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The Prisoner

by Alice Brown · English · Gutenberg #29366 · 764,613 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Prisoner

Author: Alice Brown


        
Release date: July 10, 2009 [eBook #29366]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRISONER ***




Produced by David Clarke, Woodie4 and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









  THE PRISONER




  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
  ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

  LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

  TORONTO




  THE PRISONER

  BY

  ALICE BROWN

  AUTHOR OF "MY LOVE AND I," "CHILDREN OF
  EARTH," "ROSE MACLEOD," ETC.




  New York
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  1916

  _All rights reserved_


  Copyright, 1916
  By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

  Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1916
  Reprinted June, 1916 July, 1916 Twice August, 1916.




THE PRISONER




I


There could not have been a more sympathetic moment for coming into the
country town--or, more accurately, the inconsiderable city--of Addington
than this clear twilight of a spring day. Anne and Lydia French with
their stepfather, known in domestic pleasantry as the colonel, had hit
upon a perfect combination of time and weather, and now they stood in a
dazed silence, dense to the proffers of two hackmen with the urgency of
twenty, and looked about them. That inquiring pause was as if they had
expected to find, even at the bare, sand-encircled station, the imagined
characteristics of the place they had so long visualised. The handsome
elderly man, clean-shaven, close-clipped, and, at intervals when he
recalled himself to a stand against discouragement, almost military in
his bearing, was tired, but entrenched in a patient calm. The girls were
profoundly moved in a way that looked like gratitude: perhaps, too,
exalted as if, after reverses, they had reached a passionately desired
goal. Anne was the elder sister, slender and sweet, grave with the
protective fostering instinct of mothers in a maidenly hiding, ready to
come at need. She wore her plain blue clothes as if unconscious of them
and their incomplete response to the note of time. A woman would have
detected that she trimmed her own hat, a flat, wide-brimmed straw with a
formless bow and a feather worthy only in long service. A man would
have cherished the memory of her thin rose-flushed face with the crisp
touches of sedate inquiry about the eyes. "Do you want anything?" Anne's
eyes were always asking clearly. "Let me get it for you." But even a man
thus tenderly alive to her charm would have thought her older than she
was, a sweet sisterly creature to be reverentially regarded.

Lydia was the product of a different mould. She was the woman, though a
girl in years and look, not removed by chill timidities from woman's
normal hopes, the clean animal in her curved mouth, the trick of parting
her lips for a long breath because, for the gusto of life, the ordinary
breath wouldn't always do, and showing most excellent teeth, the little
square chin, dauntless in strength, the eyes dauntless, too, and hair
all a brown gloss with high lights on it, very free about her forehead.
She was not so tall as Anne, but graciously formed and plumper.
Curiously, they did not seem racially unlike the colonel who, to their
passionate loyalties, was "father" not a line removed. In the delicacy
of his patrician type he might even have been "grandfather", for he
looked older than he was, the worsted prey of circumstance. He had met
trouble that would not be evaded, and if he might be said to have
conquered, it was only from regarding it with a perplexed immobility, so
puzzling was it in a world where honour, he thought, was absolutely
defined and a social crime as inexplicable as it was rending.

And while the three wait to have their outlines thus inadequately
sketched, the hackman waits, too, he of a more persistent hope than his
fellows who have gone heavily rolling away to the stable, it being now
six o'clock and this the last train.

Lydia was a young woman of fervid recognitions. She liked to take a day
and stamp it for her own, to say of this, perhaps: "It was the ninth of
April when we went to Addington, and it was a heavenly day. There was a
clear sky and I could see Farvie's beautiful nose and chin against it
and Anne's feather all out of curl. Dear Anne! dear Farvie! Everything
smelled of dirt, good, honest dirt, not city sculch, and I heard a
robin. Anne heard him, too. I saw her smile." But really what Anne
plucked out of the moment was a blurred feeling of peace. The day was
like a cool, soft cheek, the cheek one kisses with calm affection,
knowing it will not be turned away. It was she who first became aware of
Denny, the hackman, and said to him in her liquid voice that laid bonds
of kind responsiveness:

"Do you know the old Blake house?"

Denny nodded. He was a soft, loosely made man with a stubby moustache
picked out in red and a cheerfully dishevelled air of having been up all
night.

"The folks moved out last week," said he. "You movin' in?"

"Yes," Lydia supplied, knowing her superior capacity over the other two,
for meeting the average man. "We're moving in. Farvie, got the checks?"

Denny accepted the checks and, in a neighbourly fashion, helped the
station master in selecting the trunks, no large task when there was but
a drummer's case besides. He went about this meditatively, inwardly
searching out the way of putting the question that should elicit the
identity of his fares. There was a way, he knew. But they had seated
themselves in the hack, and now explained that if he would take two
trunks along the rest could come with the freight due at least by
to-morrow; and he had driven them through the wide street bordered with
elms and behind them what Addington knew as "house and grounds" before
he thought of a way. It was when he had bumped the trunks into the
empty hall and Lydia was paying him from a smart purse of silver given
her by her dancing pupils that he got hold of his inquisitorial outfit.

"I don't know," said Denny, "as I know you folks. Do you come from round
here?"

Lydia smiled at him pleasantly.

"Good night," said she. "Get the freight round in the morning, won't
you? and be sure you bring somebody to help open the crates."

Then Denny climbed sorrowfully up on his box, and when he looked round
he found them staring there as they had stared at the station: only now
he saw they were in a row and "holding hands".

"I think," said Lydia, in rather a hushed voice, as if she told the
others a pretty secret, "it's a very beautiful place."

"You girls haven't been here, have you?" asked the colonel.

"No," said Anne, "you'd just let it when we came to live with you."

Both girls used that delicate shading of their adoptive tie with him.
They and their mother, now these three years dead, had "come to live
with" him when they were little girls and their mother married him. They
never suggested that mother married him any time within their
remembrance. In their determined state of mind he belonged not only to
the never-ending end when he and they and mother were to meet in a
gardened heaven with running streams and bowery trees, but as well to
the vague past when they were little girls. Their own father they had
memory of only as a disturbing large person in rough tweed smelling of
office smoke, who was always trying to get somewhere before the domestic
exigencies of breakfast and carriage would let him, and who dropped dead
one day trying to do it. Anne saw him fall right in the middle of the
gravel walk, and ran to tell mother father had stubbed his toe. And when
she heard mother scream, and noted father's really humorous obstinacy
about getting up, and saw the cook even and the coachman together trying
to persuade him, she got a strong distaste for father; and when about
two years afterward she was asked if she would accept this other older
father, she agreed to him with cordial expectation. He was gentle and
had a smooth, still voice. His clothes smelled of Russia leather and
lead pencils and at first of very nice smoke: not as if he had sat in a
tight room all day and got cured in the smoke of other rank pipes like a
helpless ham, but as if a pleasant acrid perfume were his special
atmosphere.

"They haven't done much to the garden, have they?" he asked now, poking
with his stick in the beds under the windows. "I suppose you girls know
what these things are, coming up. There's a peony. I do know that. I
remember this one. It's the old dark kind, not pink. I don't much care
for a pink piny."

The big front yard sloping up to the house was almost full of shrubbery
in a state of overgrown prosperity. There were lilacs, dark with buds,
and what Anne, who was devotedly curious in matters of growing life,
thought althea, snowball and a small-leaved yellow rose. All this
runaway shrubbery looked, in a way of speaking, inpenetrable. It would
have taken so much trouble to get through that you would have felt
indiscreet in trying it. The driveway only seemed to have been brave
enough to pass it without getting choked up, a road that came in at the
big gateway, its posts marked by haughty granite balls, accomplished a
leisurely curve and went out at another similar gateway as proudly
decorated. The house held dignified seclusion there behind the
shrubbery, waiting, Lydia thought, to be found. You could not really
see it from the street: only above the first story and blurred, at that,
by rowan trees. But the two girls facing it there at near range and the
colonel with the charm of old affection playing upon him like airs of
paradise, thought the house beautiful. It was of mellow old brick with
white trimmings and a white door, and at the left, where the eastern sun
would beat, a white veranda. It came up into a kindly gambrel roof and
there were dormers. Lydia saw already how fascinating those chambers
must be. There was a trellis over the door and jessamine swinging from
it. The birds in the shrubbery were eloquent. A robin mourned on one
complaining note and Anne, wise also in the troubles of birds, looked
low for the reason and found, sitting with tail wickedly twitching at
the tip, a brindled cat. Being gentle in her ways and considering that
all things have rights, she approached him with crafty steps and a
murmured hypnotic, "kitty! kitty!" got her hands on him, and carried him
off down the drive, to drop him in the street and suggest, with a
warning pat and conciliating stroke, the desirability of home.

The colonel, following Lydia's excited interest, poked with his stick
for a minute or more at a bed under the front window, where something
lush seemed to be coming up, and Lydia, losing interest when she found
it was only pudding-bags, picked three sprays of flowering almond for
decorating purposes and drew him toward a gate at the east side of the
house where, down three rotting steps, lay level land. The end of it
next the road was an apple orchard coming into an amazingly early bloom,
a small secluded paradise. A high brick wall shut it from the road and
ran down for fifty feet or so between it and the adjoining place. There
a grey board fence took up the boundary and ran on, with a less
definite markedness to the eye, until it skirted a rise far down the
field and went on over the rise to lands unknown, at least to Lydia.

"Farvie, come!" she cried.

She pulled him down the crumbling steps to the soft sward and looked
about her with a little murmured note of happy expectation. She loved
the place at once, and gave up to the ecstasy of loving it "good and
hard," she would have said. These impulsive passions of her nature had
always made her greatest joys. They were like robust bewildering
playmates. She took them to her heart, and into her bed at night to help
her dream. There was nothing ever more warm and grateful than Lydia's
acceptances and her trust in the bright promise of the new. Anne didn't
do that kind of thing. She hesitated at thresholds and looked forward,
not distrustfully but gravely, into dim interiors.

"Farvie, dear," said Lydia, "I love it just as much now as I could in a
hundred years. It's our house. I feel as if I'd been born in it."

Farvie looked about over the orchard, under its foam of white and pink;
his eyes suffused and he put his delicate lips firmly together. But all
he said was:

"They haven't kept the trees very well pruned."

"There's Anne," said Lydia, loosing her hold of his sleeve. She ran
light-footedly back to Anne, and patted her with warm receptiveness.
"Anne, look: apple trees, pear trees, peach in that corner. See that big
bush down there."

"Quince," said Anne dreamily. She had her hat off now, and her fine soft
brown hair, in silky disorder, attracted her absent-minded care. But
Lydia had pulled out the pin of her own tight little hat with its
backward pointing quill and rumpled her hair in the doing and never
knew it; now she transfixed the hat with a joyous stab.

"Never mind your hair," said she. "What idiots we were to write to the
Inn. Why couldn't we stay here to-night? How can we leave it? We can't.
Did you ever see such a darling place? Did you ever imagine a brick wall
like that? Who built it, Farvie? Who built the brick wall?"

Farvie was standing with his hands behind him, thinking back, the girls
knew well, over the years. A mournful quiet was in his face. They could
follow for a little way the cause of his sad thoughts, and were willing,
each in her own degree of impulse, to block him in it, make running
incursions into the road, twitch him by the coat and cry, "Listen to us.
Talk to us. You can't go there where you were going. That's the road to
hateful memories. Listen to that bird and tell us about the brick wall."

Farvie was used to their invasions of his mind. He never went so far as
clearly to see them as salutary invasions to keep him from the
melancholy accidents of the road, an ambulance dashing up to lift his
bruised hopes tenderly and take them off somewhere for sanitary
treatment, or even some childish sympathy of theirs commissioned to run
up and offer him a nosegay to distract him in his walk toward old
disappointments and old cares. He only knew they were welcome visitants
in his mind. Sometimes the mind seemed to him a clean-swept place, the
shades down and no fire lighted, and these young creatures, in their
heavenly implication of doing everything for their own pleasure and not
for his, would come in, pull up the shades with a rush, light the fire
and sit down with their sewing and their quite as necessary laughter by
the hearth.

"It's a nice brick wall," said Anne, in her cool clear voice. "It
doesn't seem so much to shut other people out as to shut us in."

She slipped her hand through the colonel's arm, and they both stood
there at his elbow like rosy champions, bound to stick to him to the
last, and the bird sang and something eased up in his mind. He seemed to
be let off, in this spring twilight, from an exigent task that had shown
no signs of easing. Yet he knew he was not really let off. Only the
girls were throwing their glamour of youth and hope and bravado over the
apprehensive landscape of his fortune as to-morrow's sun would snatch a
rosier light from the apple blooms.

"My great-grandfather built the wall," said he. He was content to go
back to an older reminiscent time when there were, for him, no roads of
gloom. "He was a minister, you know: very old-fashioned even then, very
direct, knew what he wanted, saw no reason why he shouldn't have it. He
wanted a place to meditate in, walk up and down, think out his sermons.
So he built the wall. The townspeople didn't take to it much at first,
father used to say. But they got accustomed to it. He wouldn't care."

"There's a grape-vine over a trellis," said Anne softly. She spoke in a
rapt way, as if she had said, "There are angels choiring under the
trees. We can hum their songs."

"It makes an arbour. Farvie'll sit there and read his Greek," said
Lydia. "We can't leave this place to-night. It would be ridiculous, now
we've found it. It wouldn't be safe either. Places like this bust up and
blow away."

"We can get up the beds to-morrow," said Anne. "Then we never'll leave
it for a single minute as long as we live. I want to go ever the house.
Farvie, can't we go over the house?"

They went up the rotten steps, Lydia with a last proprietary look at
the orchard, as if she sealed it safe from all the spells of night, and
entered at the front door, trying, at her suggestion, to squeeze in
together three abreast, so they could own it equally. It was a still,
kind house. The last light lay sweetly in the room at the right of the
hall, a large square room with a generous fireplace well blackened and
large surfaces of old ivory paint. There was a landscape paper here, of
trees in a smoky mist and dull blue skies behind a waft of cloud. Out of
this lay the dining-room, all in green, and the windows of both rooms
looked on a gigantic lilac hedge, and beyond it the glimmer of a white
colonial house set back in its own grounds. The kitchen was in a
lean-to, a good little kitchen brown with smoke, and behind that was the
shed with dark cobwebbed rafters and corners that cried out for hoes and
garden tools. Lydia went through the rooms in a rush of happiness, Anne
in a still rapt imagining. Things always seemed to her the symbols of
dearer things. She saw shadowy shapes sitting at the table and breaking
bread together, saw moving figures in the service of the house, and
generations upon generations weaving their webs of hope and pain and
disillusionment and hope again. In the shed they stood looking out at
the back door through the rolling field, where at last a fringe of
feathery yellow made the horizon line.

"What's at the end of the field, Farvie?" Lydia asked.

"The river," said he. "Nothing but the river."

"I feel," said she, "as if we were on an island surrounded by
jumping-off places: the bushes in front, the lilac hedge on the west,
the brick wall on the east, the river at the end. Come, let's go back.
We haven't seen the other two rooms."

These were the northeast room, a library in the former time, in a dim,
pink paper with garlands, and the southeast sitting-room, in a modern
yet conforming paper of dull blue and grey.

"The hall is grey," said Lydia. "Do you notice? How well they've kept
the papers. There isn't a stain."

"Maiden ladies," said the colonel, with a sigh. "Nothing but two maiden
ladies for so long."

"Don't draw long breaths, Farvie," said Lydia. "Anne and I are maiden
ladies. You wouldn't breathe over us. We should feel terribly if you
did."

"I was thinking how still the house had been," said he. "It used to
be--ah, well! well!"

"They grew old here, didn't they?" said Anne, her mind taking the maiden
ladies into its hospitable shelter.

"They were old when they came." He was trying to put on a brisker air to
match these two runners with hope for their torch. "Old as I am now. If
their poor little property had lasted we should have had hard work to
pry them out. We should have had to let 'em potter along here. But they
seem to like their nephew, and certainly he's got money enough."

"They adore him," said Lydia, who had never seen them or the nephew.
"And they're lying in gold beds at this minute eating silver cheese off
an emerald plate and hearing the nightingales singing and saying to each
other, 'Oh, my! I _wish_ it was morning so we could get up and put on
our pan-velvet dresses and new gold shoes.'"

This effective picture Anne and the colonel received with a perfect
gravity, not really seeing it with the mind's eye. Lydia's habit of
speech demanded these isolating calms.

"I think," said Anne, "we'd better be getting to the Inn. We sha'n't
find any supper. Lydia, which bag did you pack our nighties in?"

Lydia picked out the bag, carolling, as she did so, in high bright
notes, and then remembered that she had to put on her hat. Anne had
already adjusted hers with a careful nicety.

"You know where the Inn is, don't you, Farvie?" Lydia was asking, as
they stood on the stone step, after Anne had locked the door, and gazed
about them in another of their according trances.

He smiled at them, and his eyes lighted for the first time. The smile
showed possibilities the girls had proven through their growing up
years, of humour and childish fooling.

"Why, yes," said he, "it was here when I was born."

They went down the curving driveway into the street which the two girls
presently found to be the state street of the town. The houses, each
with abundant grounds, had all a formal opulence due chiefly to the
white-pillared fronts. Anne grew dreamy. It seemed to her as if she were
walking by a line of Greek temples in an afternoon hush. The colonel was
naming the houses as they passed, with good old names. Here were the
Jarvises, here the Russells, and here the Lockes.

"But I don't know," said he, "what's become of them all."

At a corner by a mammoth elm he turned down into another street,
elm-shaded, almost as wide, and led them to the Inn, a long, low-browed
structure built in the eighteenth century and never without guests.




II


The next morning brought a confusion of arriving freight, and Denny was
supplicated to provide workmen, clever artificers in the opening of
boxes and the setting up of beds. He was fired by a zeal not all
curiosity, a true interest assuaged by certainty more enlivening yet.

"I know who ye be," he announced to the colonel. This was on his arrival
with the first load. "I ain't lived in town very long, or I should known
it afore. It's in the paper."

Mr. Blake frowned slightly and seemed to freeze all over the surface he
presented to the world. He walked away without a reply, but Lydia, who
had not heard, came up at this point to ask Denny if he knew where she
could find a maid.

"Sure I do," said Denny, who was not Irish but consorted with common
speech. "My wife's two sisters, Mary Nellen, Prince Edward girls."

"We don't want two," said Lydia. "My sister and I do a lot of the work."

"The two of them," said Denny, "come for the price of one. They're
studyin' together to set up a school in Canada, and they can't be
separated. They'd admire to be with nice folks."

"Mary? did you say?" asked Lydia.

"Mary Nellen."

"Mary and Ellen?"

"Yes, Mary Nellen. I'll send 'em up."

That afternoon they came, pleasant-faced square little trudges with
shiny black hair and round myopic eyes. This near-sightedness when they
approached the unclassified, resulted in their simultaneously making up
the most horrible faces, the mere effort of focusing. Mary Nellen--for
family affection, recognising their complete twin-ship, always blended
them--were aware of this disfiguring habit, but relegated the curing of
it to the day of their future prosperity. They couldn't afford glasses
now, they said. They'd rather put their money into books. This according
and instantaneous grimace Lydia found engaging. She could not possibly
help hiring them, and they appeared again that night with two battered
tin boxes and took up residence in the shed chamber.

There had been some consultation about the disposition of chambers. It
resolved itself into the perfectly reasonable conclusion that the
colonel must have the one he had always slept in, the southeastern
corner.

"But there's one," said Lydia, "that's sweeter than the whole house put
together. Have you fallen in love with it, Anne? It's that low, big room
back of the stairs. You go down two steps into it. There's a grape-vine
over the window. Whose chamber is that, Farvie?"

He stood perfectly still by the mantel, and the old look of
introspective pain, almost of a surprised terror, crossed his face. Then
they knew. But he delayed only a minute or so in answering.

"Why," said he, "that was Jeff's room when he lived at home."

"Then," said Anne, in her assuaging voice, "he must have it again."

"Yes," said the colonel. "I think you'd better plan it that way."

They said no more about the room, but Anne hunted out a set of Dickens
and a dog picture she had known as belonging to Jeff, who was the own
son of the colonel, and took them in there. Once she caught Lydia in the
doorway looking in, a strangled passion in her face, as if she were
going back to the page of an old grief.

"Queer, isn't it?" she asked, and Anne, knowing all that lay in the
elision, nodded silently.

Once that afternoon the great brass knocker on the front door fell, and
Mary Nellen answered and came to Lydia to say a gentleman was there.
Should he be asked in? Mary Nellen seemed to have an impression that he
was mysteriously not the sort to be admitted. Lydia went at once to the
door whence there came to Anne, listening with a worried intensity, a
subdued runnel of talk. The colonel, who had sat down by the library
window with a book he was not reading, as if he needed to soothe some
inner turmoil of his own by the touch of leathern covers, apparently did
not hear this low-toned interchange. He glanced into the orchard from
time to time, and once drummed on the window when a dog dashed across
and ran distractedly back and forth along the brick wall. When Anne
heard the front door close she met Lydia in the hall.

"Was it?" she asked.

Lydia nodded. Her face had a flush; the pupils of her eyes were large.

"Yes," said she. "His paper wanted to know whether Jeff was coming here
and who was to meet him. I said I didn't know."

