"What is it?" said he. "What's the matter?"
But Anne, after a second glance at his tired face, was all concern for him.
"Have you had something to eat?" she asked.
He put that aside, and said remindingly:
"What is it about father?"
Anne stood at the foot of the stairs. She had the air of defending the way, lest he rush up before he was intelligently prepared.
"We don't know what it is. He went all to pieces. It was just after you had gone. I found him there, shaking. He just said to me: 'I'll go to bed.' So I helped him. That's all I know."
Jeff felt an instant and annoyed compunction. He had dashed off, to the tune of his own wild mood, and left his father to the assaults of emotions perhaps as overwhelming and with no young strength to meet them.
"I'll go up," said he. "Did you call a doctor?"
"No. He wouldn't let me."
Jeff ran up the stairs and found Lydia in a chair outside the colonel's door. She looked pathetically tired and anxious. And so young: if she had arranged herself artfully to touch the sympathies she couldn't have done it to more effect. Her round arms were bare to the elbow, her hands were loosely clasped, and she was sitting, like a child, with her feet drawn up under her on the rung of the chair. She looked at him in a solemn relief but, he saw with a relief of his own, no sensitiveness to his presence apart from the effect it might have on her father.
"He's asleep," she said, in a whisper. "I'm sitting here to listen."
Jeffrey nodded at her in a bluff way designed to express his certainty that everything was going to be on its legs again now he had come home. For the first time he felt like the man in the house, and the thin tonic braced him. He opened the door of his father's room and went in. The colonel's voice came at once:
"That you, Jeff?"
"Yes," said Jeff. He sat down by the bedside in the straight-backed chair that had evidently been comfortable enough for the sisters' anxious watch. "What's the matter, father?"
The colonel moved slightly nearer the edge of the bed. His eyes brightened, Jeff noted by the light of the shaded lamp. He was glad to get his son home again.
"Jeff," said he, "I've been lying here making up my mind I'd tell you."
Jeffrey rose and closed the door he had left open a crack out of courtesy to the little watcher there. He came back to the bed, not with a creaking caution, but like a man bringing a man's rude solace. He could not believe his father was seriously undone. But, whatever was the matter, the colonel was glad to talk. Perhaps, loyal as he was, even he could scarcely estimate his own desire to turn from soft indulgences to the hard contact of a man's intelligence.
"Jeff," said he, "I'm in a bad place. I've met the last enemy."
"Oh, no, you haven't," said Jeff, at random. "The last enemy is Death. That's what they say, don't they? Well, you're years and years to the good. Don't you worry."
"Ah, but the last enemy isn't Death," said the colonelwisely. "Don't you think it. The last enemy is Fear. Death's only the executioner. Fear delivers you over, and then Death has to take you, whether or no. But Fear is the arch enemy."
Sane as he looked and spoke, this was rather impalpable, and Jeffrey began to doubt his own fitness to deal with psychologic quibbles. But his father gave short shrift for questioning.
"I'm afraid," he said quite simply.
"What are you afraid of?" Jeff felt he had to meet him with an equal candour.
"Everything."
They looked at each other a moment and then Jeff essayed a mild, "Oh, come!" because there was nothing more to the point.
"I've taken care of myself," said the colonel, with more vigour, "till I'm punk. I can't stand a knockdown blow. I couldn't stand your going away. I went to bed."
"Is my going a knockdown blow?"
There was something pathetic in hearing that, but pleasurable, too, in a warm, strange way.
"Why, yes, of course it is."
"Well, then," said Jeff, "don't worry. I won't go."
"Oh, yes, you will," said the colonel instantly, "or you'll be punk. I'd rather go with you. I told you that. But it wouldn't do. I should begin to pull on you. And you'd mother me as they do, these dear girls."
"Yes," said Jeffrey thoughtfully. "Yes. They're dear girls."
"There's nothing like them," said the colonel. "There never was anything like their mother." Then he stopped, remembering she was not Jeff's mother, too. But Jeff knew all about his own mother, the speed and shine andbewildering impulse of her, and how she was adored. But nobody could have been soothed and brooded over by her, that gallant fiery creature. Whatever she might have become if she had lived, love of her then was a fight and a devotion, flowers and stars and dreams. "And it isn't a thing for me to take, this sort of attachment, Jeff. I ought to give it. They ought to be having the kind of time girls like. They ought not to be coddling an old man badly hypped."
Jeff nodded here, comprehendingly. Yes, they did need the things girls like: money, clothes, fun. But he vaulted away from that disquieting prospect, and faced the present need.
"Have you had anything to eat?"
"Oh, yes," the colonel said. "Egg-nog. Anne makes it. Very good."
"See here," said Jeff, "don't you want to get up and slip your clothes on, and I'll forage round and fish out cold hash or something, and we'll have a kind of a mild spree?"
A slow smile lighted the colonel's face, rather grimly.
He admired the ease with which Jeff grasped the situation.
"Don't you start them out cooking," he advised.
"No, I'll find a ham-bone or something. Only slip into your trousers. Get your shoes on your feet. We'll smoke a pipe together."
"You're right," said the colonel, with vigour. "We'll put on our shoes."
Jeff, on his way to the door, heard him throwing off the bedclothes. His own was the harder part. He had to meet the tired, sweet servitors without and announce a man's fiat. There they were, Lydia still in her patient attitude, and Anne on the landing, her head thrown backand the pure outline of her chin and throat like beauty carved in the air. At the opening of the door they were awake with an instant alertness. Lydia's feet came noiselessly to the floor, and Jeff understood, with a pang of pity for her, that she had perched uncomfortably to keep herself awake. This soft creature would never understand. He addressed himself to Anne, who believed in the impeccable rights of man and could take uncomprehended ways for granted.
"He's going to get up."
Anne made a movement toward the door.
"No," said Jeffrey. He was there before her, and, though he smiled at her, she knew she was not to pass. "I'll see to him. You two run off to bed."
They were both regarding him with a pale, anxious questioning. But Anne's look cleared.
"Come, Lydia," said she, and as Lydia, cramped with sleep, trudged after her, she added wisely, "It'll be better for them both."
