Quand j'ai connu la Vérité,J'ai cru que c'était une amie;Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie,J'en étais déjà dégoûté.Et pourtant elle est éternelle,Et ceux qui se sont passés d'elleIci-bas ont tout ignoré.
Quand j'ai connu la Vérité,J'ai cru que c'était une amie;Quand je l'ai comprise et sentie,J'en étais déjà dégoûté.
Et pourtant elle est éternelle,Et ceux qui se sont passés d'elleIci-bas ont tout ignoré.
She had been deliberately ignorant of much of life—of everything.
She went through a period of despair, all the worse because, like a face in a nightmare, it was featureless. It was despair, not over the fact that she was in prison but over the whole scheme of the universe, the futile hordes of human beings living and hoping and failing and passing away.
Despair paralyzed her bodily activities. Her mind, even her giant will, failed her. She could neither sleep nor eat, and after a week of it was taken to the hospital. The rumor ran through the prison that she was going mad—that was the way it always began. She lay in the hospital two days, hardly moving. Her face seemed to have shrunk and her eyes to have grown large and fiery. The doctor came and talked to her. She would not answer him; she would not meet his gaze; she would do nothing but draw long unnatural breaths like sighs.
In the room next to her there was a mother with a six-months-old baby. Lydia at the best of times had never been much interested in babies, though all young animals made a certain appeal to her. Her friends' babies, swaddled and guarded by nurses, lacked the spontaneous charm of a kitten or a puppy. This baby, however—Joseph his name was, and he was always so referred to—was different. He spent a great deal of time alone, sitting erect in his white iron crib. In spite of the conditions of his birth, he was calm, pink-cheeked and healthy. The first day that Lydia was up she glanced at him as she passed the door. He gave her somehow the impression of leading a life apart. At first she only used to stare at him from the doorway; then she ventured in, leaned on the crib, offered him a finger to which he clung, invented a game of clapping of hands, and was rewarded by a toothless smile and a long complicated gurgle of delight.
The sound was too much for Lydia—the idea that the baby was glad to be starting out on the tortured adventure of living. She went back to her own room in tears, weeping not for her own griefs but because all human beings were so infinitely pathetic.
The next day, Anna, the mother, came in while she was bending over the crib. Lydia knew her story, the common one—the story of a respectable, sheltered girl falling suddenly, wildly in love with a handsome boy, and finding, when after a few months he wearied of her, that she had never been his wife—that he was already married.
Lydia looked at the neat, blond, spectacled woman beside her. It was hard to imagine her murdering anyone. She seemed gentle, vague, perhaps a little defective. Later in their acquaintance she told Lydia how she had done it. She had not minded his perfidy so much, until he told her that she had known all along they weren't married—that she'd done it with her eyes open—that she had been "out for a good time." He was a paperhanger among other things, and a great pair of shears had been lying on the table. The first thing she knew they were buried in his side.
Lydia could not resist asking her whether she regretted what she had done.
The girl considered. "I think it was right for him to die," she said, but she was sorry about Joseph. In a little while the baby would be taken from her and put into a state institution. She was maternal—primitively maternal—and her real punishment was not imprisonment but separation from her child. Lydia saw this without entirely understanding it.
The girl had said to her: "I suppose you can't imagine killing anyone?"
Lydia assured her that she could—oh, very easily. She went back to her room thinking that she was more a murderess at heart than this girl, who was now nothing but a mother.
When she came out of the hospital she was not put back at the schoolroom work but was sent to the kitchen. This was an immense tiled room which gave the impression to those who first entered it of being entirely empty. Then the eye fell on a row of copper containers—three of them as tall as she—one for tea, one for coffee, one for hot water, and three smaller pots, round like witches' caldrons, for the cooking of cereals and meats and potatoes. The baking was done in an adjacent alcove. There Lydia was put to work. Gradually the process began to interest her—the mixing of the dough and the baking of dozens of loaves at a time in a great oven with rotating shelves in it. The oven, like all ovens, had its caprices, dependent upon the amount of heat being used by the rest of the institution. Lydia set herself to master the subject. A certain strain of practical competence in her had never before had its expression.
As Lydia began to emerge from her depression she clung to Evans, who had first made her see that she could not think anything human alien to herself. The disciplined little Englishwoman, sincere and without self-pity, seemed the purveyor of wisdom. She saw her own mistakes clearly. William—William was the pale young footman, about whom they talked a good deal—had urged her for a long time to pick up a ten-dollar bill now and then or a forgotten bit of jewelry. She had never felt any temptation to do so until Lydia had been so indifferent about the loss of the bracelet. What was the use of caring so much about the safety of the jewels if the owner cared so little?
"Oh, that bracelet!" murmured Lydia, remembering how she had last seen it in O'Bannon's hand in court. For a moment she did not follow what Evans was saying, and came back in the midst of a sentence.
"——and made me see that because you were wrong that did not make me right. Then I got ready to confess. He made me see that the real harm was done and over when I took a thing that wasn't mine, and that the only way to get back was to obey the law and go to prison and get through with it as quick as I could. I owe a lot to him, Lydia—not that he preached at me, but his eyes looked right into me."
"Of whom are you speaking?" Lydia asked sharply.
"Of Mr. O'Bannon," answered Evans, and a reverent tone came into her voice.
This was too much for Lydia. She broke out, assuring Evans that she had been quite right to take the jewels. She, Lydia, now knew what a thoughtless, inconsiderate employer she had always been. But as for "that man," Evans must see that he had only tricked her into confessing in order to save himself trouble. It was a feather in his cap—to get a confession. He had not thought about saving her soul. Lydia stamped her foot in the old way but without creating any impression on the bewitched girl, who insisted on being grateful to the man who had imprisoned her.
"Is that what he is looking for from me?" thought Lydia.
Long, long winter nights in prison are excellent periods for thinking out a revenge. She saw it would not be easy to revenge herself on O'Bannon. If it were Albee it would be simple enough—she would make him publicly ridiculous. To wound that sensitive egotism would be to slay the inner man. If it were Bobby—poor dear Bobby—she would destroy his self-confidence and starve him to death through his own belief that he was worthless. But what could she do to O'Bannon but kill him—or make him love her? Perhaps threaten to kill him. She tried to think of him on his knees, pleading for his life. But no, she couldn't give the vision reality. He wouldn't go down on his knees; he wouldn't plead; he'd stand up to her in defiance and she would be forced to shoot to prove that she had meant what she said.
She had been in prison about three months when one morning word came to the kitchen that she was wanted in the reception room. This meant a visitor. It was not Miss Bennett's day. It must be a specially privileged visitor. Her guest was Albee.
Prisoners whose conduct was good enough to keep them in the first grade were allowed to see visitors once a week. Miss Bennett came regularly, and Eleanor had come more than once. Lydia was very eager to see these two, but was not eager to see anyone else. There was always a terrible moment of shyness with newcomers—an awkward ugly moment. She did not wish to see anyone who did not love her in a simple human way that swept away restraint.