"Did he ask who you were?"

"Yes. I told him I'd nothing to say. He said he understood Jeff's father
was here, and asked if he might see him. I said, No, he couldn't see
anybody."

"Was he put out?" Anne had just heard Mary Nellen use the phrase. Anne
thought it covered a good deal.

"No," said Lydia. She lifted her plump hands and threaded the hair back
from her forehead, a gesture she had when she was tired. It seemed to
spur her brain. "No," she repeated, in a slow thoughtfulness, "he was a
kind of gentleman. I had an idea he was sorry for me, for us all, I
suppose. I was sorry for him, too. He was trying to earn his living and
I wouldn't let him."

"You couldn't."

"No," said Lydia, rather drearily, "I couldn't. Do you think Farvie
heard?"

"I think not. He didn't seem to."

But it was with redoubled solicitude that they threw their joint
energies into making supper inviting, so that the colonel might at least
get a shred of easement out of a pleasant meal. Mary Nellen, who
amicably divided themselves between the task of cooking and serving,
forwarded their desires, making faces all the time at unfamiliar
sauce-pans, and quite plainly agreed with them that men were to be
comforted by such recognised device. Anne and Lydia were deft little
housewives. They had a sober recognition of the pains that go to a
well-ordered life, and were patient in service. Their father had no
habit of complaint if the machinery creaked and even caused the walls to
shudder with faulty action. Yet they knew their gentle ways contributed
to his peace.

After supper, having seen that he was seated and ready for the little
talk they usually had in the edge of the evening, Lydia wondered whether
she ought to tell him a reporter had run them down; but while she
balanced the question there came another clanging knock and Mary Nellen
beckoned her. This one was of another stamp. He had to get his story,
and he had overborne Mary Nellen and penetrated to the hall. Lydia could
hear the young inexorable voice curtly talking down Mary Nellen and she
closed the library door behind her. But when the front door had shut
after the invader and Lydia came back, again with reddened cheeks and
distended eyes, the colonel went to it and shot the bolt.

"That's enough for to-night," said he. "The next I'll see, but not till
morning."

"You know we all thought it best you shouldn't," Anne said, always
faintly interrogative. "So long as we needn't say who we are. They'd
know who you were."

"His father," said Lydia, from an indignation disproportioned to the
mild sadness she saw in the colonel's face. "That's what they'd say: his
father. I don't believe Anne and I could bear that, the way they'd say
it. I don't believe Jeff could either."

The colonel had, even in his familiar talk with them, a manner of
old-fashioned courtesy.

"I didn't think it mattered much myself who saw them," he said, "when
you proposed it. But now it has actually happened I see it's very
unfitting for you to do it, very unfitting. However, I don't believe we
shall be troubled again to-night."

But their peace had been broken. They felt irrationally like
ill-defended creatures in a state of siege. The pretty wall-paper didn't
help them out, nor any consciousness of the blossoming orchard in the
chill spring air. The colonel noted the depression in his two defenders
and, by a spurious cheerfulness, tried to bring them back to the warmer
intimacies of retrospect.

"It was in this very room," he said, "that I saw your dear mother
first."

Lydia looked up, brightly ready for diversion. Anne sat, her head bent a
little, responsive to the intention of his speech.

"I was sitting here," said he, "alone. I had, I am pretty sure, this
very book in my hand. I wasn't reading it. I couldn't read. The maid
came in and told me a lady wanted to see me."

"What time of the day was it, Farvie?" Lydia asked, with her eager
sympathy.

"It was the late afternoon," said he. "In the early spring. Perhaps it
was a day like this. I don't remember. Well, I had her come in. Before I
knew where I was, there she stood, about there, in the middle of the
floor. You know how she looked."

"She looked like Lydia," said Anne. It was not jealousy in her voice,
only yearning. It seemed very desirable to look like Lydia or their
mother.

"She was much older," said the colonel. "She looked very worried indeed.
I remember what she said, remember every word of it. She said, 'Mr.
Blake, I'm a widow, you know. And I've got two little girls. What am I
going to do with them?'"

"She did the best thing anybody could," said Lydia. "She gave us to
you."

"I have an idea I cried," said the colonel. "Really I know I did. And it
broke her all up. She'd come somehow expecting Jeff's father to account
for the whole business and assure her there might be a few cents left.
But when she saw me dribbling like a seal, she just ran forward and put
her arms round me. And she said, 'My dear! my dear!' I hear her now."

"So do I," said Anne, in her low tone. "So do I."

"And you never'd seen each other before," said Lydia, in an ecstasy of
youthful love for love. "I call that great."

"We were married in a week," said the colonel. "She'd come to ask me to
help her, do you see? but she found I was the one that needed help. And
I had an idea I might do something for her by taking the responsibility
of her two little girls. But it was no use pretending. I didn't marry
her for anything except, once I'd seen her, I couldn't live without
her."

"Wasn't mother darling!" Lydia threw at him, in a passionate sympathy.

"You're like her, Lydia," said Anne again.

But Lydia shook her head.

"I couldn't hold a candle to mother," said she. "My eyes may be like
hers. So is my forehead. So's my mouth. But I'm no more like mother----"

"It was her sympathy," said their father quietly, seeming to have
settled it all a long time before. "She was the most absolutely loving
person. You girls may be like her in that, too. I'm sure you're
inconceivably good to me."

"I'd like to love people to death," said Lydia, with the fierceness of
passion not yet named and recognised, but putting up its beautiful head
now and then to look her remindingly in the eyes. "I'd like to love
everybody. You first, Farvie, you and Anne. And Jeff. I'm going to love
Jeff like a house-a-fire. He doesn't know what it is to have a sister.
When he comes in I'm going to run up to him as if I couldn't wait to get
him into the room, and kiss him and say, 'Here we are, Jeff. I'm Lyddy.
Here's Anne.' You kiss him, too, Anne."

"Why," said Anne softly, "I wonder."

"You needn't stop to wonder," said Lydia. "You do it. He's going to
realise he's got sisters anyway--and a father."

The same thought sprang at once into their three minds. It was not
uncommon. They lived so close together, in such a unison of interests,
that their minds often beat accordingly. Anne hesitatingly voiced the
question.

"Do you think Esther'll meet him?"

"Impossible to say," the colonel returned, and Lydia's nipped lips and
warlike glance indicated that she found it hideously impossible to say.

"I intend to find out," said she.

"I have an idea," said her father, as if he were in the kindest manner
heading her off from a useless project, "that I'd better make a call on
her myself, perhaps at once."

"She wouldn't see you when you came before," Lydia reminded him, in a
hot rebellion against Jeff's wife who had not stood by him in his
downfall. In the space of time that he had been outside the line of
civilised life, an ideal of Jeff had been growing up in her own mind as
in Anne's. They saw him as the wronged young chevalier without reproach
whom a woman had forsaken in his need. Only a transcript of their
girlish dreams could have told them what they thought of Jeff. His
father's desolation without him, the crumbling of his father's life from
hale middle age to fragile eld, this whirling of the leaves of time had
seemed to bring them to a blazoned page where Jeff's rehabilitation
should be wrought out in a magnificent sequence. The finish to that
volume only: Jeff's life would begin again in the second volume, to be
annotated with the approbation of his fellows. He would be lifted on the
hands of men, their plaudits would upbear his soul, and he would at last
triumph, sealed by the sanction of his kind. They grew intoxicated over
it sometimes, in warm talks when their father was not there. He talked
very little: a few words now and then to show what he thought of Jeff, a
phrase or two where he unconsciously turned for them the page of the
past and explained obscurities in the text they couldn't possibly
elucidate alone--these they treasured and made much of, as the
antiquary interprets his stone language. He never knew what importance
they laid on every shred of evidence about Jeff. Perhaps if he had known
he would have given them clearer expositions. To him Jeff was the
dearest of sons that ever man begot, strangely pursued by a malign
destiny accomplished only through the very chivalry and softness of the
boy's nature. No hero, though; he would never have allowed his girls to
build on that. And in all this rehabilitation of Jeff, as the girls saw
it, there was one dark figure like the black-clad mourner at the grave
who seems to deny the tenet of immortality: his wife, who had not stood
by him and who was living here in Addington with her grandmother, had
insisted on living with grandmother, in fact, as a cloak for her
hardness. Sometimes they felt if they could sweep the black-clad figure
away from the grave of Jeff's hopes, Jeff, in glorious apotheosis, would
rise again.

"What a name for her--Esther!" Lydia ejaculated, with an intensity of
hatred Anne tried to waft away by a little qualifying murmur. "Esther!
Esthers are all gentle and humble and beautiful."

"She is a very pretty woman," said her father, with a wise gentleness of
his own. Lydia often saw him holding the balance for her intemperate
judgments, his grain of gold forever equalising her dross. "I think
she'd be called a beautiful woman. Jeff thought she was."

"Do you actually believe, Farvie," said Lydia, "that she hasn't been to
see him once in all these hideous years?"

"I know it," said he. "However, we mustn't blame her. She may be a timid
woman. We must stand by her and encourage her and make it easier for her
to meet him now. Jeff was very much in love with her. He'll understand
her better than we do."

"I don't understand her at all," said Lydia, "unless you're going to let
us say she's selfish and a traitor and----"

"No, no," said Anne. "We don't know her. We haven't even seen her. We
must do what Farvie says, and then what Jeff says. I feel as if Jeff had
thought things out a lot."

"Yes," said Lydia, and bit her lip on the implied reason that he'd had
plenty of time.

"Yes," said the colonel gravely, in his own way. "I'd better go over
there early to-morrow afternoon. Before the reporters get at her."

"Maybe they've done it already," Lydia suggested, and the gravity of his
face accorded in the fear that it might be so.

Lydia felt no fear: a fiery exultation, rather. She saw no reason why
Esther should be spared her share of invasion, except, indeed, as it
might add to the publicity of the thing.

"You'll tell her, Farvie," Anne hesitated, "just what we'd decided to do
about his coming--about meeting him?"

"Yes," said he. "In fact, I should consult her. She must have thought
out things for herself, just as he must. I should tell her he
particularly asked us not to meet him. But I don't think that would
apply to her. I think it would be a beautiful thing for her to do. If
reporters are there----"

"They will be," Lydia interjected savagely.

"Well, if they are, it wouldn't be a bad thing for them to report that
his wife was waiting for him. It would be right and simple and
beautiful. But if she doesn't meet him, certainly we can't. That would
give rise to all kinds of publicity and pain. I think she'll see that."

"I don't think she'll see anything," said Lydia. "She's got a heart like
a stone."

"Oh, don't say that," Anne besought her, "in advance."

"It isn't in advance," said Lydia. "It's after all these years."




III


The next day, after an early dinner--nobody in Addington dined at
night--the colonel, though not sitting down to a definite conclave, went
over with Anne and Lydia every step of his proposed call on Esther, as
if they were planning a difficult route and a diplomatic mission at the
end, and later, in a state of even more exquisite personal fitness than
usual, the call being virtually one of state, he set off to find his
daughter-in-law. Anne and Lydia walked with him down the drive. They had
the air of upholding him to the last.

The way to Esther's house, which was really her grandmother's, he had
trodden through all his earlier life. His own family and Esther's had
been neighbours intimately at one, and, turning the familiar corner, he
felt, with a poignancy cruel in its force, youth recalled and age
confirmed. Here were associations almost living, they were so vivid, yet
wraithlike in sheer removedness. It was all very subtle, in its
equal-sided force, this resurrection of the forms of youth, to be met by
the cold welcome of a change in him. The heart did quicken over its
recognition of the stability of things, but with no robust urge such as
it knew in other years; indeed it fluttered rather pathetically, as if
it begged him to put no unwonted strain upon it now, as in that time
foregone, when every beat cried out, "Heave the weight! charge up the
hill! We're equal to it. If we're not, we'll die submerged in our own
red fount." He was not taking age with any sense of egotistical
rebellion; but it irked him like an unfamiliar weight patiently borne
and for no reward. The sense of the morning of life was upon him; yet
here he was fettered to his traitorous body which was surely going to
betray him in the end. No miracle could save him from atomic downfall.
However exultantly he might live again, here he should live no more, and
though there was in him no fervency either of rebellion or belief, he
did look gravely now at the pack of mortality he carried. It was
carefully poised and handled. His life was precious to him, for he
wanted this present coil of circumstance made plain before he should go
hence and be seen no more.

The streets just now were empty. It was an hour of mid-afternoon when
ladies had not dawned, in calling raiment, upon a world of other
expectant ladies, and when the business man is under bonds to keep
sequestered with at least the pretext of arduous tasks. The colonel had
ample opportunity to linger by yards where shrubbery was coming out in
shining buds, and draw into his grave consciousness the sense of spring.
Every house had associations for him, as every foot of the road. Now he
was passing the great yellow mansion where James Reardon lived. Reardon,
of Irish blood and American public school training, had been Jeffrey's
intimate, the sophisticated elder who had shown him, with a cool
practicality that challenged emulation, the world and how it was to be
bought. When there were magnates in Addington, James had been a poor
boy. There were still magnates, and now he was one of them, so far as
club life went and monetary transactions. He had never tried to marry an
Addington girl, and therefore could not be said to have put his social
merit absolutely to the touch. But luck had always served him. Perhaps
it would even have done it there. He had gone into a broker's office,
had made a strike with his savings and then another with no warning
reversal, and got the gay habit of rolling up money like a snowball on
a damp day. When the ball got too heavy for him to handle deftly, Jim
dropped the game, only starting the ball down hill--if one may find
symbolism for sedate investments--gathering weight as it went and, it
was thought, at obstructive points persuading other little boys to push.
The colonel had often wondered if Jeffrey had been one of those little
boys. Now, at forty-five, Reardon lived a quiet, pottering life, a
bachelor with a housekeeper and servants enough to keep the big yellow
house in form. He read in a methodical way, really the same books over
and over, collected prints with a conviction that a print is a print,
exercised his big frame in the club gymnasium, took a walk of sanitary
length morning and afternoon and went abroad once in two years.

"I've got money enough," he was accustomed to say, when the adventurous
petitioned him to bolster new projects for swift returns, "all in
gilt-edged securities. That's why I don't propose to lay awake an hour
in my life, muddling over stocks. Why, it's destruction, man! it's
death. It eats up your tissues faster than old age." The eccentricity of
his verb indicated only the perfection of his tact. He had a perfect
command of the English language, but a wilful lapse into colloquialisms
endeared him, he knew, to his rougher kind. There was no more popular
man. He was blond and open-featured. He spoke in a loud yet always
sympathetic voice, and in skilfully different fashions he called every
man brother.

Yet the colonel, his fancy entering the seclusion of the yellow house,
rich in books that would have been sealed to even Jim's immediate
forebears, rich in all possible mechanical appliances for the ease of
life, speculated whether Reardon had, in the old days, been good for
Jeff. Could he, with his infernal luck, have been good for any youth of
Jeff's impetuous credulity? Mightn't Jeff have got the idea that life
is an easy job? The colonel felt now that he had always distrusted
Reardon's bluff bonhomie, his sympathetic voice, his booming implication
that he was letting you into his absolutely habitable heart. He knew,
too, that without word of his own his distrust had filtered out to Anne
and Lydia, and that they were prepared, while they stood by Jeff to
unformulated issues, to trip up Reardon, somehow bring him low and set
Jeff up impeccable. Of this he was thinking gravely now, the different
points of it starting up in his mind like sparks of light while he
regarded Reardon's neat shrubs healthily growing, as if the last drop of
fertilising had been poured into them at this spring awakening, and all
pruned to a wholesome symmetry. Then, hearing the sound of a door and
painfully averse to meeting Reardon, he went on and mounted the steps of
the great brick house where his daughter-in-law lived. And here the
adventure came to an abrupt stop. The maid, perfectly courteous and yet
with an air of readiness even he, the most unsuspecting of men, could
not fail to recognise, told him, almost before he had finished his
inquiry, that Mrs. Blake was not at home. She would not be at home that
afternoon. No, sir, not the next day. Madam Bell, Esther's grandmother,
he asked for then. No, sir, she was not at home. Looking in the smooth
sanguine face of the girl, noting mechanically her light eyelashes and
the spaces between her teeth, he knew she lied. Yet he was a courteous
gentleman, and did not report that to his inner mind. He bestowed his
card upon Sapphira, and walked away at his sedate pace, more than
anything puzzled. Esther was not proposing to take part in their coming
drama. He couldn't count on her. He was doubly sorry because this
defection was going to make Anne and Lydia hate her more than ever, and
he was averse to the intensification of hatred. He was no mollycoddle,
but he had an intuition that hatred is of no use. It hindered things,
all sorts of things: kindliness, even justice.

The girls were waiting for him at the door, but reading his face, they
seemed, while not withdrawing themselves bodily, really to slip away, in
order not even tacitly to question him. They had a marvellous
unwillingness to bring a man to the bar. There was no over-tactful
display of absence, but their minds simply would not set upon and
interrogate his, nor skulk round corners to spy upon it. But he had to
tell them, and he was anxious to get it over. Just as they seemed now
about to melt away to urgent tasks, he called them back.

"She's not at home," said he.

Anne looked a species of defeated interest. Lydia's eyes said
unmistakably, "I don't believe it." The colonel was tired enough to want
to say, "I don't either," but he never felt at liberty to encourage
Lydia's too exuberant candour.

"She's not to be at home to-morrow," he said. "It looks as if she'd gone
for--for the present," he ended lamely, put down his hat and went into
the east room and took up his brown book.

"Oh!" said Lydia.

That was all he was to hear from her, and he was glad. He hadn't any
assurance within him of the force to assuage an indignation he
understood though he couldn't feel it. That was another of the levelling
powers of age. You couldn't key your emotions up to the point where they
might shatter something or perhaps really do some good. It wasn't only
that you hadn't the blood and breath. It also didn't seem worth while.
He was angry, in a measure, with the hidden woman he couldn't get at to
bid her come and help him fight the battle that was hers even more
indubitably than his; yet he was conscious that behind her defences was
another world of passion and emotion and terribly strong desires, as
valid as his own. She had her side. He didn't know what it was. He
wanted really to avoid knowing, lest it weaken him through its appeal
for a new sympathy; but he knew the side was there. This, he said to
himself, with a half smile, was probably known as tolerance. It seemed
to him old age.

So, from their benign choice, he had really nothing to say to Lydia or
Anne. In the late afternoon Anne asked him to go to walk and show her
the town, and he put her off. He was conscious of having drowsed away in
his chair, into one of those intervals he found so inevitable, and that
were, at the same time, so irritatingly foreign to his previous habits
of life. He did not drop his pursuits definitely to take a nap. The nap
seemed to take him, even when he was on the margin of some lake or river
where he thought himself well occupied in seeing the moving to and fro
of boats, for business and pleasure, just as his own boat had gallantly
cut invisible paths on the air and water in those earlier years. The nap
would steal upon him like an amiable yet inexorable joker, and throw a
cloudy veil over his brain and eyes, and he would sink into a gulf he
had not perceived. It lay at his feet, and something was always ready to
push him into it. He thought sometimes, wondering at the inevitableness
of it, that one day the veil would prove a pall.

But after their twilight supper, he felt more in key with the tangible
world, and announced himself as ready to set forth. Lydia refused to go.
She had something to do, she said; but she walked down the driveway with
them, and waited until they had gone a rod or two along the street. The
colonel turned away from Esther's house, as Lydia knew he would. She had
not watched him for years without seeing how resolutely he put the
memory of pain or loss behind him whenever manly honour would allow.
The colonel's thin skin was his curse. Yet he wore it with a proud
indifference it took a good deal of warm affection to penetrate. Lydia
stood there and looked up and down the street. It had been a day almost
hot, surprising for the season, and she was dressed in conformity in
some kind of thin stuff with little dots of black. Her round young arms
were bare to the elbow, and there was a narrow lacy frill about her
neck. It was too warm really to need a hat or jacket, and this place was
informal enough, she thought, to do away with gloves. Having rapidly
decided that it was also a pity to cool resolution by returning to the
house for any conventional trappings, she stepped to the pavement and
went, with a light rapidity, along the road to Esther's.

She knew the way. When she reached the house she regarded it for a
moment from the opposite side of the street, and Jim Reardon, coming out
of his own gate for his evening's stroll to the Colonial Club, saw her
and crossed, instead of continuing on his own side as he ordinarily did.
She was a nymph-like vision of the twilight, and there was nothing of
the Addington girl about her unconsidered ease. Jim looked at her
deferentially, as he passed, a hand ready for his hat. But though Lydia
saw him she dismissed him as quickly, perhaps as no matter for
wonderment, and again because her mind was full of Esther. Now in the
haste that dares not linger, she crossed the street and ascended the
steps of the brick house. As she did so she was conscious of the
stillness within. It might have been a house embodied out of her own
dreams. But she did not ring, nor did she touch the circlet the brass
lion of a knocker held obligingly in his mouth. She lifted the heavy
latch, stepped in and shut the door behind her.

