"I wish you'd met him," she said, in great enjoyment. "Where'd he go, Jeffrey? Can't we find him now?"
"I suspect he went to the old circus-ground. I caught him there talking to Poles and Finns and Italians and Greeks, telling them the country was no good and they owned it."
"Why, the fellow can't speak to them." Madame Beattie, being a fluent linguist, had natural scorn of a tubby little New Englander who said "ma'am ".
"Oh, he had an interpreter."
"We'll drive along there," said Madame Beattie. "You tell Denny. I should dearly like to see them. Poles, do you say? I didn't know there were such people in town."
Jeffrey, rather curious himself, told Denny, and they bowled cumbrously along. He felt in a way obliged to proffer a word or two about the interview.
"What the devil made you do it anyway?" he asked her; but Madame Beattie chuckled and would not answer.
All the way along, in the warm twilight, Madame Beattie was gay over the prospect of being fought for. With the utmost precision and unflagging spirit she arranged a plausible cause for combat, and Jeffrey, not in the least intending to play his allotted part, yet enjoyed the moment fully.
"You shall do it," Madame Beattie assured him, as if she permitted him to enter upon a task for which there was wide competition. "You shall thrash him, and he will put it in his paper, and the European papers will copy."
"I haven't much idea theArgosyis read in foreign capitals," Jeff felt bound to assure her.
"Oh, but we can cable it. The French journals—they used to be very good to me."
With that her face darkened, not in a softening melancholy, but old bitterness and defeat. She was not always able to ignore the contrast between the spring of youth and this meagre eld. Jeffrey saw the tremendous recognition she assuredly had had, grown through the illusive fructifying of memory into something overwhelming, and he was glad starved vanity might once more be fed. She seemed to him a most piteous spectacle, youth and power in ruins, and age too poor to nourish even a vine to drape the crumbling walls.
"Patricia Beattie," she continued, "again acasus belli. Combat between two men—" "There won't be any combat," Jeff reminded her. "If I kick Weedie, he'll take it lying down. That's Weedie."
"I shall stand by," said Madame Beattie. "If you go too far I shall interfere. So you can go as far as you like."
"I do rather want to know what Weedie's at," said Jeff. "But I sha'n't kick him. He doesn't deserve it at one time any more than another, though he has different degrees of making himself offensive."
She was ingenuously disappointed. She even reproached him:
"You said you were going to do it."
"That was in my haste," said Jeffrey. "I can't lick him with a woman standing by. I should feel like a fool."
Denny was drawing up at the circus-ground.
"Well," said Madame Beattie, "you've disappointed me tremendously. That's all I can say."
It was dark now, and though the season was more advanced, Jeffrey could imagine that this was the moment of his arrival that other night, save that he was not now footsore or dull in the mind. But the same dusk of crowding forms lay thickly on the field, and there, he knew, was the stationary car; there were the two figures standing in it, Moore and his interpreter. He could fill out the picture with a perfect accuracy, Moore gesticulating and throwing frenzy into his high-pitched voice, which now came stridently. Madame Beattie breathed out excitement. Nothing so spiced had ever befallen her in Addington.
"Is he actually speaking?" she asked, in a hoarse whisper. "They say insects make noises with their hind legs. It's more like that than a voice. Take me round there, Jeffrey."
He was quite willing. With a good old pal like this to egg you on, he thought, there actually was some fun left. So he handed her out, and told Denny to wait for them,and they skirted the high board fence to the gap in the back. Madame Beattie, holding up her long dress in one hand and tripping quite nimbly, was clinging to his arm. By the gap they halted for her to recover breath; she drew her hand from Jeff's arm, opened her little bag, took out a bit of powder paper and mechanically rubbed her face. Jeff looked on indulgently. He knew she did not expect to need an enhanced complexion in this obscurity. The act refreshed her, that was all.
Weedon, it was easy to note, was battering down tradition.
"They talk about their laws," he shrilled. "I am a lawyer, and I tell you it breaks my heart every time I go back to worm-eaten precedent. But I have to do it, because, if I didn't talk that language the judges wouldn't understand me. Do you know what precedent is? It is the opinion of some man a hundred years ago on a case tried a hundred years ago. Do we want that kind of an opinion? No. We want our own opinions on cases that are tried to-day."
The warm rapid voice of the interpreter came in here, and Madame Beattie, who was standing apart from Jeffrey, touched his arm. He bent to listen.
"The man's a fool," said she.
"No," said Jeffrey, "he's not a fool. He knows mighty well what he's saying and how it'll take."
"If I had all the lawbooks in the world," said Weedon, "I'd pile them up here on this ground we've made free ground because we have free speech on it, and I'd touch a match to them, and by the light they made we'd sit down here and frame our own laws. And they would be laws for the rich as well as the poor. Columbus did one good thing for us. He discovered a new world. The capitalists have done their best to spoil it, and turn it into aworld as rotten as the old ones. But Columbus showed us you can find a new world if you try. And we're going to have a new world out of this one yet. New laws, new laws, I tell you, new laws!"
He screamed it at the end, this passion for new laws, and the interpreter, though he had too just an instinct to take so high a key, followed him with an able crescendo. Weedie thought he had his audience in hand, though it was the interpreter who really had it, and he ventured another stroke:
"I don't want them to tell me what some man taught in Bible days. I want to know what a man thinks right here in Addington. I don't want them to tell me what they thought in Greece and Rome. Greece and Rome are dead. The only part of them that's alive is the Greece and Rome of to-day."
When the interpreter passed this on, he stopped at a dissentient murmur. There were those who knew the bright history of their natal country and adored it.
"Oh, the man's a fool," said Madame Beattie again. "I'm going in there."
She took up the tail of her gown, put her feather-crowned head through the gap in the fence and drew her august person after, and Jeffrey followed her. He had a gay sense of irresponsibility, of seeking the event. He was grateful to Madame Beattie. They went on, and as it was that other night, some withdrew to leave a pathway and others stared, but, finding no specific reason, did not hinder them. Madame Beattie spoke once or twice, a brief mandate in a foreign tongue, and that, Jeff noted, was effective. She stepped up on the running-board of the car and laid her hand on the interpreter's arm.
"You may go, my friend," said she, quite affectionately. "I do not need you." Then she said something, possiblythe same thing, Jeff thought, in another language, and the man laughed. Madame Beattie, without showing sign of recognising Moore, who was at her elbow, bent forward into the darkness and gave a shrill call. The crowd gathered nearer. Its breath was but one breath. The blackness of the assemblage was as if you poured ink into water and made it dense. Jeffrey felt at once how sympathetic they were with her. What was the cry she gave? Was it some international password or a gipsy note of universal import? Had she called them friend in a tongue they knew? Now she began speaking, huskily at first, with tumultuous syllables and wide open vowels, and at the first pause they cheered. The inky multitude that had kept silence, by preconcerted plan, while Weedon Moore talked to them, lost control of itself and yelled. She went on speaking and they crashed in on her pauses with more plaudits, and presently she laid her hand on Jeffrey's shoulder and said to him:
"Come up here beside me."
