The next day, after an early dinner--nobody in Addington dined at
night--the colonel, though not sitting down to a definite conclave, went
over with Anne and Lydia every step of his proposed call on Esther, as
if they were planning a difficult route and a diplomatic mission at the
end, and later, in a state of even more exquisite personal fitness than
usual, the call being virtually one of state, he set off to find his
daughter-in-law. Anne and Lydia walked with him down the drive. They had
the air of upholding him to the last.
The way to Esther's house, which was really her grandmother's, he had
trodden through all his earlier life. His own family and Esther's had
been neighbours intimately at one, and, turning the familiar corner, he
felt, with a poignancy cruel in its force, youth recalled and age
confirmed. Here were associations almost living, they were so vivid, yet
wraithlike in sheer removedness. It was all very subtle, in its
equal-sided force, this resurrection of the forms of youth, to be met by
the cold welcome of a change in him. The heart did quicken over its
recognition of the stability of things, but with no robust urge such as
it knew in other years; indeed it fluttered rather pathetically, as if
it begged him to put no unwonted strain upon it now, as in that time
foregone, when every beat cried out, "Heave the weight! charge up the
hill! We're equal to it. If we're not, we'll die submerged in our own
red fount." He was not taking age with any sense of egotistical
rebellion; but it irked him like an unfamiliar weight patiently borne
and for no reward. The sense of the morning of life was upon him; yet
here he was fettered to his traitorous body which was surely going to
betray him in the end. No miracle could save him from atomic downfall.
However exultantly he might live again, here he should live no more, and
though there was in him no fervency either of rebellion or belief, he
did look gravely now at the pack of mortality he carried. It was
carefully poised and handled. His life was precious to him, for he
wanted this present coil of circumstance made plain before he should go
hence and be seen no more.
The streets just now were empty. It was an hour of mid-afternoon when
ladies had not dawned, in calling raiment, upon a world of other
expectant ladies, and when the business man is under bonds to keep
sequestered with at least the pretext of arduous tasks. The colonel had
ample opportunity to linger by yards where shrubbery was coming out in
shining buds, and draw into his grave consciousness the sense of spring.
Every house had associations for him, as every foot of the road. Now he
was passing the great yellow mansion where James Reardon lived. Reardon,
of Irish blood and American public school training, had been Jeffrey's
intimate, the sophisticated elder who had shown him, with a cool
practicality that challenged emulation, the world and how it was to be
bought. When there were magnates in Addington, James had been a poor
boy. There were still magnates, and now he was one of them, so far as
club life went and monetary transactions. He had never tried to marry an
Addington girl, and therefore could not be said to have put his social
merit absolutely to the touch. But luck had always served him. Perhaps
it would even have done it there. He had gone into a broker's office,
had made a strike with his savings and then another with no warning
reversal, and got the gay habit of rolling up money like a snowball on
a damp day. When the ball got too heavy for him to handle deftly, Jim
dropped the game, only starting the ball down hill--if one may find
symbolism for sedate investments--gathering weight as it went and, it
was thought, at obstructive points persuading other little boys to push.
The colonel had often wondered if Jeffrey had been one of those little
boys. Now, at forty-five, Reardon lived a quiet, pottering life, a
bachelor with a housekeeper and servants enough to keep the big yellow
house in form. He read in a methodical way, really the same books over
and over, collected prints with a conviction that a print is a print,
exercised his big frame in the club gymnasium, took a walk of sanitary
length morning and afternoon and went abroad once in two years.
"I've got money enough," he was accustomed to say, when the adventurous
petitioned him to bolster new projects for swift returns, "all in
gilt-edged securities. That's why I don't propose to lay awake an hour
in my life, muddling over stocks. Why, it's destruction, man! it's
death. It eats up your tissues faster than old age." The eccentricity of
his verb indicated only the perfection of his tact. He had a perfect
command of the English language, but a wilful lapse into colloquialisms
endeared him, he knew, to his rougher kind. There was no more popular
man. He was blond and open-featured. He spoke in a loud yet always
sympathetic voice, and in skilfully different fashions he called every
man brother.