This was not the front entrance. The house stood on a corner, and this
door led into a little square hall with a colonial staircase of charming
right-angled turns going compactly up. Lydia looked into the room at her
right and the one at her left. They were large and nobly proportioned,
furnished in a faded harmony of antique forms. The arrangement of the
house, she fancied, might be much like the colonel's. But though she
thought like lightning in the excitement of her invasion, there was not
much clearness about it; her heart was beating too urgently, and the
blood in her ears had tightened them. No one was in the left-hand room,
no one was in the right; only there was a sign of occupancy: a
peach-coloured silk bag hung on the back of a chair and the lacy corner
of a handkerchief stood up in its ruffly throat. The bag, the
handkerchief, brought her courage back. They looked like a substantial
Esther of useless graces she had to fight. And so passionately alive was
she to everything concerning Jeffrey that it seemed base of a woman once
belonging to him to parade lacy trifles in ruffly bags when he was
condemned to coarse, hard usages. But having Esther to fight, she
stepped into that room, and immediately a warm, yet, she had time to
think, rather a discontented voice called from the room behind it:

"Is that you, Sophy?"

Lydia answered in an intemperate haste, and like many another rebel to
the English tongue, she found a proper pronoun would not serve her for
sufficient emphasis.

"No," she said, "it's me."

And she followed on the heels of her words, with a determined soft pace,
to the room of the voice, and came upon a brown-eyed, brown-haired,
rather plump creature in a white dress, who was lying in a long chair
and eating candied fruit from a silver dish. This, Lydia knew, was
Esther Blake. She had expected to feel for her the distaste of
righteousness in the face of the wrong-doer: for Esther, she knew, was
proven, by long-continued hardness of heart and behaviour, indubitably
wrong. Here was Esther, Jeff's wife, not showing more than two-thirds of
her thirty-three years, her brow unlined, her expression of a general
sweetness indicating not only that she wished to please but that she
had, in the main, been pleased. The beauty of her face was in its long
eyelashes, absurdly long, as if nature had said, "Here's a by-product we
don't know what to do with. Put it into lashes." Her hands were white
and exquisitely cared for, and she wore no wedding ring. Lydia noted
that, with an involuntary glance, but strangely it did not move her to
any access of indignation. Anger she did feel, but it was, childishly,
anger over the candied fruit. "How can you lie there and eat," she
wanted to cry, "when Jeff is where he is?"

A little flicker ran over Esther's face: it might at first have been the
ripple of an alarmed surprise, but she immediately got herself in hand.
She put her exquisite feet over the side of the chair, got up and, in
one deft motion, set the fruit on a little table and ran a hand lightly
over her soft disorder of hair.

"Do excuse me," said she. "I didn't hear you."

"My name is French," said Lydia, in an incisive haste, "Lydia French. I
came to talk with you about Jeff."

The shadow that went over Esther's face was momentary, no more than a
bird's wing over a flowery plot; but it was a shadow only. There was no
eagerness or uplift or even trouble at the name of Jeff.

"Father came this afternoon," said Lydia. "He wanted to talk things
over. He couldn't get in."

"Oh," said Esther, "I'm sorry for that. So you are one of the
step-children. Sit down, won't you. Oh, do take this chair."

Lydia was only too glad to take any chair and get the strain off her
trembling knees. It was no trivial task, she saw, to face Jeff's wife
and drag her back to wifehood. But she ignored the proffer of the softer
chair. It was easier to take a straight one and sit upright, her brown
little hands clenched tremblingly. Esther, too, took a chair the twin of
hers, as if to accept no advantage; she sat with dignity and waited
gravely. She seemed to be watchful, intent, yet bounded by reserves. It
was the attitude of waiting for attack.

"This very next week, you know, Jeff will be discharged." Lydia spoke
with the brutality born of her desperation. Still Esther watched her.
"You know, don't you?" Lydia hurled at her. She had a momentary thought,
"The woman is a fool." "From jail," she continued. "From the Federal
Prison. You know, don't you? You heard he had been pardoned?"

Esther looked at her a full minute, her face slowly suffusing. Lydia saw
the colour even flooding into her neck. Her eyes did not fill, but they
deepened in some unusual way. They seemed to be saying, defiantly
perhaps, that they could cry if they would, but they had other modes of
empery.

"You know, don't you?" Lydia repeated, but more gently. She began to
wonder now whether trouble had weakened the wife's brain, her power at
least of receptivity.

"Yes," said Esther. "I know it, of course. To-day's paper had quite a
long synopsis of the case."

Now Lydia flushed and looked defiant.

"I am glad to know that," she said. "I must burn the paper. Farvie
sha'n't see it."

"There were two reporters here yesterday," said Esther. She spoke
angrily now. Her voice hinted that this was an indignity which need not
have been put upon her.

"Did you see them?" asked Lydia, in a flash, ready to blame her whatever
she did.

But the answer was eloquent with reproach.

"Certainly I didn't see them. I have never seen any of them. When that
horrible newspaper started trying to get him pardoned, reporters came
here in shoals. I never saw them. I'd have died sooner."

"Did Jeff write you he didn't want to be pardoned? He did us."

"No. He hasn't written me for years."

She looked a baffling number of things now, voluntarily pathetic, a
little scornful, as if she washed her hands gladly of the whole affair.

"Farvie thinks," said Lydia recklessly, "that you haven't written to
him."

"How could I?" asked Esther, in a quick rebuttal which actually had a
convincing sound, "when he didn't write to me?"

"But he was in prison."

"He hasn't had everything to bear," said Esther, rising and putting some
figurines right on the mantel where they seemed to be right enough
before. "Do you know any woman whose life has been ruined as mine has?
Have you ever met one? Now have you?"

"Farvie's life is ruined," said Lydia incisively. "Jeff's life is
ruined, too. I don't know whether it's any worse for a woman than for a
man."

"Jeffrey," said Esther, "is taking the consequences of his own act."

"You don't mean to tell me you think he was to blame?" Lydia said, in a
low tone charged with her own complexity of sentiment. She was
horror-stricken chiefly. Esther saw that, and looked at her in a large
amaze.

"You don't mean to tell me you think he wasn't?" she countered.

"Why, of course he wasn't!" Lydia's cheeks were flaming. She was
impatiently conscious of this heat and her excited breath. But she had
entered the fray, and there was no returning.

"Then who was guilty?" Esther asked it almost triumphantly, as if the
point of proving herself right were more to her than the innocence of
Jeff.

"That's for us to find out," said Lydia. She looked like the apostle of
a holy war.

"But if you could find out, why haven't you done it before? Why have you
waited all these years?"

"Partly because we weren't grown up, Anne and I. And even when we were,
when we'd begun to think about it, we were giving dancing lessons, to
help out. You know Farvie put almost every cent he had into paying the
creditors, and then it was only a drop in the bucket. And besides Jeff
pleaded guilty, and he kept writing Farvie to let it all stand as it
was, and somehow, we were so sorry for Jeff we couldn't help feeling
he'd got to have his way. Even if he wanted to sacrifice himself he
ought to be allowed to, because he couldn't have his way about anything
else. At least, that was what Anne and I felt. We've talked it over a
lot. We've hardly talked of anything else. And we think Farvie feels so,
too."

"You speak as if it were a sum of money he'd stolen out of a drawer,"
said Esther. Her cheeks were red, like exquisite roses. "It wasn't a sum
of money. I read it all over in the paper the other day. He had
stockholders' money, and he plunged, it said, just before the panic. He
invested other people's money in the wrong things, and then, it said, he
tried to realise."

"I can't help it," said Lydia doggedly. "He wasn't guilty."

"Why should he have said he was guilty?" Esther put this to her with her
unchanged air of triumphant cruelty.

"He might, to save somebody else."

Esther was staring now and Lydia stared back, caught by the almost
terrified surprise in Esther's face. Did she know about Jim Reardon? But
Esther broke the silence, not in confession, if she did know: with
violence rather.

"You never will prove any such thing. Never in the world. The money was
in Jeff's hands. He hadn't even a partner."

"He had friends," said Lydia. But now she felt she had implied more than
was discreet, and she put a sign up mentally not to go that way.
Whatever Esther said, she would keep her own eyes on the sign.




IV


Still she returned to the assault. Her next question even made her raise
her brows a little, it seemed so crude and horrible; she could have
laughed outright at herself for having the nerve to put it. She couldn't
imagine what the colonel would have thought of her. Anne, she knew,
would have crumpled up into silken disaster like a flower under too
sharp a wind.

"Aren't you going to ask Jeff here to live with you?"

Esther was looking at her in a fiery amaze Lydia knew she well deserved.
"Who is this child," Esther seemed to be saying, "rising up out of
nowhere and pursuing me into my most intimate retreats?" She answered in
a careful hedging way that was not less pretty than her unconsidered
speech:

"Jeffrey and I haven't been in communication for years."

Then Lydia lost her temper and put herself in the wrong.

"Why," said she, "you said that before. Besides, it's no answer anyway.
You could have written to him, and as soon as you heard he was going to
be pardoned, you could have made your plans. Don't you mean to ask him
here?"

Esther made what sounded like an irrelevant answer, but it meant
apparently something even solemn to her.

"My grandmother," said she, "is an old lady. She's bedridden. She's
upstairs, and I keep the house very quiet on her account."

Lydia had a hot desire to speak out what she really felt: to say, "Your
grandmother's being bedridden has no more to do with it than the cat."
Lydia was prone to seek the cat for exquisite comparison. Persons, with
her, could no more sing--or dance--than the cat. She found the cat, in
the way of metaphor, a mysteriously useful animal. But the very
embroidery of Esther's mode of speech forbade her invoking that
eccentric aid. Lydia was not eager to quarrel. She would have been
horrified if circumstance had ever provoked her into a rash word to her
father, and with Anne she was a dove of peace. But Esther by a word, it
seemed, by a look, had the power of waking her to unholy revolt. She
thought it was because Esther was so manifestly not playing fair. Why
couldn't she say she wouldn't have Jeff in the house, instead of sitting
here and talking like a nurse in a sanitarium, about bedridden
grandmothers?

"It isn't because we don't want him to come to us," said Lydia.
"Farvie's been living for it all these years, and Anne and I don't talk
of anything else."

"Isn't that interesting!" said Esther, though not as if she put a
question. "And you're no relation at all." She made it, for the moment,
seem rather a breach of taste to talk of nothing else but a man to whom
Lydia wasn't a sister, and Lydia's face burned in answer. A wave of
childish misery came over her. She wished she had not come. She wished
she knew how to get away. And while she took in Esther's harmony of
dress, her own little odds and ends of finery grew painfully cheap to
her. But the telephone bell rang in the next room, and Esther rose and
excused herself. While she was gone, Lydia sat there with her little
hands gripped tightly. Now she wished she knew how to get out of the
house another way, before Esther should come back. If it were not for
the credit of the family, she would find the other way. Meantime
Esther's voice, very liquid now that she was not talking to a sister
woman, flowed in to her and filled her with a new distrust and hatred.

"Please come," said Esther. "I depend upon it. Do you mean you weren't
ever coming any more?"

When she appeared again, Lydia was quivering with a childish anger. She
had risen, and stood with her hands clasped before her. So she was in
the habit of standing before her dancing class until the music should
begin and lead her through the measures. She was delightful so and, from
long training, entirely self-possessed.

"Good-bye," said she.

"Don't go," said Esther, in a conventional prettiness, but no such
beguilement as she had wafted through the telephone. "It's been so
pleasant meeting you."

Again Lydia had her ungodly impulse to contradict, to say: "No, it
hasn't either. You know it hasn't." But she turned away and, head a
little bent, walked out of the house, saying again, "Good-bye."

When she got out into the dusk, she went slowly, to cool down and think
it over. It wouldn't do for the colonel and Anne to see her on the swell
of such excitement, especially as she had only defeat to bring them. She
had meant to go home in a triumphant carelessness and say: "Oh, yes, I
saw her. I just walked right in. That's what you ought to have done,
Farvie. But we had it out, and I think she's ready to do the decent
thing by Jeff." No such act of virtuous triumph: she had simply been a
silly girl, and Anne would find it out. Near the corner she met the man
she had seen on her way in coming, and he looked at her again with that
solicitous air of being ready to take off his hat. She went on with a
consciousness of perhaps having achieved an indiscretion in coming out
bareheaded, and the man proceeded to Esther's door. He was expected.
Esther herself let him in.

Reardon had not planned to go to see her at that hour. He had meant to
spend it at the club, feet up, trotting over the path of custom, knowing
to a dot what men he would find there and what each would say. Old Dan
Wheeler would talk about the advisability of eating sufficient
vegetables to keep your stomach well distended. Young Wheeler would
refer owlishly to the Maries and Jennies of an opera troupe recently in
Addington, and Ollie Hastings, the oldest bore, would tell long stories,
and wheeze. But Reardon was no sooner in his seat, with his glass beside
him, than he realised he was disturbed, in some unexpected way. It might
have been the pretty girl he met going into Esther's; it might have been
the thought of Esther herself, the unheard call from her. So he left his
glass untasted and telephoned her: "You all right?" To which Esther
replied in a doubtful purr. "Want me to come up?" he asked, as he
thought, against his will. And he swallowed a third of his firewater at
a gulp and went to find her. He knew what he should find,--an Esther who
bade him remember, by all the pliancy of her attractive body and every
tone of her voice, how irreconcilably hard it was that she should have a
husband pardoned out of prison, a husband of whom she was afraid.

Lydia found Anne waiting at the gate.

"Why, where've you been?" asked Anne, with all the air of a prim mother.

"Walking," said Lydia meekly.

"You'd better have come with us," said Anne. "It was very nice. Farvie
told me things."

"Yes," said Lydia, "I wish I had."

"Without your hat, too," pursued Anne anxiously. "I don't know whether
they do that here." Lydia remembered Reardon, and thought she knew.

They went to bed early, in a low state of mind. The colonel was tired,
and Anne, watching him from above as he toiled up the stairs, wondered
if he needed a little strychnia. She would remember, she thought, to
give it to him in the morning. After they had said good-night, and the
colonel, indeed, was in his bed, she heard the knocker clang and slipped
down the stairs to answer. Halfway she stopped, for Mary Nellen, candle
in hand, had arrived from the back regions, and was, with admirable
caution, opening the door a crack. But immediately she threw it wide,
and tossed her own reassurance over her shoulder, back to Anne.

"Mr. Alston Choate. To see your father."

So Anne came down the stairs, and Mr. Choate, hat in hand, apologised
for calling so late. He was extremely busy. He had to be at the office
over time, but he didn't want to-day's sun to go down and he not have
welcomed Mr. Blake. Anne had a chance, in the space of his delivering
this preamble, to think what a beautiful person he was. He had a young
face lighted by a twisted whimsical smile, and a capacious forehead,
built out a little into knobs of a noble sort, as if there were ample
chambers behind for the storing away of precedent. Altogether he would
have satisfied every æsthetic requirement: but he had a broken nose. The
portrait painter lusted for him, and then retired sorrowfully. But the
nose made him very human. Anne didn't know its eccentricity was the
result of breakage, but she saw it was quite unlike other noses and
found it superior to them.

Alston Choate spent every waking minute of his life in the practice of
law and the reading of novels; he was either digging into precedent,
expounding it, raging over its futilities, or guiltily losing himself in
the life of books. What he really loved was music and the arts, and he
dearly liked to read about the people who had leisure to follow such
lures, time to be emotional even, and indulge in pretty talk. Yet law
was the giant he had undertaken to wrestle with, and he kept his grip.
Sometime, he thought, the cases would be all tried or the feet of
litigants would seek other doors. The wave of middle age would toss him
to an island of leisure, and there he would sit down and hear music and
read long books.

As he saw Anne coming down the stairs, he thought of music personified.
A crowd of adjectives rose in his mind and, like attendant graces,
grouped themselves about her. He could imagine her sitting at archaic
instruments, calling out of them, with slim fingers, diaphanous
melodies. Yet the beauty that surrounded her like a light mantle she had
snatched up from nature to wear about her always, did not displace the
other vision of beauty in his heart. It did not even jostle it. Esther
Blake was, he knew, the sum of the ineffable feminine.

While he made that little explanation of his haste in coming and his
fear that it was an untoward time, Anne heard him with a faint smile,
all her listening in her upturned face. She was grateful to him. Her
father, she knew, would be the stronger for men's hands to hold him up.
She returned a little explanation. Father was so tired. He had gone to
bed. Then it seemed to her that Choate did a thing unsurpassed in
splendour.

"You are one of the daughters, aren't you?" he said.

"Yes," she answered. "I'm Anne."

Mary Nellen had delivered the candle to her hand, and she stood there
holding it in a serious manner, as if it lighted some ceremonial. Then
it was that Choate made the speech that clinched his hold upon her
heart.

"When do you expect your brother?"

Anne's face flooded. He was not acting as if Jeff, coming from an
unspeakable place, mustn't be mentioned. He was asking exactly as if
Jeff had been abroad and the ship was almost in. It was like a pilot
boat going out to see that he got in safely. And feeling the
circumstance greatly, she found herself answering with a slow
seriousness which did, indeed, carry much dignity.

"We are not sure. We think he may come directly through; but, on the
other hand, he may be tired and not feel up to it."

Choate smiled his irregular, queer smile. He was turning away now.

"Tell him I shall be in soon," he said. "I fancy he'll remember me.
Good-night."

Lydia was hanging over the balustrade.

"Who was it?" she asked, as Anne went up.

Anne told her and because she looked dreamy and not displeased, Lydia
asked:

"Nice?"

"Oh, yes," said Anne. "You've heard Farvie speak of him. Exactly what
Farvie said."

Lydia had gone some paces in undressing. She stood there in a white
wrapper, with her hair in its long braid, and stared at Anne for a
considering interval.

"I think I'd better tell you," said she. "I've been to see her."

There was but one person who could have been meant, and yet that was so
impossible that Anne stared and asked:

"Who?"

They had always spoken of Esther as Esther, among themselves, quite
familiarly, but now Lydia felt she would die rather than mention her
name.

"She is a hateful woman," said Lydia, "perfectly hateful."

"But what did you go for?" Anne asked, in a gentle perplexity.

"To find out," said Lydia, in a savage tearfulness, "what she means to
do."

"And what does she?"

"Nothing."




V


The house, almost of its own will, slid into order. Mary Nellen was a
wonderful person. She arranged and dusted and put questions to Anne as
to Cicero and Virgil, and then, when Anne convoyed her further, to the
colonel, and he found a worn lexicon in the attic and began to dig out
translations and chant melodious periods. The daughters could have
hugged Mary Nellen, bright-eyed and intent on advancement up the hill of
learning, for they gave him something to do to mitigate suspense until
his son should come. And one day at twilight, when they did not know it
was going to be that day at all, but when things were in a complete
state of readiness and everybody disposed to start at a sound, the front
door opened and Jeffrey, as if he must not actually enter until he was
bidden, stood there and knocked on the casing. Mary Nellen, having more
than mortal wit, seemed to guess who he was, and that the colonel must
not be startled. She appeared before Lydia in the dining-room and gave
her a signalling grimace. Lydia followed her, and met the man, now a
step inside the hall. Lydia, too, knew who it was. She felt the blood
run painfully into her face, and hoped he didn't see how confused she
was with her task of receiving him exactly right after all this time of
preparation. There was no question of kissing or in any way sealing her
sisterly devotion. She gave him a cold little hand, and he took it with
the same bewildered acquiescence. She looked at him, it seemed to her, a
long time, perhaps a full minute, and found him wholly alien to her
dreams of the wronged creature who was to be her brother. He was of a
good height, broad in the shoulders and standing well. His face held
nothing of the look she had always wrought into it from the picture of
his college year. It was rather square. The outline at least couldn't be
changed. The chin, she thought, was lovable. The eyes were large and
blue; stern, it seemed, but really from the habit of the forehead that
had been scarred with deepest lines. The high cheekbones gave him an odd
look as if she saw him in bronze. They stared at each other and Jeffrey
thought he ought to assure her he wasn't a tramp, when Lydia found her
voice.

"I'll tell Farvie," said she. She turned away from him, and immediately
whirled back again. "I've got to do it carefully. You stay here."

But in the library where the colonel sat over Mary Nellen's last classic
riddle, she couldn't break it at all.

"He's come," she said.

The colonel got up and Virgil slid to the floor.

"Where is he?" he called, in a sharp voice. It was a voice touched with
age and apprehension. The girls hadn't known how old a man he was until
they heard him calling for his son. Jeffrey heard it and came in with a
few long steps, and his father met him at the door. To the two girls
Jeff seemed astonished at the emotion he was awakening. How could he be,
they wondered, when this instant of his release had been so terrible and
so beautiful for a long time? The tears came rushing to their eyes, as
they saw Farvie. He had laid aside all his gentle restraint, and put his
shaking hands on Jeffrey's shoulders. And then he called him by the name
he had been saying over in his heart for these last lean years:

"My son! my son!"

If they had kissed, Lydia would not have been surprised. But the two
men looked at each other, the colonel took down his hands, and Jeffrey
drew forward a chair for him.

"Sit down a minute," he said, quite gently, and then the girls knew that
he really had been moved, though he hadn't shown it, and, ready to seize
upon anything to love in him, they decided they loved his voice. When
they had got away out of the room and stood close together in the
dining-room, as if he were a calamity to be fled from, that was the only
thing they could think of to break their silence.

"He's got a lovely voice," said Anne, and Lydia answered chokingly:

"Yes."

"Do you think he sings?" Anne pursued, more, Lydia knew, to loosen the
tension than anything. "Farvie never told us that."