He shook his head. He was highly entertained, but the mysterious game was hers and Weedie's. She gave an order, it seemed, in a foreign tongue, and the thing was managed. The interpreter had stepped from the car, and now gentle yet forcible hands lifted down Weedon Moore, and set him beside it and other hands as gently set up Jeffrey in his place. There he stood with her in a dramatic isolation, but so great was the carrying power of her mystery that he did not feel himself a fool. It was quite natural to be there for some unknown purpose, at one with her and that warmly breathing mass: for no purpose, perhaps, save that they were all human and meant the same thing, a general good-will. She went on speaking, and Jeffrey knew there was fire in her words. He bent to the interpreter beside the car and asked, at the man's ear:
"What is she saying?"
The interpreter turned and looked him in the face. They were not more than three inches apart, and Jeffrey, gazing into the passionate black eyes, tasting, as it were, the odour of the handsome creature and feeling his breath, was not repelled, but had a sudden shyness before him, as if the man's opinion of him were an attack on his inmost self, an attack of adoring admiration.
"What is she saying?" he repeated, and for answer the interpreter snatched one of Jeff's hands and seemed about to kiss it.
"For God's sake, don't do that," Jeff heard himself saying, and withdrew his hand and straightened at a safe distance from the adoring face, and he heard Madame Beattie going on in her fiery periods. Whatever she was saying, they loved it, loved it to the point of madness. They cheered her, and the interpreter did not check them, but cheered too. To Jeffrey it was all a medley of strange thoughts. Here he was, in the crowd and not of it, greatly moved and yet not as the others were, because he did not understand. And though the voice and the answering enthusiasm went on for a long time, and still he did not understand, he was not tired but exhilarated only. The moon, the drifting clouds, the dramatic voice playing upon the hearts of the multitude, their hot responses, all this gave him a sense of augmented life and the feel of his own past youth. Suddenly he fancied Madame Beattie's voice failed a little; something ebbed in it, not so much force as quality.
"That's all," she said, in a quick aside to him. "Let's go." She gave an order, in English now, and a figure started out of the crowd and cranked the car.
"We can't go in this," Jeffrey said to her. "This is Moore's car."
But Madame Beattie had seated herself majestically. Her feathers even were portentous in the moonlight, like the plumage of some gigantic bird. She gave another order, whereupon the man who had cranked the machine took his place in it, and the crowd parted for them to pass. Jeffrey was amused and dashed. He couldn't leave her, nor could they sail away in Weedon's car. He put a hand on her arm.
"See here, Madame Beattie," said he, "we can't do this. We must get out at the gate, at least."
But Madame Beattie was bowing graciously to right and left. Once she rose for an instant and addressed a curt sentence to the crowd, and in answer they cheered, a full-mouthed chorus of one word in different tongues.
"What are they yelling?" Jeffrey asked.
"It's for you," Madame Beattie said composedly. "They're cheering you."
"Me? How do you know? That's not my name."
"No. It's The Prisoner. They're calling you The Prisoner."
They were at the gate now, and turned into the road and, with a free course before him, the man put on speed and they were away. Jeffrey bent forward to him, but Madame Beattie pulled him back.
"What are you doing?" she inquired. "We're going home."
"This is Moore's car," Jeffrey reminded her.
"No, it isn't. It's the proletariat's car." She rolled thersurprisingly. "Do you suppose he comes out here to corrupt those poor devils without making them pay for being corrupted? Jeffrey, take off your coat."
"What for?" He had resigned himself to his position. It was a fit part of the whole eccentric pastime, and after all it was only Weedie's car.
"I shall take cold. I got very warm speaking. My voice—"
To neither of them now was it absurd. Though it was years since she had had a voice the habit of a passionate care was still alive in her. Jeffrey had come on another rug, and wrapped it round her. He went back to his first wonder.
"But what is there in being a prisoner to start up such a row?"
Madame Beattie had retired into the rug. She sunk her chin in it and would talk no more. Without further interchange they drew up at her house. Jeffrey got out and helped her, and she stood for a moment, pressing her hand on his arm, heavily, as an old woman leans.
"Ah, Jeffrey," said she rapidly, in a low but quite a naked tone with no lisping ornament, "this is a night. To think I should have to come back here to this God-forsaken spot for a minute of the old game. Hundreds hanging on my voice—" he fancied she had forgotten now whether she had not sung to them—"and feeling what I told them to feel. They're capital people. We'll talk to them again."
She had turned toward the door and now she came back and struck his arm violently with her hand.
"Jeff," said she passionately, "you're a fool. You've still got your youth and you won't use it. And the world looks like this—" she glanced up at the radiant sky. "Even in Addington, the moon is after us trying to seduce us to the old pleasures. You've got youth. Use it. For God's sake, use it."
Now she did go up the steps and having rung the bell for her, ignoring the grim knocker that looked as if it would take more than one summons to get past its guard, Jeff told the man to drive back for Mr. Moore. The carhad gone, and still Madame Beattie rang. She knew and Jeffrey suspected suddenly that Esther was paying her out for illicit roaming. Suddenly Madame Beattie raised her voice and called twice:
"Esther! Esther!"
The sound echoed in the silent street, appallingly to one who knew what Addington streets were and what proprieties lined them. Then the door did open. Jeffrey fancied the smooth-faced maid had slipped the bolt. Esther, from what he knew of her, was not by to face the music. He heard the door shut cautiously and walked away, but not to go immediately home. What did Madame Beattie mean by telling him to use his youth? All he wanted was to hold commerce with the earth and dig hard enough to keep himself tired so that he might sleep. For since he had come out of prison he was every day more subject to this besetment of recalling the past. It was growing upon him that he had always made wrong choices. Youth, what seemed to him through the vista of vanished time a childhood even, when he was but little over twenty, had been a delirium of expectation in a world that was merely a gay-coloured spot where, if you were reasonably fit, as youth should be, you could always snatch the choicest fruit from the highest bough. Then he had met Esther, and the world stopped being a playground and became an ordered pageant, and he was the moving power, trying to make it move faster or more lightly, to please Esther who was sitting in front to see it move, and who was of a decided mind in pageants. It was always Esther who was to be pleased. These things he had not thought of willingly during his imprisonment, because it was necessary not to think, lest the discovery of the right causes that brought him there should turn his brain. But now he had leisure and freedom and a measure of solitude, and it began to strike himthat heretofore, being in the pageant and seeing it move, he had not enjoyed it over much. There had been a good deal of laughter and light and colour—there had to be, since these were the fruits Esther lived on—but there had been no affectionate converse with the world. Strange old Madame Beattie! she had brought him the world to-night. She had taken strangers from its furthest quarters and welded them into a little community that laughed and shouted and thought according things. That they had hailed him, even as a prisoner, brought him a little warmth. It was mysterious, but it seemed they somehow liked him, and he went into the quiet house and to bed with the feeling of having touched a hand.