Yet the colonel, his fancy entering the seclusion of the yellow house,
rich in books that would have been sealed to even Jim's immediate
forebears, rich in all possible mechanical appliances for the ease of
life, speculated whether Reardon had, in the old days, been good for
Jeff. Could he, with his infernal luck, have been good for any youth of
Jeff's impetuous credulity? Mightn't Jeff have got the idea that life
is an easy job? The colonel felt now that he had always distrusted
Reardon's bluff bonhomie, his sympathetic voice, his booming implication
that he was letting you into his absolutely habitable heart. He knew,
too, that without word of his own his distrust had filtered out to Anne
and Lydia, and that they were prepared, while they stood by Jeff to
unformulated issues, to trip up Reardon, somehow bring him low and set
Jeff up impeccable. Of this he was thinking gravely now, the different
points of it starting up in his mind like sparks of light while he
regarded Reardon's neat shrubs healthily growing, as if the last drop of
fertilising had been poured into them at this spring awakening, and all
pruned to a wholesome symmetry. Then, hearing the sound of a door and
painfully averse to meeting Reardon, he went on and mounted the steps of
the great brick house where his daughter-in-law lived. And here the
adventure came to an abrupt stop. The maid, perfectly courteous and yet
with an air of readiness even he, the most unsuspecting of men, could
not fail to recognise, told him, almost before he had finished his
inquiry, that Mrs. Blake was not at home. She would not be at home that
afternoon. No, sir, not the next day. Madam Bell, Esther's grandmother,
he asked for then. No, sir, she was not at home. Looking in the smooth
sanguine face of the girl, noting mechanically her light eyelashes and
the spaces between her teeth, he knew she lied. Yet he was a courteous
gentleman, and did not report that to his inner mind. He bestowed his
card upon Sapphira, and walked away at his sedate pace, more than
anything puzzled. Esther was not proposing to take part in their coming
drama. He couldn't count on her. He was doubly sorry because this
defection was going to make Anne and Lydia hate her more than ever, and
he was averse to the intensification of hatred. He was no mollycoddle,
but he had an intuition that hatred is of no use. It hindered things,
all sorts of things: kindliness, even justice.
The girls were waiting for him at the door, but reading his face, they
seemed, while not withdrawing themselves bodily, really to slip away, in
order not even tacitly to question him. They had a marvellous
unwillingness to bring a man to the bar. There was no over-tactful
display of absence, but their minds simply would not set upon and
interrogate his, nor skulk round corners to spy upon it. But he had to
tell them, and he was anxious to get it over. Just as they seemed now
about to melt away to urgent tasks, he called them back.
"She's not at home," said he.
Anne looked a species of defeated interest. Lydia's eyes said
unmistakably, "I don't believe it." The colonel was tired enough to want
to say, "I don't either," but he never felt at liberty to encourage
Lydia's too exuberant candour.
"She's not to be at home to-morrow," he said. "It looks as if she'd gone
for--for the present," he ended lamely, put down his hat and went into
the east room and took up his brown book.
"Oh!" said Lydia.
That was all he was to hear from her, and he was glad. He hadn't any
assurance within him of the force to assuage an indignation he
understood though he couldn't feel it. That was another of the levelling
powers of age. You couldn't key your emotions up to the point where they
might shatter something or perhaps really do some good. It wasn't only
that you hadn't the blood and breath. It also didn't seem worth while.
He was angry, in a measure, with the hidden woman he couldn't get at to
bid her come and help him fight the battle that was hers even more
indubitably than his; yet he was conscious that behind her defences was
another world of passion and emotion and terribly strong desires, as
valid as his own. She had her side. He didn't know what it was. He
wanted really to avoid knowing, lest it weaken him through its appeal
for a new sympathy; but he knew the side was there. This, he said to
himself, with a half smile, was probably known as tolerance. It seemed
to him old age.
So, from their benign choice, he had really nothing to say to Lydia or
Anne. In the late afternoon Anne asked him to go to walk and show her
the town, and he put her off. He was conscious of having drowsed away in
his chair, into one of those intervals he found so inevitable, and that
were, at the same time, so irritatingly foreign to his previous habits
of life. He did not drop his pursuits definitely to take a nap. The nap
seemed to take him, even when he was on the margin of some lake or river
where he thought himself well occupied in seeing the moving to and fro
of boats, for business and pleasure, just as his own boat had gallantly
cut invisible paths on the air and water in those earlier years. The nap
would steal upon him like an amiable yet inexorable joker, and throw a
cloudy veil over his brain and eyes, and he would sink into a gulf he
had not perceived. It lay at his feet, and something was always ready to
push him into it. He thought sometimes, wondering at the inevitableness
of it, that one day the veil would prove a pall.
But after their twilight supper, he felt more in key with the tangible
world, and announced himself as ready to set forth. Lydia refused to go.
She had something to do, she said; but she walked down the driveway with
them, and waited until they had gone a rod or two along the street. The
colonel turned away from Esther's house, as Lydia knew he would. She had
not watched him for years without seeing how resolutely he put the
memory of pain or loss behind him whenever manly honour would allow.