But Lydia couldn't answer any more, and then they both became aware that
Mary Nellen had hurried out some supper from the pantry and put quite an
array of candles on the table. She had then disappeared. Mary Nellen had
great delicacy of feeling. Anne began to light the candles, and Lydia
went back to the library. The colonel and Jeffrey were sitting there
like two men with nothing in particular to say, but, because they
happened to be in the same room, exchanging commonplaces.

"Supper's in the dining-room," said Lydia, in a weak little voice.

The colonel was about to rise, but Jeffrey said:

"Not for me."

"Have you had something?" his father asked, and Jeffrey answered:

"None for me--thank you."

The last two words seemed to be an afterthought. Lydia wondered if he
hadn't felt like thanking anybody in years. There seemed to be nothing
for her to do in this rigid sort of reunion, and she went back to Anne
in the dining-room.

"He doesn't want anything," she said. "We can clear away."

They did it in their deft fashion of working together, and then sat down
in the candlelight, making no pretence of reading or talk. All the time
they could hear the two voices from the library, going on at regular
intervals. At ten o'clock they were still going on, at eleven. Lydia
felt a deadly sleepiness, but she roused then and said, in the midst of
a yawn:

"I'm afraid Farvie'll be tired."

"Yes," said Anne. "I'll go and speak to them."

She went out of the room, and crossed the hall in her delicate,
soft-stepping way. She seemed to Lydia astonishingly brave. Lydia could
hear her voice from the other room, such a kind voice but steadied with
a little clear authority.

"You mustn't get tired, Farvie."

The strange voice jumped in on the heels of hers, as if it felt it ought
to be reproved.

"Of course not. I'd no idea how late it was."

Anne turned to Jeffrey. Lydia, listening, could tell from the different
direction of the voice.

"Your room is all ready. It's your old room."

There was a pin-prick of silence and then the strange voice said
quickly: "Thank you," as if it wanted to get everything, even
civilities, quickly over.

Lydia sat still in the dining-room. The candles had guttered and gone
down, but she didn't feel it possible to move out of her lethargy. She
was not only sleepy but very tired. Yet the whole matter, she knew, was
that this undramatic homecoming had deadened all her expectations. She
had reckoned upon a brother ready to be called brother; she had meant to
devote herself to him and see Anne devote herself, with an equal mind.
And here was a gaunt creature with a sodden skin who didn't want
anything they could do. She heard him say "Good-night." There was only
one good-night, which must have been to the colonel, though Anne was
standing by, and then she heard Anne, in a little kind voice, asking her
father if he wouldn't have something hot before he went to bed. No, he
said. He should sleep. His voice sounded exhilarated, with a thrill in
it of some even gay relief, not at all like the voice that had said
good-night. And Anne lighted his candle for him and watched him up the
stairs, and Lydia felt curiously outside it all, as if they were playing
the play without her. Anne came in then and looked solicitously at the
guttered candles of which one was left with a winding-sheet, like a
tipsy host that had drunk the rest under the table, and appeared to be
comforting the others for having made such a spectacle of themselves to
no purpose. Lydia was so sleepy now that there seemed to be several
Annes and she heard herself saying fractiously:

"Oh, let's go to bed."

Through the short night she dreamed confusedly, always a dream about
offering Farvie a supper tray, and his saying: "No, I never mean to eat
again." And then the tray itself seemed to be the trouble, and it had to
be filled all over. But nobody wanted the food.

In the early morning she awoke with the sun full upon her, for she had
been too tired the night before to close a blind. She got out of bed and
ran to the window. The night had been so confusing that she felt in very
much of a hurry to see the day. Her room overlooked the orchard,
outlined by its high red wall. For the first time, the wall seemed to
have a purpose. A man in shirt and trousers was walking fast inside it,
and while she looked he began to run. It was Jeffrey, the real Jeffrey,
she felt sure; not the Jeffrey of last night who had been so far from
her old conception of him that she had to mould him all over now to fit
him into the orchard scene. He was running in a foolish, half-hearted
way; but suddenly he seemed to call upon his will and set his elbows and
ran hard. Lydia felt herself panting in sympathy. She had a distaste for
him, too, even with this ache of pity sharper than any she had felt
while she dreamed about him before he came. What did he want to do it
for? she thought, as she watched him run. Why need he stir up in her a
deeper sorrow than any she had felt? She stepped back from her stand
behind the curtain, and began to brush her hair. She wasn't very happy.
It was impossible to feel triumphant because he was out of prison. She
had lost a cherished dream, that was all. After this she wouldn't wake
in the morning thinking: "Some day he'll be free." She would think:
"He's come. What shall we do with him?"

When she went down she found everybody had got up early, and Mary
Nellen, with some prescience of it, had breakfast ready. Jeff, now in
his coat, stood by the dining-room door with his father, talking in a
commonplace way about the house as it used to be, and the colonel was
professing himself glad no newer fashions had made him change it in
essentials.

"Here they are," said he. "Here are the girls."

Anne, while Lydia entered from the hall, was coming the other way, from
the kitchen where she had been to match conclusions with Mary Nellen
about bacon and toast. Anne was flushed from the kitchen heat, and she
had the spirit to smile and call, "Good morning." But Lydia felt halting
and speechless. She had thought proudly of the tact she should show when
this moment came, but she met it like a child. They sat down, and Anne
poured coffee and asked how Farvie had slept. But before anybody had
begun to eat, there was a knock at the front door, and Mary Nellen,
answering it, came back to Anne, in a distinct puzzle over what was to
be done now:

"It's a newspaper man."

Lydia, in her distress, gave Jeffrey a quick look, to see if he had
heard. He put his napkin down. His jaw seemed suddenly to set.

"Reporters?" he asked his father.

The fulness had gone out of Farvie's face.

"I think you'd better let me see them," he began, but Jeffrey got up and
pushed back his chair.

"No," said he. "Go on with your breakfast."

They heard him in the hall, giving a curt greeting. "What do you want?"
it seemed to say. "Get it over."

There was a deep-toned query then, and Jeffrey answered, without
lowering his voice, in what seemed to Lydia and Anne, watching the
effect on their father, a reckless, if not a brutal, disregard of
decencies:

"Nothing to say. Yes, I understand. You fellows have got to get a story.
But you can't. I've been pardoned out, that's all. I'm here. That ends
it."

It didn't end it for them. They kept on proffering persuasive little
notes of interrogative sound, and possibly they advanced their claim to
be heard because they had their day's work to do.

"Sorry," said Jeff, yet not too curtly. "Yes, I did write for the prison
paper. Yes, it was in my hands. No, I hadn't the slightest intention of
over-turning any system. Reason for doing it? Why, because that's the
way the thing looked to me. Not on your life. I sha'n't write a word for
any paper. Sorry. Good-bye."

The front door closed. It had been standing wide, for it was a warm
morning, but Lydia could imagine he shut it now in a way to make more
certain his tormentors had gone. While he was out there her old sweet
sympathy came flooding back, but when he strode into the room and took
up his napkin again, she stole one glance at him and met his scowl and
didn't like him any more. The scowl wasn't for her. It was an
introspective scowl, born out of things he intimately knew and couldn't
communicate if he tried.

The colonel had looked quite radiantly happy that morning. Now his
colour had died down, leaving in his cheeks the clear pallor of age, and
his hands were trembling. It seemed that somebody had to speak, and he
did it, faintly.

"I hope you are not going to be pursued by that kind of thing."

"It's all in the day's work," said Jeffrey.

He was eating his breakfast with a careful attention to detail. Anne
thought he seemed like a painstaking child not altogether sure of his
manners. She thought, too, with her swift insight into the needs of man,
that he was horribly hungry. She was not, like Lydia, on the verge of
impulse all the time, but she broke out here, and then bit her lip:

"I don't believe you did have anything to eat last night."

Lydia gave a little jump in her chair. She didn't see how Anne dared
bait the scowling martyr. He looked at Anne. His scowl continued. They
began to see he perhaps couldn't smooth it out. But he smiled a little.

"Because I'm so hungry?" he asked. His voice sounded kind. "Well, I
didn't."

Lydia, now conversation had begun, wanted to be in it.

"Why not?" asked she, and Anne gave a little protesting note.

"I don't know," said Jeffrey, considering. "I didn't feel like it."

This he said awkwardly, but they all, with a rush of pity for him,
thought they knew what he meant. He had eaten his food within
restraining walls, probably in silence, and to take up the kind
ceremonial of common life was too much for him. Anne poured him another
cup of coffee.

"Seen Jim Reardon?" Jeffrey asked his father.

Anne and Lydia could scarcely forbear another glance at him. Here was
Reardon, the evil influence behind him, too soon upon the scene. They
would not have had his name mentioned until it should be brought out in
Jeffrey's vindication.

"No," said the colonel. "Alston Choate called."

"I wonder what Reardon's doing now?" Jeffrey asked.

But his father did not know.

Jeffrey finished rapidly, and then leaned back in his chair, looked out
of the window and forgot them all. Lydia felt one of her disproportioned
indignations. She was afraid the colonel was not going to have the
beautiful time with him their hopes had builded. The colonel looked
older still than he had an hour ago.

"What shall we do, my son?" he asked. "Go for a walk--in the orchard?"

A walk in the street suddenly occurred to him as the wrong thing to
offer a man returned to the battery of curious eyes.

"If you like," said Jeffrey indifferently. "Do you take one after
breakfast?"

He spoke as if it were entirely for his father, and Anne and Lydia
wondered, Anne in her kind way and the other hotly, how he could forget
that all their passionate interests were for him alone.

"Not necessarily," said the colonel. They were rising. "I was thinking
of you--my son."

"What makes you call me that?" Jeffrey asked curiously.

They were in the hall now, looking out beyond the great sun patch on the
floor, to the lilac trees.

"What did I call you?"

"Son. You never used to."

Lydia felt she couldn't be quick enough in teaching him how dull he was.

"He calls you so because he's done it in his mind," she said, "for years
and years. Your name wasn't enough. Farvie felt so--affectionate."

The last word sounded silly to her, and her cheeks were so hot they
seemed to scald her eyes and melt out tears in them. Jeffrey gave her a
little quizzical look, and slipped his arm through his father's. Anne,
at the look, was suddenly relieved. He must have some soft emotions, she
thought, behind the scowl.

"Don't you like it?" the colonel asked him. He straightened consciously
under the touch of his son's arm.

"Oh, yes," said Jeffrey. "I like it. Only you never had. Except in
letters. Come in here and I'll tell you what I'm going to do."

He had piloted the colonel into the library, and Anne and Lydia were
disappearing into the dining-room where Mary Nellen was now supreme. The
colonel called them, imperatively. There was such a note of necessity in
his voice that they felt sure he didn't know how to deal, quite by
himself, with this unknown quantity of a son.

"Girls, come here. I have to have my girls," he said to Jeffrey, "when
anything's going to be talked over. They're the head of the house and my
head, too."

The girls came proudly, if unwillingly. They knew the scowling young man
didn't need them, might not want them indeed. But they were a part of
Farvie, and he'd got to accept them until they found out, at least, how
safe Farvie was going to be in his hands. Jeffrey wasn't thinking of
them at all. He was accepting them, but they hadn't any share in his
perspective. Lydia felt they were the merest little dots there. She
giggled, one brief note to herself, and then sobered. She was as likely
to laugh as to fume, and it began to seem very funny to her that in this
drama of The Prisoner's Return she and Anne were barely to have speaking
parts. The colonel sat in his armchair at the orchard window, and
Jeffrey stood by the mantel and fingered a vase. Lydia, for the first
time seeing his hands with a recognising eye, was shocked by them. They
were not gentleman's hands, she thought. They were worn, and had
calloused stains and ill-kept nails.

"I thought you'd like to know as soon as possible what I mean to do," he
said, addressing his father.

"I'm glad you've got your plans," his father said. "I've tried to make
some, but I couldn't--couldn't."

"I want first to find out just how things are here," said Jeffrey. "I
want to know how much you've got to live on, and whether these girls
have anything, and whether they want to stay on with you or whether
they're doing it because--" Jeffrey now had a choking sense of emotions
too big for him--"because there's no other way out."

"Do you mean," said Lydia, in a burst, before Anne's warning hand could
stop her, "you want us to leave Farvie?"

The colonel looked up with a beseeching air.

"Good God, no!" said Jeffrey irritably. "I only want to know the state
of things here. So I can tell what to do."

The colonel had got hold of himself, and straightened in his chair. The
girls knew that motion. It meant, "Come, come, you derelict old body.
Get into form."

"I've tried to write you fully," he said. "I hoped I gave you a--a
picture of the way we lived."

"You did. You have," said Jeffrey, still with that air of getting
nowhere and being greatly irritated by it. "But how could I know how
much these girls are sacrificing?"

"Sacrificing?" repeated the colonel helplessly, and Lydia was on the
point of another explosion when Jeffrey himself held up his hand to her.

"Wait," he said. "Let me think. I don't know how to get on with people.
They only make me mad."

That put a different face on it. Anne knew what he meant. Here he was,
he for whom they had meant to erect arches of welcome, floored in a
moment by the perplexities of family life.

"Of course," said Anne. She often said "of course" to show her sympathy.
"You tell it your own way."

"Ah!" said Jeffrey, with a breath of gratitude. "Now you're talking.
Don't you see----" he faced Anne as the only person present whose
emotions weren't likely to get the upper hand----"don't you see I've got
to know how father's fixed before I make any plans for myself?"

Anne nodded.

"We live pretty simply," she said, "but we can live. I keep the
accounts. I can tell you how much we spend."

The colonel had got hold of himself now.

"I have twelve hundred a year," he said. "We do very well on that. I
don't actually know how, except that Anne is such a good manager. She
and Lydia have earned quite a little, dancing, but I always insisted on
their keeping that for their own use."

Here Jeffrey looked at Anne and found her pinker than she had been. Anne
was thinking she rather wished she had not been so free with her offer
of accounts.

"Dancing," said he. "Yes. You wrote me. Do you like to dance?"

He had turned upon Lydia.

"Oh, yes," said she. "It's heavenly. Anne doesn't. Except when she's
teaching children."

"What made you learn dancing?" he asked Anne.

"We wanted to do something," she said guiltily. She was afraid her
tongue was going to betray her and tell the story of the lean year after
their mother died when they found out that mother had lived a life of
magnificent deception as to the ease of housekeeping on twelve hundred a
year.

"Yes," said Jeffrey, "but dancing? Why'd you pick out that?"

"We couldn't do anything else," said Lydia impatiently. "Anne and I
don't know anything in particular." She thought he might have been
clever enough to see that, while too tactful to betray it. "But we look
nice--together--and anybody can dance."

"Oh!" said Jeffrey. His eyes had a shade less of gravity, but he kept an
unmoved seriousness of tone.

"About our living with Farvie," said Anne. "I can see you'd want to
know."

"Yes," said he, "I do."

"We love to," said Anne. "We don't know what we should do if Farvie
turned us out."

"My dear!" from the colonel.

"Why, he's our father," said Lydia, in a burst. "He's just as much our
father as he is yours."

"Good!" said Jeffrey. His voice had warmed perceptibly. "Good for you.
That's what I thought."

"If you'd rather not settle down here," said his father, in a tone of
hoping Jeff would like it very much, "we shall be glad to let the house
again and go anywhere you say. We've often talked of it, the girls and
I."

Jeffrey did not thank them for that, or seem to hear it even.

"I want," said he, "to go West."

"Well," said Farvie, with a determined cheerfulness, "I guess the
girls'll agree to that. Middle West?"

"No," said Jeffrey, "the West--if there is any West left. Somewhere
where there's space." His voice fell, on that last word. It held wonder
even. Was there such a thing, this man of four walls seemed to ask, as
space?

"You'd want to go alone," said Anne softly. She felt as if she were
breaking something to Farvie and adjuring him to bear it.

"Yes," said Jeffrey, in relief. "I've got to go alone."

"My son--" said the colonel and couldn't go on. Then he did manage.
"Aren't we going to live together?"

"Not yet," said Jeffrey. "Not yet."

The colonel had thought so much about his old age that now he was near
saying: "You know I haven't so very many years," but he held on to
himself.

"He's got to go alone," said Anne. "But he'll come back."

"Yes," said Lydia, from the habit they had learned of heartening Farvie,
"he'll come back."

But she was hotly resolving that he should learn his duty and stay here.
Let her get a word with him alone.

"What I'm going to do out there I don't know," said Jeffrey. "But I am
going to work, and I'm going to turn in enough to keep you as you ought
to be. I want to stay here a little while first."

The colonel was rejuvenated by delight. Lydia wondered how anybody could
see that look on his face and not try to keep it there.

"I've got," said Jeffrey, "to write a book."

"Oh, my son," said the colonel, "that's better than I hoped. The
newspapers have had it all, how you've changed the prison paper, and how
you built up a scheme of prison government, and I said to myself, 'When
he comes out, he'll write a book, and good will come of it, and then we
shall see that, under Providence, my son went to prison that he might do
that.'"

He was uplifted with the wonder of it. The girls felt themselves carried
along at an equal pace. This was it, they thought. It was a part of the
providences that make life splendid. Jeffrey had been martyred that he
might do a special work.

"Oh, no," said he, plainly bored by the inference. "That's not it. I'm
going to write the life of a fellow I know."

"Who was he?" Anne asked, with a serious uplift of her brows.

"A defaulter."

"In the Federal Prison?"

"Yes."




VI


He looked at them, quite unconscious of the turmoil he had wakened in
them. Lydia was ready to sound the top note of revolt. Her thoughts were
running a definite remonstrance: "Write the life of another man when you
should be getting your evidence together and proving your own innocence
and the injustice of the law?" Anne was quite ready to believe there
must be a cogent reason for writing the life of his fellow criminal, but
she wished it were not so. She, too, from long habit of thought, wanted
Jeffrey to attend to his own life now he had a chance. The colonel, she
knew, through waiting and hoping, had fallen into an attitude of mind as
wistful and expectant as hers and Lydia's. The fighting qualities, it
seemed, had been ground out of him. The fostering ones had grown
disproportionately, and sometimes, she was sure, they made him ache, in
a dull way, with ruth for everybody.

"Did the man ask you to write his life?" he inquired.

"No," said Jeffrey. "I asked him if I could. He agreed to it. Said I
might use his name. He's no family to squirm under it."

"You feel he was unjustly sentenced," the colonel concluded.

"Oh, no. He doesn't either. He mighty well deserved what he got. Been
better perhaps if he'd got more. What I had in mind was to tell how a
man came to be a robber."

Lydia winced at the word. Jeffrey had been commonly called a defaulter,
and she was imperfectly reconciled to that: certainly not to a branding
more ruthless still.

"I've watched him a good deal," said Jeffrey. "We've had some talk
together. I can see how he did what he did, and how he'd do it again.
It'll be a study in criminology."

"When does he--come out?" Anne hesitated over this. She hardly knew a
term without offence.

"Next year."

"But," said she, "you wouldn't want to publish a book about him and have
him live it down?"

"Why shouldn't I?" asked Jeffrey, turning on her. "He's willing."

"He can't be willing," Lydia broke in. "It's frightful."

"Well, he is," said Jeffrey. "There's nothing you could do to him he'd
mind, if it gave him good advertising."

"What does he want to do," asked the colonel, "when he comes out?"

"Get into the game again. Make big money. And if it's necessary, steal
it. Not that he wants to bunco. He's had his dose. He's learned it isn't
safe. But he'd make some dashing _coup_; he couldn't help it. Maybe he'd
get nabbed."

"What a horrid person!" said Lydia. "How can you have anything to do
with him?"

"Why, he's interesting," said Jeffrey, in a way she found brutal. "He's
a criminal. He's got outside."

"Outside what?" she persisted.

"Law. And he wouldn't particularly want to get back, except that it
pays. But I'm not concerned with what he does when he gets back. I want
to show how it seemed to him outside and how he got there. He's more
picturesque than I am, or I'd take myself."

Blessed Anne, who had no grasp, she thought, of abstract values, but
knew how to make a man able for his work, met the situation quietly.

"You could have the blue chamber, couldn't he, Farvie? and do your
writing there."

Lydia flashed her a reproachful glance. She would have scattered his
papers and spilled the ink, rather than have him do a deed like that. If
he did it, it was not with her good-will. Jeff had drawn his frown the
tighter.

"I don't know whether I can do it," he said. "A man has got to know how
to write."

"You wrote some remarkable things for the _Nestor_," said the colonel,
now hesitating. It had been one of the rules he and the girls had
concocted for the treatment of a returning prisoner, never to refer to
stone walls and iron bars. But surely, he felt, Jeff needed
encouragement.

Jeff was ruthless.

"That was all rot," he said.

"What was?" Lydia darted at him. "Didn't you mean what you said?"

"It was idiotic for the papers to take it up," said Jeff. "They got it
all wrong. 'There's a man,' they said, 'in the Federal Prison, Jeffrey
Blake, the defaulter. Very talented. Has revolutionised the _Nestor_,
the prison organ. Let him out, pardon him, simply because he can
write.'"

"As I understand," said his father, "you did get the name of the paper
changed."

