Part 23

Nothing could have been more like her, more entirely characteristic of her whole life, than that this question, which would have been the first with many, should have been the last with her. Yet now that it had occurred to her, she held her breath with fear. If it should be more than the amount of the whole pension,--more than she had or ever hoped to have in the wide world,--what should she do then?

"It was drawn for a hundred dollars. I have not yet calculated the interest," the judge answered reluctantly.

Miss Judy gasped and turned white; the earth seemed suddenly sliding beneath her feet. Then in another instant a scarlet tide swept the paleness from her alarmed face. The blood in her gentle veins was, after all, the blood of a soldier, and she fought on to the last trench.

"It must be paid, as soon as possible," she said formally, as if speaking to a stranger; but she laid her trembling little hand in John Stanley's warm, firm clasp with a look of perfect love and trust before she turned from him and went on her troubled way homeward.

He stood still for a moment when she had left him, gazing after the little figure in black fluttering against the warm wind. Then he turned slowly and went back to his seat on the bench, and the routine of the court forthwith began to drone throughout the long, hot day. A feeling of foreboding, a vague dread of some unknown calamity, had hung over him when he had first awakened on that morning; as though a formless warning had come through the mists of unremembered dreams. He was not able to cast off the depression which it caused, and the feeling deepened with the dragging of the heavy hours. But it wavered still without distinct form. It had nothing to do with his hourly, momentary expectation of seeing the Spaniard's threatening face and wild eyes confronting him through the gloom of the low-ceiled court-room. He was used to the sight and he never had feared it, save as he always feared himself and the enforced shedding of blood. The only unusual thing was that Alvarado should not be in his accustomed place that day, as he invariably had been heretofore, whenever the judge had been on the bench; but this fact gave the judge no uneasiness, he hardly thought of it at all, for his mind was filled with other things. He leaned his aching head on his hand as the business of the court droned dully along and the heat grew steadily greater. He thought, vaguely, that it must be the heat and the scent of the catalpa flowers which weighed so heavily upon him. For a few large, white bells swung uncommonly late amongst the heavy, dusty foliage of the catalpa trees, crowding close to the deep windows, darkening the court-room and shutting out every breath of the fitful, sultry breeze.

He left the court-house as soon as he could get away, and strolled slowly toward the farthest, highest hillside, whither he often went at the close of a tiring day. The warm wind had died out of the valley, but the air would, so he thought, be cooler on the hilltop; a cool breeze nearly always stirred the tall cedars of the graveyard, as if with the chill air of the tomb. He found the gate open, as it always was. There was never any need for closing it. Within were no gilded bones to be stolen: without were no inhuman robbers of graves. So that here those who rested within had nothing more to fear; and those who strove without could not be barred when they also came to stay.

Leaning on the fence, he turned and looked down upon the drowsing village; at the men, white and black, who were going homeward with the unhasting pace of the country; at the black women with milk-pails, crossing the back lots whence the cows were calling; at the farmers, already far in the distance, riding away from court; at the great road wagons, with their mighty teams of four and six horses. These great wagons were the huge ships of this vast inland sea of wheat and corn and tobacco, and now but lately launched, heavy-laden, with the newly garnered grain.

And then, as his wandering, absent gaze fell near by, upon the path from the village leading up the hillside, he saw that Lynn and Doris were slowly climbing it after him toward the graveyard. He had met the young man at the tavern on the previous day, and he had known his father. He had always known Doris in the distant way in which he knew all the people of Oldfield, with the sole exception of Miss Judy. He therefore greeted them with the formal courtesy that he gave to every one; and he talked with them for a few moments, in his grave, impersonal way, but he was disappointed in his wish for solitude, and he lingered no longer than good breeding required. He did not stay to go over to an isolated corner of the graveyard as he had intended, to see if the tangle of weeds and briers, which makes the desolation of neglected burial-grounds, had been taken away from one solitary grave, as it always was when he came and never at any other time. He could not do this in the presence of any one, so that, lifting his hat with a faint smile, he now turned his face toward the village and the tavern.

At the foot of the hill he happened upon the little Frenchman, who sat groaning by the roadside, unable to walk because he had wrenched his ankle, spraining it very badly, in getting over the fence.

"But it is not that I do care for the pain. Bah!" cried monsieur, with a Gallic gesture and an inflection that belonged to no nation and was wholly his own. "It is--helas!--the ploughing for the spring wheat. A man may not hobble after the plough, neither may he follow with crutches."

"Oh, you needn't trouble about that. There's plenty of time, and you can't plough, anyway, until a rainfall has softened the ground," said the judge, kindly.

"The black man, devoid of intelligence, who tills the fields of monsieur the doctor, ploughs to-day in the dust. Should the grain of the fields of monsieur the doctor grow quicker and thrive better than the grain of the fields of madame the mistress, whose fields I myself do till, then I shall surely mortify."