Within a week Jeffrey, going down town in his blue blouse to do an errand at the stores, twice met squads of workmen coming from the mill—warm-coloured, swarthy men, most of them young. He was looking at them in a sudden curiosity as to their making part of Weedon Moore's audience, when bright pleasure rippled over the dark faces. They knew him; they were mysteriously glad to see him. Caps were snatched off. Jeffrey snatched at his in return. There was a gleam of white teeth all through the squad; as he passed in the ample way they made for him, he felt foolishly as if they were going to stretch out kind detaining hands. They looked so tropically warm and moved, he hardly knew what greeting he might receive. "What have I done?" he thought. "Are they going to kiss me?" He wished he could see Madame Beattie and ask her what she had really caused to happen.
But on a later afternoon, at his work in the field, he saw Miss Amabel carefully treading among corn hills, very hot though in her summer silk and with a parasol. She always did feel the heat but patiently, as one under bonds of meekness to the God who sent it; but to-day her discomfort was within. Jeffrey threw down his hoe and wiped his face. There was a bench under the beech tree shade. He had put it there so that his father might be beguiled into resting after work. When she reached the edge of the corn, he advanced and took her parasol and held it over her.
"Ladies shouldn't come out here," he said. "They must send Mary Nellen to fetch me in."
Miss Amabel sat down on the bench and did a little extra breathing, while she looked at him affectionately.
"You are a good boy, Jeff," said she, at length, "whatever you've been doing."
"I've been hoeing," said Jeff. "Here, let me."
He took her large fine handkerchief, still in its crisp folds, and with an absurd and yet pretty care wiped her face with it. He wiped it all over, the moist forehead, the firm chin where beads stood glistening, and Miss Amabel let him, saying only as he finished:
"Father used to perspire on his chin."
"There," said Jeffrey. He folded the handkerchief and returned it to its bag. "Now you're a nice dry child. I suppose you've got your shoes full of dirt. Mine are when I've been out here."
"Never mind my shoes," said she. "Jeff, how nice you are. How much you are to-day like what you used to be when you were a boy."
"I feel rather like it nowadays," said Jeff, "I don't know why. Except that I come out here and play by myself and they all let me alone."
"But you mustn't play tricks," said Miss Amabel. "You must be good and not play tricks on other people."
Jeff drew up his knees and clasped his hands about them. His eyes were on the corn shimmering in the heat.
"What's in your bonnet, dear?" said he. "I hear a buzz."
"What happened the other night?" she asked. "It came to my ears, I won't say how."
"Weedie told you. Weedie always told."
"I don't say it was Mr. Weedon Moore."
She was speaking with dignity, and Jeffrey laughed and unclasped his hands to pat her on the arm.
"I wonder why it makes you so mad to have me call him Weedie."
She answered rather hotly, for her.
"You wouldn't do it, any of you, if you weren't disparaging him."
"Oh, we might. Out of affection. Weedie! good old Weedie! can't you hear us saying that?"
"No, I can't. You wouldn't say it that way. Don't chaff me, Jeff. What do they say now—'jolly' me? Don't do that."
Again Jeffrey gave her a light touch of affectionate intimacy.
"What is it?" said he. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to let Weedon Moore talk to people who are more ignorant than the rest of us, and tell them things they ought to know. About the country, about everything."
"You don't want me to spoil Weedie's game."
"It isn't a game, Jeff. That young man is giving up his time, and with the purest motives, to fitting our foreign population for the duties of citizenship. He doesn't disturb the public peace. He takes the men away after their day's work—"
"Under cover of the dark."
"He doesn't run any risk of annoying people by assembling in the streets."
"Weedie doesn't want any decent man to know his game, whatever his game is."
"I won't answer that, Jeffrey. But I feel bound to say you are ungenerous. You've an old grudge againstWeedon Moore. You all have, all you boys who were brought up with him. So you break up the meeting."
"Now, see here, Amabel," said Jeff, "we haven't a grudge against him. Anyhow, leave me out. Take a fellow like Alston Choate. If he's got a grudge against Moore, doesn't it mean something?"
"You hated him when you were boys," said Amabel. "Those things last. Nothing is so hard to kill as prejudice."
"As to the other night," said Jeffrey, "I give you my word it was as great a surprise to me as it was to Moore. I hadn't the slightest intention of breaking up the meeting."
"Yet you went there and you took that impossible Martha Beattie with you—"
"Patricia, not Martha."
"I have nothing to do with names she assumed for the stage. She was Martha Shepherd when she lived in Addington. No doubt she is entitled to be called Beattie; but Martha is her Christian name."
"Now you're malicious yourself," said Jeff, enjoying the human warmth of her. "I never knew you to be so hateful. Why can't you live and let live? If I'm to let your Weedie alone, can't you keep your hands off poor old Madame Beattie?"
Miss Amabel turned upon him a look where just reproof struggled with wounded pride.
"Jeffrey, I didn't think you'd be insincere with me."
"Hang it, Amabel, I'm not. You're one of the few unbroken idols I've got. Sterling down to the toes. Didn't you know it?"
"And yet you did take Madame Beattie to Moore's rally."
"Rally? So that's what he calls it."
"And you did prompt her to talk to those men in their language—several languages, I understand, quick as lightning, one after the other—and to say things that counteracted at once all Mr. Moore's influence."
"Now," said Jeffrey, in a high degree of interest, "we're getting somewhere. What did I say to them? What did I say through Madame Beattie?"
"We don't know."
"Ask Moore."
"Mr. Moore doesn't know."
"He can ask his interpreter, can't he?"
"Andrea? He won't tell."
Jeffrey released his knees and lay back against the bench. He gave a hoot of delighted laughter, and Lydia, watching them from the window, thought of Miss Amabel with a wistful envy and wondered how she did it.
"Weedie's own henchman won't go back on her," he exclaimed, in an incredulous pleasure. "Now what spell has that extraordinary old woman over the south of Europe?"
"South of Europe?"
"Why, yes, the population you've got here. It's south of Europe chiefly, isn't it? eastern Europe?—the part Weedie hasn't turned into ward politicians yet. Who is Andrea? This is the first time I have heard his honourable name. Weedon's interpreter."