"Well, now," said Jeff, appealingly, in a candid way, "what kind of name
was that for a prison paper? _Nestor!_ 'Who was Nestor?' says the man
that's been held up in the midst of his wine-swilling and money-getting.
Wise old man, he remembers. First-class preacher. Turn on the tap and
he'll give you a maxim. 'Gee!' says he, 'I don't want advice. I know
how I got here, and if I ever get out, I'll see to it I don't get in
again.'"

Lydia found this talk exceedingly diverting. She disapproved of it. She
had wanted Jeff to appear a dashing, large-eyed, entirely innocent young
man, his mouth, full of axioms, prepared to be the stay of Farvie's
gentle years. But this rude torrent of perverse philosophy bore her
along and she liked it, particularly because she felt she should
presently contradict and show how much better she knew herself. Anne,
too, evidently had an unlawful interest in it, and wanted him to keep on
talking. She took that transparent way of furthering the flow by asking
a question she could answer herself.

"You called it _Prison Talk_, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Jeff. "They called it _Prison Talk."_

"And all our newspapers copied your articles," said Anne, artfully
guiding him forward, "the ones you called 'The New Republic.'"

"What d'they want to copy them for?" asked Jeff. "It was a fool thing to
do. I'd simply written the letters to the men, to ask 'em if they didn't
think the very devil of prison life was that we were outside. Not
because we were inside, shut up in a jug. You could bear to be in a jug,
if that was all. But you've got to have ties. You've got to have laws
and the whole framework that's been built up from the cave man. Or
you're desperate, don't you see? You're all alone. And a man will do a
great deal not to be alone. If there's nothing for you to do but learn a
trade, and be preached at by _Nestor_, and say to yourself, 'I'm
outside'--why there's the devil in it."

He was trying to convince them as he had previously convinced others,
those others who had lived with him under the penal law. He looked at
Anne much as if she were a State or Federal Board and incidentally at
Lydia, as if he would say:

"Here's a very young and insignificant criminal. We'll return to her
presently. But she, too, is going to be convinced."

"And I don't say a man hasn't got to be infernally miserable when he's
working out his sentence. He has. I don't want you to let up on him.
Only I don't want him to get punky, so he isn't fit to come back when
his term is over. I don't believe it's going to do much for him merely
to keep the laws he's been chucked under, against his will, though he's
got to keep 'em, or they'll know the reason why."

Lydia wondered who They were. She thought They might be brutal wardens
and assembled before her, in a terrifying battalion, the strait-jackets
and tortures she'd found in some of the older English novels.

"So I said to the men: 'We've got to govern ourselves. We haven't got a
damned word'"--really abashed he looked at Anne--"I beg your pardon. 'We
haven't got a word to say in this government we're under; but say we
have. Say the only thing we can do is to give no trouble, fine
ourselves, punish ourselves if we do. The worst thing that can happen to
us,' I said, 'is to hate law. Well, the best law we've got is prison
law. It's the only law that's going to touch us now. Let's love it as if
it were our mother. And if it isn't tough enough, let's make it tougher.
Let's vote on it, and publish our votes in this paper.'"

"I was surprised," said his father, "that so much plain speaking was
allowed."

"Advertising! Of course they allowed us," said Jeff. "It advertised us
outside. Advertised the place. Officials got popular. Inside conduct
went up a hundred per cent, just as it would in school. Men are only
boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to
work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you
could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't
publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was
inside the fellows. Sometimes they were as smug as a prayer-meeting."

"Did this man write?" Lydia asked scornfully, with a distaste she didn't
propose to lessen. "The one you're going to do the book about?"

"Oh, he's a crook," said Jeff indifferently. "Crook all through. If we'd
been trying to build up a monarchy instead of a republic he'd have
hatched up a scheme for looting the crown jewels. Or if we'd been
founding a true and only church, he'd have suggested a trick for melting
the communion plate."

"And you want to write his life!" said Lydia's look.

But Jeff cared nothing about her look. He was, with a retrospective eye,
regarding the work he had been doing, work that had perhaps saved his
reason as well as bought his freedom. Now he was spreading it out and
letting them consider it, not for praise, but because he trusted them.
He felt a few rivets giving in the case he had hardened about himself
for so long a time. He thought he had got very hard indeed, and was even
willing to invite a knock or two, to test his induration. But there was
something curiously softening in this little group sitting in the shade
of the pleasant room while the sunshine outside played upon growing
leaves. He was conscious, wonderingly, that they all loved him very
much. His father's letters had told him that. It seemed simple and
natural, too, that these young women, who were not his sisters and who
gave him, in his rough habit of life, a curious pain with their delicacy
and softness--it seemed natural enough that they should, in a way not
understood, belong to him. He had got gradually accustomed to it, from
their growing up in his father's house from little girls to girls
dancing themselves into public favour, and then, again, he had been
living "outside" where ordinary conventions did not obtain. He had got
used to many things in his solitary thoughts that were never tested by
other minds in familiar intercourse. The two girls belonged there among
accepted things. He looked up suddenly at his father, and asked the
question they had least of all expected to hear:

"Where's Esther?"

The two girls made a movement to go, but he glanced at them frowningly,
as if they mustn't break up the talk at this moment, and they hesitated,
hand in hand.

"She's living here," said the colonel, "with her grandmother."

"Has that old harpy been over lately?"

"Madame Beattie?"

"Yes."

"Not to my knowledge."

Anne and Lydia exchanged looks. Madame Beattie was a familiar name to
them, but they had never heard she was a harpy.

"Was she Esther's aunt?" Lydia inquired, really to give the talk a jog.
She was accustomed to shake up her watch when it hesitated.

"Great-aunt," said Jeffrey. "Step-sister to Esther's grandmother. She
must be sixty-five where grandmother's a good ten years older."

"She sang," said the colonel, forgetting, as he often did, they seemed
so young, that everybody in America must at least have heard tradition
of Madame Beattie's voice. "She lived abroad."

"She had a ripping voice," said Jeff. "When she was young, of course.
That wasn't all. There was something about her that took them. But she
lost her voice, and she married Beattie, and he died. Then she came back
here and hunted up Esther."

His face settled into lines of sombre thought, puzzled thought, it
seemed to Anne. But to Lydia it looked as if this kidnapping of Madame
Beattie from the past and thrusting her into the present discussion was
only a pretext for talking about Esther. Of course, she knew, he was
wildly anxious to enter upon the subject, and there might be pain enough
in it to keep him from approaching it suddenly. Esther might be a
burning coal. Madame Beattie was the safe holder he caught up to keep
his fingers from it. But he sounded now as if he were either much
absorbed in Madame Beattie or very wily in his hiding behind her.

"I've often wondered if she came back. I've thought she might easily
have settled on Esther and sucked her dry. No news of her?"

"No news," said the colonel. "It's years since she's been here. Not
since--then."

"No," said Jeff. There was a new line of bitter amusement near his
mouth. "I know the date of her going, to a dot. The day I was arrested
she put for New York. Next week she sailed for Italy." But if Lydia was
going to feel more of her hot reversals in the face of his calling plain
names, she found him cutting them short with another question: "Seen
Esther?"

"No," said the colonel.

A red spot had sprung into his cheek. He looked harassed. Lydia sprang
into the arena, to save him, and because she was the one who had the
latest news.

"I have," she said. "I've seen her."

She knew what grave surprise was in the colonel's face. But no such
thing appeared in Jeff's. He only turned to her as if she were the next
to be interrogated.

"How does she look?" he asked.

The complete vision of her stretched at ease eating fruit out of a
silver dish, as if she had arranged herself to rouse the most violent
emotions in a little seething sister, stirred Lydia to the centre. But
not for a million dollars, she reflected, in a comparison clung to
faithfully, would she tell how beautiful Esther appeared to even the
hostile eye.

"She looked," said she coldly, "perfectly well."

"Where d'you see her?" Jeff asked.

"I went over," said Lydia. Her colour was now high. She looked as if you
might select some rare martyrdom for her--quartering or gridironing
according to the oldest recipes--and you couldn't make her tell less
than the truth, because only the truth would contribute to the downfall
of Esther. "I went in without ringing, because Farvie'd been before and
they wouldn't let him in."

"Lydia!" the colonel called remindingly.

"I found her reading--and eating." Lydia hadn't known she could be so
hateful. Still she was telling the exact truth. "We talked a few minutes
and I came away."

"Did she--" at last suddenly and painfully thrown out of his nonchalant
run of talk, he stopped.

"She's a horrid woman," said Lydia, crimson with her own daring, and got
up and ran out of the room.

Anne looked appealingly at Jeff, in a way of begging him to remember how
young Lydia was, and perhaps how spoiled. But he wasn't disturbed. He
only said to his father in a perfectly practical way:

"Women never did like her, you know."

So Anne got up and went out, thinking it was the moment for him and his
father to pace along together on this road of masculine understanding.
She found Lydia by the dining-room window, savagely drying her cheeks.
Lydia looked as if she had cried hard and scrubbed the tears off and
cried again, there was such wilful havoc in the pink smoothness of her
face.

"Isn't he hateful?" she asked Anne, with an incredulous spite in her
voice. "How could anybody that belonged to Farvie be so rough? I can't
endure him, can you?"

Anne looked distressed. When there were disagreements and cross-purposes
they made her almost ill. She would go about with a physical nausea upon
her, wishing the world could be kind.

"But he's only just--free," she said.

They were still making a great deal of that word, she and Lydia. It
seemed the top of earthly fortune to be free, and abysmal misery to have
missed it.

"I can't help it," said Lydia. "What does he want to act so for? Why
does he talk about such places, as if anybody could be in them?"

"Prisons?"

"Yes. And talking about going West as if Farvie hadn't just lived to get
him back. And about her as if she wasn't any different from what he
expected and you couldn't ask her to be anything else."

"But she's his wife," said Anne gently. "I suppose he loves her. Let's
hope he does."

"You can, if you want to," said Lydia, with a wet handkerchief making
another renovating attack on her face. "I sha'n't. She's a horrid
woman."

They parted then, for their household deeds, but all through the morning
Lydia had a fire of curiosity burning in her to know what Jeff was
doing. He ought, she knew, to be sitting by Farvie, keeping him company,
in a passionate way, to make up for the years. The years seemed
sometimes like a colossal mistake in nature that everybody had got to
make up for--make up to everybody else. Certainly she and Anne and
Farvie had got to make up to the innocent Jeff. And equally they had all
got to make up to Farvie. But going once noiselessly through the hall,
she glanced in and saw the colonel sitting alone by the window, Mary
Nellen's Virgil in his hand. He was well back from the glass, and Lydia
guessed that it was because he wanted to command the orchard and not
himself be seen. She ran up to her own room and also looked. There he
was, Jeff, striding round in the shadow of the brick wall, walking like
a man with so many laps to do before night. Sometimes he squared his
shoulders and walked hard, but as if he knew he was going to get
there--the mysterious place for which he was bound. Sometimes his
shoulders sagged, and he had to drive himself. Lydia felt, in her
throat, the aching misery of youth and wondered if she had got to cry
again, and if this hateful, wholly unsatisfactory creature was going to
keep her crying. As she watched, he stopped, and then crossed the
orchard green directly toward her. She stood still, looking down on him
fascinated, her breath trembling, as if he might glance up and ask her
what business she had staring down there, spying on him while he did
those mysterious laps he was condemned to, to make up perhaps for the
steps he had not taken on free ground in all the years.

"Got a spade?" she heard him call.

"Yes." It was Anne's voice. "Here it is."

"Why, it's new," Lydia heard him say.

He was under her window now, and she could not see him without putting
her head over the sill.

"Yes," said Anne. "I went down town and bought it."

Anne's voice sounded particularly satisfied. Lydia knew that tone. It
said Anne had been able to accomplish some fit and clever deed, to
please. It was as if a fountain, bubbling over, had said, "Have I given
you a drink, you dog, you horse, you woman with the bundle and the
child? Marvellous lucky I must be. I'll bubble some more."

Jeff himself might have understood that in Anne, for he said:

"I bet you brought it home in your hand."

"No takers," said Anne. "I bet I did."

"That heavy spade?"

"It wasn't heavy."

"You thought I'd be spading to keep from growing dotty. Good girl. Give
it here."

"But, Jeff!" Anne's voice flew after him as he went. Lydia felt herself
grow hot, knowing Anne had taken the big first step that had looked so
impossible when they saw him. She had called him Jeff. "Jeff, where are
you going to spade?"

"Up," said Jeff. "I don't care where. You always spade up, don't you?"

In a minute Lydia saw Anne, with the sun on her brown hair, the colonel,
and Jeff with the shining spade like a new sort of war weapon, going
forth to spade "up". Evidently Anne intended to have no spading at
random in a fair green orchard. She was one of the conservers of the
earth, a thrifty housewife who would have all things well done. They
looked happily intent, the three, going out to their breaking ground.
Lydia felt the tempest in her going down, and she wished she were with
them. But her temper shut her out. She felt like a little cloud driven
by some capricious wind to darken the face of earth, and not by her own
willingness.

She went down to the noon dinner quite chastened, with the expression
Anne knew, of having had a temper and got over it. The three looked as
if they had had a beautiful time, Lydia thought humbly. The colour was
in their faces. Farvie talked of seed catalogues, and it became evident
that Jeff was spading up the old vegetable garden on the orchard's edge.
Anne had a soft pink in her cheeks. They had all, it appeared, begun a
pleasant game.

Lydia kept a good deal to herself that day. She accepted a task from
Anne of looking over table linen and lining drawers with white paper.
Mary Nellen was excused from work, and sat at upper windows making a hum
of study like good little translating bees. Anne went back and forth
from china closet to piles of dishes left ready washed by Mary Nellen,
and the colonel, in the library, drowsed off the morning's work. Lydia
had a sense of peaceful tasks and tranquil pauses. Her own pulses had
quieted with the declining sun, and it seemed as if they might all be
settling into a slow-moving ease of life at last.

"Where is he?" suddenly she said to Anne, in the midst of their weaving
the household rhythm.

"Jeff?" asked Anne, not stopping. "He's spading in the garden."

"Don't you want to go out?" asked Lydia. She felt as if they had on
their hands, not a liberated prisoner, but a prisoner still bound by
their fond expectations of him. He must be beguiled, distracted from the
memory of his broken fetters.

"No," said Anne. "He'll be tired enough to sleep to-night."

"Didn't he sleep last night?" Lydia asked, that old ache beginning again
in her.

"I shouldn't think so," said Anne. "But he's well tired now".

And it was Lydia that night at ten who heard long breaths from the
little room when she went softly up the back stairs to speak to Mary
Nellen. There was a light on his table. The door was open. He sat, his
back to her, his arms on the table, his head on his arms. She heard the
long labouring breaths of a creature who could have sobbed if he had not
kept a heavy hand on himself. They were, Lydia thought, like the breaths
of a dear dog she had known who used to put his nose to the crack of the
shut door and sigh into it, "Please let me in." It seemed to her acutely
sensitive mind, prepared like a chemical film to take every impression
Jeff could cast, as if he were lying prone at the door of the cruel
beauty and breathing, "Please let me in." She wanted to put her hands on
the bowed head and comfort him. Now she knew how Anne felt, Anne, the
little mother heart, who dragged up compassion from the earth and
brought it down from the sky for unfriended creatures. And yet all the
solace Lydia had to offer was a bitter one. She would only have said:

"Don't cry for her. She isn't worth it. She's a hateful woman."




VII


Madame Beattie was near, and had that morning telegraphed Esther. The
message was explicit, and, in the point of affection, diffuse.
Old-fashioned, too: she longed to hold her niece in her arms. A more
terrified young woman could not easily have been come on that day than
Esther Blake, as she opened the envelope, afraid of detectives, of
reporters, of anything connected with a husband lately returned from
jail. But this was worse than she could have guessed. In face of an
ordinary incursion she might shut herself up in her room and send Sophy
to tell smooth fictions at the door. Reporters could hardly get at her,
and her husband himself, if he should try, could presumably be routed.
Aunt Patricia Beattie was another matter. Esther was so panicky that she
ran upstairs with the telegram and tapped at grandmother's door. Rhoda
Knox came in answer. She was a large woman of a fine presence, red
cheekbones with high lights, and smooth black hair brushed glossy and
carefully coiled. She was grandmother's attendant, helplessly hated by
grandmother but professionally unmoved by it, a general who carried on
intricate calculations to avoid what she called "steps." In the matter
of steps, she laid bonds on high and low. A deed that would have taken
her five minutes to do she passed on to the next available creature,
even if it required twenty minutes' planning to hocus him into accepting
it. She had the intent look of the schemer: yet she was one who meant
well and simply preferred by nature to be stationary. Grandmother
feared her besides hating her, though loving the order she brought to
pass.

Esther slipped by her, and went to the bed where grandmother was lying
propped on pillows, an exceedingly small old woman who was even to
life-long friends an enigma presumably without an answer. She had the
remote air of hating her state of age, which did not seem a natural
necessity but a unique calamity, a trap sprung on her and, after the
nature of traps, most unexpectedly. When she was young she had believed
the old walked into the trap deliberately because it was provided on a
path they were tired of. But she wasn't tired, and yet the trap had
clutched her. She had a small face beautifully wrought upon by lines, as
if she had given a cunning artificer the preparation of a mask she was
paying dearly for and yet didn't prize at all. An old-fashioned nightcap
with a frill covered her head, and she had tied herself so tightly into
it that he must be a bold adventurer who would get at the thoughts
inside. Her little hands were shaded by fine frills. She looked, on the
whole, like a disenchanted lingerer in the living world, a useless
creature for whom fostering had done so much that you might ask: "What
is this illustration of a clean old woman? What is it for? What does it
teach?"

Esther, with her telegram, stood beside the bed.

"Grandmother," said she, in the perfect tone she used toward her, clear
and not too loud, "Aunt Patricia Beattie is coming."

Grandmother lifted large black eyes dulled by the broken surface of age,
to Esther's face. There was no envy in the gaze but wonder chiefly.

"Is that youth?" the eyes inquired. "Useless, not especially
admirable--but curious."

Esther, waiting there for recognition, felt the discomfort grandmother
always seemed to stir into her mood. Her rose-touched skin was a little
more suffused, though not beyond a furtherance of beauty.

"Aunt Patricia is coming," she repeated. "When I heard from her last she
was in Poland."

"Her name is Martha," said grandmother. "Don't let her come in here."
She had a surprising voice, of a barbaric quality, the ring of metal.
Hearing it you were mentally translated for an instant, and thought of
far-off, palm-girt islands and savages beating strange instruments and
chanting to them uncouth syllables. "Rhoda Knox, don't let her get up
here."

"How can I keep her out?" asked Esther. "You'll have to see her. I can't
live down there alone with her. I couldn't make her happy."

A satirical light shivered across grandmother's eyes.

"Where is your husband?" she inquired. "Here?"

"Here?" repeated Esther. "In this house?"

"Yes."

"He isn't coming here. It would be very painful for him."

The time had been when grandmother, newer to life, would have asked,
"Why?" But she knew Esther minutely now; all her turns of speech and
habits of thought were as a tale long told. Once it had been a mildly
fascinating game to see through what Esther said to what she really
meant. It was easy, once you had the clue, too easy, all certainties,
with none of the hazards of a game. Esther, she knew, lived with a
lovely ideal of herself. The imaginary Esther was all sympathy; she was
even self-sacrificing. No shining quality lay in the shop window of the
world's praise but the real Esther snatched it and adorned herself with
it. The Esther that was talked in the language of the Esther that ought
to be. If she didn't want to see you, she told you it would be
inconvenient for you to come. If she wanted to tell you somebody had
praised the rose of her cheek, she told you she was so touched by
everybody's goodness in loving to give pleasure; then she proved her
point by naive repetition of the pretty speech. Sometimes she even, in
the humility of the other Esther, deprecated the flattery as insincere;
but not before she had told you what it was.

"I haven't seen her since--I haven't seen her for years," she said. "She
wasn't happy with me then. She'll be much less likely to be now."

"Older," said grandmother. "More difficult. Keep her out of here."

It seemed to Esther there was no sympathy for her in the world, even if
she got drum and fife and went out to beat it up. One empty victory she
had achieved: grandmother had at least spoken to her. Sometimes she
turned her face to the wall and lay there, not even a ruffle quivering.
Esther moved away, but Rhoda Knox was beforehand with her. Rhoda held a
letter.

"Mrs. Blake, could you take this down?" she asked, in a faultless
manner, and yet implacably. "And let it go out when somebody is going?"

Esther accepted the letter helplessly. She knew how Rhoda sat planning
to get her errands done. Yet there was never any reason why you should
not do them. She ran downstairs carrying the letter, hating it because
it had got itself carried against her will, and went at once to the
telephone. And there her voice had more than its natural appeal, because
she was so baffled and angry and pitied herself so much.

"Could you come in? I'm bothered. Yes," in answer to his question, "in
trouble, I'm afraid."

Alston Choate came at once; her voice must have told him moving things,
for he was full of warm concern. Esther met him with a dash of agitation
admirably controlled. She was not the woman to alarm a man at the start.
Let him get into a run, let him forget the spectators by the way, and
even the terrifying goal where he might be crowned victor even before he
chose. Only whip up his blood until the guidance of them both was hers,
not his. So he felt at once her need of him and at the same time her
distance from him. It was a wonderfully vivifying call: nothing to fear
from her, but exhilarating feats to be undertaken for her sake.