When they were gone, Jeffrey did go down to the kitchen, rigid in the order Mary Nellen always left. He entered boldly on a campaign of ruthless ravaging, found bread and cheese and set them out, and a roast most attractive to the eye. He lighted candles, and then a lamp with a gay piece of red flannel in its glass body, put there by Mary Nellen, who, though on Homeric knowledge bent, kept religiously all the ritual of home. The colonel's slippered step was coming down the stairs. Jeffrey went out into the hall and beckoned. He looked stealth and mischief, and the colonel grimaced wisely at him. They went into the kitchen and sat down to their meal like criminals. The colonel had to eat, in vying admiration of Jeff, ravenous from his day's walk. When they drew back, Jeff pulled out his pipe. He was not an incessant smoker, butin this first interval of his homecoming all small indulgences were sweet. He paused in filling, finger on the weed.
"Where's yours?" he asked.
The colonel shook his head.
"Don't smoke?" Jeff inquired.
"I haven't for a year or so." He was shamefaced over it. "The fact is—Jeff, I'm nothing but a malingerer. I thought—my heart—"
"Very wise," said Jeffrey, his eyes half-closed in a luxurious lighting up. "Very wise indeed. But just to-night—don't you think you'd better have a whiff to-night?" The colonel shook his head, but Jeff sent out an advance signal of blue smoke. "Where is it?" said he.
"Oh, I suppose it's in my bureau drawer," said the colonel, with impatience. "Left hand. I kept it; I don't know why."
"Yes," said Jeffrey. "Of course you kept your pipe."
He ran softly upstairs, opening and shutting doors with an admirable quiet, and put his hand on the old briarwood. From Anne's room he heard a low crooning. She was awake then, but with mind at ease or she wouldn't sing like that. He could imagine how Lydia had dropped off to sleep, like a burden of sweet fragrances cast on the bosom of the night, an unfinished prayer babbled on her lips. But to think of Lydia now was to look trouble in the face, and he returned to his father not so thoroughly in the spirit of a specious gaiety. It did him good, though, to see the colonel's fingers close on the old pipe, with a motion of the thumb, indicating a resumed habit, caressing a smooth, warm boss. The colonel soberly but luxuriously lighted up, and they sat and puffed a while in silence. Jeffrey drew up a chair for his father's feet and another for his own.
"What's your idea," he said,' at length, "of Weedon Moore?"
The colonel took his pipe out and replaced it.
"Rather a dirty fellow, wasn't he?"
"Yes. That is, in college."
"What d' he do?"
The colonel had never been told at the time. He knew Moore was an outcast from the gang.
"Everything," said Jeffrey briefly. "And told of it," he added.
The colonel nodded. Jeffrey put Moore aside for later consideration, and made up his mind pretty generously to talk things over. The habit of his later years had been all for silence, and the remembered confidences of the time before had involved Esther. Of that sweet sorcery he would not think. As he stood now, the immediate result of his disaster had been to callous surfaces accessible to human intercourse and at the same time cause him, in the sensitive inner case of him, to thank the ruling powers that he need never again, seeing how ravaging it is, give himself away. But now because his father had got to have new wine poured into him, he was giving himself away, just as, on passionate impulse, he had given himself away to Lydia. He put his question desperately, knowing how inexorably it committed him.
"Do you suppose there's anything in this town for me to do?"
The colonel produced at once the possibility he had been privately cherishing.
"Alston Choate—"
"I know," said Jeffrey. "I sha'n't go to Choate. You know what Addington is. Before I knew it, I should be a cause. Can't you and I hatch up something?"
The colonel hesitated.
"It would be simple enough," he said, "if I had any capital."
"You haven't," said Jeff, rather curtly, "for me to fool away. What you've got you must save for the girls."
The same doubt was in both their minds. Would Addington let him earn his living in the bald give and take of everyday commerce? Would it half patronise and half distrust him? He thought, from old knowledge of it, that Addington would behave perfectly but exasperatingly. It was passionate in its integrity, but because he was born out of the best traditions in it, a temporary disgrace would be condoned. If he opened a shop, Addington would give him a tithe of its trade, from duty and, as it would assuredly tell itself, for the sake of his father. But he didn't want that kind of nursing. He was sick enough at the accepted ways of life to long for wildernesses, ocean voyages on rough liners, where every man is worked hard enough to let his messmate alone. He was hurt, irremediably hurt, he knew, in what stands in us for the affections. But here were affections still, inflexibly waiting. They had to be reckoned with. They had to be nurtured and upheld, no matter how the contacts of life hit his own skin. He tried vaguely, and still with angry difficulty, to explain himself.
"I want to stand by you, father. But you won't get much satisfaction out of me."
The colonel thought he should get all kinds of satisfaction. His glance told that. How much of the contentment of it, Jeffrey wondered, with a cynical indulgence for life as it is, came from tobacco and how much from him?
"You see I'm not the chap I was," he blundered, trying to open his father's eyes to the abysmal depth of his futility.
"You're older," said the colonel. "And—you'll letme say it, won't you, Jeff?" He felt very timid before his rough-tongued, perhaps coarsened son. "You seem to me to have got a lot out of it."
Out of his imprisonment! The red mounted to Jeffrey's forehead. He took out his pipe, emptied it carefully and laid it down.
"Father," he said slowly, "I'm going to tell you the truth. When we're young we're full of yeast. We know it all. We think we're going to do it all. But we're only seething and working inside. It's a dream, I suppose. We live in it and we think we've got it all. But it's a horribly uncomfortable dream."
The colonel gave his little acquiescing nod.
"I wouldn't have it again," he said. "No, I wouldn't go back."
"And I give you my word," said Jeffrey, slowly thinking out his way, though it looked to him as if there were really no way, "I'm as much at sea as I was then. It's not the same turmoil, but it's a turmoil. I was pulled up short. I was given plenty of time to think. Well, I thought—when I hadn't the nerve to keep myself from doing it."
"You said some astonishing things in the prison paper," his father ventured. The whole thing seemed so gravely admirable to him—Jeff and the prison as the public knew them—that he wished Jeff himself could get comfort out of it.
"Some few things I believe I settled, so far as I understand them." Jeff was frowning at the table where his hand beat an impatient measure. "I saw things in the large. I saw how the nations—all of 'em, in living under present conditions—could go to hell quickest. That's what they're bent on doing. And I saw how they could call a halt if they would. But how to start in on my ownlife, I don't know. You'd think I'd had time enough to face the thing and lick it into shape. I haven't. I don't know any more what to do than if I'd been born yesterday—on a new planet—and not such an easy one."
While the colonel had bewailed his own limitations a querulous discontent had ivoried his face. Now it had cleared and left the face sedate and firm in a gravity fitted to its nobility of line.
"Jeff," he said. He leaned over the table and touched Jeffrey's hand.
Jeff looked up.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The reason you're not prepared to go on is because you don't care. You don't care a hang about yourself."