She did not want to see Albee, and she was equally sure he did not want to see her but had been driven by the politician's fear of leaving behind him in his course onward and upward any smoldering fires of hatred which a little easy kindness might quench. As a matter of fact, she did not hate Albee—nor like him. She simply recognized him as a useful person whom all her life she would go on using. This coming interview must serve to attach him to her, so that if in the future she needed a powerful politician to help her destroy O'Bannon she would have one ready to her hand. She knew exactly and instinctively how to manage Albee—not by being appealing and friendly. If she were nice to him he would go away feeling that that chapter in his life was satisfactorily closed. But if she were hostile, if she made him uncomfortable, he would work to win back her friendship. Prisoner as she was, she would be his master. She arranged herself, expression and spirit alike, to meet him sternly.
She did not stop to consider the impression she might make on her visitor—in her striped dress and her prison shoes. It was never Lydia's habit to think first of the impression she was making.
She was brought to the matron's room, and then crossing the hall she entered the bare reception room, with its chill, white mantelpiece, the fireplace blocked by a sheet of metal, its empty center table and stiff straight-backed chairs. She entered without any anticipation of what was in store for her, and saw a tall figure just turning from the window. It was O'Bannon. She had just a blurred vision of his gray eyes and the hollows in his cheeks. Then her wrists and knees seemed to melt, her heart turned over within her; everything grew yellow, green and black, and she fainted—falling gently full length at the feet of the district attorney.
When she came to she was in her own cell. She turned her head slowly to right and left.
"Where is that man?" she said. She was told he had gone.
Of course he had gone—gone without waiting for her recovery, without speaking to anyone else. There was the proof that he was vindictive; that he had come to humiliate her, to feast his eyes on her distress. He had hardly dared hope that she would faint at his feet. There was real cruelty for you, she thought—to ruin a woman's life and then to come and enjoy the spectacle. What a story for him to go home with, to remember and smile over, to tell, perhaps, to his mother or Eleanor!
"The poor girl!" he might say with tones of false pity in his voice. "At the mere sight of me she fainted dead away and lay at my feet in her prison dress, her hands coarsened by hard work——"
This last proof of her utter defenselessness infuriated her. She was justified in her revenge, whatever it might be. The thought of it ran through all her dreams like a secret romance.
It began to take shape in her mind as political ruin. She knew from Eleanor that he had ambitions. He had taken the district attorneyship with the intention of making it lead to higher political office. She had fancies of defeating him in a campaign, using all the tragedy of her own experience to rouse the emotions of audiences. Easier to destroy him within his own party by Albee's help—easier, but not so spectacular. He might not know who had done it unless she went to him and explained. Over that interview her mind often lingered.
As her ideas of retribution took shape she became happier in her daily life, as if the thought of O'Bannon sucked up all the poison in her nature and left her other relations sweeter.
If Lydia had but known it, her revenge was complete when she fell at his feet. The months she had spent in prison had been paradise compared to the months he had spent at large. The verdict in the case had hardly been rendered before he had begun to be tortured by doubts as to his own motives. It was no help to him that his reason offered him a perfect defense. The girl was a criminal—reckless, irresponsible and untruthful, more deserving of punishment than most of the defendants who came into court. If there were any personal animus in his prosecution there was an excuse for it in the fact that Albee had certainly come to him with the intention of exerting dishonorable pressure in her behalf. Everyone he saw—his mother, Eleanor, Foster, Judge Homan—all believed that he had followed the path of duty in spite of many shining temptations to be weakly pitiful. But he himself knew—and gradually came to admit—that he had done what he passionately desired to do. Even he could not look deeply enough into his own heart to understand his motives, but he began to be aware of a secret growing remorse poisoning his inner life.
The thought of her in prison was never out of his mind, and it was a nightmare prison he thought of. In the first warm September days he imagined the leaden, airless heat of cells. When October turned suddenly cold and windy he remembered how she was accustomed to playing golf on the windy links and how he had once seen her driving from a tee near the roadside with her skirts wrapped about her by her vigorous swing. He gave up playing bridge—the memories were too poignant. And after Eleanor had once mentioned that Lydia was fond of dancing he could not listen to a strain of dance music. Christmas was a particularly trying time to him, with all its assumption of rejoicing—a prison Christmas!
During the holidays he was in New York for a few days. His theory was that lack of exercise was the reason for his not sleeping better. He used to take long walks in the afternoon and evening so as to go to bed tired.
One afternoon at twilight he was walking round the reservoir in the Park when he recognized something familiar in a trim little figure approaching him—something that changed the beat of his heart. It was Miss Bennett. He stopped her, uncertain of his reception.
"Is that Mr. O'Bannon?" she said, staring up at him in the dim light.
The city beyond the bare trees had begun to turn into a sort of universal lilac mist, punctuated with yellow dots of light. It was too dark for Miss Bennett to see any change in O'Bannon's appearance, anything ravaged and worn, anything suggesting an abnormal strain. Miss Bennett, though kind and gentle, was not imaginative about turbulent, irregular emotions, such as she herself did not experience. She was not on the lookout for danger signals.
She did not feel unfriendly to O'Bannon. On the contrary she admired him. She could, as she said, see his side of it. She prided herself on seeing both sides of every question. She greeted him cordially as soon as she was sure it was he. He turned and walked with her. They had the reservoir to themselves.
Miss Bennett thought it more tactful not to refer to Lydia. She began talking about the beauty of the city. Country people always spoke as if all natural beauty were excluded from towns, but for her part——
O'Bannon suddenly interrupted her.
"Have you seen Miss Thorne lately?" he said in a queer, quick, low tone.
When Benny felt a thing she could always express it. This was fortunate for her because when she expressed it she relieved the acuteness of her own feeling. She very naturally, therefore, sought the right phrase, even sometimes one of an almost indecent poignancy, because the more poignantly she made the other person feel the more sure she could be of her own relief. Then, too, she was not sorry that O'Bannon should understand just what it was he had done—his duty, perhaps, but he might as well know the consequences.
"Have I seen her?" she exclaimed. "Oh, Mr. O'Bannon!" There was a pause as if it were too terrible to go on with, but of course she did go on. "I see her every week. She's like an animal in a trap. Perhaps you never saw one—in a trap, I mean. Lydia had a gray wolfhound once, and in the woods it strayed away and got caught in a mink trap. It was almost dead when we found it, but so patient and hopeless. She's getting to be like that—each week a little more patient than the week before—she who was never patient. Oh, Mr. O'Bannon, I feel sometimes as if I couldn't bear it—the way they've ground it out of her in a few months! She seems like an old woman in a lovely young woman's body. They haven't spoiled that—at least they haven't yet."
She wiped her eyes with a filmy handkerchief, and her step became brisker. She felt better. For a moment she had got rid of the pathos of the situation. O'Bannon, she saw, had taken up her burden. He walked along beside her silent for a few steps, and then suddenly took off his hat, murmured something about being late for an engagement and left her, disappearing down the steep slope of the reservoir.
He wandered restlessly up and down like a man in physical pain. No reality, he finally decided, could be as terrible as the visions which, with the help of Miss Bennett, his imagination kept calling before him. That night he took the train, and in the middle of the next morning arrived at the prison gates.