"He has the fruit store on Mill Street."
"Ah! Amabel, do you know what this interview has done for me? It's given me a perfectly overwhelming desire to speak the tongues."
"Foreign languages, Jeff?"
"Any language that will help me beat Weedie at his game, or give me a look at the cards old Madame Beattie holds. I feel a fool. Why can't I know what they'retalking about when they can kick up row enough under my very nose to make you come and rag me like this?"
"Jeff," said Miss Amabel, "unless you are prepared to go into social work seriously and see things as Mr. Moore sees them—"
Jeff gave a little crow of derision and she coloured. "It wouldn't hurt you, Jeff, to see some things as he does. The necessity of getting into touch with our foreign population—"
"I'll do that all right," said Jeffrey. "That's precisely what I mean. I'm going to learn foreign tongues and talk to 'em."
"They say Madame Beattie speaks a dozen or so and I don't know how many dialects."
"Oh, I can't compete with Madame Beattie. She's got the devil on her side."
Miss Amabel rose to her feet and stood regarding him sorrowfully. He looked up at her with a glance full of affection, yet too merry for her heavy mood. Then he got on his feet and took her parasol.
"You haven't noticed the corn," said he. "Don't you know you must praise the work of a man's hands?"
"I don't know whether it's a good thing for you or not," said she. "Yes, it must have been, so far. You're tanned."
"I feel fit enough."
"You don't look over twenty."
"Oh, I'm over twenty, thank you," said Jeff. A shadow settled on his face; it even touched his eyes, mysteriously, and dulled them. "I'm not tanned all through."
"But you're only doing this for a time?"
"I don't know, Amabel. I give you my word I don't know the next step after to-day—or this hill of corn—or that."
"If you wanted capital, Jeff—"
He took up a fold of her little shoulder ruffle and put it to his lips, and Lydia saw and wondered.
"No, dear," said he. "I sha'n't need your money. Only don't you let Weedie have it, to muddle away in politics."
She was turning at the edge of the corn and looking at him perplexedly. Her mission hadn't succeeded, but she loved him and wanted to make that manifest.
"I can't bear to have you doing irresponsible things with Madame Beattie. She's not fit—"
"Not fit for me to play with? Madame Beattie won't hurt me."
"She may hurt Lydia."
"Lydia!"
The word leaped out of some deep responsiveness she did not understand.
"Don't you know how much they are together? They go driving."
"Well, what's that? Madame Beattie's a good old sport. She won't harm Lydia."
But instead of keeping up his work, he went on to the house with her. Miss Amabel would not go in and when he had said good-bye to her—affectionately, charmingly, as if to assure her that, after all, she needn't fear him even with Weedie who wasn't important enough to slay—he entered the house in definite search of Lydia. He went to the library, and there she was, in the window niche, where she sat to watch him. Day by day Lydia sat there when he was in the garden and she was not busy and he knew it was a favourite seat of hers for, glancing over his rows of corn, he could see the top of her head bent over a book. He did not know how long she pored over a page with eyes that saw him, a wraith of him hovering over theprint, nor that when their passionate depths grew hungrier for the actual sight of him, how she threw one glance at his working figure and bent to her book again. As he came suddenly in upon her she sprang up and faced him, the book closed upon a trembling finger.
"Lydia," said he, "you're great chums with Madame Beattie, aren't you?"
Lydia gave a little sigh of a relief she hardly understood. What she expected him to ask her she did not know, but there were strange warm feelings in her heart she would not have shown to Jeff. She could have shown them before that minute—when he had said the thing that ought not even to be remembered: "I only love you." Before that, she thought, she had been quite simply his sister. Now she was a watchful servitor of a more fervid sort. Jeffrey thought she was afraid of being scolded about her queer old crony.
"Sit down," he said. "There's nothing to be ashamed of in liking Madame Beattie. You do like her, don't you?"
"Oh, yes," said Lydia. "I like her very much."
She had sunk back in her chair and closed the book though she kept it in her lap. Jeffrey sat astride a chair and folded his arms on the top. Some of the blinds had been closed to keep out the heat, and the dusk hid the deep, crisp lines of his face. Under his moist tossed hair it was a young face, as Miss Amabel had told him, and his attitude became a boy.
"Lydia," said he, "what do you two talk about?"
"Madame Beattie and I?"
"Yes. In those long drives, for instance, what do you say?"
Lydia looked at him, her eyes narrowed slightly, and Jeffrey knew she did not want to tell. When Esther didn'twant to tell, a certain soft glaze came over her eyes. Jeffrey had seen the glaze for a number of years before he knew what it meant. And when he found out, though it had been a good deal of a shock, he hardly thought the worse of Esther. He generalised quite freely and concluded that you couldn't expect the same standards of women as from men; and after that he was a little nervous and rather careful about the questions he asked. But Lydia's eyes had no glaze. They were desperate rather, the eyes of a little wild thing that is going to be frightened and possibly caught. Jeffrey felt quite excited, he was so curious to know what form the lie would take.
"Politics," said Lydia.
Jeffrey broke out into a laugh.
"Oh, come off!" said he. "Politics. Not much you don't."
Lydia laughed, too, in a sudden relief and pleasure. She didn't like her lie, it seemed.
"No," said she, "we don't. But I tell Anne if people ask questions it's at their own risk. They must take what they get."
"Anne wouldn't tell a lie," said Jeffrey.
She flared up at him.
"I wouldn't either. I never do. You took me by surprise."
"Does Madame Beattie talk to you about her life abroad?"
He ventured this. But she was gazing at him in the clearest candour.
"Oh, no." "About what, Lydia? Tell me. It bothers me."
"Did Miss Amabel bother you?" The charming face was fiery.
"I don't need Amabel to tell me you're taking longdrives with Madame Beattie. She's a battered old party, Lydia. She's seen lots of things you don't want even to hear about."
She was gazing at him now in quite a dignified surprise.
"If you mean things that are not nice," she said, "I shouldn't listen to them. But she wouldn't want me to. Madame Beattie is—" She saw no adequate way to put it.
But Jeffrey understood her. He, too, believed Madame Beattie had a decency of her own.
"Never mind," said he. "Only I want to keep you as you are. So would father. And Anne."
Lydia sat straight in her chair, her cheeks scarlet from excitement, her eyes speaking with the full power of their limpid beauty. What if she were to tell him how they talked of Esther and her cruelty, and of him and his misfortunes, and of the need of his at once setting out to reconstruct his life? But it would not do. This youth here astride the chair didn't seem like the Jeff who was woven into all she could imagine of tragedy and pain. He looked like the Jeff she had heard the colonel tell about, who had been reckless and impulsive and splendid, and had been believed in always and then had grown up into a man who made and lost money and was punished for it. He was speaking now in his new coaxing voice.