Jeffrey debated a moment. It was true. His troublesome self did not seem to him of any least account.
"Well," said he, "let's go to bed."
But they shook hands before they parted, and the colonel did not put his pipe away in the drawer. He left it on the mantel, conveniently at hand.
Next morning Anne, after listening at the colonel's door and hearing nothing, decided not to tap. She went on downstairs to be saluted by a sound she delighted in: a low humming. It came from the library where her father was happily and most villainously attacking the only song he knew: "Lord Lovell." Anne's heart cleared up like a smiling sky. She went in to him, and he, at the window, his continued humming like the spinning of a particularly eccentric top, turned and greeted her, and he seemed to be very well and almost gay. He showed no sign of even remembering yesterday, and when presently Jeffrey came in and then Lydia, they all behaved, Anne thought, like an ordinary family with no queer problems round the corner.
After breakfast Jeffrey turned to Lydia and said quite simply: "Come into the orchard and walk a little."
But to Lydia, Anne saw, with a mild surprise, his asking must have meant something not so simple. Her face flushed all over, and a misty sweetness, like humility and gratitude, came into her eyes. Jeffrey, too, caught that morning glow, only to find his task the sadder. How to say things to her! and after all, what was it possible to say? They went down into the orchard, and Lydia, by his side, paced demurely. He saw she was trying to fit her steps to his impatient stride, and shortened up on it. He felt very tender toward Lydia. At last, when it seemed as if they might be out of range of the windows, and, he unreasonably felt, more free, he broke out abruptly:
"I've got a lot of things to say to you." Lydia glanced up at him with that wonderful, exasperating look, half humility, and waited. It seemed to her he must have a great deal to say. "I don't believe it's possible for you—for a girl—to understand what it would be for a man in my place to come home and find everybody so sweet and kind. I mean you—and Anne."
Now he felt nothing short of shame. But she took him quickly enough. He didn't have to go far along the shameful road. She glanced round at him again, and, knowing what the look must be, he did not meet it. He could fancy well the hurt inquiry leaping into those innocent eyes.
"What have I done," she asked, and his mind supplied the accusatory inference, "that you don't love me any more?"
He hastened to answer.
"You've been everything that's sweet and kind." He added, whether wisely or not he could not tell, what seemed to him the truth: "I haven't got hold of myself. I thought it would be an easy stunt to come back and stay a while and then go away and get into something permanent. But it's no such thing. Lydia, I don't understand people very well. I don't understand myself. I'm afraid I'm a kind of blackguard."
"Oh, no," said Lydia gravely. "You're not that."
She did not understand him, but she was, in her beautiful confidence, sure he was right. She was hurt. There was the wound in her heart, and that new sensation of its actually bleeding; but she had a fine courge of her own, and she knew grief over that inexplicable pang must be put away until the sight of it could not trouble him.
"I'm going to ask you a question," said Jeffrey shortly,in his distaste for asking it at all. "Do you want me to take father away with me, you and Anne?"
"Are you going away?" she asked, in an irrepressible tremor.
"Answer me," said Jeffrey.
She was not merely the beautiful child he had thought her. There was something dauntless in her, something that could endure. He felt for her a quick passion of comradeship and the worship men have for women who seem to them entirely beautiful and precious enough to be saved from disillusion.
"If I took him away with me—and of course it would be made possible," he was blundering over this in decency—"possible for you to live in comfort—wouldn't you and Anne like to have some life of your own? You haven't had any. Like other girls, I mean."
She threw her own question back to him with a cool and clear decision he hadn't known the soft, childish creature had it in her to frame.
"Does he want us to go?"
"Good God, no!" said Jeffrey, faced, in the instant, by the hideous image of ingratitude she conjured up, his own as well as his father's.
"Do you?"
"Lydia," said he, "you don't understand. I told you you couldn't. It's only that my sentence wasn't over when I left prison. It's got to last, because I was in prison."
"Oh, no! no!" she cried.
"I've muddled my life from the beginning. I was always told I could do things other fellows couldn't. Because I was brilliant. Because I knew when to strike. Because I wasn't afraid. Well, it wasn't so. I muddled the whole thing. And the consequence is, I've got to keepon being muddled. It's as if you began a chemical experiment wrong. You might go on messing with it to infinity. You wouldn't come out anywhere."
"You think it's going to be too hard for us," she said, with a directness he thought splendid.
"Yes. It would be infernally hard. And what are you going to get out of it? Go away, Lydia. Live your life, you and Anne, and marry decent men and let me fight it out."
"I sha'n't marry," said Lydia. "You know that."
He could have groaned at her beautiful wild loyalty. The power of the universe had thrown them together, and she was letting that one minute seal her unending devotion. But her staunchness made it easier to talk to her. She could stand a good deal, the wind and rain of cruel fact. She wouldn't break.
"Lydia," said he, "you are beautiful to me. But I can't let you go on seeming beautiful, if—if you're so divinely kind to me and believing, and everything that's foolish—and dear."
"You mean," said Lydia, "you're afraid I should think wrong thoughts about you—because there's Esther. Oh, I know there's Esther. But I didn't mean to be wicked. And you didn't. It was so—so above things. So above everything."
Her voice trembled too much for her to manage it. He glanced at her and saw her lip was twitching violently, and savagely thought a man sometime would have a right to kiss it. And yet what did he care? To kiss a woman's lips was a madness or a splendour that passed. He knew there might be, almost incredibly, another undying passion that did last, made up of endurance and loyalty and the free rough fellowship between men. This girl, this soft yet unyielding thing, was capable of that. But she mustnot squander it on him who was bankrupt. Yet here she was, in her house of dreams, tended by divine ministrants of the ideal: the old lying servitors that let us believe life is what we make it and deaf to the creatures raging there outside who swear it is made irrevocably for us. He was sure they lied, these servitors in the house of maiden dreams. Yet how to tell her so! And would he do it if he could?
"You see," he said irrelevantly, "I want you to have your life."
"It will be my life," she said. "To take care of Farvie, as we always have. To make things nice for you in the house. I don't believe you and Farvie'd like it at all without Anne and me."
She was announcing, he saw, quite plainly, that she didn't want a romantic pact with him. They had met, just once, for an instant, in the meeting of their lips, and Lydia had simply taken that shred of triumphant life up to the mountain-top to weave her nest of it: a nest where she was to warm all sorts of brooding wonders for him and for her father. There was nothing to be done with her in her innocence, her ignorance, her beauty of devotion.