"I'm frightened at last," she told him. That she was a brave woman the
woman she had created for her double had persuaded her. "I had to speak
to somebody."

Choate looked really splendid in the panoply of his simplicity and
restraints and courtesy. A man can be imposing in spite of a broken
nose.

"What's gone wrong?" he asked.

"Aunt Patricia is coming."

Choate had quite forgotten Aunt Patricia. She had been too far in the
depths of Poland for Esther to summon up her shade. Possibly it was a
dangerous shade to summon, lest the substance follow. But now she
sketched Aunt Patricia with hesitating candour, but so that he lost none
of her undesirability, and he listened with a painstaking courtesy.

"You say you're afraid of her?" he said, at the end. "Let her come. She
may not want to stay."

"She is so--different," faltered Esther. She looked at him with humid
eyes. It was apparent that Aunt Patricia was different in a way not to
be commended.

Now Choate thought he saw how it was.

"You mean she's been banging about Europe," he said, "living in
_pensions_, trailing round with second-rate professionals. I get that
idea, at least. Am I right?"

"She's frightfully bohemian, of course," said Esther. "Yes, that's what
I did mean."

"But she's not young, you know," said Choate, in an indulgent kindliness
Esther was quite sure he kept for her alone. "She won't be very rackety.
People don't want the same things after they're sixty."

"She smokes," said Esther, in a burst of confidence. "She did years ago
when nice women weren't doing it."

He smiled at this, but tenderly. He didn't leave Addington very often,
but he did know what a blaze the vestals of the time keep up.

"No matter," said he, "so long as you don't."

"She drinks brandy," said Esther, "and tells things. I can't repeat what
she tells. She's different from anybody I ever met--and I don't see how
I can make her happy."

By this time Choate saw there was nothing he could do about Aunt
Patricia, and dismissed her from his orderly mind. She was not
absolutely pertinent to Esther's happiness. But he looked grave. There
was somebody, he knew, who was pertinent.

"I haven't succeeded in seeing Jeff yet," he began, with a slight
hesitation. It seemed to him it might be easier for her to hear that
name than the formal words, "your husband". She winced. Choate saw it
and pitied her, as she knew he would. "Is he coming--here?"

She looked at him with large, imploring eyes.

"Must I?" he heard her whispering, it seemed really to herself.

"I don't see how you can help it, dear," he answered. The last word
surprised him mightily. He had never called her "dear". She hadn't even
been "Esther" to him. But the warmth of his compassion and an irritation
that had been working in him with Jeff's return--something like jealousy,
it might even be--drove the little word out of doors and bade it lodge
with her and so betray him. Esther heard the word quite clearly and knew
what volumes of commentary it carried; but Choate, relieved, thought it
had passed her by. She was still beseeching him, even caressing him,
with the liquid eyes.

"You see," she said, "he and I are strangers--almost. He's been away so
long."

"You haven't seen him," said Choate, like an accusation. He had often
had to bruise that snake. He hoped she'd step on it for good.

"No," said Esther. "He didn't wish it."

Choate's sane sense told him that no man could fail to wish it. If Jeff
had forbidden her to come at the intervals when he could see his kin,
she should have battered down his denials and gone to him. She should
have left on his face the warm touch of hers and the cleansing of her
tears. Choate had a tremendous idea of the obligations of what he called
love. He hid what he thought of it in the fastnesses of a shy heart, but
he took delight and found strength, too, in the certainty that there is
unconquerable love, and that it laughs at even the locksmiths that
fasten prison doors. He knew what a pang it would have been to him if he
had seen Esther Blake going year after year to carry her hoarded
sweetness to another man. But he wished she had done it. Some hardy,
righteous fibre in him would have been appeased.

"He's happier away from me," said Esther, shaking her head. "His father
understands him. I don't. Why, before he went away we weren't so very
happy. Didn't you know that?"

Choate was glad and sorry.

"Weren't you?" he responded. "Poor child!"

"No. We'd begun to be strangers, in a way. And it's gone on and on, and
of course we're really strangers now."

The Esther she meant to be gave her a sharp little prick here--that
Esther seemed to carry a needle for the purpose of these occasional
pricks, though she used it less and less as time went on--and said to
her, "Strangers before he went away? Oh, no! I'd like to think that. It
makes the web we're spinning stronger. But I can't. No. That isn't
true."

"So you see," said the real Esther to Choate, "I can't do anything. I
sit here alone with my hands tied, and grandma upstairs--of course I
can't leave grandma--and I can't do anything. Do you think--" she looked
very challenging and pure--"do you think it would be wicked of me to
dream of a divorce?"

Choate got up and walked to the fireplace. He put both hands on the
mantel and gripped it, and Esther, with that sense of implacable mastery
women feel at moments of sexual triumph, saw the knuckles whiten.

"Wouldn't it be better," she said, "for him? I don't care for myself,
though I'm very lonely, very much at sea; but it does seem to me it
would be better for him if he could be free and build his life up again
from the beginning."

Choate answered in a choked voice that made him shake his head
impatiently:

"It isn't better for any man to be free."

"Not if he doesn't care for his wife?" the master torturer proceeded,
more and more at ease now she saw how tight she had him.

Choate turned upon her. His pale face was scarred with an emotion as
deep as the source of tears, though she exulted to see he had no tears
to show her. Men should, she felt, be strong.

"Don't you know you mustn't say that kind of thing to me?" he asked
her. "Don't you see it's a temptation? I can't listen to it. I can't
consider it for a minute."

"Is it a temptation?" she asked, in a whisper, born, it seemed, of
unacknowledged intimacies between them. The whisper said, "If it is a
temptation, it is not a temptation to you alone."

Choate was not looking at her, but he saw her, with the eyes of the
mind: the brown limpid look, the uplift of her quivering face, the curve
of her throat and the long ripple to her feet. He walked out of the
room; it was the only thing for a decent man to do, in the face of
incarnate appeal, challenge, a vitality so intense, and yet so
unconscious of itself, he knew, that it was, in its purity, almost
irresistible. In the street he was deaf to the call of a friend and
passed another without seeing him. They chaffed him about it afterward.
He was, they told him, thinking of a case.

Esther went about the house in an exhilarated lightness. She sang a
little, in a formless way. She could not manage a tune, but she had a
rhythmic style of humming that was not unpleasant to hear and gave her
occasional outlet. It was the animal in the desert droning and purring
to itself in excess of ease. She felt equal to meeting Aunt Patricia
even.

About dusk Aunt Patricia came in the mediæval cab with Denny driving.
There was no luggage. Esther hoped a great deal from that. But it proved
there was too much to come by cab, and Denny brought it afterward,
shabby trunks of a sophisticated look, spattered with labels. Madame
Beattie alighted from the cab, a large woman in worn black velvet, with
a stale perfume about her. Esther was at the door to meet her, and even
in this outer air she could hardly help putting up her nose a little at
the exotic smell. Madame Beattie was swarthy and strong-featured with a
soft wrinkled skin unnatural from over-cherishing. She had bright,
humorously satirical eyes; and her mouth was large. Therefore you were
surprised at her slight lisp, a curious childishness which Esther had
always considered pure affectation. She had forgotten it in these later
years, but now the sound of it awakened all the distaste and curiosity
she had felt of old. She had always believed if Aunt Patricia spoke out,
the lisp would go. The voice underneath the lisp was a sad thing when
you remembered it had once been "golden ". It was raucous yet husky, a
gin voice, Jeffrey had called it, adding that she had a gin cough. All
this Esther remembered as she went forward prettily and submitted to
Aunt Patricia's perfumed kiss. The ostrich feathers in the worn velvet
travelling hat cascaded over them both, and bangles clinked in a thin
discord with curious trinkets hanging from her chatelaine. Evidently the
desire to hold her niece in her arms had been for telegraphic purposes
only.

When they had gone in and Aunt Patricia was removing her gloves and
accepting tea--she said she would not take her hat off until she went
upstairs--she asked, with a cheerful boldness:

"Where's your husband?"

Esther shrank perceptibly. No one but Lydia had felt at liberty to pelt
her with the incarcerated husband, and she was not only sensitive in
fact but from an intuition of the prettiest thing to do.

"Oh, I knew he was out," said Madame Beattie. "I keep track of your
American papers. Isn't he here?"

"He's in town," said Esther, in a low voice. Her cheeks burned with
hatred of the insolence of kin which could force you into the open and
strip you naked.

"Where?"

"With his father."

"Does his father live alone?"

"No. He has step-daughters."

"Children of that woman that married him out of hand when he was over
sixty? Ridiculous business! Well, what's Jeff there for? Why isn't he
with you?"

Madame Beattie had a direct habit of address, and, although she spoke
many other languages fluently, in the best of English. There were times
when she used English with an extreme of her lisping accent, but that
was when it seemed good business so to do. This she modified if she
found herself cruising where New England standards called for plain New
England speech.

"Why isn't he with you?" she asked again.

The tea had come and Madame Beattie lifted her cup in a manner elegantly
calculated to display, though ingenuously, a hand loaded with rings.

"Dear auntie," said Esther, widening eyes that had been potent with
Alston Choate but would do slight execution among a feminine contingent,
"Jeffrey wouldn't be happy with me."

"Nonsense," said Aunt Patricia, herself taking the teapot and
strengthening her cup. "What do you mean by happy?"

"He is completely estranged," said Esther. "He is a different man from
what he used to be."

"Of course he's different. You're different. So am I. He can't take up
things where he left them, but he's got to take them up somewhere.
What's he going to do?"

"I don't know," said Esther. She drank her tea nervously. It seemed to
her she needed a vivifying draught. "Auntie, you don't quite understand.
We are divorced in every sense."

That sounded complete, and she hoped for some slight change of position
on the part of the inquisitor.

"Of course you went to see him while he was in prison?" auntie pursued
inexorably.

"No," said Esther, in a voice thrillingly sweet. "He didn't wish it."

Auntie helped herself to tea. Esther made a mental note that an extra
quantity must be brewed next time.

"You see," said Madame Beattie, putting her cup down and settling back
into her chair with an undue prominence of frontal velvet, "you have to
take these things like a woman of the world. What's all this talk about
feelings, and Jeff's being unhappy and happy? He's married you, and it's
a good thing for you both you've got each other to turn to. This kind of
sentimental talk does very well before marriage. It has its place. You'd
never marry without it. But after the first you might as well take
things as they come. There was my husband. I bore everything from him.
Then I kicked over the traces and he bore everything from me. But when
we found everybody was doing us and we should be a great deal stronger
together than apart, we came together again. And he died very happily."

Esther thought, in her physical aversion to auntie, that he must indeed
have been happy in the only escape left open to him.

"Where is Susan?" auntie inquired, after a brief interlude of coughing.
It could never be known whether her coughs were real. She had little dry
coughs of doubt, of derision, of good-natured tolerance; but perhaps she
herself couldn't have said now whether they had their origin in any
disability.

"Grandma is in her room," said Esther faintly. She felt a savage
distaste for facing the prospect of them together, auntie who would be
sure to see grandmother, and grandmother who would not be seen. "She
lies in bed."

"All the time?"

"Yes."

"Not all the time!"

"Why, yes, auntie, she lies in bed all the time."

"What for? Is she crippled, or paralysed or what?"

"She says she is old."

"Old? Susan is seventy-six. She's a fool. Doesn't she know you don't
have to give up your faculties at all unless you stop using them?"

"She says she is old," repeated Esther obstinately. It seemed to her a
sensible thing for grandmother to say. Being old kept her happily in
retirement. She wished auntie had a similar recognition of decencies.

"I'll go to my room now," said Madame Beattie. "What a nice house! This
is Susan's house, isn't it?"

"Yes." Esther had now retired to the last defences. She saw auntie
settling upon them in a jovial ease. It might have been different, she
thought, if Alston Choate had got her a divorce years ago and then
married her. "Come," she said, with an undiminished sweetness, "I'll
take you to your room."




VIII


Addington, so Jeffrey Blake remembered when he came home to it, was a
survival. Naïve constancies to custom, habits sprung out of old
conditions and logical no more, and even the cruder loyalties to the
past, lived in it unchanged. This was as his mind conceived it. His
roots had gone deeper here than he knew while he was still a part of it,
a free citizen. The first months of his married life had been spent
here, but as his prosperity burned the more brilliantly, he and Esther
had taken up city life in winter, and for the summer had bought a large
and perfectly equipped house in a colony at the shore. That, in the
crash of his fortunes, had gone with other wreckage, and now he never
thought of it with even a momentary regret. It belonged to that fevered
time when he was always going fast and faster, as if life were a
perpetual speeding in a lightning car. But of Addington he did think, in
the years that were so much drear space for reflection, and though he
felt no desire to go back, the memory of it was cool and still. The town
had distinct social strata, the happier, he felt, in that. There were
the descendants of old shipbuilders and merchants who drew their
sufficient dividends and lived on the traditions of times long past. All
these families knew and accepted one another. Their peculiarities were
no more to be questioned than the eccentric shapes of clouds. The
Daytons, who were phenomenally ugly in a bony way, were the Daytons.
Their long noses with the bulb at the base were Dayton noses. The
Madisons, in the line of male descent from distinguished blood, drank
to an appalling extent; but they were Madisons, and you didn't interdict
your daughters' marrying them. The Mastertons ate no meat, and didn't
believe in banks. They kept their money in queer corners, and there was
so much of it that they couldn't always remember where, and the
laundress had orders to turn all stockings before wetting, and did
indeed often find bills in the toe. But the laundress, being also of
Addington, though of another stratum, recognised this as a Masterton
habit, and faithfully sought their hoarded treasure for them, and
delivered it over with the accuracy of an accountant. She wouldn't have
seen how the Mastertons could help having money in their clothes unless
they should cease being Mastertons. Nor was it amazing to their peers,
meeting them in casual talk, to realise that they were walking
depositories of coin and bills. A bandit on a lonely road would, if he
were born in Addington, have forborne to rob them. These and other
personal eccentricities Jeffrey Blake remembered and knew he should find
them ticking on like faithful clocks. It was all restful to recall, but
horrible to meet. He knew perfectly what the attitude of Addington would
be to him. Because he was Addington born, it would stand by him, and
with a double loyalty for his father's sake. That loyalty, beautiful or
stupid as you might find it, he could not bear. He hoped, however, to
escape it by making his father the briefest visit possible and then
getting off to the West. Anne had reminded him that Alston Choate had
called, and he had commented briefly:

"Oh! he's a good old boy."

But she saw, with her keen eyes gifted to read the heart, that he was
glad he had not seen him. The first really embarrassing caller came the
forenoon after Madame Beattie had arrived at Esther's, Madame Beattie
herself in the village hack with Denny, uncontrollably curious, on the
box. Madame Beattie paid twenty-five cents extracted from the tinkling
chatelaine, and dismissed Denny, but he looked over his shoulder
regretfully until he had rounded the curve of the drive. Meantime she,
in her plumes and black velvet, was climbing the steps, and Jeffrey, who
was on the side veranda, heard her and took down his feet from the rail,
preparatory to flight. But she was aware of him, and stepped briskly
round the corner. Before he reached the door she was on him.

"Here, Jeff, here!" said she peremptorily and yet kindly, as you might
detain a dog, and Jeff, pausing, gazed at her in frank disconcertment
and remarked as frankly:

"The devil!"

Madame Beattie threw back her head on its stout muscular neck and
laughed, a husky laugh much like an old man's wheeze.

"No! no!" said she, approaching him and extending an ungloved hand, "not
so bad as that. How are you? Tell its auntie."

Jeffrey laughed. He took the hand for a brief grasp, and returned to the
group of chairs, where he found a comfortable rocker for her.

"How in the deuce," said he, "did you get here so quick?"

Madame Beattie rejected the rocker and took a straight chair that kept
her affluence of curves in better poise.

"Quick after what?" she inquired, with a perfect good-nature.

Jeffrey had seated himself on the rail, his hands, too, resting on it,
and he regarded her with a queer terrified amusement, as if, in
research, he had dug up a strange object he had no use for and might
find it difficult to place. Not to name: he could name her very
accurately.

"So quick after I got here," he replied, with candour. "I tell you
plainly, Madame Beattie, there isn't a cent to be got out of me. I'm
done, broke, down and out."

Madame Beattie regarded him with an unimpaired good-humour.

"Bless you, Jeff," said she, "I know that. What are you going to do, now
you're out?"

The question came as hard as a stroke after the cushioned assurance
preceding it. Jeff met it as he might have met such a query from a man
to whom he owed no veilings of hard facts.

"I don't know," said he. "If I did know I shouldn't tell you."

Madame Beattie seemed not to suspect the possibility of rebuff.

"Esther hasn't changed a particle," said she.

Jeff scowled, not at her, but absently at the side of the house, and
made no answer.

"Aren't you coming down there?" asked Madame Beattie peremptorily, with
the air of drumming him up to some task that would have to be reckoned
with in the end. "Come, Jeff, why don't you answer? Aren't you coming
down?"

Jeffrey had ceased scowling. He had smoothed his brows out with his
hand, indeed, as if their tenseness hurt him.

"Look here," said he, "you ask a lot of questions."

She laughed again, a different sort of old laugh, a fat and throaty one.

"Did I ever tell you," said she, "what the Russian grand duke said when
I asked him why he didn't marry?"

"No," said Jeff, quite peaceably now. She was safer in the company of
remembered royalties.

Madame Beattie sought among the jingling decorations of her person for
a cigarette, found it and offered him another.

"Quite good," she told him. "An Italian count keeps me supplied. I don't
know where the creature gets them."

Then, after they had lighted up, she returned to her grand duke, and
Jeff found the story sufficiently funny and laughed at it, and she
pulled another out of her well-stored memory, and he laughed at that.
Madame Beattie told her stories excellently. She knew how little weight
they carry smothered in feminine graces and coy obliquities from the
point. Graces had long ceased to interest her as among the assets of a
life where man and woman have to work to feed themselves. Now she sat
down with her brother man and emulated him in ready give and take.
Jeffrey forsook the rail which had subtly marked his distance from her;
he took a chair, and put his feet up on the rail. Madame Beattie's
neatly shod and very small feet went up on a chair, and she tipped the
one she was sitting in at a dangerous angle while she exhaled
luxuriously, and so Lydia, coming round the corner in a simple curiosity
to know who was there, found them, laughing uproariously and dim with
smoke. Lydia had her opinions about smoking. She had seen women indulge
in it at some of the functions where she and Anne danced, but she had
never found a woman of this stamp doing it with precisely this air.
Indeed, Lydia had never seen a woman of Madame Beattie's stamp in her
whole life. She stopped short, and the two could not at once get hold of
themselves in their peal of accordant mirth. But Lydia had time to see
one thing for a certainty. Jeff's face had cleared of its brooding and
its intermittent scowl. He was enjoying himself. This, she thought, in a
sudden rage of scorn, was the kind of thing he enjoyed: not Farvie, not
Anne's gentle ministrations, but the hooting of a horrible old woman.
Madame Beattie saw her and straightened some of the laughing wrinkles
round her eyes.

"Well, well!" said she. "Who's this?"

Then Jeffrey, becoming suddenly grave, as if, Lydia thought, he ought to
be ashamed of laughing in such company, sprang to his feet, and threw
away his cigarette.

"Madame Beattie," said he, "this is Miss Lydia French."

Madame Beattie did not rise, as who, indeed, so plumed and
black-velveted should for a slip of a creature trembling with futile
rage over a brother proved wanting in ideals? She extended one hand,
while the other removed the cigarette from her lips and held it at a
becoming distance.

"And who's Miss Lydia French?" said she. Then, as Lydia, pink with
embarrassment and disapproval, made no sign, she added peremptorily,
"Come here, my dear."

Lydia came. It was true that Madame Beattie had attained to privilege
through courts and high estate. When she herself had ruled by the
prerogative of a perfect throat and a mind attuned to it, she had
imbibed a sense of power which was still dividend-paying even now,
though the throat was dead to melody. When she really asked you to do
anything, you did it, that was all. She seldom asked now, because her
attitude was all careless tolerance, keen to the main chance but lax in
exacting smaller tribute, as one having had such greater toll. But
Lydia's wilful hesitation awakened her to some slight curiosity, and she
bade her the more commandingly. Lydia was standing before her, red,
unwillingly civil, and Madame Beattie reached forward and took one of
her little plump work-roughened hands, held it for a moment, as if in
guarantee of kindliness, and then dropped it.

"Now," said she, "who are you?"

Jeffrey, seeing Lydia so put about, answered for her again, but this
time in terms of a warmth which astonished him as it did Lydia.

"She is my sister Lydia."

Madame Beattie looked at him in a frank perplexity.

"Now," said she, "what do you mean by that? No, no, my dear, don't go."
Lydia had turned by the slightest movement. "You haven't any sisters,
Jeff. Oh, I remember. It was that romantic marriage." Lydia turned back
now and looked straight at her, as if to imply if there were any
qualifying of the marriage she had a word to say. "Wasn't there another
child?" Madame Beattie continued, still to Jeff.

"Anne is in the house," said he.

He had placed a chair for Lydia, with a kindly solicitude, seeing how
uncomfortable she was; but Lydia took no notice. Now she straightened
slightly, and put her pretty head up. She looked again as she did when
the music was about to begin, and her little feet, though they kept
their decorous calm, were really beating time.