"There's nothing to be done in the fields now," the judge said, trying not to smile. "Let me help you," bending over and offering his strong arm and broad shoulder. "You'll be all right again in good time for the spring wheat. A sprained ankle is no Waterloo!"

The Frenchman shrunk, dropping away from the outstretched arm as though it had struck him down. His face, open and transparent as a child's, had been confidingly upturned; now it fell, reddened and clouded with anger, indignation, and shame. Falling back, he tried at once to rise again, only to sink--groaning and helpless--more prone than before, while hissing through his clenched teeth something about _le sentiment du fer_.

"It is the fatal misfortune of my father that you do insult!" he said fiercely, in English, striving vainly to maintain an icy civility. "When it is that I may again stand on my feet, your Highness will perhaps--"

"Come, come, Beauchamp. You are suffering. Here, let me help you."

"_Jamais! Jamais!_--not to ze death!" cried monsieur, shrieking with mingled rage and pain.

The judge, from his calm height, looked silently down on the pathetic little form stretched at his feet, at the gray head resting now on the hard earth, and, seeing the dignity, the tragedy, which strangely invested it, a great surge uplifted the deep pity for the mystery and the sorrow of living which always filled his sad heart.

"As you please about that, Mr. Beauchamp. But you must allow me to pull off your boot before your leg becomes worse swollen. You are risking permanent injury by keeping it on; the hurt seems more serious than any mere sprain," he said, with the gentle patience that great strength always has for real weakness.

And then this stately gentleman, this famous judge, knelt down in the dust of the common highway, beside this poor distraught, angry, resisting, atom of humanity, and tenderly released the injured ankle from the pressure that was torturing it.

"Now, that's better," he said, rising, and looking round in some perplexity. "Ah, yonder is a cart coming up the big road. I can get the driver of it to take you home."

He spoke to the negro who was driving the swaying oxen, and gave him some money, and stood waiting until he saw the Frenchman lifted carefully and safely into the cart, and well started on the way toward his home. Then the judge went on his own lonely, homeless road to the tavern. The lengthening shadows of the hills were already darkening the valley, although a wonderful golden light still lingered above the summits, making the new moon look wan. There was only daylight enough for the judge to see old lady Gordon sitting alone at her window, and seeing her, he was reminded that it was his duty to tell her of the accident which had befallen the manager of her farm.

She looked up suddenly, almost eagerly, at the sound of his approach, and peered into the gloaming with the sad intentness of weary eyes which are no longer sure of what they see. When she recognized the judge, she suddenly settled heavily back in her chair with an abrupt movement of angry disappointment. She did not thank him for coming to tell her, and she did not ask him to come in. She merely nodded with the rude taciturnity which, with her, always marked some disturbance of mind.

XXIV

OLD LADY GORDON'S ANGER

For this breaker from a sea of troubles, gradually overspreading all Oldfield, had now gone so far that it had stirred, at last, even the long unstirred level of old lady Gordon's vast indifference.

It had been many a long year since she had been moved to such anger as she was feeling on that day; few things seemed to her worth real anger; she accepted almost everything with careless, almost amiable, tolerance. Selfishness as absolute as hers often wears a manner very like good nature, because it is far too great to be moved by trifles.

Poor old lady Gordon! She had managed to sink her disappointment in self-indulgence, as wretchedness too often sinks itself in opium. She had eaten rich food because the eating of it helped to pass the dull days of her distasteful life; she had read all the novels within her reach--good, bad, and indifferent--because reading was not so tiresome as thinking, when there was nothing pleasant to think about; she had laughed at many follies and mistakes which she saw clearly enough, because it seemed to her useless to try to prevent folly or the making of mistakes.

And yet none knew the true from the false better than this honest, scornful old pagan, who had buried more than one talent, more than ordinary intelligence, under habitual sloth of mind and body; and none had a more genuine respect for all that was finest and highest. But her own early striving toward it had met too complete a defeat for her--being what she was--to go on striving or to think it worth while for others to strive. A nature like hers can never submit, unembittered and unhardened, to wrong and unhappiness; nor is it ever winged by the spiritual so that it may rise above its false place in the world. It can only beat itself against the stone wall of environment, or recoil in fatalistic indifference. And in this last poor old lady Gordon had found refuge so long ago that she had quite forgotten the pain--and the pleasure--which comes with suffering through loving.