"It doesn't make any difference about me," he said. "I'm out of the running in every possible way. But it makes a lot of difference about you and Anne."
"It doesn't make any difference to Anne," said Lydia astutely, "because she's going to heaven, and so she doesn't care about what she has here."
He was most amusedly anxious to know whether Lydia also was going to heaven.
"Do you care what happens to you here?" he asked.
"Yes," she answered instantly. "I care about staying with my folks."
The homely touch almost conquered him. He thought perhaps such a fierce little barbarian might even find it better to eat bitter bread with her own than to wander out into strange flowery paths.
"Are you going to heaven, too, Lydia?" he ventured. "With Anne?"
"I'm going everywhere my folks go," she said, with composure. "Now I can't talk any more. I told Mary Nellen I'd dust while they do the silver."
The atmosphere of a perfectly conventional living was about them. Jeffrey had to adjure himself to keep awake to the difficulties he alone had made. He had come out to confess to her the lawlessness of his mind toward her, and she was deciding merely to go on living with him and her father, which meant, in the first place, dusting for Mary Nellen. They walked along the orchard in silence, and Jeffrey, with relief, also took a side track to the obvious. Absently his eyes travelled along the orchard's level length, and his great thought came to him. The ground did it. The earth called to him. The dust rose up impalpably and spoke to him.
"Lydia," said he, "I see what to do."
"What?"
The startled brightness in her eyes told him she feared his thought, and, not knowing, as he did, how great it was, suspected him of tragic plans for going away.
"I'll go to work on this place. I'll plough it up. I'll raise things, and father and I'll dig."
As he watched her interrogatively the colour faded from her face. The relief of hearing that homespun plan had chilled her blood, and she was faint for an instant with the sickness of hearty youth that only knows it feels odd to itself and concludes the strangeness is of the soul. But she did not answer, for Anne was at the window, signalling.
"Come in," said Lydia. "She wants us."
Miss Amabel, in a morning elegance of black muslin and silk gloves, was in the library. Anne looked excited and the colonel, there also, quite pleasurably stirred. Lydia was hardly within the door when Anne threw the news at her.
"Dancing classes!"
"At my house," said Miss Amabel. She put a warm hand on Lydia's shoulder and looked down at her admiringly: wistfully as well. "Can anything," the look said, "be so young, so unthinkingly beautiful and have a right to its own richness? How could we turn this dower into the treasury of the poor and yet not impoverish the child herself?" "We'll have an Italian class and a Greek. And there are others, you know, Poles, Armenians, Syrians. We'll manage as many as we can."
They sat down to planning classes and hours, and Jeffrey, looking on, noted how keen the two girls were, how intent and direct. They balked at money. If the classes were for the poor, they proposed giving their time as Miss Amabel gave her house. But she disposed of that with a conclusive gravity, and a touch, Jeffrey was amused to see, of the Addington manner. Miss Amabel was pure Addington in all her unconsidered impulses. She wanted to give, not to receive. Yet if you reminded her that giving was the prouder part, she would vacate her ground of privilege with a perfect simplicity sweet to see. When she got up Jeffrey rose with her, and though he took the hand she offered him, he said:
"I'm going along with you."
And they were presently out in Addington streets, walking together almost as it might have been when they walked from Sunday school and she was "teacher ". He began on her at once.
"Amabel, dear, what are you running with Weedon Moore for?"
She was using her parasol for a cane, and now, in instinctive remonstrance, she struck it the more forcibly on the sidewalk and had to stop and pull it out from a worn space between the bricks.
"I'm glad you spoke of Weedon," she said. "It's giving me a chance to say some things myself. You know, Jeffrey, you're very unjust to Weedon."
"No, I'm not," said Jeff.
"Alston Choate is, too."
"Choate and I know him, better than you or any other woman can in a thousand years."
"You think he's the same man he was in college."
"Fellows like Moore don't change. There's something inherently rotten in 'em you can't sweeten out."
"Jeffrey, I assure you he has changed. He's a power for good. And when he gets his nomination, he'll be more of a power yet."
"Nomination. For what?"
"Mayor."
"Weedon Moore mayor of this town? Why, the cub! We'll duck him, Choate and I." They were climbing the rise to her red brick house, large and beautiful and kindly. It really looked much like Miss Amabel herself, a little unkempt, but generous and belonging to an older time. They went in and Jeffrey, while she took off her bonnet and gloves, stood looking about him in the landscape-papered hall.
"Go into the east room, dear," said she. "Why, Jeff, what is it?"
He was standing still, looking now up the stairs.
"Oh," said he, "I believe I'm going to cry. It hasn't changed—any more than you have. You darling!"
Miss Amabel put her hand on his shoulder, and he drew it to his lips; and then she slipped it through his arm and they went into the east room together, which also had not changed, and Jeff took his accustomed place on the sofa under the portrait of the old judge, Miss Amabel's grandfather. Jeff shook off sentiment, the softness he could not afford.
"I tell you I won't have it," he said. "Weedon Moore isn't going to be mayor of this town. Besides he can't. He hasn't been in politics—"
"More or less," said she.
"Run for office?"
"Yes."
"Ever get any?"
"No."
"There! what d'I tell you?"
"But he has a following of his own now," said she, in a quiet triumph, he thought. "Since he has done so much for labour."
"What's he done?"
"He has organised—"
"Strikes?"
"Yes. He's been all over the state, working."
"And talking?"
"Why, yes, Jeff! Don't be unjust. He has to talk."
"Amabel," said Jeffrey, with a sudden seriousness that drew her renewed attention, "have you the slightest idea what kind of things Moore is pouring into the ears of these poor devils that listen to him?"
She hesitated.
"Have you, now?" he insisted.
"Well, no, Jeffrey. I haven't heard him. There's rather a strong prejudice here against labour meetings.So Weedon very wisely talks to the men when he can get them alone."
"Why wisely? Why do you say that?"
"Because we want to spread knowledge without rousing prejudice. Then there isn't so much to fight."
"What kind of knowledge is Weedon Moore spreading? Tell me that."
Her plain face glowed with the beauty of her aspiration.
"He is spreading the good tidings," she said softly, "good tidings of great joy."
"Don't get on horseback, dear," he said, inexorably, but fondly. "I'm a plain chap, you know. I have to have plain talk. What are the tidings?"
She looked at him in a touched solemnity.
"Don't you know, Jeff," she said, "the working-man has been going on in misery all these centuries because he hasn't known his own power? It's like a man's dying of thirst and not guessing the water is just inside the rock and the rock is ready to break. He's only to look and there are the lines of cleavage." She sought in the soft silk bag that was ever at her hand, took out paper and pen and jotted down a line.