There was no difficulty about his seeing the prisoner. His explanation that he was passing by on his way to see the warden about one of the men prisoners was not required. The matron agreed readily to send for Lydia. It seemed to him a long time before she came. He stood staring out of the window, stray sentences leaping up in his mind—"not less than three nor more than seven years"—"an animal in a trap"—"an old woman in a lovely young woman's body." He heard steps approaching and his pulses began to beat thickly and heavily. He turned round, and as he did so she fell at his feet.
The matron came in, running at the sound of her fall. O'Bannon picked her up limp as a rag doll in his arms and carried her back to her cell. Under most circumstances he would have noticed that the cell was bright and large, but now he only compared it, with a pang at his heart, to that large, luxurious, deserted bedroom of Lydia's in which he had once interviewed Evans.
The matron drove him away before Lydia recovered consciousness. He waited in the outer room, heard that she was perfectly well, and then took his miserable departure. He got back to New York late that night, and the next day he resigned his position as district attorney.
Eleanor read of his resignation first in the local paper, and came to his mother for an explanation; but Mrs. O'Bannon was as much surprised as anyone. Without acknowledging it, both women were frightened at the prospect of O'Bannon's attempting, without backing, to build up a law practice in New York. Both dreaded the effect upon him of failure. Both would have advised against his resigning his position. Perhaps for this very reason neither had been consulted.
The two women who loved him parted with specious expressions of confidence. Doubtless Dan would make a great success of it, they said. He was brilliant, and worked so hard.
In the spring Lydia was transferred from the kitchen to the long, bright workroom. Here the women prisoners hemmed the blankets woven in the men's prison. Here they themselves wove the rag rugs for the floors, made up the house linen and their own clothes—Joseph's too—not only their prison clothes, but the complete outfit with which each prisoner was dismissed.
Lydia was incredibly awkward with the needle. It surprised the tall, thin assistant in charge of the workroom that anyone who had had what she described as advantages could be so grossly ignorant of the art of sewing. Lydia hardly knew on which finger to put her thimble and tied a knot in her thread like a man tying a rope. But it was her very inability that first woke her interest, her will. She did not like to be stupider than anyone else. Suddenly one day her little jaw set and she decided to learn how to sew. From that moment she began to adjust herself to prison life.
Lydia wondered, considering prisoners in the first grade are allowed to receive visits from their families once a week, and from others, with the approval of the warden, once a month, at the small number of visitors who came to the prison. Were all these women cast off by their families? Evans explained the matter to her, and Lydia felt ashamed that she had needed an explanation.
"It takes a man a week's salary—at a good job, too—from New York here and back."
Lydia did what was rare of her—she colored. For the first time in her life she felt ashamed, not so much of the privileges of money but of the ease with which she had always taken them. It came over her that this was one of the objects for which Mrs. Galton had once asked a subscription. A memory rose of the way in which in old days she used to dispose of her morning's mail when it came in on her flowered breakfast tray. Advertisements and financial appeals from unknown sources were twisted together by her vigorous fingers and tossed into the waste-paper basket. Mrs. Galton's might well have been among these.
She was horrified on looking back at her own lack of humanity. She might have guessed without going through the experience that prison life needed some alleviation. It meant a great deal to her to see Benny every week. Benny stood in the place of her family. She longed to hear of the outside world and her old friends. But she did not crave these visits with such passion as the imprisoned mothers craved a sight of their children.
Thought leading quickly to action in Lydia, she arranged through Miss Bennett, allowing it to be supposed to be Miss Bennett's enterprise, to finance the visits of families to the prison. Everyone rejoiced, as if it were a common benefit, over the visit of Muriel's mother and the beautiful auburn-haired daughter of the middle-aged real-estate operator. Lydia felt as if she had been outside the human race all her life and had just been initiated into it. She said something like this to Evans.
"Oh, Louisa, rich people don't know anything, do they?"
Evans tried to console her.
"If they want to they always can."
It was true, Lydia thought; she had not wanted to know. She had not wanted anything but her own way, irrespective of anyone else's. That was being criminal—to want your own way too much. That was all that these people about her had wanted—these forgers and defrauders—their own way, their own way. Though she still held her belief that the killing of Drummond had been an accident, she saw that the bribing of him had been wrong—the same streak in her, the same determination to have her own way. She thought of her father and all their early struggles, and how when she had believed that she was triumphing most over him she had been at her worst.
Her poor father! It was from him she had inherited her will, but he had learned in life, as she was now learning in prison, that the strongest will is the will that knows how to bend.
She thought a great deal about her father. He must have been terribly lonely sometimes. She had never given him anything in the way of affection. She had not really loved him, and yet she loved him now. Her heart ached with a palpable weight of remorse. He had been her only relation, and she had done nothing but fight and oppose and wound him. What a cruel, stupid creature she had been—all her life! And now it was too late. Her father was gone, so long ago she had almost forgotten him in one aspect. And then again it would seem as if he must still be somewhere, waiting to order her upstairs as he had when she was a child.
Only Benny was left—Benny whom she had so despised. Yet Benny would not need to go to prison in order to learn to respect other people's rights. Benny had been born knowing just what everyone else wanted—eager to get all men their hearts' desire.
Lydia was not religious by temperament. She had now none of the joy of a great revelation. But she had the courage, unsupported by any sense of a higher power, to look at herself as she was. She saw now that her relation to life had always been ugly, hostile, violent. Everyone who had ever loved her had been able to love through something beautiful in their own natures—in spite of all the unloveliness of hers. She thought not only of the relations she had missed, like the relation to her father, but of friendships she had lost, which she had deliberately broken in the hideous daily struggle to get her own way. She would never now renew that struggle. She had come in contact with something stronger than herself, of which the impersonal power of the law was only a visible symbol. She was not sure whether it had broken her or remade her, but it had given her peace—happiness she had never had—a peace which she believed she could preserve even when she went out of the sheltering routine of prison. The only feature of life which terrified and revolted her was the persisting individuality of Lydia Thorne. If there were only a charm other than death to free you from yourself! Sometimes she felt like a maniac chained to a mirror. Yet she knew that it was the long months of enforced contemplations that had saved her.
On Friday evening the inmates were allowed to dance in the assembly room—half theater, half chapel. In her effort to escape from herself Lydia went once to watch, and came again and again with increasing interest. It soon began to be rumored that she was a good dancer and knew new steps. The dances became dancing classes. Lydia, except for her natural impatience, was a born teacher, clear in her explanations and willing to work for perfection.
Evans, who had taken Lydia to so many balls in past years, smiled to see her laboring over the steps of some heavy grandmother or light-footed—and perhaps light-fingered—mulatto girl.
An evening suddenly came back to her. It was in New York. She had come downstairs about eleven o'clock with Miss Thorne's opera cloak and fan. There had been people to dinner, but they had all gone except Mr. Dorset, and he was being instructed in some new intricacy of the dance. Miss Bennett, who belonged to a generation that knew something about playing the piano, was making music for them. Evans, if she shut her eyes, could see Lydia as she was then, in a short blue brocade, trying to shove her partner into the correct step and literally shaking him when he failed to catch her rhythm. She was being far more patient with Muriel, holding her pale coffee-colored hands and repeating, "One-two, one-two; one-two-three-four. There, Muriel, you've got it!" Her face lit up with pleasure as she turned to Evans. "Isn't she quick at it, Louisa?"