"There's one thing you could tell me. That wouldn't do any harm."
"What?" asked Lydia.
"Your old crony must have mentioned the night we ran away with Weedon Moore's automobile."
"Oh, yes," said Lydia. Her eyes were eloquent now. "She told me."
"Did she tell you what she said to Weedon's crowd, toturn them round like a flock of sheep and bring them over to us?"
"Oh, yes, she told me."
"What was it?"
But Lydia again looked obstinate, though she ventured a little plea of her own.
"Jeff, you must go into politics."
"Not on your life."
"The way is all prepared."
"Who prepared it? Madame Beattie?"
"You are going," said Lydia, this irrepressibly and against her judgment, "to be the most popular man in Addington."
"Gammon!" This he didn't think very much of. If this was how Lydia and Madame Beattie spent their hours of talk, let them, the innocents. It did nobody harm. But he was still conscious of a strong desire: to protect Lydia, in her child's innocence, from evil. He wondered if she were not busy enough, that she had time to take up Madame Beattie. Yet she and Anne seemed as industrious as little ants.
"Lydia," said he, "what if I should have an Italian fruit-seller come up here to the house and teach Italian to you and me—and maybe Anne?"
"Andrea?" she asked.
"Do you know him?"
"Madame Beattie does." She coloured slightly, as if all Madame Beattie's little secrets were to be guarded.
"We'll have him up here if he'll come, and we'll learn to pass the bread in Italian. Shall we?"
"I'd love to," said Lydia. "We're learning now, Anne and I."
"Of Andrea?"
"Oh, no. But we're picking up words as fast as we can, all kinds of dialects. From the classes, you know, Miss Amabel's classes. It's ridiculous to be seeing these foreigners twice a week and not understand them or not have them half understand us."
"It's ridiculous anyway," said Jeffrey absently. He was regarding the shine on Lydia's brown hair. "What's the use of Addington's being overrun with Italy and Greece and Poland and Russia? We could get men enough to work in the shops, good straight stock."
"Well," said Lydia conclusively, "we've got them now. They're here. So we might as well learn to understand them and make them understand us."
Jeff smiled at her, the little soft young thing who seemed so practical. Lydia looked like a child, but she spoke like the calm house mother who had had quartered on her a larger family than the house would hold and yet knew the invaders must be accommodated in decent comfort somewhere. He sat there and stared at her until she grew red and fidgety. He seemed to be questioning something in her inner mind.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Nothing," said Jeff, and got up and went away to his own room. He had been thinking of her clear beauties of simple youthful outline and pure restraints, and wondering why the world wasn't made so that he could take her little brown hand in his and walk off with her and sit all day on a piney bank and listen to birds and find out what she thought about the prettiness of things. She was not his sister, she was not his child, though the child in her so persuaded him; and in spite of the dewy memory of her kiss she could not be his love. Yet she was most dear to him.
He threw himself down on the sofa and clasped his handsunder his head, and he laughed suddenly because he was taking refuge in the thought of Esther. That Esther had become sanctuary from his thoughts of Lydia was an ironic fact indeed, enough to make mirth crack its cheeks. But since he was bound to Esther, the more he thought of her the better. He was not consciously comparing them, the child Lydia and the equipped siren, to Esther's harm. Only he knew at last what Esther was. She was Circe on her island. Its lights hung high above the wave, the sound of its music beat across the foam. Reardon heard the music; so did Alston Choate. Jeffrey knew that, in the one time he had heard Choate speak of her, a time when he had been in a way compelled to; and though it was the simplest commonplace, something new was beating in his voice. Choate had heard Esther's music, he had seen the dancing lights, and Esther had been willing he and all men should. There was no mariner who sailed the seas so insignificant as not to be hailed by Esther. That was the trouble. Circe's isle was there, and she was glad they knew it. Jeffrey did not go so far as to think she wanted inevitably to turn them into beasts, but he knew she was virtually telling them she had the power. That had been one of the first horrors of his disenchantment, when she had placed herself far enough away from him by neither writing to him nor visiting him; then he had seen her outside the glamour of her presence. Once he had been proud when the eyes of all men followed her. That was in the day of his lust for power and life, when her empery seemed equal in degree to his. Something brutal used to come up in him when men looked boldly at her, and while he wanted to quench the assault of their hot eyes it was always with the equal brutality: "She's mine." That was while he thought she walked unconscious of the insult. But when he knew she called it tribute, a rage more justthan jealousy came up in him, and he hated something in her as he hated the men desiring her.
Yet now the thought of her was his refuge. She was not his, but he was hers to the end of earthly time. There was no task for him to do but somehow to shield Lydia from the welling of her wonderful devotion to him. If Esther was Circe on her island, Lydia was the nymph in a clear mountain brook of some undiscovered wood where the birds came to bathe, but no hoof had ever muddied the streams. If she had, out of her hero-worship, conceived a passion for him, he had an equal passion for her, of protectingness and sad certainty that he could do no better than ensure her distance from him.
Jeffrey, in his working clothes, went down to Mill Street and found Andrea presiding over a shop exhaling the odour of pineapple and entrancing to the eye, with its piled ovals and spheres of red and yellow, its diversities of hue and surface. It was a fruit shop, and God had made the fruit beautiful and Andrea had disposed it so. His wife, too, was there, a round, dark creature in a plaid skirt and a shirt waist with islands of lace over a full bosom, her black hair braided and put round and round her head, and a saving touch of long earrings to tell you she was still all peasant underneath. A soft round-faced boy was in charge, and ran out to tell Jeffrey prices. But they all knew him. Jeffrey felt the puzzle begin all over when Andrea came hurrying out, like a genial host at an inn, hands outstretched, and his wife followed him. They looked even adoring, and again Jeffrey wondered, so droll was their excess of welcome, if he were going to be embraced. The boy, too, was radiant, and, like an acolyte at some ritual, more humbly though exquisitely proffered his own fit portion of worship. Jeffrey, it being the least he could offer, shook hands all round. Then he asked Andrea:
"Who do you think I am? What did Madame Beattie tell you?"
Andrea spread his hands dramatically, palms outward, and implied brokenly that though he understood English he did not speak it to such an extent as would warrant him in trying to explain what was best left alone. Hewould only repeat a word over and over, always with an access of affection, and when Jeffrey asked:
"Does that mean 'prisoner'?" he owned it did. It seemed to hold for the three the sum of human perfectibility. Jeffrey was The Prisoner, and therefore they loved him. He gave up trying to find out more; it seemed to him he could guess the riddle better if he had a word or two of Andrea's language to help him, and he asked summarily if they couldn't have some lessons together. Wouldn't Andrea come up to the house and talk Italian? Andrea blossomed out in gleam of teeth and incredible shininess of eyes. He would come. That night? Yes, he would come that night. So Jeffrey shook hands again all round and went away, curiously ill at ease until he had turned the corner; the warmth of their adoration seemed burning into his back.