"What are you writing there?" Jeffrey asked, with a certainty that it had something to do with Moore.
"What I just said," she answered, with a perfect simplicity. "About lines of cleavage. It's a good figure of speech, and it's something the men can understand."
"For Moore? You're writing it for Moore?"
"Yes." She slipped the pad into her bag.
"Amabel," said he, helpless between inevitable irritation and tenderest love of her, "you are a perfectly unspoiled piece of work from the hand of God Almighty. But if you're running with Weedon Moore, you're going to do an awful lot of harm."
"I hope not, dear," she said gravely, but with no understanding, he saw, that her pure intentions could lead her wrong.
"I've heard Weedon Moore talking to the men."
She gave him a look of acute interest.
"Really, Jeff? Now, where?"
"The old circus-ground. I heard him. And he's pulling down, Amabel. He's destroying. He's giving those fellows an idea of this country that's going to make them hate it, trample it—" He paused as if the emotion that choked him made him the more impatient of what caused it.
"That's it," said she, her own face settling into a mournful acquiescence. "We've earned hate. We must accept it. Till we can turn it into love."
"But he's preaching discontent."
"Ah, Jeffrey," said she, "there's a noble discontent. Where should we be without it?"
He got up, and shook his head at her, smilingly, tenderly. She had made him feel old, and alien to this strange new day.
"You're impossible, dear," said he, "because you're so good. You've only to see right things to follow them and you believe everybody's the same."
"But why not?" she asked him quickly. "Am I to think myself better than they are?"
"Not better. Only more prepared. By generations of integrity. Think of that old boy up there." He glanced affectionately at the judge, a friend since his childhood, when the painted eyes had followed him about the room and it had been a kind of game to try vainly to escape them. "Take a mellow soil like your inheritance and the inheritance of a lot of 'em here in Addington. Plant kindness in it and decency and—"
"And love of man," said Miss Amabel quietly.
"Yes. Put it that way, if you like it better. I mean the determination to play a square game. Not to gorge, but make the pile go round. Plant in that kind of a soil and, George! what a growth you get!"
"I don't find fewer virtues among my plainer friends."
"No, no, dear! But you do find less—less background."
"That's our fault, Jeff. We've made their background. It's a factory wall. It's the darkness of a mine."
"Exactly. Knock a window in here and there, but don't chuck the reins of government into the poor chaps' hands and tell 'em to drive to the devil."
Her face flamed at him, the bonfire's light when prejudice is burned.
"I know," she said, "but you're too slow. You want them educated first. Then you'll give them something—if they deserve it."
"I won't give them my country—or Weedon Moore's country—to manhandle till they're grown up, and fit to have a plaything and not smash it."
"I would, Jeffrey."
"You would?"
"Yes. Give them power. They'll learn by using it. But don't waste time. Think of it! All the winters and summers while they work and work and the rest of us eat the bread they make for us."
"But, good God, Amabel! there isn't any curse on work. If your Bible tells you so, it's a liar. You go slow, dear old girl; go slow."
"Go slow?" said Amabel, smiling at him. "How can I? Night and day I see those people. I hear them crying out to me."
"Well, it's uncomfortable. But it's no reason for yourdelivering them over to demagogues like Weedon Moore."
"He's not a demagogue."
There was a sad bravado in her smile, and he answered with an obstinacy he was willing she should feel.
"All the same, dear, don't you try to make him tetrarch over this town. The old judge couldn't stand for that. If he were here to-day he wouldn't sit down at the same table with Weedie, and he wouldn't let you."
She followed him to the door; her comfortable hand was on his arm.
"Weedon will begin his campaign this fall," she said. Evidently she felt bound to define her standpoint clearly.
"Where's his money?" They were at the door and Jeffrey turned upon her. "Amabel, you're not going to stake that whelp?"
She flushed, from guilt, he knew.
"I am not doing anything unwise," she said, with the Addington dignity.
Thereupon Jeffrey went away sadly.
Jeffrey began to dig, and his father, without definite intention, followed him about and quite eagerly accepted lighter tasks. They consulted Denny as to recognised ways of persuading the earth, and summoned a ploughman and his team, and all day Jeffrey walked behind the plough, not holding it, for of that art he was ignorant, but in pure admiration. He asked questions about planting, and the ploughman, being deaf, answered in a forensic bellow, so that Addington, passing the brick wall in its goings to and fro, heard, and communicated to those at home that Jeffrey Blake, dear fellow, was going back to the land. Jeffrey did, as he had cynically foreseen, become a cause. All persons of social significance came to call, and were, without qualification, kind. Sometimes he would not see them, but Anne one day told him how wrong he was. If he hid himself he put a burden on his father, who stood in the breach, and talked even animatedly, renewing old acquaintance with a dignified assumption of having nothing to ignore. But when the visitors were gone the red in his cheek paled something too much, and Anne thought he was being unduly strained.
After that Jeffrey doggedly stayed by. He proved rather a silent host, but he stood up to the occasion, and even answered the general query whether he was going into business by the facer that he and his father had gone into it. They were market-gardening. The visitors regretted that, so far as Addington manners would permit, becausethey had noticed the old orchard was being ploughed, and that of course meant beans at least. Some of the older ladies recalled stories of dear Doctor Blake's pacing up and down beside the wall. They believed you could even find traces of the sacred path; but one day Jeffrey put an end to that credulous ideal by saying you couldn't now anyway, since it had been ploughed. Then, he saw, he hurt Addington and was himself disquieted. Years ago he had been amused when he hit hard against it and they flew apart equally banged; now he was grown up, whether to his advantage or not, and it looked to him as if Addington ought by this time to be grown up too.
It was another Addington altogether from the one he had left, though a surface of old tradition and habit still remained to clothe it in a semblance of past dignity and calm. Not a public cause existed in the known world but Addington now had a taste of it, though no one but Miss Amabel did much more than talk with fervour. The ladies who had once gone delicately out to teas and church, as sufficient intercourse with this world and preparation for the next, now had clubs and classes where they pounced on subjects not even mentionable fifty years ago, and shook them to shreds in their well-kept teeth. There was sprightly talk about class-consciousness, and young women who, if their incomes had been dissipated by inadequate trusteeship, would once have taught school according to a gentle ideal, now went away and learned to be social workers, and came back to make self-possessed speeches at the Woman's Club and present it with new theories to worry. This all went on under the sanction of Addington manners, and kept concert pitch rather high.