Lydia's second spring in prison was well advanced when she was sent for by the matron. Such a summons was an event Lydia racked her brain to think what was coming—for good or evil. The matron's first question was startling. Did she know anything about baseball?
Did she? Yes, something. Her mind went back to a Fourth of July house party she had been to where a baseball game among the guests was a yearly feature. She and the matron discussed the possibilities of getting up two nines among the inmates. She suggested that there were books on the subject. A book would be provided. She felt touched and flattered at the responsibility put upon her, humbly eager to succeed.
The whole question began to absorb her. She studied it in the evening and thought about it during the day, considering the possibilities of her material, the relation of character to skill. Grace, a forger, was actually a better pitcher, but the woman who had killed her husband had infinitely more staying power.
All through that second summer she occupied herself, day and night, with the team, more and more as September drew to a close. For she knew that with the approaching expiration of her minimum sentence the parole board would consider her release. Freedom in all probability was near, and freedom is a disorganizing thought to prisoners. The peace she had gained in prison began to flow away as each day brought her nearer to release. She began to dream that she was already free, and to wake dissatisfied, with a trace of the same restless irritation of her first weeks. Could it be, she thought, that she had learned nothing after all? Could even the idea of returning to the old life change her back into the old detestable thing?
Prison authorities have learned that the last night in prison is more trying to a prisoner's morale than any other, except perhaps the first. Lydia found it so when her last night there came. She knew that she was to be set free early in the morning. Miss Bennett would be there, and they would take an early train to New York together. It was a certainty, she kept telling herself, a certainty on which she could rely, and yet she spent the entire night in an agony of fear and impatience. She would have been calmer if she had been waiting the hour of a prearranged escape. The darkness of night continued so long that it seemed as if some unheralded eclipse had done away with sunrise, and when at last the dawn began to color the window the hour between it and her release was nothing but a fevered anxiety.
She was hardly aware of Miss Bennett waiting for her in the matron's room—hardly aware of the matron herself, imperturbable as ever, bidding her good-by. Only the clang of the gate behind her quieted her. Only from outside the bars did she want to pause and look back at the prison as at an old friend.
It was a bright autumn morning. The wind was chasing immense white clouds across the sky and scattering the leaves of the endless row of trees that stood like sentinels along the high wall.
Miss Bennett wanted to hurry across the street at once to the railroad station, although their train would not start for some time; she wanted to get away from the menace of that dark wall—a very perfect piece of masonry. But Lydia had seen it too long from the inside not to be eager to savor a view of it from without. She stared slowly about her like a tourist before some spectacle of awesome beauty. She looked down the alley between the trees and the wall to where on her left was the sharp clean corner of the stonework. She looked to her right, where as the wall rose higher she could see the little watchtower of the prison guard. Then she turned completely round and looked back through the bars at the prison itself.
"Don't you think it's a pretty old doorway?" she said.
Miss Bennett acknowledged its beauty rather briefly.
"Will you tell me why it has 'State Asylum' on the horse block?" she said.
"That's just what it is," said Lydia—"an asylum, a real asylum to some of us. It used to be for the insane, Benny. That's why."
On the all-day journey to New York Miss Bennett had counted on hearing the full psychological story of the last two years. In her visits to the prison she had found that Lydia wanted to hear of the outside world—not to talk of herself; but now that she was free Miss Bennett hoped this might be changed. She had taken a compartment so they could be by themselves, but the minute the door was shut upon them a funny change came over Lydia. She grew absent and tense, and at last she sprang up and opened it.
"It's pleasanter open," she said haughtily, and then she suddenly laughed. "Oh, Benny, to be able to open a closed door!"
Miss Bennett began to cry softly. All these months she had been trying to persuade herself that the change in Lydia was due to prison clothes; but now, seeing her dressed as she used to dress, the change was still there. She was thinner, finer—shaped, as it were, by a sharper mold. All her reactions were slower. It took her longer to answer, longer to smile. This gave her—what Lydia had never had before—a touch of mystery, as if her real life were going on somewhere else, below the surface, remote from companionship.
She wiped her eyes, thinking that she must not let Lydia guess she thought her changed. Their eyes met. Lydia was discovering a curious fact, which she in her turn thought it better to conceal. It was this: That the figures of her prison life had a depth and reality that made all the rest of the world seem like shadows. Even while she questioned Miss Bennett about her friends she felt as if she were asking about characters in a book which she had not had time to finish. Would Bobby be sure to be at the station? Was Eleanor coming to town that night to see her? Where was Albee?
Miss Bennett did not know where Albee was, and her tone indicated that she did not greatly care. She did not intend to stir Lydia up against anyone but she could not help wishing Lydia would punish Albee. He had not been really loyal, and he was the only one of the intimate circle who had not been. A man with red blood in his veins, Miss Bennett thought, would have married Lydia the day before she went to prison or would at least be waiting, hat in hand, the day she came out.
Bobby, gay and affectionate as ever, met them at the station and drove with them to the town house. Morson opened the front door and ran down the steps with a blank face and a brisk manner, as if she had been returning from a week-end; but as she stepped out of the motor he attempted a sentence.
"Glad to see you back, miss," he said, and then his self-control gave way. He turned aside with one hand over his eyes and the other feeling wildly in his tail pocket for a handkerchief.
Lydia began to cry too. She put her hand on Morson's shoulder and said, "I'm so glad to see you, Morson. You're almost the oldest friend I have in the world," and she added, without shame, to Miss Bennett, "Isn't it awful the way I cry at anything nowadays?"
She went into the house, blowing her nose.
The house was full of telegrams and flowers. Lydia did not open the telegrams, but the flowers seemed to give her pleasure. She went about breathing in long whiffs of them and touching their petals. Morson, in perfect control of himself, but with his eyes as red as fire, came to ask at what hour she would dine.
Lydia had a great deal to do before dinner. She produced a dirty paper from her pocketbook and began studying it.
"Is there anything special you'd like to order?" said Miss Bennett.
Lydia did not look up but answered that Morson remembered what she liked, which drove him out of the room again. Her telephoning, it appeared, was to the families and friends of her fellow prisoners. She was very conscientious about it, and very patient, even with those who, unaccustomed to the telephone or unwilling to lose touch with a voice so recently come from their loved ones, would ask the same question over and over again.
But finally it was over, and Lydia free to bathe and dress and finally to sit down in her own dining room to a wonderful little meal that was the symbol of her freedom. Yet all she could think of was the smell of the freshly baked dinner rolls that brought back the large, low kitchen and the revolving oven—revolving at that very moment, perhaps—so far away.
