Lydia laid the picture carefully away in a pigeonhole of her desk. She
was still thinking soberly of the subtle web of prejudices, feelings
and conditions into which she had obtruded her one fixed purpose in
life. But if Mr. Elliot had been as good as engaged to Fanny Dodge, as
Mrs. Solomon Black had been at some pains to imply, in what way had she
(Lydia) interfered with the dénouement?
She shook her head at last over the intricacies of the imperfectly
stated problem. The idea of coquetting with a man had never entered
Lydia’s fancy. Long since, in the chill spring of her girlhood, she had
understood her position in life as compared with that of other girls.
She must never marry. She must never fall in love, even. The inflexible
Puritan code of her uncle’s wife had found ready acceptance in Lydia’s
nature. If not an active participant in her father’s crime, she still
felt herself in a measure responsible for it. He had determined to grow
rich and powerful for her sake. More than once, in the empty rambling
talk which he poured forth in a turgid stream during their infrequent
meetings, he had told her so, with extravagant phrase and gesture. And
so, at last, she had come to share his punishment in a hundred secret,
unconfessed ways. She ate scant food, slept on the hardest of beds,
labored unceasingly, with the great, impossible purpose of some day
making things right: of restoring the money they—she no longer said
_he_—had stolen; of building again the waste places desolated by the
fire of his ambition for her. There had followed that other purpose,
growing ever stronger with the years, and deepening with the deepening
stream of her womanhood: her love, her vast, unavailing pity for the
broken and aging man, who would some day be free. She came at length to
the time when she saw clearly that he would never leave the prison
alive, unless in some way she could contrive to keep open the clogging
springs of hope and desire. She began deliberately and with purpose to
call back memories of the past: the house in which he had lived, the
gardens and orchards in which he once had taken pride, his ambitious
projects for village improvement.
“You shall have it all back, father!” she promised him, with passionate
resolve. “And it will only be a little while to wait, now.”
Thus encouraged, the prisoner’s horizon widened, day by day. He
appeared, indeed, to almost forget the prison, so busy was he in
recalling trivial details and unimportant memories of events long since
past. He babbled incessantly of his old neighbors, calling them by
name, and chuckling feebly as he told her of their foibles and
peculiarities.
“But we must give them every cent of the money, father,” she insisted;
“we must make everything right.”
“Oh, yes! Oh, yes, we’ll fix it up somehow with the creditors,” he
would say.
Then he would scowl and rub his shorn head with his tremulous old
hands.
“What did they do with the house, Margaret?” he asked, over and over, a
furtive gleam of anxiety in his eyes. “They didn’t tear it down; did
they?”
He waxed increasingly anxious on this point as the years of his
imprisonment dwindled at last to months. And then her dream had
unexpectedly come true. She had money—plenty of it—and nothing stood in
the way. She could never forget the day she told him about the house.
Always she had tried to quiet him with vague promises and imagined
descriptions of a place she had completely forgotten.
“The house is ours, father,” she assured him, jubilantly. “And I am
having it painted on the outside.”
“You are having it painted on the outside, Margaret? Was that
necessary, already?”
“Yes, father.... But I am Lydia. Don’t you remember? I am your little
girl, grown up.”
“Yes, yes, of course. You are like your mother— And you are having the
house painted? Who’s doing the job?”
She told him the man’s name and he laughed rather immoderately.
“He’ll do you on the white lead, if you don’t watch him,” he said. “I
know Asa Todd. Talk about frauds— You must be sure he puts honest
linseed oil in the paint. He won’t, unless you watch him.”
“I’ll see to it, father.”
“But whatever you do, don’t let ’em into my room,” he went on, after a
frowning pause.
“You mean your library, father? I’m having the ceiling whitened. It—it
needed it.”
“I mean my bedroom, child. I won’t have workmen pottering about in
there.”
“But you won’t mind if they paint the woodwork, father? It—has grown
quite yellow in places.”
“Nonsense, my dear! Why, I had all the paint upstairs gone over—let me
see—”
And he fell into one of his heavy moods of introspection which seemed,
indeed, not far removed from torpor.
When she had at last roused him with an animated description of the
vegetable garden, he appeared to have forgotten his objections to
having workmen enter his chamber. And Lydia was careful not to recall
it to his mind.
She was still sitting before his desk, ostensibly absorbed in the rows
of incomprehensible figures Deacon Whittle, as general contractor, had
urged upon her attention, when Martha again parted the heavy cloud of
her thoughts.
“The minister, come to see you again,” she announced, with a slight but
mordant emphasis on the ultimate word.
“Yes,” said Lydia, rousing herself, with an effort. “Mr. Elliot, you
said?”
“I s’pose that’s his name,” conceded Martha ungraciously. “I set him in
the dining room. It’s about the only place with two chairs in it; an’ I
shan’t have no time to make more lemonade, in case you wanted it, m’m.”