On all topics but one Addington agreed to such an extent that discussion really became more like axioms chanted in unison; but when it came to woman suffragesociety silently but exactly split. There were those who would stick at nothing, even casting a vote. There were those who said casting a vote was unwomanly, and you couldn't possibly leave the baby long enough to do it. Others among the antis were reconciled to its coming, if it came slowly enough not to agitate us. "Of course," said one of these, a Melvin who managed her ample fortune with the acumen of a financier, "it will come sometime. But we are none of us ready. We must delay it as long as we can." So she and the like-minded drove into the country round and talked about preventing the extension of the suffrage to women until hard-working, meagre-living people who had not begun to think much about votes, save as a natural prerogative of man, thought about them a great deal, and incidentally learned to organise and lobby, and got a very good training for suffrage when it should come. It did no harm, nor did the fervour of the other side do good. The two parties got healthfully tired with the exercise and "go" of it all, and at least they stirred the pot. But whatever they said or did, suffragists and antis never, so to speak, "met". The subject, from some occult sense of decorum, was tabu. If an anti were setting forth her views when a suffragist entered the room she instantly ceased and began to talk about humidity or the Balkans. A suffragist would no more have marshalled her arguments for the overthrow of an equal than she would have corrected a point of etiquette. But each went out with zeal into New England villages for the conversion of social underlings.
When they elected Jeffrey into a cause they did it with a rush, and they also elected his wife. Through her unwelcoming door poured a stream of visitors, ostensibly to call on Madame Beattie, but really, as Esther saw with bitterness, to recommend this froward wife to live with herhusband. Feeling ran very high there. Addington, to a woman, knew exactly the ideal thing for Esther to have done. She should have "received" him—that was the phrase—and helped him build up his life—another phrase. This they delicately conveyed to her in accepted innuendos Addington knew how to handle. Esther once told Aunt Patricia there were women selected by the other women to "do their dirty work ". But what she really meant was that Addington had a middle-aged few of the old stock who, with an arrogant induration in their own position, out of which no attacking humour could deliver them, held, as they judged, the contract to put questions. These it was who would ask Esther over a cup of tea: "Are you going on living in this house, my dear?" or: "Shall you join your husband at his father's? And will his father and the step-children stay on there?" And the other women, of a more circuitous method or a more sensitive touch, would listen and, Esther felt sure, discuss afterward what the inquisitors had found out: with an amused horror of the inquisitors and a grateful relish of the result. Esther sometimes thought she must cry aloud in answer; but though a flush came into her face and gave her an added pathos, she managed, in a way of gentle obstinacy, to say nothing, and still not to offend. And Madame Beattie sat by, never saving her, as Esther knew she might, out of her infernal cleverness, but imperturbably and lightly amused and smoking cigarettes all over the tea things. As a matter of fact, the tea things and their exquisite cloth were unpolluted, but Esther saw figuratively the trail of smoke and ashes, like a nicotian Vesuvius, over the home. She still hated cigarettes, which Addington had not yet accepted as a feminine diversion, though she had the slight comfort of knowing it forgave in MadameBeattie what it would not have tolerated in an Addingtonian. "Foreign ways," the ladies would remark to one another. "And she really is a very distinguished woman. They say she visits everywhere abroad."
Anne and Lydia were generally approved as modest and pretty girls; and Miss Amabel's classes in national dances became an exceedingly interesting feature of the town life. Anne and Lydia were in this dancing scheme all over. They were enchanted with it, the strangeness and charm of these odd citizens of another world, and made friends with little workwomen out of the shops, and went home with them to see old pieces of silver and embroidery, and plan pageants—this in the limited English common to them. Miss Amabel, too, was pleased, in her wistful way that always seemed to be thanking you for making things come out decently well. She had one big scheme: the building up of homespun interests between old Addington and these new little aliens who didn't know the Addington history or its mind and heart.
One night after a dancing class in her dining-room the girls went, with pretty good-nights, and Anne with them. She was hurrying down town on some forgotten errand, and refused Lydia's company. For Lydia was tired, and left alone with Miss Amabel, she settled to an hour's laziness. She knew Miss Amabel liked having her there, liked her perhaps better than Anne, who was of the beautiful old Addington type and not so piquing. Lydia had, across her good breeding, a bizarre other strain, not bohemian, not gipsy, but of a creature who is and always will be, even beyond youth, new to life. There were few conventions for Lydia. She did not instinctively follow beaten paths. If the way looked feasible and pleasant, she cut across.
"You're a little tired," said Miss Amabel, hesitating. She knew this was violating the etiquette of dancing. To be tired, Anne said, and Lydia, too, was because you hadn't the "method".
"It isn't the dancing," said Lydia at once, as Miss Amabel knew she would.
"No. But you've seemed tired a good deal of the time lately. Does anything worry you?"
"No," said Lydia soberly. She looked absent-minded, as if she sought about for what did worry her.
"You don't think your father's working too hard, planting?"
"Oh, no! It's good for him. He gets frightfully tired. They both do. But Farvie sleeps and eats and smokes. And laughs! That's Jeffrey. He can always make Farvie laugh." She said the last rather wonderingly, because she knew Jeffrey hadn't, so far as she had seen him, much light give and take and certainly no hilarity of his own. "But I suppose," she added wisely, as she had many times to herself, "Farvie's so pleased even to look at him and think he's got him back."
Miss Amabel disposed a pillow more invitingly on the old sofa that had spacious hollows in it, and Lydia obeyed the motion and lay down. It was not, she thought, because she was tired. Only it would please Miss Amabel. But the heart had gone out of her. If she looked as she felt, she realised she must be wan. But it takes more than the sorrows of youth to wash the colour out of it. She felt an impulse now to give herself away.
"It's only," she said, "we're not getting anywhere. That worries me."
"With your work?" Miss Amabel was waving a palm-leaf fan, from no necessity but the tranquillity induced by its rhythmic sway.
"Oh, no. About Jeffrey. Didn't you know we meant to clear him, Anne and I?"
"Clear him, dear? What of?"
"Why, what he was accused of," said Lydia.
"But he had his trial, you know. He was found guilty. He pleaded guilty, dear. That was why he was sentenced."
"Oh, but we all know why he pleaded guilty," said Lydia. "It was to save somebody else."
"Not exactly to save her," said Miss Amabel. "She wouldn't have been tried, you know. She wasn't guilty in that sense. Of course she was, before the fact. But that's not being legally guilty. It's only morally so."
Lydia was staring at her with wide eyes.