The colonel's thin skin was his curse. Yet he wore it with a proud
indifference it took a good deal of warm affection to penetrate. Lydia
stood there and looked up and down the street. It had been a day almost
hot, surprising for the season, and she was dressed in conformity in
some kind of thin stuff with little dots of black. Her round young arms
were bare to the elbow, and there was a narrow lacy frill about her
neck. It was too warm really to need a hat or jacket, and this place was
informal enough, she thought, to do away with gloves. Having rapidly
decided that it was also a pity to cool resolution by returning to the
house for any conventional trappings, she stepped to the pavement and
went, with a light rapidity, along the road to Esther's.
She knew the way. When she reached the house she regarded it for a
moment from the opposite side of the street, and Jim Reardon, coming out
of his own gate for his evening's stroll to the Colonial Club, saw her
and crossed, instead of continuing on his own side as he ordinarily did.
She was a nymph-like vision of the twilight, and there was nothing of
the Addington girl about her unconsidered ease. Jim looked at her
deferentially, as he passed, a hand ready for his hat. But though Lydia
saw him she dismissed him as quickly, perhaps as no matter for
wonderment, and again because her mind was full of Esther. Now in the
haste that dares not linger, she crossed the street and ascended the
steps of the brick house. As she did so she was conscious of the
stillness within. It might have been a house embodied out of her own
dreams. But she did not ring, nor did she touch the circlet the brass
lion of a knocker held obligingly in his mouth. She lifted the heavy
latch, stepped in and shut the door behind her.
This was not the front entrance. The house stood on a corner, and this
door led into a little square hall with a colonial staircase of charming
right-angled turns going compactly up. Lydia looked into the room at her
right and the one at her left. They were large and nobly proportioned,
furnished in a faded harmony of antique forms. The arrangement of the
house, she fancied, might be much like the colonel's. But though she
thought like lightning in the excitement of her invasion, there was not
much clearness about it; her heart was beating too urgently, and the
blood in her ears had tightened them. No one was in the left-hand room,
no one was in the right; only there was a sign of occupancy: a
peach-coloured silk bag hung on the back of a chair and the lacy corner
of a handkerchief stood up in its ruffly throat. The bag, the
handkerchief, brought her courage back. They looked like a substantial
Esther of useless graces she had to fight. And so passionately alive was
she to everything concerning Jeffrey that it seemed base of a woman once
belonging to him to parade lacy trifles in ruffly bags when he was
condemned to coarse, hard usages. But having Esther to fight, she
stepped into that room, and immediately a warm, yet, she had time to
think, rather a discontented voice called from the room behind it:
"Is that you, Sophy?"
Lydia answered in an intemperate haste, and like many another rebel to
the English tongue, she found a proper pronoun would not serve her for
sufficient emphasis.
"No," she said, "it's me."
And she followed on the heels of her words, with a determined soft pace,
to the room of the voice, and came upon a brown-eyed, brown-haired,
rather plump creature in a white dress, who was lying in a long chair
and eating candied fruit from a silver dish. This, Lydia knew, was
Esther Blake. She had expected to feel for her the distaste of
righteousness in the face of the wrong-doer: for Esther, she knew, was
proven, by long-continued hardness of heart and behaviour, indubitably
wrong. Here was Esther, Jeff's wife, not showing more than two-thirds of
her thirty-three years, her brow unlined, her expression of a general
sweetness indicating not only that she wished to please but that she
had, in the main, been pleased. The beauty of her face was in its long
eyelashes, absurdly long, as if nature had said, "Here's a by-product we
don't know what to do with. Put it into lashes." Her hands were white
and exquisitely cared for, and she wore no wedding ring. Lydia noted
that, with an involuntary glance, but strangely it did not move her to
any access of indignation. Anger she did feel, but it was, childishly,
anger over the candied fruit. "How can you lie there and eat," she
wanted to cry, "when Jeff is where he is?"
A little flicker ran over Esther's face: it might at first have been the
ripple of an alarmed surprise, but she immediately got herself in hand.
She put her exquisite feet over the side of the chair, got up and, in
one deft motion, set the fruit on a little table and ran a hand lightly
over her soft disorder of hair.
"Do excuse me," said she. "I didn't hear you."
"My name is French," said Lydia, in an incisive haste, "Lydia French. I
came to talk with you about Jeff."
The shadow that went over Esther's face was momentary, no more than a
bird's wing over a flowery plot; but it was a shadow only. There was no
eagerness or uplift or even trouble at the name of Jeff.
"Father came this afternoon," said Lydia. "He wanted to talk things
over. He couldn't get in."
"Oh," said Esther, "I'm sorry for that. So you are one of the
step-children. Sit down, won't you. Oh, do take this chair."
Lydia was only too glad to take any chair and get the strain off her
trembling knees. It was no trivial task, she saw, to face Jeff's wife
and drag her back to wifehood. But she ignored the proffer of the softer
chair. It was easier to take a straight one and sit upright, her brown
little hands clenched tremblingly. Esther, too, took a chair the twin of
hers, as if to accept no advantage; she sat with dignity and waited
gravely. She seemed to be watchful, intent, yet bounded by reserves. It
was the attitude of waiting for attack.