"Oh, my dear," said Miss Bennett, "I've found the nicest little maid for you—a Swiss girl who can sew—really make your things if you want her to, and——"
Lydia felt embarrassed. She turned her head from side to side as Miss Bennett ran on describing the discovery. She simply could never have a maid again. How was she to explain? She did not understand it thoroughly herself, only she knew that she could never again demand that another woman—as young, perhaps, and as fond of amusement as herself—should give a lifetime to taking care of her wardrobe. Personal service like that would annoy and embarrass her now. The first thing to do was to make her life less complex in such matters. She put her hand over Miss Bennett's as it lay on the table.
"Shouldn't you think she'd wish me back at hard labor?" she said to Bobby. "She takes such a lot of trouble for me."
Miss Bennett, emotionally susceptible to praise, wiped her eyes, and presently went away, leaving Bobby and Lydia alone. She wondered if perhaps that would be the best thing for Lydia to do—to rebuild her life on Bobby's gay but unwavering devotion.
Lydia, leaning her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands, listened while Bobby gossiped over the empty coffee cups. Did Lydia know about this Western coal man that May Swayne was going to marry? Bobby set him before her in an instant—"A round-faced man, Lydia, with $30,000,000, and such a vocabulary! He never thinks; he presumes. He doesn't come into a room; he ventures to intrude. May has quite a lot of alterations to do on him."
And the Piers—had Lydia heard about them? Fanny had fallen in love with the prophet of a new religion and had made all her arrangements to divorce Noel, but before she left him, as a proof of her new powers, she thought she'd cure him of drinking. Well, my dear, she did. And the result was she found she liked a nonalcoholic Noel better than ever—and she chucked the seer. Can you beat it?
Shadows—they did seem like shadows to Lydia. Staring before her, she fell into meditation, remembering Evans and the pale coffee-colored Muriel and the matron—the small, placid-browed matron who knew not fear.
Suddenly she came back to realize that Bobby was asking her to marry him.
Most of their acquaintances believed that he never did anything else; but as a matter of fact, it was the first time he had ever put it into words. He wasn't sure it was a tactful thing to do now. She might think—Bobby was always terribly aware of what people might think—that his suggesting such a mediocre future for her was to admit that he thought her beaten. Whereas to him she was as triumphant and desirable as ever. On the other hand, it might be just the right thing to do. With men like Albee getting to cover and some people bound to be hateful, she could say to herself, "Well, I can always marry Bobby and go to live in Italy."
He put it to her.
"Lydia, wouldn't you consider marrying me to-morrow and sailing for Greece or Sicily or Grenada—that's a heavenly place. I should be so wildly happy, dear, that I think you'd be pleased in a mild sort of way, too."
Go away? It was the last thing she wanted to do.
"No, no!" she said quickly. "I must stay here!"
"Well, marry me and stay here."
She shook her head, trying to explain to him—she wouldn't ever marry. She had found a new clew to life and wanted to follow it alone. She had interest, intense, vital interest, to give to life and affairs—yes, and even people; but she had not love. Human relationships couldn't make or mar life for her any more. She wanted to work—nothing else.
She paused, and in the pause the dining-room door opened and Eleanor came in. Eleanor had been up at dawn to get a train from the Adirondacks in time to meet Lydia at the station, and of course the train had been late. Would Lydia put her up for the night?
Lydia's cry of welcome did not sound like a person to whom all human relationships had become indifferent. Indeed Eleanor was the person she wanted most to see. Eleanor was not emotional, or rather she expressed her emotion by a heightened intellectual sensitiveness. She wouldn't cry, she wouldn't regard Lydia as a shorn lamb the way Miss Bennett did, nor yet would she assume that she was utterly unchanged, as all the rest of her friends might. Eleanor's manner was almost commonplace. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that she left the introduction of anything dramatic to Lydia's choice.
Bobby soon went away and left the two women together. They went upstairs to Lydia's bedroom, and in their dressing gowns, with chairs drawn to the fire, they talked. They talked with long pauses between them. No one but Eleanor would have allowed those long silences to pass uninterrupted, but she was wise enough to know they were the very essence of companionship.
Though Eleanor asked several questions about the details of prison life, she was too wise to ask anything about the fundamental change which she felt had taken place in Lydia. She did not betray that she felt there was a change. She wondered whether Lydia knew it herself. It was hard to say, for the girl, always inexpert with verbal expressions, had become more so in the two years of solitude and contemplation. Whatever spontaneity of speech she had had was gone. She was, Eleanor thought, like a person using an unfamiliar tongue, aware of the difficulty of putting thought into words.
She could not help being touched—and a little amused—at the seriousness with which Lydia mentioned her late companions; Lydia, who had always been so selective about her own friends and so scornful about everybody else's. She spoke of Evans, the pallid little thief, as if light had flowed from her as from an incarnation of the Buddha. Seeing that Lydia had caught some reflection of the thought, Eleanor thought it better to put it into words.
"Now, don't tell me, my dear," she said, "that you, too, have discovered that all criminals are pure white souls."
"Just the opposite. All pure white souls are criminals—all of us are criminals at heart. The only way not to be is to recognize the fact that you are. It's a terrible idea at first—at least it was to me. It was like going through death and coming out alive." Lydia paused, staring before her, and anyone in the world except Eleanor would have thought she had finished; but Eleanor's fine ear caught the beat of an approaching idea. "But it's such a comfort, Nell, to belong to the tribe—such a relief. And I should never have had it if it had not been"—she hesitated, and Eleanor's heart contracted with a sudden fear that the name of O'Bannon was about to enter—"if it had not been for my accident."
Eleanor was not sure that Lydia had deliberately avoided the name. What, she wondered, was left of that unjust and bitter hatred? She could not detect a trace of bitterness anywhere in Lydia's nature to-night. But then she had always had those moments of gentleness.
Presently Miss Bennett came in to say in her old, timid, suggestive manner that it was late—she hated to interrupt them, but she really did think that Lydia ought to go to bed. Lydia got up at once.
"I suppose I ought," she said. "It's been an exciting day for me."
Eleanor noted that such a suggestion from Miss Bennett in old days would have meant that Lydia would have felt it her duty to stay up another hour.
"I have to, my dear," she would have said, "or else Benny would be trying to coerce me in every detail of my life."
The next morning at the regular prison hour Lydia woke with a start. She had been aware for some time of a strange unaccountable roaring in her ears. She looked about her, surprised to see that the light of dawn was not falling through a tall barred aperture at the head of her bed, but was coming across a wide carpeted room from two chintz-curtained windows. Then she remembered she was at home; the roaring was the habitual sound of a great city; the room was the room she had had since she was a child. It seemed less familiar to her, less homelike, than her cell. She put out her hand to the satin coverlet and the sheets, softer than satin. The physical sensation of the contact was delicious, and yet there was something sad about it too. It was the thought of her late companions that made her sad, as if she had deserted them in trouble.
It would be two hours or more before Eleanor and Benny would be awake. She flung her arms above her head and lay back, thinking. She mustn't let them cherish her as if she were a wounded, stricken creature. She was more to be envied now than in the old fighting days, when all her inner life had been a sort of poisoned turmoil. No one had pitied her then.