"Do you mean Esther?" she asked.
"Why, yes, of course I mean Esther."
"But I don't. I mean that dreadful man."
She put her feet to the floor and sat upright, smoothing her hair with hurried fingers. At least if she could talk about it with some one who wasn't Anne with whom she had talked for years knowing exactly what Anne would say at every point, it seemed as if she were getting, even at a snail's pace, upon her road. But Miss Amabel was very dense.
"My dear," said she, "I don't know what you mean."
"I mean the man that was in the scheme with him, in a way, and got out and sold his shares while they were up, and let the crash come on Jeffrey when he was alone."
"James Reardon?"
Lydia hated him too much to accept even a knowledge of his name.
"He was a promoter, just as Jeffrey was," she insisted, with her pretty sulkiness. "He was the one that went West and looked after the mines. And if there was nothing in them, he knew it. But he let Jeffrey go on trying to—to place the shares—and when Jeffrey went under he was safely out of the way. And he's guilty."
Miss Amabel looked at her thoughtfully and patiently.
"I'm afraid he isn't guilty in any sense the law would recognise," she said. "You see, dear, there are things the law doesn't take into account. It can't. You believe in Jeffrey. So do I. But I think you'll have to realise Jeffrey lost his head. And he did do wrong."
"Oh, how can you say a thing like that?" cried Lydia, in high passion. "And you've known him all your life."
Miss Amabel was not astute. Her nobility made it a condition of her mind to be unsuspecting. She knew the hidden causes of Jeffrey's downfall. She was sure his father knew, and it never seemed to her that these two sisters were less than sisters to him. What she herself knew, they too must have learned; out of this believing candour she spoke.
"You mustn't forget there was the necklace, and Madame Beattie expecting to be paid."
Lydia was breathless in her extremity of surprise.
"What necklace?" asked she.
"Don't you know?"
Miss Amabel's voice rose upon the horror of her own betrayal.
"What do you mean?" Lydia was insisting, with an iteration that sounded like repeated onslaughts, a mental pounce, to shake it out of her. "What do you mean?"
Miss Amabel wore the dignified Addington aloofness.
"I am very sorry," said she. "I have been indiscreet."
"But you'll tell me, now you've begun," panted Lydia. "You'll have to tell me or I shall go crazy."
"We must both control ourselves," said Miss Amabel, with a further retreat to the decorum of another generation. "You are not going crazy, Lydia. We are both tired and we feel the heat. And I shall not tell you."
Lydia ran out of the room. There was no other word for the quickness of her going. She fled like running water, and having worn no hat, she found herself bareheaded in the street, hurrying on to Esther's. An instinct told her she could only do her errand, make her assault, it seemed, on those who knew what she did not, if she never paused to weigh the difficulties: her hatreds, too, for they had to be weighed. Lydia was sure she hated Madame Beattie and Esther. She would not willingly speak to them, she had thought, after her last encounters. But now she was letting the knocker fall on Esther's door, and had asked the discreet maid with the light eyelashes, who always somehow had an air of secret knowledge and amusement, if Madame Beattie were at home, and gave her name. The maid, with what seemed to Lydia's raw consciousness an ironical courtesy, invited her into the library and left her there in its twilight tranquillity. Lydia stood still, holding one of her pathetically small, hard-worked hands over her heart, and shortly, to her gratitude, Sophy was back and asked her to go up to Madame Beattie's room.
The maid accompanying her, Lydia went, with her light step, afraid of itself lest it turn coward, and in the big dark room at the back of the house, its gloom defined by the point of light from a shaded reading candle, she was left, and stood still, almost wishing for Sophy whose footfalls lessened on the stairs. There were two bits of light in the room, the candle and Madame Beattie's face. Madame Beattie had taken off her toupée, and for Lydia she had not troubled to put it on. She lay on the bed against pillows, a down quilt drawn over her feet, regardless of the seasonable warmth, and a disorder of paper-coveredbooks about her. One she held in her ringed hand, and now she put it down, her eyeglasses with it, and turned the candle so that the light from the reflector fell on Lydia's face.
"I wasn't sure which girl it was," she said, in a tone of mild good-nature. "It's not the good one. It's you, mischief. Come and sit down."
Madame Beattie did not apologise for giving audience in her bedchamber. In the old royal days before the downfall of her kingdom she had accorded it to greater than Lydia French. Lydia's breath came so fast now that it hurt her. She stepped forward, but she did not take the low chair which really had quite a comfortable area left beyond Madame Beattie's corset and stockings. She stood there in the circle of light and said desperately:
"What was it about your necklace?"
She had created an effect. Madame Beattie herself gasped.
"For God's sake, child," said she, "what do you know about my necklace?"
"I don't know anything," said Lydia. "And I want to know everything that will help Jeff."
She broke down here, and cried bitterly. Madame Beattie lay there looking at her, at first with sharp eyes narrowed, as if she rather doubted whose emissary Lydia might be. Then her face settled into an astonished yet astute calm and wariness.
"You'll have to sit down," said she. "It's a long story." So Lydia sank upon the zone left by the corset and stockings. "Who's been talking to you?" asked Madame Beattie: but Lydia looked at her and dumbly shook her head. "Jeff?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"His father?"
"Farvie? Not a word."
Madame Beattie considered.
"What business is it of yours?" she asked.
Lydia winced. She was used to softness from Anne and the colonel. But she controlled herself. If she meant to enter on the task of exonerating Jeffrey, she must, she knew, make herself impervious to snubs.
"Anne and I are doing all we can to help Jeffrey," she said. "He doesn't know it. Farvie doesn't know it. But there's something about a necklace. And it had ever so much to do with Jeffrey and his case. And I want to know."
Madame Beattie chuckled. Her worn yellowed face broke into satirical lines, hateful ones, Lydia thought. She was like a jeering unpleasant person carved for a cathedral and set up among the saints.
"I'll tell you about my necklace," said she. "I'm perfectly willing to. Perhaps you can do something about it. Something for me, too."
It was a strange, vivid picture: that small arc of light augmenting the dusk about them, and Lydia sitting rapt in expectation while Madame Beattie's yellowed face lay upon the obscurity, an amazing portraiture against the dark. It was a picture of a perfect consistency, of youth and innocence and need coming to the sybil for a reading of the leaves of life.
"You see, my dear," said Madame Beattie, "years ago I had a necklace given me—diamonds." She said it with emotion even. No one ever heard her rehearse her triumphs on the lyric stage. They were the foundation of such dignity as her life had known; but the gewgaws time had flung at her she did like, in these lean years, to finger over. "It was given me by a Royal Personage. He had to do a great many clever things to get ahead of his government and his exchequer to give me such a necklace. But he did."