And then, after she had thus lived through many wasted days, and many empty nights, it seemed as if this grandson had come at the eleventh hour to open the door of her prison-house. She had not believed it at first; more than a half-century is so long to wait for everything which the heart most craves, that it cannot believe at once when its supreme desire seems about to be granted at last. But, nevertheless, old lady Gordon's pleasure and pride in her grandson had grown fast and steadily through those perfect days and weeks of summer. It had pleased her more and more to hear his strong, gay young voice ringing through the silence of the dull old house. It had pleased her more and more to look at his bright, handsome young face across the table, which had been lonely so long. It had pleased her most of all to have his cheering young presence--so over-flowing with hope and spirits--at her side, through the dreary hours of the lingering twilight, when she had been forced, in the solitude of the old time, to face alone the dreaded muster of disappointment's mocking spectres.

Thus had old lady Gordon regarded her grandson in the beginning of her acquaintance with him. But she gradually began to know him, to see him as he really was, to think that he might be what he meant to be. And so, little by little, this hard, embittered, lonely old soul came finally to believe that a grudging fate was, after all, about to grant to her age the true son of her own heart, of her great pride, of her unbounded ambition--the son whom it had so cruelly denied to her youth and maturity. Then there came a strange and piteous stirring of all her long-numbed sensibilities; a powerful, and even terrible, uprising of all her intensest feelings. It was as if a mighty old grapevine, long stripped of fruit and foliage, long fallen away from every living thing, long trailing along the earth--deeply covered with mould and weeds--as if such a mighty, twisted, hard old grapevine were suddenly to put forth strong new tendrils, and, entwining them around a young tree, should thus begin to rise again toward the last light of life's sunset.

And now, just as this late warmth was sending its rays through the chill veins of unloved and unloving old age,--the coldest and the saddest thing in the whole world,--old lady Gordon once more found herself facing the same danger which had wrecked all her earlier hopes. She had shut her keen old eyes to it at first, and had merely smiled, although she had seen her grandson's interest in Doris quite clearly ever since its commencement. The girl seemed to her so far beneath her grandson in station as to be safely outside any serious consideration. For no Brahmin was ever more deeply imbued with the prejudice of caste than this slothful old lady Gordon; and no consideration other than a serious one could disturb her in the least. Moreover, she rested for a while upon her confidence in Lynn's singleness of purpose, believing in his determination to allow nothing to turn him from the pursuit of his ambition. But later, as the summer days went by and she saw him giving more and more of his time to this yellow-haired, brown-eyed, sweet-spoken, soft-mannered daughter of the village news-monger, and less and less to the thought and study of his chosen profession, a doubt entered her mind, and began to rankle like a thorn in the flesh. As she was left more and more alone, till she had scarcely any of her grandson's society, which was now become so sweet, she had time to remember the folly and weakness of his father, and the folly and wickedness of his grandfather. These dark memories, surging back, as she brooded in solitude, brought old bitterness to her new uneasiness; and yet, recalling many mistakes which she had made in the old time through the rashness of inexperience, she still kept silence, resolving not to fall into such errors again. She did not speak slightingly of the girl, recalling that as one of her most fatal errors; and she was also withheld by a grim sense of justice which was always lurking, half-forgotten, within her hard old breast. She accordingly wisely confined herself to passing comments upon Sidney, and to occasional references to Uncle Watty, directing most of her witty, satirical talk toward love and marriage in the abstract. One day she read Lynn a couple of lines from an old novel which said that:--

"Falling in love is like falling downstairs; it is always an accident, and nearly always a misfortune."

She had many such dry and stinging epigrams at her sharp tongue's end in those days, when she was using wit, satire, irony, and ridicule as weapons to defend her late-coming happiness. Poor old lady Gordon! it was very hard. Selfishness always makes opposition bitterly hard, and it is hard indeed to have been compelled to wait through the space of a generation for the supreme desire of the heart. It was harder than a nature so imperious as hers could endure, to meet such ignoble interference at this eleventh hour, now that its late fulfilment seemed so near, now that she herself had so little time for longer waiting.

So thus it was that scornful impatience gradually gave way to bitter anger, to the fierce, compelling anger of the autocrat long unused to having her will crossed, much less lightly set aside, and, least of all, to having it totally disregarded. It was lightly and even gayly that Lynn had gone his own way in opposition to hers; but when their wills had clashed slightly once or twice, old lady Gordon had seen that they were made of the same piece of cold steel. She had recognized the fact with a queer mixture of pride and displeasure, but the recognition had turned her away from all thought of force, and she had henceforth resorted to subtler measures. She had tried--with a gentleness so foreign to her nature that it was pathetic--to keep him at her side, as a tigress might softly stretch out a paw--every cruel claw sheathed in velvet--to draw a cub away from danger. But this too failed, as the efforts of the old to hold the young always must fail when nature calls. And thus it was that the lingering twilights of those last summer days found old lady Gordon again alone, as the judge had found her; again solitary at lonely nightfall; again--with the long night so near--gazing into the gathering darkness at the ghostly assemblage of all her dead hopes.