Her plan had been not to be too hasty in arranging her new life, which she knew must include work—work in connection with prisoners. But now she saw she mustn't waste a minute. She must have work at once to take her away from herself. She could hardly face the coming day—everyone considering her and that detestable ego of hers, asking her what she wanted to do. She must have a routine immediately. She was not strong enough yet to live without one. Only one thing must take precedence of everything else—a pardon for Evans. She could not bear to remain at liberty with Evans still serving a sentence. With that accomplished, she could go forward in peace. In peace? As she thought of it she knew that there was one corner of her mind where there was not and never would be peace. Only last evening, in the first happiness of being at home, the mention of O'Bannon's name had threatened to destroy it.
And now he was in her mind, holding it without rivals. The moment had come when her hatred of him could find expression. It needn't be a secret dream, like a child's fairy story. She needn't suppress it—she could act. If she had not been such a coward last evening she would have named him and gone boldly on and found out from Eleanor where he was, what he was doing, what was his heart's desire. Perhaps if she had put her questions frankly Eleanor would not have told her; but it would not be difficult to deceive so doting a friend of his. Eleanor could easily be persuaded that his victim had been so tamed and crushed in prison that she had come to admire him, to look differently on the world.
Suddenly Lydia sat straight up in her bed. And hadn't she changed? In the old days she had never felt with more bitter violence than she was feeling now. The excitement of her revenge had wiped out every other interest. The flame of her hatred had destroyed the whole structure of her new philosophy. She sat up in her bed and wrung her hands. What could she do? What could she do? The mere thought of that man changed her back into being the woman she hated to be. She would rather die than live as her old self, but how could she help thinking of him when the idea of injuring him was more vivid, more exciting, than any other idea in the world? She had come out of prison resolved that her first action would be to get a pardon for Evans, and here she was forgetting her obligations and her remorse, forgetting everything but a desire to wound and destroy. He had the power to make her what she loathed to be.
Her room was at the back of the house, and the sun, finding some chink between the houses behind the Thorne house, crept in under the shades and began moving slowly across the plain, dark, velvet carpet. It had time to move some distance while she sat there immovable, unaware of her surroundings.
Gradually she came to see that she must choose between the two. Either she must give up forever the idea of revenging herself on O'Bannon or she must give up all the peace and wisdom that she had so painfully learned—she had almost lost it already, and she had not been twenty-four hours out of prison.
An hour later Eleanor was wakened by the opening of her door. Lydia was standing at the foot of her bed, grasping the edge of it in her two white hands. It was Eleanor's first good look at her in the light of day. She was startled by Lydia's beauty—a kind of beauty she had never had before. No one could now have likened her to a picture by Cabanel of the Star of the Harem. Everything sleek and hard and smooth had gone. She looked more like the picture of some ravaged, pale Spanish saint, still so young that the inner struggle had molded without lining her face. She stood staring at Eleanor, her dark hair standing out about her face, and her pale dressing gown defining the beautiful line of her shoulders, as she raised them, pressing her hands down on the foot of the bed.
"Well, my dear, good morning," was Eleanor's greeting, though she was not unaware that something emotional was in the air.
"Eleanor," began the other, her enormous tragic eyes fixed now, not on her friend's, but on a spot on the pillow about five inches away, "there is something I want to say to you." The best agreement was silence, and Lydia went on, "I want you never to talk to me about that man—your friend—I mean O'Bannon."
"Talk of him!" exclaimed Eleanor, her first thought being, "Am I always talking of him?"
"I don't want to hear of him or think of him or speak of him."
This time Eleanor's hesitation was not entirely acquiescent.
"I can understand," she said, "that you might not want to see him, but to speak of him——I have been thinking, Lydia, that that is one of the subjects that you and I ought to talk over—to talk out."
"No, no!" returned Lydia quickly, and Eleanor saw with surprise that it was only by leaning on her hands that she kept them from trembling. "I can't explain it to you—I don't want to go into it—but I don't want to remember that he exists. If you would just accept it as a fact, and tell other people—Benny and Bobby. If you would do that for me, Eleanor——"
"Of course I'll do it," answered Eleanor. There really was not anything else to say. The next instant Lydia was gone.
Eleanor lay quite still, trying to understand the meaning of the scene. She was often accused by her friends of coldness, of lack of human imagination, of attempting to substitute mental for emotional processes. Aware of a certain amount of justice in these accusations, she tried to atone by putting her reasoning faculty most patiently and gently at work upon the problems of those she loved. Her nature was not capable of really understanding turgidity, but she did better than most people inasmuch as she avoided forming wrong judgments about it. She felt about Lydia now as she had once felt when O'Bannon had described to her his struggle against drinking—wonder that a person so much braver and stronger than she, Eleanor, was, could be content to avoid temptation instead of fighting it.
At breakfast, which the three women had together, Eleanor saw that Lydia had regained her calm of the evening before. While they were still at table Wiley was shown in. He felt obviously a certain constraint, an embarrassment to know what to say, which he concealed under a formal professional manner. Lydia put a stop to this simply enough by getting up and putting her arms round his neck.
"I've thought so much of all you've been doing for me since I was a child," she said.
He was associated in her mind with her father. Wiley felt his eyelids stinging.
"Why, my dear child, my dear child!" he said. And he held her off to look at her as if uncertain that it was the same girl. "Well, I must say prison doesn't seem to have done you much harm."
"It's done me good, I hope," said Lydia.
She made him sit down and drink an extra cup of coffee. There was something quite like a festival in the comradeship that developed among the four of them. She began to question her visitor about the method of getting a pardon for Evans. He advised her to go and see Mrs. Galton. At the name she and Benny glanced at each other and smiled. They were both thinking of the day when Lydia had so resented the presence of the old lady in her house.
She went to Mrs. Galton's office that same morning. It occupied the second floor of an old building that looked out over Union Square. Lydia had not thought of making an appointment, and when she reached the outer office she was told that Mrs. Galton was engaged—would be engaged for some time—a member of the parole board was in conference. Would Miss Thorne wait?
Yes, Lydia would wait. She sat down on a hard bench and watched the work of the society go on before her eyes. She had some knowledge of business and finance, and she knew very soon that she was in the presence of an efficient organization; but it was not only the efficiency that charmed her—it was partly the mere business routine, which made her feel like coming home after she had been at sea. The clear impersonal purpose of it all promised forgetfulness of self. At the end of half an hour of waiting she was possessed with the desire to become part of this work. Here was the solution of her problem. When at last she was shown into Mrs. Galton's bleak little office—not half the size of Lydia's cell—her first words were not of Evans, after all.
"Mrs. Galton," she said, "can you use me in this organization?"
Without intending the smallest disrespect to Mrs. Galton, it must be admitted that this question was like asking a lion if it could use a lamb. The organization, like all others of its type, needed devotion, needed workers, needed money, and was not averse to a little discreet publicity. All these Lydia offered. Mrs. Galton smiled.
"Yes," she said. The monosyllable was expressive.
The older woman, with forty years of executive work behind her, divided all workers roughly into two classes: The amiable idealists who created no antagonism and accomplished nothing, and the effective workers who accomplished marvels and stirred up endless quarrels. She—except in her very weakest moments—preferred the latter, though they disrupted her office force and gave her nervous indigestion. She recognized Lydia as belonging to this class.