"Why did he?" Lydia asked.
It was an innocent question designed to keep the sybil going. Madame Beattie's eyes narrowed slightly. You could see what she had been in the day of her power.
"He had to," said she, with an admiringly dramatic simplicity. "I wanted it."
"But—" began Lydia, and Madame Beattie put up a small hand with a gesture of rebuttal.
"Well, time went on, and he needed the necklace back. However, that doesn't belong to the story. Some years ago, just before your Jeff got into trouble, I came over here to the States. I was singing then more or less." A concentrated power, of even a noble sort, came into her face. There was bitterness too, for she had to remember how disastrous a venture it had been. "I needed money, you understand. I couldn't have got an audience over there. I thought here they might come to hear me—to say they'd heard me—the younger generation—and see my jewels. I hadn't many left. I'd sold most of them. Well, I was mistaken. I couldn't get a house. The fools!" Scorn ate up her face alive and opened it out, a sneering mask. They were fools indeed, she knew, who would not stir the ashes of such embers in search of one spark left. "I'm a very strong woman. But I rather broke down then. I came here to Esther. She was the only relation I had, except my stepsister, and she was off travelling. Susan was always ashamed of me. She went to Europe on purpose. Well, I came here. And Esther wished I was at the bottom of the sea. But she liked my necklace, and she stole it."
Esther, as Lydia had seen her sitting in a long chair and eating candied fruit, had been a figure of such civilisedworth, however odious, that Lydia said involuntarily, in a loud voice:
"She couldn't. I don't believe it."
"Oh, but she did," said Madame Beattie, looking at her with the coolness of one who holds the cards. "She owned she did."
"To you?"
"To Jeff. He was madly in love with her then. Married, you understand, but frightfully in love. Yes, she owned it. I always thought that was why he wasn't sorry to go to jail. If he'd stayed out there was the question of the necklace. And Esther. He didn't know what to do with her."
"But he made her give it back," said Lydia, out of agonised certainty that she must above all believe in him.
"He couldn't. She said she'd lost it."
Lydia stared at her, and her own face went white. Now the picture of youth and age confronting each other was of the sybil dealing inexorable hurts and youth anguished in the face of them.
"She said she'd lost it," Madame Beattie went on, in almost chuckling enjoyment of her tale. "She said it had bewitched her. That was true enough. She'd gone to New York. She came back by boat. Crazy thing for a woman to do. And she said she stayed on deck late, and stood by the rail and took the necklace out of her bag to hold it up in the moonlight. And it slipped out of her hands."
"Into the water?"
"She said so."
"You don't believe it." Lydia read that clearly in the contemptuous old face.
"Well, now, I ask you," said Madame Beattie, "was there ever such a silly tale? A young woman of NewEngland traditions—yes, they're ridiculous, but you've got to reckon with them—she comes home on a Fall River boat and doesn't even stay in her cabin, but hangs round on decks and plays with priceless diamonds in the moonlight. Why, it's enough to make the cat laugh."
Madame Beattie, in spite of her cosmopolitan reign, was at least local enough to remember the feline similes Lydia put such dependence on, and she used this one with relish. Lydia felt the more at home.
"But what did she do with it?" she insisted.
"I don't know," said Madame Beattie idly. "Put it in a safety deposit in New York perhaps. Don't ask me."
"But don't you care?" cried Lydia, all of a heat of wonder—terror also at melodramatic thieving here in simple Addington.
"I can care about things without screaming and sobbing," said Madame Beattie briefly. "Though I sobbed a little at the time. I was a good deal unstrung from other causes. But of course I laid it before Jeff, as her husband—"
"He must have been heartbroken."
"Well, he was her husband. He was responsible for her, wasn't he? I told him I wouldn't expose the creature. Only he'd have to pay me for the necklace."
The yellow-white face wavered before Lydia. She was trying to make her brain accept the raw material Madame Beattie was pouring into it and evolve some product she could use.
"But he couldn't pay you. He'd just got into difficulties. You said so."
"Bless you, he hadn't got into any difficulty until Esther pushed him in by helping herself to my necklace. He turned crazy over it. He hadn't enough to pay for it. So he went into the market and tried a bigcoupwith all hisown money and the money he was holding—people subscribed for his mines, you know, or whatever they were—and that minute there was a panic. And the courts, or whatever it was, got hold of him for using the mails for fraudulent purposes or whatever, and he lost his head. And that's all there was about it."
Lydia's thoughts were racing so fast it seemed to her that she—some inner determined frightened self in her—was flying to overtake them.
"Then you did it," she said. "You! you forced him, you pushed him—"
"To pay me for my necklace," Madame Beattie supplied. "Of course I did. It was a very bad move, as it proved. I was a fool; but then I might have known. Old Lepidus told me the conjunction was bad for me."
"Who was Lepidus?"
"The astrologer. He died last month, the fool, and never knew he was going to. But he'd encouraged me to come on my concert tour, and when that went wrong I lost confidence. It was a bad year, a bad year."
A troop of conclusions were rushing at Lydia, all demanding to be fitted in.
"But you've come back here," she said, incredulous that things as they actually were could supplement the foolish tale Madame Beattie might have stolen out of a silly book. "You think Esther did such a thing as that, and yet you're here with her in this house."
"That's why I'm here," said Madame Beattie patiently. "Jeff's back again, and the necklace hasn't been fully paid for. I've kept my word to him. I haven't exposed his wife, and yet he hasn't recognised my not doing it."
The vision of Jeffrey fleeing before the lash of this implacable taskmaster was appalling to Lydia.
"But he can't pay you," said she. "He's no money. Not even to settle with his creditors."
"That's it," said Madame Beattie. "He's got to make it. And I'm his first creditor. I must be paid first."
"You haven't told him so?" said Lydia, in a manner of fending her off.
"It isn't time. He hasn't recovered his nerve. But he will, digging in that absurd garden."
"And when you think he has, you'll tell him?"
"Why, of course." Madame Beattie reached for her book and smoothed the pages open with a beautiful hand. "It'll do him good, too. Bring him out of thinking he's a man of destiny, or whatever it is he thinks. You tell him. I daresay you've got some influence with him. That's why I've gone into it with you."
"But you said you promised him not to tell all this about Esther. And you've told me."
"That's why. Get him to work. Spur him up. Talk about his creditors. Now run away. I want to read."