"Well, you're a pretty girl," said Madame Beattie, dropping her lorgnon.
She had lifted it for a stare and taken in the whole rebellious figure.
"Esther didn't tell me you were pretty. You know Esther, don't you?"

"No," said Lydia, in a wilful stubbornness; "I don't know her."

"You've seen her, haven't you?"

"Yes, I've seen her."

"You don't like her then?" said Madame astutely. "What's the matter with
her?"

Something gave way in Lydia. The pressure of feeling was too great and
candour seethed over the top.

"She's a horrid woman."

Or was it because some inner watchman on the tower told her Jeff himself
had better hear again what one person thought of Esther? Madame Beattie
threw back her plumed head and laughed, the same laugh she had used to
annotate the stories. Lydia immediately hated herself for having
challenged it. Jeffrey, she knew, was faintly smiling, though she could
not guess his inner commentary:

"What a little devil!"

Madame Beattie now turned to him.

"Same old story, isn't it?" she stated. "Every woman of woman born is
bound to hate her."

"Yes," said Jeff.

Lydia walked away, expecting, as she went, to be called back and
resolving that no inherent power in the voice of aged hatefulness should
force her. But Madame Beattie, having placed her, had forgotten all
about her. She rose, and brushed the ashes from her velvet curves.

"Come," she was saying to Jeffrey, "walk along with me."

He obediently picked up his hat.

"I sha'n't go home with you," said he, "if that's what you mean."

She took his arm and convoyed him down the steps, leaning wearily. She
had long ago ceased to exercise happy control over useful muscles. They
even creaked in her ears and did strange things when she made requests
of them.

"You understand," said Jeffrey, when they were pursuing a slow way along
the street, he with a chafed sense of ridiculous captivity. "I sha'n't
go into the house. I won't even go to the door."

"Stuff!" said the lady. "You needn't tell me you don't want to see
Esther."

Jeff didn't tell her that. He didn't tell her anything. He stolidly
guided her along.

"There isn't a man born that wouldn't want to see Esther if he'd seen
her once," said Madame Beattie.

But this he neither combated nor confirmed, and at the corner nearest
Esther's house he stopped, lifted the hand from his arm and placed it in
a stiff rigour at her waist. He then took off his hat, prepared to stand
while she went on. And Madame Beattie laughed.

"You're a brute," said she pleasantly, "a dear, sweet brute. Well,
you'll come to it. I shall tell Esther you love her so much you hate
her, and she'll send out spies after you. Good-bye. If you don't come,
I'll come again."

Jeffrey made no answer. He watched her retreating figure until it turned
in at the gate, and then he wheeled abruptly and went back. An instinct
of flight was on him. Here in the open street he longed for walls, only
perhaps because he knew how well everybody wished him and their kindness
he could not meet.

Madame Beattie found Esther at the door, waiting. She was an excited
Esther, bright-eyed, short of breath.

"Where have you been?" she demanded.

Madame Beattie took off her hat and stabbed the pin through it. Her
toupée, deranged by the act, perceptibly slid, but though she knew it by
the feel, that eccentricity did not, in the company of a mere niece,
trouble her at all. She sank into a chair and laid her hat on the
neighbouring stand.

"Where have you been?" repeated Esther, a pulse of something like anger
beating through the words.

Madame Beattie answered idly: "Up to see Jeff."

"I knew it!" Esther breathed.

"Of course," said Madame Beattie carelessly. "Jeff and I were quite
friends in old times. I was glad I went. It cheered him up."

"Did he--" Esther paused.

"Ask for you?" supplied Madame Beattie pleasantly. "Not a word."

Here Esther's curiosity did whip her on. She had to ask:

"How does he look?"

"Oh, youngish," said Madame. "Rather flabby. Obstinate. Ugly, too."

"Ugly? Plain, do you mean?"

"No. American for ugly--obstinate, sore-headed. He's hardened. He was
rather a silly boy, I remember. Had enthusiasms. Much in love. He isn't
now. He's no use for women."

Esther looked at her in an arrested thoughtfulness. Madame Beattie could
have laughed. She had delivered the challenge Jeff had not sent, and
Esther was accepting it, wherever it might lead, to whatever duelling
ground. Esther couldn't help that. A challenge was a challenge. She had
to answer. It was a necessity of type. Madame Beattie saw the least
little flickering thought run into her eyes, and knew she was
involuntarily charting the means of summons, setting up the loom, as it
were, to weave the magic web. She got up, took her hat, gave her toupée
a little smack with the hand, and unhinged it worse than ever.

"You'll have to give him up," she said.

"Give him up!" flamed Esther. "Do you think I want--"

There she paused and Madame Beattie supplied temperately:

"No matter what you want. You couldn't have him."

Then she went toiling upstairs, her chained ornaments clinking, and only
when she had shut the door upon herself did she relax and smile over the
simplicity of even a feminine creature so versed in obliquity as
Esther. For Esther might want to escape the man who had brought disgrace
upon her, but her flying feet would do her no good, so long as the
mainspring of her life set her heart beating irrationally for conquest.
Esther had to conquer even when the event would bring disaster: like a
chieftain who would enlarge his boundaries at the risk of taking in
savages bound to sow the dragon's teeth.




IX


That evening the Blake house had the sound and look of social life,
voices in conversational interchange and lights where Mary Nellen
excitedly arrayed them. Alston Choate had come to call, and following
him appeared an elderly lady whom Jeffrey greeted with more outward
warmth than he had even shown his father. Alston Choate had walked in
with a simple directness as though he were there daily, and Anne
impulsively went forward to him. She felt she knew him very well. They
were quite friends. Alston, smiling at her and taking her hand on the
way to the colonel and Jeff, seemed to recognise that, and greeted her
less formally than the others. The colonel was moved at seeing him. The
Choates were among the best of local lineage, men and women
distinguished by clear rigidities of conduct. Their friendship was a
promissory note, bound to be honoured to the full. Lydia was for some
reason abashed, and Jeff, both she and Anne thought, not adequately
welcoming. But how could he be, Anne considered. He was in a position of
unique loneliness. He lacked fellowship. Nobody but Alston, in their
stratum at least, had come in person. No wonder he looked warily, lest
he assume too much.

Before they settled down, the elderly lady, with a thud of feet softly
shod, walked through the hall and stood at the library door regarding
them benignantly. And then Jeff, with an outspoken sound of pleasure and
surprise, got up and drew her in, and Choate smiled upon her as if she
were delightfully unlike anybody else. The colonel, with a quick, moved
look, just said her name:

"Amabel!"

She gave warm, quick grasps from a firm hand, gave them all round, not
seeming to know she hadn't met Anne and Lydia, and at once took off her
bonnet. It had strings and altogether belonged to an epoch at least
twenty years away. The bonnet she "laid aside" on a table with a certain
absent care, as ladies were accustomed to treat bonnets before they got
into the way of jabbing them with pins. Then she sat down, earnestly
solicitous and attentive as at a consultation. Anne thought she was the
most beautiful person she had ever seen. It was a pity Miss Amabel
Bracebridge could not have known that impetuous verdict. It would have
brought her a surprised, spontaneous laugh: nothing could have convinced
her it was not delicious foolery. She was tall and broad and heavy. When
she stood in the doorway, she seemed to fill it. Now that she sat in the
chair, she filled that, a soft, stout woman with great shoulders and a
benign face, a troubled face, as if she were used to soothing ills, yet
found for them no adequate recompense. Her dark grey dress was buttoned
in front, after the fashion of a time long past. It was so archaic in
cut, with a little ruffle at neck and sleeves, that it did more than
adequate service toward maturing her. Indeed, there was no youth about
Miss Amabel, except the youth of her eyes and smile. There were
childlike wistfulness and hope, but experience chiefly, of life, of the
unaccounted for, the unaccountable. She had, above all, an expression of
well-wishing. Now she sat and looked about her.

"Dear me!" she said, "how pleasant it is to see this house open again."

"But it's been open," Lydia impulsively reminded her.

"Yes," said Miss Amabel. "But not this way." She turned to Jeff and
regarded him anxiously. "Don't you smoke?" she asked.

He laughed again. He was exceedingly pleased, Anne saw, merely at seeing
her. Miss Amabel was exactly as he remembered her.

"Yes," said he. "Want us to?"

She put up her long eyebrows and smiled as if in some amusement at
herself.

"I've learned lately," she said, "that gentlemen are so devoted to it
they feel lost without it."

"Light up, Choate," said Jeffrey. "My sisters won't mind. Will you?" He
interrogated Anne. "They get along with me."

No, Anne didn't mind, and she rose and brought matches and little trays.
Lydia often wondered how Anne knew the exact pattern of man's
convenience. But though Choate accepted a cigar, he did not light it.

"Not now," he said, when Jeffrey offered him a light; he laid the cigar
down, tapping it once or twice with his fine hand, and Anne thought he
refrained in courtesy toward her and Lydia.

"This is very pleasant," said the colonel suddenly. "It's good to see
you, Amabel. Now I feel myself at home."

But what, after the first settling was over, had they to say? The same
thought was in all their minds. What was Jeffrey going to do? He knew
that, and moved unhappily. Whatever he was going to do, he wouldn't talk
about it. But Miss Amabel was approaching him with the clearest
simplicity.

"Jeff, my dear," she said, "I can't wait to hear about your ideal
republic."

And then, all his satisfaction gone and his scowl come back, Jeff shook
his head as if a persistent fly had lighted on him, and again he
disclaimed achievement.

"Amabel," said he, "I'm awfully sick of that, you know."

"But, dear boy, you revolutionised--" she was about to add, "the
prison," but stumbled lamely--"the place."

"The papers told us that," said Choate. It was apparent he was helping
somebody out, but whether Jeff or Miss Amabel even he couldn't have
said.

"It isn't revolutionised," said Jeff. He turned upon Choate brusquely.
"It's exactly the same."

"They say it's revolutionised," Miss Amabel offered anxiously.

"Who says so?" he countered, now turning on her.

"The papers," she told him. "You didn't write me about it. I asked you
all sorts of questions and you wouldn't say a word."

"But you wrote me," said Jeff affectionately, "every week. I got so used
to your letters I sha'n't be able to do without them; I shall have to
see you every day."

"Of course we're going to see each other," she said. "And there's such a
lot you can do."

She looked so earnestly entreating that Choate, who sat not far from
her, gave a murmured: "Ah, Miss Amabel!" In his mind the
half-despairing, wholly loving thought had been: "Good old girl! You're
spending yourself and all your money, but it's no use--no use."

She was going on with a perfect clarity of purpose.

"Oh, you know, Jeff can do more for us than anybody else."

"What do you want done for you?" he inquired.

His habit of direct attack gave Lydia a shiver. She was sure people
couldn't like it, and she was exceedingly anxious for him to be liked.
Miss Amabel turned to Farvie.

"You see," she said, "Addington is waking up. I didn't dwell very much
on it," she added, now to Jeff, "when I wrote you, because I thought
you'd like best to think of it as it was. But now--"

"Now I'm out," said Jeff brutally, "you find me equal to it."

"I think," said Miss Amabel, "you can do so much for us." Nothing
troubled her governed calm. It might almost be that, having looked from
high places into deep ones, no abyss could dizzy her. "Weedon Moore
feels as I do."

"Weedon Moore?" Jeffrey repeated, in a surprised and most uncordial
tone. He looked at Choate.

"Yes," said Choate, as if he confirmed not only the question but Jeff's
inner feeling, "he's here. He's practising law, and besides that he
edits the _Argosy_."

"Owns it, too, I think," said Farvie. "They told me so at the
news-stand."

"Well," said Choate pointedly, "it's said Miss Amabel owns it."

"Then," said Jeff, including her abruptly, "you've the whip-hand. You
can get Moore out of it. What's he in it for anyway? Did you have to
take him over with the business?"

Miss Amabel was plainly grieved.

"Now why should you want to turn him out of it?" she asked, really of
Choate who had started the attack. "Mr. Moore is a very able young man,
of the highest ideals."

Jeff laughed. It was a kindly laugh. Anne was again sure he loved Miss
Amabel.

"I can't see Moore changing much after twenty-five," he said to Choate,
who confirmed him briefly:

"Same old Weedie."

"Mr. Moore is not popular," said Miss Amabel, with dignity, turning now
to Farvie. "He never has been, here in Addington. He comes of plain
people."

"That's not it, Miss Amabel," said Choate gently. "He might have been
spawned out of the back meadows or he might have been--a Bracebridge."
He bowed to her with a charming conciliation and Miss Amabel sat a
little straighter. "If we don't accept him, it's because he's Weedon
Moore."

"We were in school with him, you know: in college, too," said Jeff, with
that gentleness men always accorded her, men of perception who saw in
her the motherhood destined to diffuse itself, often to no end: she was
so noble and at the same time so helpless in the crystal prison of her
hopes. "We knew Weedie like a book."

Miss Amabel took on an added dignity, proportioned to the discomfort of
her task. Here she was defending Weedon Moore whom her outer
sensibilities rejected the while his labelled virtues moved her soul.
Sometimes when she found herself with people like these to-night,
manifestly her own kind, she was tired of being good.

"I don't know any one," said she, "who feels the prevailing unrest more
keenly than Weedon Moore."

At that instant, Mary Nellen, her eyes brightening as these social
activities increased, appeared in the doorway, announcing doubtfully:

"Mr. Moore."

Jeffrey, as if actually startled, looked round at Choate who was
unaffectedly annoyed. Anne, rising to receive the problematic Moore,
thought they had an air of wondering how they could repel unwarranted
invasion. Miss Amabel, in a sort of protesting, delicate distress, was
loyally striving to make the invader's path plain.

"I told him I was coming," she said. "It seems he had thought of
dropping in." Then Anne went out on the heels of Mary Nellen, hearing
Miss Amabel conclude, as she left, with an apologetic note unfamiliar to
her soft voice, "He wants you to write something, Jeff, for the
_Argosy_."

Anne, even before seeing him, became conscious that Mary Nellen regarded
the newcomer as undesirable; and when she came on him standing, hat in
hand, she agreed that Weedon Moore was, in his outward integument,
exceedingly unpleasant: a short, swarthy, tubby man, always, she was to
note, dressed in smooth black, and invariably wearing or carrying, with
the gravity of a funeral mourner, what Addington knew as a "tall hat".
When the weather gave him countenance, he wore a black coat with a cape.
One flashing ring adorned his left hand, and he indulged a barbaric
taste in flowing ties. Seeing Anne, he spoke at once, and if she had not
been prepared for him she must have guessed him to be a man come on a
message of importance. There was conscious emphasis in his voice, and
there needed to be if it was to accomplish anything: a high voice,
strident, and, like the rest of him, somehow suggesting insect life. He
held out his hand and Anne most unwillingly took it.

"Miss French," said he, with no hesitation before her name, "how is
Jeff?"

The mere inquiry set Anne vainly to hoping that he need not come in. But
he gave no quarter.

"I said I'd run over to-night, paper or no paper. I'm frightfully busy,
you know, cruelly, abominably busy. But I just wanted to see Jeff."

"Won't you come in?" said Anne.

Even then he did not abandon his hat. He kept his hold on it, bearing it
before him in a way that made Anne think absurdly of shields and
bucklers. When, in the library, she turned to present him, as if he were
an unpleasant find she had got to vouch for somehow, the men were
already on their feet and Jeff was setting forward a chair. She could
not help thinking it was a clever stage business to release him from the
necessity of shaking hands. But Moore did not abet him in that
informality. His small hand was out, and he was saying in a sharp,
strained voice, exactly as if he were making a point of some kind, an
oratorical point:

"Jeff, my dear fellow! I'm tremendously glad to see you."

Anne thought Jeff might not shake hands with him at all. But she saw him
steal a shamefaced look at Miss Amabel and immediately, as if something
radical had to be done when it came to the friend of a beloved old girl
like her, strike his hand into Moore's, with an emphasis the more
pronounced for his haste to get it over. Moore seemed enraptured at the
handshake and breathless over the occasion. Having begun shaking hands
he kept on with enthusiasm: the colonel, Miss Amabel and Lydia had to
respond to an almost fervid greeting.

Only Choate proved immune. He had vouchsafed a cool: "How are you,
Weedie?" when Moore began, and that seemed all Moore was likely to
expect. Then they all sat down and there was, Lydia decided, as she
glanced from one to another, no more pleasure in it. There was talk.
Moore chatted so exuberantly, his little hands upon his fattish knees,
that he seemed to squeeze sociability out of himself in a rapture of
generous willingness to share all he had. He asked the colonel how he
liked Addington, and was not abashed at being reminded that the colonel
had known Addington for a good many years.

"Still it's changed," said Moore, regarding him almost archly.
"Addington isn't the place it was even a year ago."

"I hope we've learned something," said Miss Amabel earnestly and yet
prettily too.

"My theory of Addington," said Choate easily, "is that we all wish we
were back in the Addington of a hundred years ago."

"You'd want to be in the dominant class," said Moore. There was
something like the trammels of an unwilling respect over his manner to
Choate; yet still he managed to be rallying. "When the old merchants
were coming home with china and bales of silk and Paris shoes for madam.
And think of it," said he, raising his sparse eyebrows and looking like
a marionette moulded to express something and saying it with painful
clumsiness, almost grotesquerie, "the ships are bringing human products
now. They're bringing us citizens, bone and sinew of the republic, and
we cry back to china and bales of silk."

"I didn't answer you, Moore," said Choate, turning to him and speaking,
Lydia thought, with the slightest arrogance. "I should have wanted to
belong to the governing class--of course."

"Now!" said Miss Amabel. She spoke gently, and she was, they saw, pained
at the turn the talk had taken. "Alston, why should you say that?"

"Because I mean it," said Alston. His quietude seemed to carry a private
message to Moore, but he turned to her, as he spoke and smiled as if to
ask her not to interpret him harshly. "Of course I should have wanted to
be in the dominant class. So does everybody, really."

"No, my dear," said Miss Amabel.

"No," agreed Choate, "you don't. The others like you didn't. I won't
embarrass you by naming them. You want to sit submerged, you others, and
be choked by slime, if you must be, and have the holy city built up on
your shoulders. But the rest of us don't. Moore here doesn't, do you,
Weedie?"

Weedon gave a quick embarrassed laugh.

"You're so droll," said he.

"No," said Choate quietly, "I'm not being droll. Of course I want to
belong to the dominant class. So does the man that never dominated in
his life. He wants to overthrow the over-lords so he can rule himself.
He wants to crowd me so he can push into a place beside me."

Moore laughed with an overdone enjoyment.

"Excellent," he said, squeezing the words out of his knees. "You're such
a humourist."

If he wanted to be offensive, that was the keenest cut he could have
delivered.

"I have often thought," said the colonel, beginning in a hesitating,
deferent way that made his utterance rather notable, "that we saddle
what we call the lower orders with motives different from our own."

"Precisely," Choate clipped in. "We used to think, when they committed a
perfectly logical crime, like stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread, that
it was absolutely different from anything we could have done. Whereas in
their places we should have tried precisely the same thing. Just as
cleanliness is a matter of bathtubs and temperature. We shouldn't bathe
if we had to break the ice over a quart of water and then go out and run
a trolley car all day."

Lydia's face, its large eyes fixed upon him, said so plainly "I don't
believe it" that he laughed, with a sudden enjoyment of her, and, after
an instant of wider-eyed surprise, she laughed too.

"And here's Miss Amabel," Choate went on, in the voice it seemed he kept
for her, "going to the outer extreme and believing, because the
labouring man has been bled, that he's incapable of bleeding you. Don't
you think it, Miss Amabel. He's precisely like the rest of us. Like me.
Like Weedon here. He'll sit up on his platform and judge me like forty
thousand prophets out of Israel; but put him where I am and he'll cling
with his eyelids and stick there. Just as I shall."

Miss Amabel looked deeply troubled and also at a loss.

"I only think, Alston," she said, "that so much insight, so much of the
deepest knowledge comes of pain. And the poor have suffered pain so many
centuries. They've learned things we don't know. Look how they help one
another. Look at their self-sacrifice."

"Look at your own self-sacrifice," said Choate.

"Oh, but they know," said she. The flame of a great desire was in her
face. "I don't know what it is to be hungry. If I starved myself I
shouldn't know, because in somebody's pantry would be the bread-box I
could put my hand into. They know, Alston. It gives them insight. When
they remember the road they've travelled, they're not going to make the
mistakes we've made."

"Oh, yes, they are," said Choate. "Pardon me. There are going to be
robbers and pirates and Napoleons and get-rich-quicks born for quite a
while yet. And they're not going to be born in my class alone--nor
Weedon's."

Weedon squirmed at this, and even Jeff thought it rather a nasty cut.
But Jeff did not know yet how well Choate knew Weedon in the ways of
men. And Weedon accepted no rebuff. He turned to Jeff, distinctly
leaving Choate as one who would have his little pleasantries.

"Jeff," he said, "I want you to do something for the _Argosy_."

Jeff at once knew what.

"Queer," he said, "how you all think I've got copy out of jail."

Anne resented the word. It was not jail, she thought, a federal prison
where gentlemen, when they have done wrong or been, like Jeff, falsely
accused, may go with dignity.

"My dear," said Miss Amabel, in a manner at once all compassion and
inexorable demand, "you've got so much to tell us. You men in
that--place," she stumbled over the word and then accepted
it--"discussed the ideal republic. You made it, by discussing it."