But that night Andrea did not come. The family had assembled, Anne a little timid before new learning, Lydia sitting on the edge of her chair determined to be phenomenal because Jeffrey must be pleased, and even Mary Nellen with writing pads and pencils at the table to scrape up such of the linguistic leavings as they might. At nine o'clock the general attention began to relax, and Lydia widely yawned. Jeffrey, looking at her, caught the soft redness of her mouth and thought, forgetful of Circe's island where he had taken refuge, how sweet the little barbarian was.
But nobody next day could tell him why Andrea had not come, not even Andrea himself. Jeffrey sought him out at the fruit-stand and Andrea again shone with welcome. But he implied, in painfully halting English, that he could not give lessons at all. Nor could any of his countrymen in Addington.
Jeffrey stood upon no ceremony with him.
"Why the devil," said he, "do you talk to me as if you'd begun English yesterday? You forget I've heard you translating bunkum up on the circus-ground."
Andrea's eyes shone the more enchantingly. He was shameless, though. He took nothing back, and even offered Jeffrey an enormous pineapple, with the air of wanting to show his good-will and expecting it to be received with an equal open-heartedness. Jeffrey walked away with the pineapple, beaten, and reflecting soberly, his brow tightened into a knot. Things were going on just outside his horizon, and he wasn't to know. Who did know? Madame Beattie, certainly. The old witch was at the bottom of it. She had, for purposes of her own, wound the foreign population round her finger, and she was going to unwind them when the time came to spin a web. A web of many colours, he knew it would be, doubtless strong in some spots and snarled in others. Madame Beattie was not the person to spin a web of ordinary life.
He went on in his blue working clothes, absently taking off his hat to the ladies he met who looked inquiringly at him and then quite eagerly bowed. Jeff was impatient of these recognitions. The ladies were even too gracious. They were anxious to stand by him in the old Addington way, and as for him, he wanted chiefly to hoe his corn and live unseen. But his feet did not take him home. They led him down the street and up the stairs into Alston Choate's office, and there, hugging his pineapple, he entered, and found Alston sitting by the window in the afternoon light, his feet on a chair and a novel in his hand. This back window of the office looked down over the river, and beyond a line of willows to peaceful flats, and now the low sun was touching up the scene with afternoon peace. Alston, at sight of him, took his legs down promptly. He, too, was more eager in welcome because Jeffrey was amarked figure, and went so seldom up other men's stairs. Alston threw his book on the table, and Jeffrey set his pineapple beside it.
"There's a breeze over here," said Alston, and they took chairs by the window.
For a minute Jeffrey looked out over the low-lying scene. He drew a quick breath. This was the first time he had overlooked the old playground since he had left Addington for his grown-up life.
"We used to sail the old scow down there," he said. "Remember?"
Choate nodded.
"She's down there now in one of the yards, filled with red geraniums."
They sat for a while in the silence of men who find it unexpectedly restful to be together and need not even say so. Yet they were not here at all. They were boys of Addington, trotting along side by side in the inherited games of Addington. Alston offered Jeffrey a smoke, and Jeff refused it.
"See here," said he, "what's Madame Beattie up to?"
Choate turned a startled glance on him. He did not see how Jeffrey, a stranger in his wife's house, should know anything at all was up.
"She's been making things rather lively," he owned. "Who told you?"
"Told me? I was in it, at the beginning. She and I drove out by chance, to hear Moore doing his stunt in the circus-ground. That began it. But now, it seems, she's got some devil's influence over Moore's gang. She's told 'em something queer about me."
"She's told 'em something that makes things infernally uncomfortable for other people," said Choate bluntly."Did you know she had squads of them—Italians, Poles, Abyssinians, for all I know, playing on dulcimers—she's had them come up at night and visit her in her bedroom. They jabber and hoot and smoke, I believe. She's established an informal club—in that house."
Alston's irritation was extreme. It was true Addington to refer to foreign tongues as jabber, and "that house", Jeffrey saw, was a stiff paraphrase for Esther's dwelling-place. He perceived here the same angry partisanship Reardon had betrayed. This was the jealous fire kindled invariably in men at Esther's name.
"How do you know?" he asked.
Alston hesitated. He looked, not abashed, but worried, as if he did not see precisely the road of good manners in giving a man more news about his wife than the man was able to get by himself.
"Did Esther tell you?" Jeff inquired.
"Yes. She told me."
"When?"
"Several times. She has been very uncomfortable. She has needed counsel."
Choate had gone on piling up what might have been excuses for Esther, from an irritated sense that he was being too closely cross-examined. He had done a good deal of it himself in the way of his profession, and he was aware that it always led to conclusions the victim had not foreseen and was seldom willing to face. And he had in his mind not wholly recognised yet unwelcome feelings about Esther. They were not feelings such as he would have allowed himself if he had known her as a young woman living with her husband in the accepted way. He did not permit himself to state that Esther herself might not, in that case, have mingled for him the atmosphereshe breathed about him now. But Jeffrey did not pursue the dangerous road of too great candour. He veered, and asked, as if that might settle a good many questions:
"What's the matter with this town, anyway?"
"Addington?" said Choate. "You find it changed?"
"Changed! I believe you. Addington used to be a perfect picture—like a summer landscape—you know the kind. You walked into the picture the minute you heard the name of Addington. It was full of nice trees and had a stream and cows with yellow light on them. When you got into Addington you could take a long breath."
For the first time in his talk with anybody since he came home Jeff was feeling lubricated. He couldn't express himself carelessly to his father, who took him with a pathetic seriousness, nor to the girls, to whom he was that horribly uncomfortable effigy, a hero. But here was another fellow who, he would have said, didn't care a hang, and Jeff could talk to him.
"There's no such picture now," Alston assured him. "The Addington we knew was Victorian."
"Yes. It hadn't changed in fifty years. What's it changing for now?"
"My dear boy," said Alston seriously, because he had got on one of his own hobbies that he couldn't ride in Addington for fear of knocking ladies off their legs, "don't you know what's changing the entire world? It's the birth of compassion."
"Compassion?"
"Yes. Sympathy, ruth, pity. I looked up the synonyms the other day. But we're at the crude, early stages of it, and it's devilish uncomfortable. Everybody's so sorry for everybody that we can't tell the kitchen maid to scour the knives without explaining."
Jeff was rather bewildered.
"Are we so compassionate as all that?" he asked.