And presently, being a wise and experienced woman, she recognized another fact: That she was probably in the presence of her successor. A pang shot through her. She was seventy and keener than ever about the work to which she had given all her life. If she kept this girl out she would hold office longer than if she let her in. If she let her in it would vivify the whole organization. She might become the ideal leader; at least she could be made so—youth, beauty, money, experience of prison conditions and the romance of her story to capture public imagination.
Lydia, with her acute sense of her own unworthiness, was dimly aware of some hesitation, and supposed that she was being weighed in the balance. She had no suspicion that a struggle, somewhat like her own struggle, was going on in the honest, philanthropic breast before her. A few minutes afterwards Mrs. Galton offered her the treasurership. Lydia was overcome by the honor.
"But I thought you had a treasurer, already," she murmured. "If I could be her assistant——"
"Oh, no doubt she will be glad to resign," said the president with a calmness that suggested that glad or not the resignation would be forthcoming.
The two women went out to lunch together. More and more, as they talked, Lydia saw that this was just what she wanted. This would be her salvation. After they were back in the office again she spoke of Evans. What could she do? What must be done?
"Let me see," said Mrs. Galton. "You were the complaining witness against her, I suppose. Well, you must see the judge and the district attorney who tried the case."
Lydia gave a funny little sound, half exclamation, half moan.
"O'Bannon!" she said.
No, Mrs. Galton thought that wasn't the name of the district attorney of Princess County. She rang her bell and told her secretary to look it up, while she went on calmly discussing the details of the procedure. Presently the secretary returned with a book. John J. Hillyer was district attorney.
"Are you sure?" Lydia asked. "I thought Mr. O'Bannon was."
The secretary said, consulting her book, that he had resigned almost two years before.
"But we'd have to have his signature, wouldn't we?" said Mrs. Galton.
She and the secretary talked of it, back and forth, not knowing that they were setting an impossible condition for Lydia. She couldn't ask O'Bannon. All her interest in the prospect of this new work had withered at the name. She felt a profound discouragement. It was terrible to find she would rather leave Evans in prison than ask O'Bannon to help get her out; terrible to find that man like a barrier across every path she tried to follow in order to escape from him. She thanked them for the trouble they had taken and rose to go. It was arranged that she was to come and begin work on the following Monday.
It was almost tea time when she reached home. Bobby was there, and the Piers, and presently May Swayne came in with her coal baron. Lydia's first emotion on seeing them was a warm, welcoming gladness, but she soon found to her surprise that she had very little to say to them.
The truth was that she had lost the trick of meeting her fellow beings in a purely social relation, and the conscious effort to adapt herself, her words, her attention to them exhausted her. She looked back with wonder to the old days, when she had done nothing else all day long.
Miss Bennett soon began to notice that she was looking like a little piece of carved ivory, with eyes of the blackest jet. When at last her visitors had all gone she went straight to bed.
The next day she had herself driven down to Wide Plains, so that she could see Judge Homans. Court was still in session when she got there, and she was shown to the judge's little book-lined room and left to wait. She had expected her first view of the wide main street, of Mr. Wooley's shop, of the columned courthouse to be intensely painful to her, but it wasn't. The tall attendant who ushered her in greeted her warmly. She remembered him clearly leaning against the double doors of the court room to prevent anyone leaving during the judge's charge.
Presently the judge came in, just as he had come in every day to her trial, his hands folded, his robes flowing about him. Lydia rose. Her name apparently had not been given to him, for he looked at her in surprise. Then his face lit up.
"My dear Miss Thorne," he said, "when did you get out?"
It was the first perfectly natural, spontaneous reference to her imprisonment that she had heard since she left prison. It did away with all constraint and awkwardness, to be taken as a matter of course. Criminals were no novelty in the judge's life. He sat down, waved her into a chair opposite, put his elbows on the arms of his swinging chair and locked his knuckles together.
"I'm very glad to see you—very glad indeed," he said.
But he wasn't at all surprised that she had come. It was not unusual, evidently, for the first visit of a released convict to be paid to the judge. He began to question her rather as if she were a child home for the holidays.
"And what did you learn? Baking? Now that's interesting, isn't it? And sewing? Well, well!"
He treated her so simply that Lydia found herself speaking to him with more freedom about the whole experience of prison than she had been able to speak to anyone. The reason was, she thought, that she did not need to explain to him that she was not a tragic exception, a special case. To him she was just one of a long series of lawbreakers.
They talked for an hour. She noted that the judge still enjoyed talking, still insisted on rounding out his sentences; but she felt now no impatience. His reminiscences interested her. Before long she found herself consulting him about a subject that had long preyed on her mind—Alma Wooley. She wanted to do something for Alma Wooley, yet she supposed the girl would utterly reject anything coming from the woman who had——
The judge put his hand on her arm.
"Now don't you worry a mite about Alma," he said. "Alma married a nice young fellow out of the district attorney's office—named Foster—and now they have a baby, a nice little baby. I was saying to her father only yesterday that Foster is a much better man for her——"
While the judge was launched on his speech to Mr. Wooley, Lydia's mind went back to Foster—Foster waiting and watching for O'Bannon like a puppy for its supper. Well, she could forgive him even his admiration for that man since he had made Alma Wooley happy. A weight was lifted from her conscience.
Finally, with some embarrassment, she told the judge the object of her visit—a pardon for Evans. She was prepared to have him remind her, as O'Bannon had once done, that it was a matter which had been in her own hands, in that in this very room in which she was now sitting she had virtually refused to help Evans. But Judge Homans, if he remembered, made no reference to the past.
"Yes, yes," he said. "Now let me see. It must have been O'Bannon tried that case, wasn't it?" Lydia nodded, and he went on, "Poor O'Bannon! I miss him very much. He resigned, you know, about the time Mrs. O'Bannon died."
"He was married?" asked Lydia, and even in her own ears her voice sounded unnaturally loud.
No, the judge said, it was the old lady, his mother; and he went on telling Lydia what a fine fellow the former district attorney had been—a good man and a good lawyer.
"The two are not always combined," the judge said with a chuckle, feeling something cold in his auditor's attention.
Lydia rose to her feet. She was sorry, she said, that she really must be going home. The judge found his soft black hat and accompanied her to her car.
"Don't drive yourself?" he asked.
She shook her head. She would never drive a car again. The judge patted her hand—told her to come and see him again—let him know how she was getting on. She promised. She saw that in some way an unbreakable human bond had been established between them by the fact that she had committed a crime and he had sentenced her to state's prison for it.
She went home feeling encouraged. Not only had she managed to get him to agree to enlist O'Bannon's help in the matter of Evans' pardon, but she herself had supported the mention of O'Bannon's name with something that was almost calm.
It was noticeable—though no one noticed it—that a month after Lydia went to work in Mrs. Galton's organization everyone in her immediate circle was doing something for released convicts. Bobby, Miss Bennett, Eleanor, Wiley, all suddenly began to think that the problem of the criminal was the most important, the most vital, the most interesting problem in the world. The explanation was simple: A will like Lydia's, harnessed to a constructive purpose, was far more irresistible than in the old days when it had been selfish, spasmodic and undisciplined.