"Yes," said Choate, in voice of curious circumspection as if he hardly
knew what form even of eulogy might hurt, "it was an astonishing piece
of business. You can't expect people not to notice a thing like that."

"I can't help it," said Jeff. "I don't want such a row made over it."

Whether the thing was too intimate, too near his heart still beating
sluggishly it might be, from prison air, could not be seen. But Miss
Amabel, exquisitely compassionate, was yet inexorable, because he had
something to give and must not withhold.

"The wonderful part of it is," she said, "that when you have built up
your ideal government, prison ceases to be prison. There won't be
punishment any more."

"Oh, don't you make that mistake," said Jeff, instantly, moved now too
vitally to keep out of it. "There are going to be punishments all along
the line. The big punishment of all, when you've broken a law, is that
you're outside. If it's a small break, you're not much over the sill. If
it's a big break, you're absolutely out. Outside, Amabel, outside!" He
never used the civil prefix before her name, and Anne wondered again
whether the intimacy of the letters accounted for this sweet
informality. "You're banished. What's worse than that?"

"Oh, but," said she, her plain, beautiful face beaming divinity on him
as one of the children of men, "I don't want them to be banished. If
anybody has sinned--has broken the law--I want him to be educated.
That's all."

"Look here," said Jeff, He bent forward to her and laid the finger of
one trade-stained hand in the other palm. "You're emasculating the whole
nation. Let us be educated, but let us take our good hard whacks."

"Hear! hear!" said Choate, speaking mildly but yet as a lawyer, who
spent his life in presenting liabilities for or against punishment.
"That's hot stuff."

"I believe in law," said Jeff rapidly. "Sometimes I think that's all I
believe in now."

Anne and Lydia looked at him in a breathless waiting upon his words. He
had begun to justify himself to their crescent belief in him, the
product of the years. His father also waited, but tremulously. Here was
the boy he had wanted back, but he had not so very much strength to
accord even a fulfilled delight. Jeff, forgetful of everybody but the
old sybil he was looking at, sure of her comprehension if not her
agreement, went on.

"I'd rather have bad laws than no laws. I believe in Sparta. I believe
in the Catholic Church, if only because it has fasts and penances. We've
got to toe the mark. If we don't, something's got to give it to us good
and hard, the harder the better, too. Are we children to be let off from
the consequences of what we've done? No, by God! We're men and we've got
to learn."

Suddenly his eyes left Miss Amabel's quickened face and he glanced about
him, aware of the startled tensity of gaze among the others. Moore,
with a little book on his knee, was writing rapidly.

"Notes?" Jeff asked him shortly. "No, you don't."

He got up and extended his hand for the book, and Moore helplessly,
after a look at Miss Amabel, as if to ask whether she meant to see him
bullied, delivered it. Jeff whirled back two leaves, tore them out,
crumpled them in his hand and tossed them into the fireplace.

"You can't do that, Moore," he said indifferently, and Choate murmured a
monosyllabic assent.

Moore never questioned the bullying he so prodigally got. He never had
at college even; he was as ready to fawn the next day. It seemed as if
the inner man were small, too small for sound resentment. Jeff sat down
again. He looked depressed, his countenance without inward light. But
Lydia and Anne had rediscovered him. Again he was their hero, reclothed
indeed in finer mail. Miss Amabel rose at once. She shook hands with the
colonel, and asked Anne and Lydia to come to see her.

"Don't you do something, you two girls?" she asked, with her inviting
smile. "I'm sure Jeff wrote me so."

"We dance," said Lydia, in a bubbling bright voice, as if she had run
forward to be sure to get the chance of answering. "Let us come and
dance for you. We can dance all sorts of things."

And Lydia was so purely childlike and dear, after this talk of
punishments and duties, that involuntarily they all laughed and she
looked abashed.

"Perhaps you know folk-dances," said Miss Amabel.

"Oh, yes," said Lydia, getting back her spirit. "There isn't one we
don't know."

And they laughed again and Miss Amabel tied on her bonnet and went away
attended by Choate, with Weedon Moore a pace behind, holding his hat,
until he got out of the house, as it might be at a grotesque funeral.

Miss Amabel had called back to Lydia:

"You must come and train my classes in their national dancing."

Lydia, behind the colonel and Jeff as they stood at the front door,
seized Anne's hand and did a few ecstatic little steps.

The colonel was bright-eyed and satisfied with his evening. "Jeff," said
he, before they turned to separate, "I always thought you were meant for
a writer."

Jeff looked at him in a dull denial, as if he wondered how any man, life
being what it is, could seek to bound the lot of another man. His face,
flushed darkly, was seamed with feeling.

"Father," said he, in a voice of mysterious reproach, "I don't know what
I was meant to be."




X


It was Lydia who found out what Jeff meant himself to be, for the next
day, in course of helping Mary Nellen, she went to his door with towels.
Mr. Jeffrey had gone out, Mary Nellen said. She had seen him spading in
the orchard, and if Miss Lydia wanted to carry up the towels! there was
the dusting, too. Lydia, at the open door, stopped, for Jeff was sitting
at his writing table, paper before him. He flicked a look at her,
absently, as at an intruder as insignificant as undesired, and because
the sacredness of his task was plain to her she took it humbly. But
Jeff, then actually seeing her, rose and put down his pen.

"I'll take those," he said.

It troubled him vaguely to find her and Anne doing tasks. He had a
worried sense that he and the colonel were living on their kind offices,
and he felt like assuring Lydia she shouldn't carry towels about for
either of them long. Then, as she did not yield them but looked,
housekeeper-wise, at the rack still loaded with its tumbled reserves, he
added:

"Give them here."

"You mustn't leave your writing," said Lydia primly if shyly, and
delivered up her charge.

Jeff stepped out after her into the hall. He had left dull issues at his
table, and Lydia seemed very sweet, her faith in him chiefly, though he
didn't want any more of it.

"Don't worry about my writing," said he.

"Oh, no," she answered, turning on him the clarity of her glance. "I
shouldn't. Authors never want it talked about."

"That's not it," said he. She found him tremendously in earnest. "I'm
not an author."

"But you will be when this is written."

"I don't know," he said, "how I can make you see. The whole thing is so
foreign to your ideas about books and life. It only happened that I met
a man--in there--" he hesitated over it, not as regarding delicacies but
only as they might affect her--"a man like a million others, some of 'em
in prison, more that ought to be. Well, he talked to me. I saw what
brought him where he was. It was picturesque."

"You want other people to understand," said Lydia, bright-eyed, now she
was following him. "For--a warning."

His frown was heavy. Now he was trying to follow her.

"No," he said, "you're off there. I don't take things that way. But I
did see it so plain I wanted everybody to see it, too. Maybe that was
why I did want to write it down. Maybe I wanted to write it for myself,
so I should see it plainer. It fascinated me."

Lydia felt a helpless yearning, because things were being so hard for
him. She wished for Anne who always knew, and with a word could help you
out when your elucidation failed.

"You see," Jeff was going on, "there's this kind of a brute born into
the world now, the kind that knows how to make money, and as soon as
he's discovered his knack, he's got the mania to make more. It's an
obligation, an obsession. Maybe it's only the game. He's in it, just as
much as if he'd got a thousand men behind him, all looting territory. It
might be for a woman. But it's the game. And it's a queer game. It cuts
him off. He's outside."

And here Lydia had a simple and very childlike thought, so inevitable to
her that she spoke without consideration.

"You were outside, too."

Jeff gave a little shake of the head, as if that didn't matter now he
was here and explaining to her.

"And the devil of it is, after they're once outside they don't know they
are."

"Do you mean, when they've done something and been found guilty and--"

"I mean all along the line. When they've begun to think they'll make
good, when they've begun to play the game."

"For money?"

"Yes, for money, for pretty gold and dirty bills and silver. That's what
it amounts to, when you get down to it, behind all the bank balances and
equities. There's a film that grows over your eyes, you look at nothing
else. You don't think about--" his voice dropped and he glanced out at
the walled orchard as if it were even a sacred place--"you don't think
about grass, and dirt, and things. You're thinking about the game."

"Well," said Lydia joyously, seeing a green pathway out, "now you've
found it's so, you don't need to think about it any more."

"That's precisely it," said he heavily. "I've got to think about it all
the time. I've got to make good."

"In the same way?" said Lydia, looking up at him childishly. "With
money?"

"Yes," said he, "with money. It's all I know. And without capital, too.
And I'm going to keep my head, and do it within the law. Yes, by God!
within the law. But I hate to do it. I hate it like the devil."

He looked so hard with resolution that she took the resolution for
pride, though she could not know whether it was a fine pride or a
heaven-defying one.

"You won't do just what you did before?" asserted Lydia, out of her
faith in him.

"Oh, yes, I shall."

She opened terrified eyes upon him.

"Be a promoter?"

"I don't know what I shall be. But I know the money game, and I shall
have to play it and make good."

She ventured a question touching on the fancies that were in her mind,
part of the bewildering drama that might attend on his return. She
faltered it out. It seemed too splendid really to assault fortune like
that. And yet perhaps not too splendid for him. This was the question.

"And pay back--" There she hesitated, and he finished for her.

"The money I lost in a hole? Well, we'll see." This last sounded
indulgent, as if he might add, "little sister ".

Lydia plucked up spirit.

"There's something else I hoped you'd do first."

"What is it?"

"I want you to prove you're innocent."

She found herself breathless over the words. They brought her very near
him, and after all she was not sure what kind of brother he was, save
that he had to be supremely loved. He looked pale to her now, of a
yellowed, unhappy hue, and he was staring at her fixedly.

"Innocent!" he repeated. "What do you mean by innocent?"

Lydia took heart again, since he really did invite her on.

"Why, of course," she said, "we all know--Farvie and Anne and I--we know
you never did it."

"Did what?"

"Lost all that money. Took it away from people."

The softness of her voice was moving to him. He saw she meant him very
well indeed.

"Lydia," said he, "I lost the money. Don't make any mistake about that."

"Yes, you were a promoter," she reminded him. "You were trying to get
something on the market." She seemed to be assuring him, in an agonised
way, of his own good faith. "And people bought shares. And you took
their money. And--" her voice broke here in a sob of irrepressible
sympathy--"and you lost it."

"Yes," said he patiently. "I found myself in a tight place and the
unexpected happened--the inconceivable. The market went to pieces. And
of course it was at the minute I was asked to account for the funds I
had. I couldn't. So I was a swindler. I was tried. I was sentenced, and
I went to prison. That's all."

"Oh," said Lydia passionately, "but do you suppose we don't know you're
not the only person concerned? Don't you suppose we know there's
somebody else to blame?"

Jeff turned on her a sudden look so like passion of a sort that she
trembled back from him. Why should he be angry with her? Did he stand by
Reardon to that extent?

"What do you mean?" he asked her. "Who's been talking to you?"

"We've all been talking," said Lydia, with a frank simplicity, "Farvie
and Anne and I. Of course we've talked. Especially Anne and I. We knew
you weren't to blame."

Jeff turned away from her and went back into his room. He shut the door,
and yet so quietly that she could not feel reproved. Only she was sad.
The way of being a sister was a harder one than she had looked for. But
she felt bound to him, even by stronger and stronger cords. He was hers,
Farvie's and Anne's and hers, however unlikely he was to take hold of
his innocence with firm hands and shake it in the public face.

Jeff, in his room, stood for a minute or more, hands in his pockets,
staring at the wall and absently thinking he remembered the paper on it
from his college days. But he recalled himself from the obvious. He
looked into his inner chamber of mind where he had forbidden himself to
glance since he had come home, lest he see there a confusion of idea and
desire that should make him the weaker in carrying out the
inevitabilities of his return. There was one thing in decency to be
expected of him at this point: to give his father a period of
satisfaction before he left him to do what he had not yet clearly
determined on. It was sufficiently convincing to tell Lydia he intended
to make good, but he had not much idea what he meant by it. He was
conscious chiefly that he felt marred somehow, jaded, harassed by life,
smeared by his experience of living in a gentlemanly jail. The fact that
he had left it did not restore to him his old feeling of owning the
earth. He had, from the moment of his conviction and sentence, been
outside, and his present liberty could not at once convey him inside.

He was, he knew, for one thing, profoundly tired. Nothing, he felt sure,
could give him back the old sense of air in his lungs. Confinement had
not deprived him of air. He had smiled grimly to himself once or twice,
as he thought what the sisters' idea of his prison was likely to be.
They probably had conjured up fetid dungeons. There were chains of a
surety, certainly a clank or two. As he remembered it, there was a
clanking in his mind, quite sufficient to fulfil the prison ideal. And
then he thought, with a sudden desire for man's company, the expectation
that would take you for granted, that he'd go down and see old Reardon.
Reardon had not been to call, but Jeff was too sick of solitariness to
mind that.

He went out without seeing anybody, the colonel, he knew, being at his
gentle task of cramming for Mary Nellen's evening lesson. Jeff had not
been in the street since the walk he had cut short with Madame Beattie.
He felt strange out in the world now, as if the light blinded him or the
sun burned him, or there were an air too chill--all, he reflected, in a
grim discovery, the consequence of being outside and not wanting houses
to see you or persons to bow and offer friendly hands. Reardon would
blow such vapours away with a breath of his bluff voice. But as he
reached the vestibule of the yellow house, Reardon himself was coming
out and Jeff, with a sick surprise, understood that Reardon was not
prepared to see him.




XI


Reardon stood there in his middle-aged ease, the picture of a man who
has nothing to do more hazardous than to take care of himself. His hands
were exceedingly well-kept. His cravat, of a dull blue, was suited to
his fresh-coloured face, and, though this is too far a quest for the
casual eye, his socks also were blue, an admirable match. Jeff was not
accustomed, certainly in these later years, to noting clothes; but he
did feel actually unkempt before this mirror of the time. Yet why? For
in the old days also Reardon had been rather vain of outward conformity.
He had striven then to make up by every last nicety of dress and manner
for the something his origin had lacked. It was not indeed the
perfection of his dress that disconcerted; it was the kind of man
Reardon had grown to be: for of him the clothes did, in their degree,
testify. Jeffrey was conscious that every muscle in Reardon's body had
its just measure of attention. Reardon had organised the care of that
being who was himself. He had provided richly for his future, wiped out
his past where it threatened to gall him, and was giving due
consideration to his present. He meant supremely to be safe, and to that
end he had entrenched himself on every side. Jeff felt a very
disorganised, haphazard sort of being indeed before so complete a
creature. And Reardon, so far from breaking into the old intimacy that
Jeff had seen still living behind them in a sunny calm, only waiting for
the gate to be opened on it again, stood there distinctly embarrassed
and nothing more.

"Jeff!" said he. "How are you?" That was not enough. He found it
lacking, and added, with a deepened shade of warmth, "How are you, old
man?"

Now he put out his hand, but it had been so long in coming that Jeff
gave no sign of seeing it.

"I'll walk along with you," he said.

"No, no." Reardon was calling upon reserves of decency and good feeling.
"You'll do nothing of the sort. Come in."

"No," said Jeff. "I was walking. I'll go along with you."

Now Reardon came down the steps and put an insistent hand on his
shoulder.

"Jeff," said he, "come on in. You surprised me. That's the truth. I
wasn't prepared. I hadn't looked for you."

Jeff went up the steps; it seemed, indeed, emotional to do less. But at
the door he halted and his eyes sought the chairs at hand.

"Can't we," said he, "sit down here?"

Reardon, with a courteous acquiescence, went past one of the chairs,
leaving it for him, and dropped into another. Jeff took his, and found
nothing to say. One of them had got to make a civil effort. Jeff,
certain he had no business there, took his hand at it.

"This was the old Pelham house?"

Reardon assented, in evident relief, at so remote a topic.

"I bought it six years ago. Had it put in perfect repair. The plumbing
cost me--well! you know what old houses are."

Jeff turned upon him.

"Jim," said he quietly, "what's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter," said Reardon, blustering. "My dear boy! I'm no
end glad to see you."

"Oh, no," said Jeff. "No, you're not. You've kicked me out. What's the
reason? My late residence? Oh, come on, man! Didn't expect to see me?
Didn't want to? That it?"

Suddenly the telephone rang, and the English man-servant came out and
said, with a perfect decorum:

"Mrs. Blake at the telephone, sir."

Jeff was looking at Reardon when he got the message and saw his small
blue eyes suffused and the colour hot in his cheeks. The blond well-kept
man seemed to be swelling with embarrassment.

"Excuse me," he said, got up and went inside, and Blake heard his voice
in brief replies.

When he came back, he looked harassed, fatigued even. His colour had
gone down and left him middle-aged. Jeff had not only been awaiting him,
but his glance had, as well. His eyes were fixed upon the spot where
Reardon's face, when he again occupied his chair, would be ready to be
interrogated.

"What Mrs. Blake?" Jeff asked.

Reardon sat down and fussed with the answer.

"What Mrs. Blake?" he repeated, and flicked a spot of dust from his
trousered ankle lifted to inspection.

"Yes," said Jeff, with an outward quiet. "Was that my wife?"

Again the colour rose in Reardon's face. It was the signal of an emotion
that gave him courage.

"Why, yes," he said, "it was."

"What did she want?"

"Jeff," said Reardon, "it's no possible business of yours what Esther
wants."

"You call her Esther?"

"I did then."

An outraged instinct of possession was rising in Reardon. Esther
suddenly meant more to him than she had in all this time when she had
been meaning a great deal. Alston Choate had power to rouse this
primitive rage in him, but he could always conquer it by reasoning that
Alston wouldn't take her if he could get her. There were too many
inherited reserves in Alston. Actually, Reardon thought, Alston wouldn't
really want a woman he had to take unguardedly. But here was the man
who, by every rigour of conventional life, had a right to her. It could
hardly be borne. Reardon wasn't used to finding himself dominated by
primal impulses. They weren't, his middle-aged conclusions told him,
safe. But now he got away from himself slightly and the freedom of it,
while it was exciting, made him ill at ease. The impulse to speak really
got the better of him.

"Look here, Blake," he said--and both of them realised that it was the
first time he had used that surname; Jeff had always been a boy to
him--"it's very unwise of you to come back here at all."

"Very unwise?" Jeff repeated, in an unmixed amazement, "to come back to
Addington? My father's here."

"Your father needn't have been here," pursued Reardon doggedly. Entered
upon what seemed a remonstrance somebody ought to make, he was
committed, he thought, to going on. "It was an exceedingly ill-judged
move for you all, very ill-judged indeed."

Jeff sat looking at him from a sternness that made a definite setting
for the picture of his wonder. Yet he seemed bent only upon
understanding.

"I don't say you came back to make trouble," Reardon went on, pursued
now by the irritated certainty that he had adopted a course and had got
to justify it. "But you're making it."

"How am I making it?"

"Why, you're making her damned uncomfortable."

"Who?"

Reardon had boggled over the name. He hardly liked to say Esther again,
since it had been ill-received, and he certainly wouldn't say "your
wife". But he had to choose and did it at a jump.

"Esther," he said, fixing upon that as the least offensive to himself.

"How am I making my wife uncomfortable?" Jeff inquired.

"Why, here you are," Reardon blundered, "almost within a stone's throw.
She can't even go into the street without running a chance of meeting
you."

Jeff threw back his head and laughed.

"No," he said, "she can't, that's a fact. She can't go into the street
without running the risk of meeting me. But if you hadn't told me,
Reardon, I give you my word I shouldn't have thought of the risk she
runs. No, I shouldn't have thought of it."

Reardon drew a long breath. He had, it seemed to him, after all done
wisely. The note of human brotherhood came back into his voice, even an
implication that presently it might be actually soothing.

"Well, now you do see, you'll agree with me. You can't annoy a woman.
You can't keep her in a state of apprehension."

Jeff had risen, and Reardon, too, got on his feet. Jeff seemed to be
considering, and very gravely, and Reardon, frowning, watched him.

"No," said Jeff. "No. Certainly you can't annoy a woman." He turned upon
Reardon, but with no suggestion of resentment. "What makes you think I
should annoy her?"

"Why, it isn't what you'd wilfully do." Now that the danger of violence
was over, Reardon felt that he could meet his man with a perfect
reasonableness, and tell him what nobody else was likely to. "It's your
being here. She can't help going back. She remembers how things used to
be. And then she gets apprehensive."

"How they used to be," Jeff repeated thoughtfully. He sounded stupid
standing there and able, apparently, to do nothing better than repeat.
"How was that? How do you understand they used to be?"

Reardon lost patience. You could afford to, evidently, with so numb an
antagonist.

"Why, you know," he said. "You remember how things used to be."

Jeff looked full at him now, and there was a curious brightness in his
eyes.

"I don't," he said. "I should have said I did, but now I hear you talk I
give you my word I don't. You'll have to tell me."

"She never blamed you," said Reardon expansively. He was beginning to
pity Jeff, the incredible density of him, and he spoke incautiously.
"She understood the reasons for it. You were having your business
worries and you were harassed and nervous. Of course she understood. But
that didn't prevent her from being afraid of you."

"Afraid of me!" Jeff took a step forward and put one hand on a pillar of
the porch. The action looked almost as if he feared to trust himself,
finding some weakness in his legs to match this assault upon the heart.
"Esther afraid of me?"

Reardon, fee

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