"Not really. It's my impression most of us aren't compassionate at all."
"Amabel is."
"Oh, yes, Amabel and Francis of Assisi and a few others. But the rest of us have caught the patter and it makes us 'feel good'. We wallow in it. We feel warm and self-righteous—comfy, mother says, when she wants to tuck me up at night same as she used to after I'd been in swimming and got licked. Yes, we're compassionate and we feel comfy."
"But what's Weedon Moore got to do with it? Is Weedie compassionate?"
"Oh, Weedie's working Amabel and telling the mill hands they're great fellows and very much abused and ought to own the earth. Weedie wants their votes."
"Then Weedie is up for office? Amabel told me so, but I didn't think Addington'd stand for it. Time was when, if a man like Weedie had put up his head, nobody'd have taken the trouble to bash it. We should have laughed."
"We don't laugh now," said Choate gravely. There was even warning in his voice. "Not since Weedie and his like have told the working class it owns the earth."
"And doesn't it?"
"Yes. In numbers. It can vote itself right into destruction—which is what it's doing."
"And Weedie wants to be mayor."
"God knows what he wants. Mayor, and then governor and—I wouldn't undertake to say where Weedie'd be willing to stop. Not short of an ambassadorship."
"Choate," said Jeffrey cheerfully, "you're an alarmist."
"Oh, no, I'm not. A man like Weedie can get anywhere, because he's no scruples and he can rake in mere numbers to back him. And it's all right. This is a democracy. If the majority of the people want a demagogue to rule over them, they've a perfect right to go to the devil their own way."
"But where's he get his infernal influence? Weedie Moore!"
"He gets it by telling every man what the man wants to hear. He gets hold of the ignorant alien, and tells him he is a king in his own right. He tells him Weedie'll get him shorter and shorter hours, and make him a present of the machinery he runs—or let him break it—and the poor devil believes him. Weedie has told him that's the kind of a country this is. And nobody else is taking the trouble to tell him anything else."
"Well, for God's sake, why don't they?"
"Because we're riddled with compassion, I tell you. If we see a man poorer than we are, we get so apologetic we send him bouquets—our women do."
"Is that what the women here are doing?"
"Oh, yes. If there's a strike over at Long Meadow they put on their furs and go over and call on a few operatives and find eight living in one room, in a happy thrift, and they come back and hold an indignation meeting and 'protest'."
"You're not precisely a sentimentalist, are you?" said Jeff. He was seeing Choate in the new Addington as Choate presented it.
"No, by George! I want to see things clarified and the good old-fashioned virtues come back into their place—justice and common-sense. Compassion is something to die for. But you can't build states out of it alone. It makes me sick—sick, when I see men getting dry-rot."
Jeff's face was a map of dark emotion. His mind wentback over the past years. He had not been made soft by the nemesis that laid him by the heels. He had been terribly hardened in some ways, so calloused that it sometimes seemed to him he had not the actual nerve surface for feeling anything. The lambent glow of beauty might fall upon him unheeded; even its lightnings might not penetrate his shell. But that had been better than the dry-rot of an escape from righteous punishment.
"You know, Choate," said he, "I believe the first thing for a man to learn is that he can't dodge penalties."
"I believe you. Though if he dodges, he doesn't get off. That's the other penalty, rot inside the rind. All the palliatives in the world—the lying securities and false peace—all of them together aren't worth the muscle of one man going out to bang another man for just cause. And getting banged!"
Jeff was looking at him quizzically.
"Where do you live," said he, "in the new Addington or the old one?"
Choate answered rather wearily, as if he had asked himself that question and found the answer disheartening.
"Don't know. Guess I'm a non-resident everywhere. I curse about Addington by the hour—the new Addington. But it's come, and come to stay."
"You going to let Moore administer it?"
"If he's elected."
"He can't be elected. We won't have it. What you going to do?"
"Nothing, in politics," said Alston. "They're too vile for a decent man to touch."
Jeffrey thought he had heard the sound of that before. Even in the older days there had been some among the ultra-conservative who refused to pollute their ideals by dropping a ballot. But it hadn't mattered much then.Public government had been as dual in its nature as good and evil, sometimes swaying to the side of one party, sometimes the other; but always, such had been traditionary influence, the best man of a party had been nominated. Then there was no talk of Weedon Moores.
"Do you suppose Weedie's going on with his circus-ground rallies?" he asked.
"They say not."
"Who?"
"Oh, I've kept a pretty close inquiry afoot. I'm told the men won't go."
"Why not?"
"Madame Beattie won't let them."
"The devil she won't! What's the old witch's spell?"
"I don't know. Esther—" he caught himself up—"Mrs. Blake doesn't know. She only knows, as I tell you, the men come to the house, and talk things over. And I hear from reliable sources, Weedie summons them and the men simply won't go. So I assume Madame Beattie forbids it."
"It's not possible." Jeff had withdrawn his gaze from the old playground and sat staring thoughtfully at his legs, stretched to their fullest length. "I rather wish I could talk with her," he said, "Madame Beattie. I don't see how I can though, unless I go there."
"Jeff," said Alston, earnestly, "you mustn't do that."
He spoke unguardedly, and now that the words were out, he would have recalled them. But he made the best of a rash matter, and when Jeff frowned up at him, met the look with one as steady.
"Why mustn't I?" asked Jeff.
It was very quietly said.
"I beg your pardon," Choate answered. "I spoke on impulse."
"Yes. But I think you'd better go on."
Alston kept silence. He was looking out of the window now, pale and immovably obstinate.
"Do you, by any chance," said Jeff, "think Esther is afraid of me?"
Choate faced round upon him, immediately grateful to him.
"That's it," he said. "You've said it. And since it's so, and you recognise it, why, you see, Jeff, you really mustn't, you know."
"Mustn't go there?" said Jeff almost foolishly, the thing seemed to him so queer. "Mustn't see my wife, because she says she is afraid of me?"
"Because sheisafraid of you," corrected Choate impulsively, in what he might have told himself was his liking for the right word. But he had a savage satisfaction in saying it. For the instant it made it seem as if he were defending Esther.
"I'd give a good deal," said Jeff slowly, "to hear just how Esther told you she was afraid of me. When was it, for example?"
"It was at no one time," said Choate unwillingly. Yet it seemed to him Jeff did deserve candour at all their hands.
"You mean it's been a good many times?"
"I mean I've been, in a way, her adviser since—"
"Since I've been in jail. That's very good of you, Choate. But do you gather Esther has told other people she is afraid of me, or that she has told you only?"
"Why, man," said Choate impatiently, "I tell you I've been her adviser. Our relations are those of client and counsel. Of course she's said it to nobody but me."
