Under the Law. Edwina Stanton Babcock
the four winds and gave on the tree-fringed expanse of water. At night those tower panes were literally dashed with stars. As a little girl she had lain watching their fairy dance like fire-flies; later her clear brown eyes became fixed thoughtfully on what seemed strings of jasmine-like blossoms. Coming home from boarding-school, the stars half thrilled her with mystical trailing blossoms of a home-sky, but now of late, after college and a new sense of values, these stars had suddenly ceased throwing their soft lights across the panes. East, west, north and south, they now stood in an awful order like knights leaning on spears. They were challenging in their geometry, severe in their puzzling fixity; they seemed to say—"Well, Sard, you are grown up now; you make your own choices; what is your law? We have our law—have you discovered yours?"
During two years at college Sard had thought little about "law." The stars there had asked few questions. They had seemed companionable, dashing confidently, shining over the campus with capricious groups of girls; they had shone on bright camp-fires and twinkled at the saucy songs shouted into their very eyes. The college stars had seemed to vibrate like sleigh-bells to such defiant songs as "Where, oh death, is thy stingalingaling?" and they thrilled to a thousand funny whistles and calls of a rather self-consciously emphasized youth. But here they were back with their spell and their question. Knights with spears, they rode softly past the window-panes, keeping their geometric order, saying, insistently—"This is our law; we obey always. What is your law?"
At first the thing had awed Sard, then saddened her. So after all, the world physical went on this grand orderly, terrible sort of way, and so did the spiritual world seem to, no matter how much one wanted to change things; but the world of people and purpose? how about that?
What should be the laws of one's life? The books on Sard's shelves gleamed in the moonlight. Here and there they had helped and suggested and one or two men or women Sard had met seemed to have an idea. Then this thing they called "Love"—Sard, lying in bed, pondered; did love do what people said it did, sweeten, make deeper, wiser? Well, Sard had seen girls at college who became engaged, said they were in love, certainly were changed and made queer by a force bigger than themselves; and yet it all seemed to end trivially. One or two children, a little house not very well kept, a tired husband, not "enough" money ... and there were other girls who mocked at love and played with it and coquetted until their faces became cynical, hard and horrible.... If there were things that swept people so they rose bigger and finer than they had ever dreamed themselves to be, that might count some way, but how did they start becoming bigger and finer? One couldn't go down-stairs and announce to one's family—"From now on I am going to be bigger and finer." So, tossing away from the star inquiry, turning penitently back to it, the young form fought out the thing. A sense of awful loneliness and youth came to Sard, an awful sense of not knowing herself, not working from the most inward of her. She stretched out appealing arms—"What are my laws?" she asked softly. "Oh, what are my laws?" For Sard knew, and knew with feelings of awe that for every life that counted there must be laws.
CHAPTER III
BY-LAWS
The Judge opened the door and propelled himself into the room in a finicking, faultfinding way, peculiarly inappropriate to his massive shoulders and head. He grunted something to Sard's "Good-morning, Dad," picked up his paper and flapped it into a fold. His slow eyes, seeming like ground glass set in front of the remorseless deliberations of his mind, paused at the coffee-urn, as he made inquiry:
"Dunstan not down yet?"
For answer Dunstan Bogart shuffled down the broad stairs and, slipping on a rug, entered the dining-room with an operatic air of being in extreme haste. Half tumbling into the room, he halted, dramatically, appearing to remind himself that the breakfast-room was holy ground. "Greeting to thee, fellow sufferers," he announced cheerfully. He made passes at his father's back, stared his aunt solemnly in the face, ruffled Sard's hair and finally took his seat.
"Frogs in the finger-bowls again?" he questioned sepulchrally. "Else why all this gloom?"
The Judge, unnoticing, motioned his finished grapefruit away. No one appearing to effect this transfer, he indicated the butler's pantry back of him and Sard felt anew for the electric bell.
"I wonder if this thing works—it doesn't seem to ring in the kitchen."
"It is at present ringing in the chicken-coop and the garage," announced Dunstan; "I heard it as I dressed—it is ringing in the furnace and in the fountain; it is ringing in Heaven, it is ringing—in—excuse me."
The Judge, twitching the paper, looked at his son. "She ought to hear it," he growled; "ring it again."
Dunstan suddenly dived under the table, feeling for the button.
"Blame not the damsel," came the lad's voice, this time near Sard's feet.
"Cuss the battery if you must cuss." He emerged from under the table and catapulted into the kitchen, where he nearly upset the cook, entering with a tray of smoking Sally Lunn. His father followed him with a cold eye of disgust.
"Does he think that sort of thing amusing?" he inquired. The sacks under the Judge's dull eyes had a slightly swelled, feverish look. The eyes themselves were leaden gooseberry and boiled hard in the pupil. The Judge's nose, aristocratic and sharp, held a fearful look of pride, and the grizzled hair, scant on his head, was heavy on ears and eyebrows. Sard had often thought that the men and women brought before her father must have had dread long before the slightly nasal voice deliberately twanged out the sentence. But as a little girl she remembered her mother always said to her, "Baby, we love Foddie, don't we? Foddie won't send us with the naughty pwisoners to pwison. Foddie won't take away all our nice toys and put us in dungeons." There was invariably a smell of cologne and little soft tickles of curls that went with this, and a rustle of spreading ruffled silks and laces. With these things, part of their pretty feminine play, Sard could hear the whisper, that strange mother whisper, the whisper which is back of the building of the whole world, the whisper which is responsible for the best men and the best women, for all greatness and heroism and sometimes for the weakness and foolishness and decadence—The Mother-whisper.
"We love Foddie, little Sard, don't we? We aren't afraid of him—he won't send us to pwison." Then over their own clasping had come the man's bear hug and little laughs and screams from her pretty mother. Then Sard had always gone gravely and happily away to play.
Dunstan returned from the kitchen with the air of news. "Cook hath secured the main part of the breakfast booty, but thy maiden hath left—she answers not to her name in the scullery."
Miss Aurelia Bogart, the Judge's sister, sighed deeply. "Poor Dora, she never came in at all last night—she—I—you—well, she is taking this thing very hard—I suppose," with another sigh, "it is natural."
Dunstan grinned. "You are right, Aunt Reely; right, delicate nun! It is not unnatural to be sad when your only brother is indicted for murder. So the fair nymph never came in at all last night? Queer about these women." Dunstan winked at his sister, then stared blankly into his father's equally blank face.
"I say, Pop, are you really going to jug him for life, meaning the tow-headed murderer brother of our esteemed waitress?"
The Judge turned. It might have been a veritable mask of implacability that met the young brown faun-like gaze turned toward it, except that plaster is tenderer and softer than the human face devoid of the emotions of the human heart. A human face controlled by machine action is a terrible thing to see. The Judge had for years been a machine.
Dunstan's own face reddened and turned away. Sticking out his cup in the direction of the breakfast urn, the Judge remarked curtly, "More sugar." Then to his son, "I rather fancy your sort of levity is not as amusing as you seem to think. It is merely underbred and oafish, a sort of nigger minstrel's buffoonery." The Judge paused a moment and then added coolly, "As for what you wish to know, I am always ready to talk with you on any subject that is not pure meddling on your part."