Lynn did not come that night until she had turned and tossed through more than one sleepless hour. At breakfast the next morning they had little to say to one another. It was nearly always so now, although Lynn had scarcely noted the fact that all ease and confidence had gone out of their companionship. He was always in haste of late to get away; every morning he went earlier to join Doris, forgetting all about the law books which lay on the table in his room, and which his grandmother used to go and look at and turn over--most piteously. She now used rarely to stir from her chair except to do this. Every evening he was later in leaving Doris, and slower in coming home; and he never lingered now on the dark porch to think over his plans. And day by day old lady Gordon's secret wrath burned more fiercely, although she still kept it carefully covered with the ashes of assumed indifference. But on the evening of the judge's visit her long-smouldering anger had, for the first time, burst into flame beyond her control. She had seen Lynn and Doris passing on their way to the graveyard; she had watched the flutter of the girl's white skirt at her grandson's side all along the slow, winding way up to the high hilltop. The sight had been as wind and fuel to raging fire. It was well for the judge that he had not lingered while the flames thus raged; it was well for Lynn that he had been for the moment beyond the reach of his grandmother's burning contempt; it was well for Doris--though as innocent of all offence as one of the white lambs feeding on the hillside--well that her return was unseen in the gloaming; it had been well--most of all--for this fierce old spirit itself that certain strong, dark drops, from the bag hanging at the head of her bed, could lay for a few hours the mocking ghosts of dead hopes, all slain by folly and weakness, even as this last one seemed now being put to death before her very eyes.

The morning found her spent in strength; and the fire of her anger, although uncooled, was again covered by the silence of exhaustion. Moods of silence were, however, not unusual with her, and Lynn was too deeply absorbed in his own pleasant thoughts to observe his grandmother's ominous brooding. When the meal was over, with the exchange of hardly a dozen thoughtless words upon his part, and of taciturn responses upon her side, Lynn took up his hat and went out of the house and toward the gate. Pausing under the cypress tree, he looked back and smiled and waved his hand; and then he went swiftly along the big road toward the silver poplars.

Old lady Gordon sat quite still in her chair, gazing after him with darkly drawn brows, with her turkey-wing fan lying forgotten on her lap, and her novel cast, neglected, on a chair by her side. She had not told Lynn of the accident to the manager of the farm; she had not spoken of her intended visit to the Frenchman on that morning; she had not asked her grandson to go with her, although she walked with difficulty and even with pain, and longed with age's helplessness to have him near by to lean upon. When Lynn was quite out of sight she arose--a fine, majestic old figure in her loose white drapery--and started across the fields, making her slow, painful way to the Beauchamp cottage. She found the Frenchman in bed, and, seeing how seriously he was hurt, and remembering the farm work which must go undirected, she was not in a better humor when she turned her face homeward. Still she held her wrath with an iron hand, exercising perhaps the greatest self-control that she had ever brought to bear upon anything during her whole life. She even forced herself to make some gruffly civil response when Lynn came back to dinner at noon, and hastened away again as soon as he could, with a few hurried, happy words and another gay smile and careless wave of his hand. But all through the afternoon hours of that long, dull, solitary day old lady Gordon's anger grew as thunder clouds gather, and when, after supper, Lynn again took up his hat and turned, intending again to leave her, the brewing tempest suddenly burst upon him.

"Have you ever stopped to think where all this philandering must lead? It's high time," she broke out, hoarse with passionate rage.

The young man, holding his hat in his hand, wheeled and looked at his grandmother in utter amazement, startled, almost alarmed, by the violence of her tone and by the suddenness of the attack.

"I don't understand. I don't know in the least what you mean," he said honestly enough, and yet, even as he spoke, a glimmering consciousness came into his open face.

"Oh, yes, you do. You know perfectly well, but I'll put it plainer if you want me to," she went on, roughly, sneeringly.

Lynn reddened, putting up his hand with a gesture imposing silence. "Perhaps I do understand something of what you mean," he said hesitatingly, with the hesitation which every right-minded man feels at referring--however distantly--in any such connection to a girl whom he reveres. "And if I do understand anything of what you mean, you must allow me to tell you that there has been no philandering, nor any semblance of it."

"Then what do you call it?" she demanded, with even greater violence and roughness than before. "May I ask how you characterize this perpetual dawdling, all day and nearly all night, at the heels of a girl whose rank is hardly above that of a servant--a girl whom even the son of your father, or the grandson of your grandfather, could scarcely be fool or rake enough to think of--except as something to philander after."

She hurled the brutal words at him as she would have thrown stones in his face, far too furious to think or to care how they might hurt.

He recoiled, shocked, revolted, by the sight of such unrestrained anger in age. It seemed an incredibly monstrous thing. Then he stood still, looking at her with a cool courage which matched her flaming rage. He now moved farther away, but it was solely because he felt a sudden extreme repulsion.