She was given a little office, like Miss Galton's, and she was in it every morning at nine o'clock. Miss Bennett, who had worried all her life because Lydia led an irregular, aimless, idle existence, now worried even more because her working hours were long.
"Surely," she protested almost every morning, "Mrs. Galton will not care if you don't get there until half past nine or even ten. These cold days it isn't good for you——"
Lydia explained that she was not going to the office early in order to please Mrs. Galton, who, as a matter of fact, did not arrive there until late in the morning. The organization needed money desperately, there was much to be done. But the truth was she loved the routine—the hard impersonal work. It saved her from herself. She was almost happy.
Eleanor had evidently done what she had been asked to do, for O'Bannon seemed to have dropped out of the world. His name was never mentioned, and as week after week went by it seemed to Lydia that she herself was forgetting him. Perhaps a time would come when she could even see him without wrecking her peace of soul. Her only sorrow was the delay in Evans' pardon. It didn't come. Lydia could not enjoy her liberty with Evans in prison. The forms had all been complied with, but the governor did not act. At last Mrs. Galton suggested her going to Albany; or perhaps she knew someone who would have influence with the governor. Yes, Lydia knew someone—Albee.
Albee was now senator from his own state, and a busy session in Washington had kept him there. He had been among the first to telegraph Lydia. She found his message and his flowers in the house when she first came home. The message sounded as if it had come from a friend; but Lydia knew that it had not; that Albee had escaped from her and her influence, or thought he had. She had known it even in the days of her trial, and looking back on the facts and on herself she wondered that she had not resented it. Those were days in which she had awarded punishments readily, and Albee had really behaved badly to her. They had been very nearly engaged and yet the instant she was in trouble he had deserted her. He had gone through all the motions of helping her, but in spirit she knew that Albee the day she killed Drummond had begun to disentangle himself. She felt not the least resentment against him; only she recognized the fact that his remoteness from her made it more difficult to make use of him for Evans, unless—the idea suddenly came to her—it might make it easier. He would avoid seeing her if he could; but if she found her way to him he might be eager to atone, to set himself right by doing her a definite favor.
The evening of the day that she saw this clearly she took a train to Washington. The next morning she was waiting in his outer office before he reached it himself. A new secretary—the old one had been promoted to some position of political prominence at home—did not know her and had not been warned against her by name. So she was sitting there when Albee came in with his old cheerful, dominating, leonine look. Just for the fraction of a second his face fell at seeing her, and then he hurried to her side, as if out of all the world she was the person he most wanted to see.
It must not be supposed that Lydia had become so saintly that she had forgotten her knowledge of men. She knew now that if she were cordial to Albee she could not depend on his doing what she wanted. If on the other hand she withheld her friendship she was sure he would bid high for it. She ignored all his flustered protestations. She smiled at him, a smile a little sad, a little chilly and infinitely remote.
"I want very much to speak to you, Stephen," she said, and her tone told him that whatever she wanted to talk about had nothing whatsoever to do with themselves.
He led her into the inner office. A curious thing was happening to him. He had never been in love with Lydia. He had deliberately allowed her beauty and wealth to dazzle him; he had admired her courage, her sureness of herself, contrasting it with his own terror of giving offense to anyone; but at times he had almost hated her. If she had inspired him with one atom of tenderness he would not have deserted her. She never had. He had cut himself off from her without regret. But now as she sat there, finer and paler and more—much more—than two years older, she did inspire tenderness, tenderness of a most vivid and disturbing sort. He could not take his eyes from her face. He suddenly cut into what she was saying about Evans.
"Lydia, my dear, are you happy? Yes, yes, of course I can get from the governor anything you ask me, but tell me about yourself."
He leaned over, taking her hands in his. She rose, withdrawing them slowly as she did so.
"Not now," she answered, and moved toward the door.
"You mustn't go like that," he protested. "Just think, my dear, I have not seen you for two years—the toughest two years I ever spent! You can't just come and go like this. I must see you, talk to you."
"When you have got me Evans' pardon, Stephen—if you get it." She still spoke gently, but there was a good deal of intention behind Lydia at her gentlest.
He caught the "if"—almost an insult after his confident assertion, but he did not think of the insult. He was aware of nothing but the desire that she should smile gayly and admiringly at him again as she used to, making him feel Jovian.
"I'm going to New York on Thursday," he said. "On Friday evening you shall have the pardon. Will you be at the opera Friday evening?"
She hesitated. She had not been to the opera yet. She could not bear the publicity of that blazing circle, but she had kept her box. After all, she thought, she could sit in the back of it, and music was one of the greatest of her pleasures.
"Will you join me there?" she said.
"It will be like old times."
"Not quite," she answered.
Still with his hand on the knob of the door, as if he were just going to open it for her, he detained her, trying to make her talk, asking her about her friends, her work, her health; trying to hit upon the master key to her mind, and at last, for he was a man of long experience, he found it.
"And that damned crook who prosecuted your case," he said. "Do you ever see him?"
She shook her head.
"I prefer not even to think of him," she replied, and this time she made a gesture that he should open the door. Instead he stepped in front of it. He had waked her; he had her attention at last.
"Naturally, naturally," he said, "but I wish you would think of him for a minute. I'm in rather a fix about that fellow."
She longed to know what the fix was, but she did not dare hear. She said softly, "Please don't make me think of him, Stephen. I'd really rather not."
"But you must listen, Lydia. Help me. I don't know what I ought to do. I have it in my power to ruin that man. Shall I?"
There was a pause. Albee heard her long breaths trembling as she drew them. He thought to himself that his knowledge of her had not gone astray. She had hated that man, and whatever else had changed in her, that hadn't. She suddenly came to life and tried to open the door for herself.
"I must go," she said. He did not move.
"You know," he said, speaking quickly, "that after your trial he went to pieces, resigned his position, took to drinking again, tried to make his way in New York. He was nearly down and out for a time there."
He watched her. A smile, a terrible smile, began to curve the corners of her mouth. He went on:
"I couldn't be exactly sorry for his bad luck. In fact, to be candid, I gave him a kick or two when I had the chance. But now he's pulled himself out. He's worked like a dog, and I hear that a couple of friends of mine, of the firm of Simpson, Aspinwall & McCarter, are going to offer him a partnership. It's a big firm, particularly in the political world." There was a short silence. "Shall I let him have it, Lydia?"
She raised her shoulders scornfully.
"Could you stop his getting it, Stephen?"
"Do you doubt it?"
She turned on him. Her jaw was set and lifted as in the old days.
"Of course I do! If you could have you certainly would have without consulting me. There is a man who you know lacks all integrity and honor, and who, moreover, goes about saying that you tried to bribe him—and failed. Oh, he makes a great point of that—you failed! Would you let a man like that go into a firm of your friends if you could stop it? No, no! Not unless you have grown a good deal meeker than I remember you, Stephen."
Albee made a sweeping gesture, as expressive as a Roman emperor's thumbs down.
"He shall not have it," and he added with a smile as cruel as Lydia's own: "He believes himself absolutely sure of it."