsearched.

He had a plan to make his search complete. He would make a map of each day’s wanderings, note each house and corner and way of egress, choose the most likely and search it to the end, then come back and choose the next. It seemed, perhaps, the work of a lifetime, yet he did not feel that he would be long in finding her. There was something in his soul that told him he would find her. He had to find her and tell her what he had been doing, and that he never would do it again. He had to absolve his soul from that before her eyes. He could not lift up his head and respect himself again unless he did. She had stood like a young saint within the shrine of his heart, and now he felt cast away from the presence of all that he held really holy in the world.

So he went step by step over the way that Joyce had gone, his clever judgment quickly deciding which corner she would have chosen, where she would have paused, and how gone on again. And Joyce would have been surprised to know how far he traced her very steps.

It was not until he reached the city that his way became bewildering. He had dropped into a number of homes on his way where people lived who often visited in Meadow Brook, and casually, as if he had had an accident on the road and needed to borrow water or a tool for his car, which he had left out of sight down the road, he would put one or two keen questions that would make him sure she had not passed that way while these people were about. And so his little note book became filled with tiny tracings of maps, with streets and corners noted, and each turning that he had not followed marked for returning some day in case his quest was not successful.

He thought much as he took his way on foot through the world, and began to feel himself a pilgrim on a holy quest, not a knight, for his self-confidence had been too badly shaken for that. He had not so much the feeling that she needed him and he could help her to her inheritance if he found her, as he had the need of her in his soul. It seemed sometimes that he could not live until he had unburdened his soul by confession to her and had told her he would sin that way no more. He wanted her restored confidence, her clear-eyed smile, the feeling that she was his friend, though ever so far away, that there was something sweet and true between them. He had never thought of her as his in any way except as a guiding star, but now that he had lost that star, his life seemed all awry, as if he could not go on without her, as if all was darkness and horror, that she should think of him as one so unworthy.

As he thought out his pilgrimage before him it occurred to him that the churches should be his goal. He knew that she always went to service, to prayer meetings, and Sunday School, and morning and evening church gatherings. There was his key to the situation. If she were still in the land of the living, if nothing evil had befallen her, she would be at some place of worship at the time appointed. And so, when a bell from some steeple rang a call to worship, he would pause, and wait, and watch the worshippers till all were in, or if he passed an open church door he would enter, sit down and gaze about until he had searched every face, and was sure she was not there. Then he would quietly get up and leave. Seldom did he hear the service that went on about him, seldom pretended to listen. He was there but for one purpose, and he had no time to waste. Words indeed passed through his consciousness as they were spoken, in story or song, but they left no impression there. He was not a scoffer at religious things. They had simply never touched him. He stood on the outside of them. Except for that one afternoon in his life when he had sat in the dim aisles of the grove and listened to Mary Massey reading the story of the blind man, he had never really taken heed to the Bible. Oh, he had heard it read in school, of course, and now and then in a service that some strange fancy carried him to as a boy, never in Sunday School, for he had not been sent there, and it was not a place he would have chosen to go because it meant confinement in the house when one might be out-of-doors. He had always been a law unto himself and he was rather proud of the fact. Now a great depression was upon him because he felt he had not kept his own law. It was Joyce’s clear eyes, her keen question, that made him see that in breaking the law of his land, he had broken also the law of that inner, finer self. It was in his thoughts of her that he came to see that there was always something behind a law, it was never just a law.