"Then if you chance to be about the next time it happens, I hope it won't disturb you either," she remarked, as she rode up the hill.
The meeting lingered in Ordway's mind with a freshness which was associated less with the incident itself than with some vivid quality in the appearance of the girl. Her face, her voice, her carriage—even the little brown curls blowing on her temples, all united in his thoughts to form a memory in which Alice appeared to hold a place. Why should this country girl, he wondered, bring back to him so clearly the figure of his daughter?
But there was no room for a memory in his life just now, and by the time he reached Baxter's Warehouse, he had forgotten the interest aroused in him a moment before. Baxter had not yet appeared in his office, but two men, belonging evidently to the labouring class, were talking together under the brick archway. When Ordway joined them they did not interrupt their conversation, which he found, after a minute, to concern the domestic and financial troubles of the one whom he judged to be the poorer of the two. He was a meanly clad, wretched looking workman, with a shock of uncombed sandy hair, a cowed manner, and the expression of one who has been beaten into apathy rather than into submission. A sordid pathos in his voice and figure brought Ordway a step closer to his side, and after a moment's careless attention, he found his mind adjusting itself to the small financial problems in which the man had become entangled. The workman had been forced to borrow upon his pathetic personal securities; and in meeting from year to year the exorbitant rate of interest, he had paid back several times the sum of the original debt. Now his wife was ill, with an incurable cancer; he had no hope, as he advanced beyond middle age, of any increase in his earning capacity, and the debt under which he had struggled so long had become at the end an intolerable burden. His wife had begged him to consult a lawyer—but who, he questioned doggedly, would take an interest in him since he had no money for a fee? He was afraid of lawyers anyway, for he could give you a hundred cases where they had stood banded together against the poor.
As Ordway listened to the story, he felt for an instant a return of his youthful enthusiasm, and standing there amid the tobacco stems in Baxter's warehouse, he remembered a great flour trust from which he had withdrawn because it seemed to him to bear unjustly upon the small, isolated farmers. Beyond this he went back still further to his college days, when during his vacation, he had read Virginia law in the office of his uncle, Richard Ordway, in the town of Botetourt. He could see the shining rows of legal volumes in the walnut bookcases, the engraving of Latane's Burial, framed in black wood above the mantel, and against this background the silent, gray haired, self-righteous old man so like his father. Through the window, he could see still the sparrows that built in the ivied walls of the old church.
With a start he came back to the workman, who was unfolding his troubles in an abandon of misery under the archway.
"If you'll talk things over with me to-night when we get through work, I think I may be able to straighten them out for you," he said.
The man stared at him out of his dogged eyes with a helpless incredulity.
"But I ain't got any money," he responded sullenly, as if driven to the defensive.
"Well, we'll see," said Ordway, "I don't want your money."
"You want something, though—my money or my vote, and I ain't got either."
Ordway laughed shortly. "I?—oh, I just want the fun," he answered.
The beginning was trivial enough, the case sordid, and the client only a dull-witted labourer; but to Ordway it came as the commencement of the new life for which he had prayed—the life which would find its centre not in possession, but in surrender, which would seek as its achievement not personal happiness, but the joy of service.
CHAPTER VI
The Pretty Daughter Of The Mayor
THE pretty girl whom Ordway had seen on the gravelled walk was Milly Trend, the only child of the Mayor of Tappahannock. People said of Jasper Trend that his daughter was the one soft spot in a heart that was otherwise as small and hard as a silver dollar, and of Milly Trend the same people said—well, that she was pretty. Her prettiness was invariably the first and the last thing to be mentioned about her. Whatever sterner qualities she may have possessed were utterly obscured by an exterior which made one think of peach blossoms and spring sunshine. She had a bunch of curls the colour of ripe corn, which she wore tied back from her neck with a velvet ribbon; her eyes were the eyes of a baby; and her mouth had an adorable little trick of closing over her small, though slightly prominent teeth. The one flaw in her face was this projection of her teeth, and when she looked at herself in the glass it was her habit to bite her lips closely together until the irregular ivory line was lost. It was this fault, perhaps, which kept her prettiness, though it was superlative in its own degree, from ever rising to the height of beauty. In Milly's opinion it had meant the difference between the glory of a world-wide reputation and the lesser honour of reigning as the acknowledged belle of Tappahannock. She remembered that the magnificent manager of a theatrical company, a gentleman who wore a fur-lined coat and a top hat all day long, had almost lost his train while he stopped to look back at her on the crowded platform of the station. Her heart had beat quickly at the tribute, yet even in that dazzling minute she had felt a desperate certainty that her single imperfection would decide her future. But for her teeth, she was convinced to-day, that he might have returned.
If a woman cannot be a heroine in reality, perhaps the next best thing is to look as if she might have been one in the age of romance; and this was what Milly Trend's appearance suggested to perfection. Her manner of dressing, the black velvet ribbon on her flaxen curls, her wide white collars open at her soft throat, her floating sky-blue sashes and the delicate peach bloom of her cheeks and lips—all these combined to produce a poetic atmosphere about an exceedingly poetic little figure. Being plain she would probably have made currant jelly for her pastor, and have taught sedately in the infant class in Sunday school: being pretty she read extravagant romances and dreamed strange adventures of fascinating highwaymen on lonely roads.
But many a woman who has dreamed of a highwayman at eighteen has compromised with a bank clerk at twenty-two. Even at Tappahannock—the veriest prose piece of a town—romance might sometimes bud and blossom, though it usually brought nothing more dangerous than respectability to fruit. Milly had read Longfellow and Lucille, and her heroic ideal had been taken bodily from one of Bulwer's novels. She had played the graceful part of heroine in a hundred imaginary dramas; yet in actual life she had been engaged for two years to a sandy-haired, freckled face young fellow, who chewed tobacco, and bought the dry leaf in lots for a factory in Richmond. From romance to reality is a hard distance, and the most passionate dreamer is often the patient drudge of domestic service.
And yet even to-day Milly was not without secret misgivings as to the wisdom of her choice. She knew he was not her hero, but in her short visits to larger cities she had met no one who had come nearer her ideal lover. To be sure she had seen this ideal, in highly coloured glimpses, upon the stage—though these gallant gentlemen in trunks had never so much as condescended to glance across the foot-lights to the little girl in the dark third row of the balcony. Then, too, all the ladies upon the stage were beautiful enough for any hero, and just here she was apt to remember dismally the fatal projection of her teeth.
So, perhaps, after all, Harry Banks was as near Olympus as she could hope to approach; and there was a mild consolation in the thought that there was probably more sentiment in the inner than in the outward man. Whatever came of it, she had learned that in a prose age it is safer to think only in prose.
On the morning upon which Ordway had first passed her gate, she had left the breakfast table at the postman's call, and had run down the gravelled walk to receive a letter from Mr. Banks, who was off on a short business trip for his firm. With the letter in her hand she had turned to find Ordway's blue eyes fixed in careless admiration upon her figure; and for one breathless instant she had felt her insatiable dream rise again and clutch at her heart.