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 thefamily, 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 comingout 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."
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 dreamsof 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 inyears. 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 trouserswas 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 momentcame, 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 Anneand 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 saidto 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 wantto 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 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 quitea 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 turnin 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."
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 commonlycalled 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 dashingcoup; 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 theNestor," 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 theNestor, 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!' sayshe, '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 itPrison Talk, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Jeff. "They called itPrison 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 byNestor, 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 werea 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 hundredper 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 naturalenough 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 momentfor 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. Lydiaknew 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, withthe 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 tirednow".
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."