"Not to Reardon," Jeff's inner voice was commenting satirically. "What would you think if you knew she hadsaid it to Reardon, too? And how many more? She has spun her pretty web, and you're a prisoner. So is Reardon. You've each a special web. You are not allowed to meet."
He laughed out, and Alston looked at him in a sudden offence. It seemed to Alston that he had been sacrificing all sorts of delicacies that Jeff might be justly used, and the laugh belittled them both. But Jeff at that instant saw, not Alston, but a new vision of life. It might have been that a tide had rushed in and wiped away even the prints of Esther's little feet. It might have been that a wind blew in at the windows of his mind and beat its great wings in the corners of it and winnowed out the chaff. As he saw life then his judgments softened and his irritations cooled. Nothing was left but the vision of life itself, the uncomprehended beneficence, the consoler, the illimitable beauty we look in the face and do not see. For an instant perhaps he had caught the true proportions of things and knew at last what was worth weeping over and what was matter for a healthy mirth. It was all mirth perhaps, this show of things Lord God had set us in. He had not meant us to take it dumbly. He had hoped we should see at every turn how queer it is, and yet how orderly, and get our comfort out of that. He had put laughter behind every door we open, to welcome us. Grief was there, too, but if we fully understood Lord God and His world, there would be no grief: only patience and a gay waiting on His time. And all this came out of seeing Alston Choate, who thought he was a free man, hobbled by Esther's web.
Jeffrey got up and Alston looked at him in some concern, he was so queer, flushed, laughing a little, and with a wandering eye. At the door he stopped.
"About Weedie," he said. "We shall have to do something to Weedie. Something radical. He's not going to be mayor of Addington. And I rather think you'll have to get into politics. You'd be mayor yourself if you'd get busy."
Jeffrey had no impulse to-day to go and ask Esther if she were afraid of him as he had when Reardon told him the same tale. He wasn't thinking of Esther now. He was hugging his idea to his breast and hurrying with it, either to entrust it to somebody or to wrap it up in the safety of pen and ink while it was so warm. And when he got home he came on Lydia, sitting on the front steps, singing to herself and cuddling a kitten in the curve of her arm. Lydia with no cares, either of the house or her dancing class or Jeff's future, but given up to the idleness of a summer afternoon, was one of the most pleasing sights ever put into the hollow of a lovely world. Jeffrey saw her, as he was to see everything now, through the medium of his new knowledge. He saw to her heart and found how sweet it was, and how full of love for him. He saw Circe's island, and knew, since the international codes hold good, he must remember his allegiance to it. He still owned property there; he must pay his taxes. But this Eden's garden which was Lydia was his chosen home. He was glad to see it so. He must, he knew, hereafter see things as they are. And they would not be tragic to him. They would be curious and funny and dear: for they all wore the mantle of life. He sat down on a lower step, and Lydia looked at him gravely, yet with pleasure, too.
"Lydia," said he, "do you know what they're calling me, these foreigners Madame Beattie's training with?"
She nodded.
"The Prisoner," said Jeff. "That's what I am—The Prisoner."
She hastened to reassure him.
"They don't do it to be hateful. It's in love. That's what they mean it in—love."
Jeff made a little gesture of the hand, as if he tossed off something so lightly won.
"Never mind how they mean it. That's not what I'm coming to. It's that they call me The Prisoner. Well, ten minutes ago it just occurred to me that we're all prisoners. I saw it as it might be a picture of life and all of us moving in it. Alston Choate's a prisoner to Esther. So's Reardon. Only it's not to Esther they're prisoners. It's to the big force behind her, the sorcery of nature, don't you see? Blind nature."
She was looking at him with the terrified patience of one compelled to listen and yet afraid of hearing what threatens the safe crystal of her own bright dream: that apprehensive look of woman, patient in listening, but beseeching the speaker voicelessly not to kill warm personal certainties with the abstractions he thinks he has discovered. Jeffrey did not understand the look. He was enamoured of his abstraction.
"And all the mill hands have been slaves to Weedon Moore because he told them lies, and now they're prisoners to Madame Beattie because she's telling them another kind of lie, God knows what. And Addington is prisoner to catch-words."
"But what are we prisoner to?" Lydia asked sharply, as if these things were terrifying. "Is Farvie a prisoner?"
"Why, father, God bless him!" said Jeff, moved at once, remembering what his father had to fight, "he's prisoner to his fear of death."
"And Anne? and I?"
Jeff sat looking at her in an abstracted thoughtfulness.
"Anne?" he repeated. "You? I don't know. Ishouldn't dare to say. I've no rights over Anne. She's so good I'm shy of her. But if I find you're a prisoner, Lydia, I mean you shall be liberated. If nature drives you on as it drives the rest of us to worship something—somebody—blindly, and he's not worth it, you bet your life I'll save you."
She leaned back against the step above, her face suddenly sick and miserable. What if she didn't want to be saved? the sick face asked him. Lydia was a truth-teller. She loved Jeff, and she plainly owned it to herself and felt surprisingly at ease over it. She was born to the dictates of nice tradition, but when that inner warmth told her she loved Jeff, even though he was bound to Esther, she didn't even hear tradition, if it spoke. All she could possibly do for Jeff, who unconsciously appealed to her every instant he looked at her with that deep frown between his brows, seemed little indeed. Should she say she loved him? That would be easy. But were his generalities about life strong enough to push her and her humilities aside? That was hard to bear.
"And," he was saying, "once we know we're prisoners, We can be free."
"How?" said Lydia hopefully. "Can we do the things we like?"
"No, by God! there's only one way of getting free, and that's by putting yourself under the law."
Lydia's heart fell beyond plummet's sounding. She did not want to put herself under any stricter law than that of heart's devotion. She had been listening to it a great deal, of late. They were sweet things it told her, and not wicked things, she thought, but all of humble service and unasked rewards.
Jeff was roaming on, beguiled by his new thoughts and the sound of his own voice.
"It's perfectly true what I used to write in that beggarly prison paper. The only way to be really free is to be bound—by law. It's the big paradox. Do you know what I'm going to do?"
She shook her head. He was probably, her apprehensive look said, going to do something that would take him out of the pretty paradise where she longed to set him galloping on the road to things men ought to have.
"I am going in to tear up the stuff I'm writing about that man I knew there in the prison. What does God Almighty care about him? I'm going to write a book and call it 'Prisoners,' and show how I was a prisoner myself, to money, and luxury, and the game and—" he would not mention Esther, but Lydia knew where his mind stumbled over the thought of her—"and how I got my medicine. And how other fellows will have to take theirs, these fellows Weedie's gulling and Addington, because it's a fool wrapped up in its own conceit and stroking the lion's cub till it's grown big enough to eat us."