"This very next week, you know, Jeff will be discharged." Lydia spoke
with the brutality born of her desperation. Still Esther watched her.
"You know, don't you?" Lydia hurled at her. She had a momentary thought,
"The woman is a fool." "From jail," she continued. "From the Federal
Prison. You know, don't you? You heard he had been pardoned?"
Esther looked at her a full minute, her face slowly suffusing. Lydia saw
the colour even flooding into her neck. Her eyes did not fill, but they
deepened in some unusual way. They seemed to be saying, defiantly
perhaps, that they could cry if they would, but they had other modes of
empery.
"You know, don't you?" Lydia repeated, but more gently. She began to
wonder now whether trouble had weakened the wife's brain, her power at
least of receptivity.
"Yes," said Esther. "I know it, of course. To-day's paper had quite a
long synopsis of the case."
Now Lydia flushed and looked defiant.
"I am glad to know that," she said. "I must burn the paper. Farvie
sha'n't see it."
"There were two reporters here yesterday," said Esther. She spoke
angrily now. Her voice hinted that this was an indignity which need not
have been put upon her.
"Did you see them?" asked Lydia, in a flash, ready to blame her whatever
she did.
But the answer was eloquent with reproach.
"Certainly I didn't see them. I have never seen any of them. When that
horrible newspaper started trying to get him pardoned, reporters came
here in shoals. I never saw them. I'd have died sooner."
"Did Jeff write you he didn't want to be pardoned? He did us."
"No. He hasn't written me for years."
She looked a baffling number of things now, voluntarily pathetic, a
little scornful, as if she washed her hands gladly of the whole affair.
"Farvie thinks," said Lydia recklessly, "that you haven't written to
him."
"How could I?" asked Esther, in a quick rebuttal which actually had a
convincing sound, "when he didn't write to me?"
"But he was in prison."
"He hasn't had everything to bear," said Esther, rising and putting some
figurines right on the mantel where they seemed to be right enough
before. "Do you know any woman whose life has been ruined as mine has?
Have you ever met one? Now have you?"
"Farvie's life is ruined," said Lydia incisively. "Jeff's life is
ruined, too. I don't know whether it's any worse for a woman than for a
man."
"Jeffrey," said Esther, "is taking the consequences of his own act."
"You don't mean to tell me you think he was to blame?" Lydia said, in a
low tone charged with her own complexity of sentiment. She was
horror-stricken chiefly. Esther saw that, and looked at her in a large
amaze.
"You don't mean to tell me you think he wasn't?" she countered.
"Why, of course he wasn't!" Lydia's cheeks were flaming. She was
impatiently conscious of this heat and her excited breath. But she had
entered the fray, and there was no returning.
"Then who was guilty?" Esther asked it almost triumphantly, as if the
point of proving herself right were more to her than the innocence of
Jeff.
"That's for us to find out," said Lydia. She looked like the apostle of
a holy war.
"But if you could find out, why haven't you done it before? Why have you
waited all these years?"
"Partly because we weren't grown up, Anne and I. And even when we were,
when we'd begun to think about it, we were giving dancing lessons, to
help out. You know Farvie put almost every cent he had into paying the
creditors, and then it was only a drop in the bucket. And besides Jeff
pleaded guilty, and he kept writing Farvie to let it all stand as it
was, and somehow, we were so sorry for Jeff we couldn't help feeling
he'd got to have his way. Even if he wanted to sacrifice himself he
ought to be allowed to, because he couldn't have his way about anything
else. At least, that was what Anne and I felt. We've talked it over a
lot. We've hardly talked of anything else. And we think Farvie feels so,
too."
"You speak as if it were a sum of money he'd stolen out of a drawer,"
said Esther. Her cheeks were red, like exquisite roses. "It wasn't a sum
of money. I read it all over in the paper the other day. He had
stockholders' money, and he plunged, it said, just before the panic. He
invested other people's money in the wrong things, and then, it said, he
tried to realise."
"I can't help it," said Lydia doggedly. "He wasn't guilty."
"Why should he have said he was guilty?" Esther put this to her with her
unchanged air of triumphant cruelty.
"He might, to save somebody else."
Esther was staring now and Lydia stared back, caught by the almost
terrified surprise in Esther's face. Did she know about Jim Reardon? But
Esther broke the silence, not in confession, if she did know: with
violence rather.
"You never will prove any such thing. Never in the world. The money was
in Jeff's hands. He hadn't even a partner."
"He had friends," said Lydia. But now she felt she had implied more than
was discreet, and she put a sign up mentally not to go that way.
Whatever Esther said, she would keep her own eyes on the sign.