Still she returned to the assault. Her next question even made her raise
her brows a little, it seemed so crude and horrible; she could have
laughed outright at herself for having the nerve to put it. She couldn't
imagine what the colonel would have thought of her. Anne, she knew,
would have crumpled up into silken disaster like a flower under too
sharp a wind.
"Aren't you going to ask Jeff here to live with you?"
Esther was looking at her in a fiery amaze Lydia knew she well deserved.
"Who is this child," Esther seemed to be saying, "rising up out of
nowhere and pursuing me into my most intimate retreats?" She answered in
a careful hedging way that was not less pretty than her unconsidered
speech:
"Jeffrey and I haven't been in communication for years."
Then Lydia lost her temper and put herself in the wrong.
"Why," said she, "you said that before. Besides, it's no answer anyway.
You could have written to him, and as soon as you heard he was going to
be pardoned, you could have made your plans. Don't you mean to ask him
here?"
Esther made what sounded like an irrelevant answer, but it meant
apparently something even solemn to her.
"My grandmother," said she, "is an old lady. She's bedridden. She's
upstairs, and I keep the house very quiet on her account."
Lydia had a hot desire to speak out what she really felt: to say, "Your
grandmother's being bedridden has no more to do with it than the cat."
Lydia was prone to seek the cat for exquisite comparison. Persons, with
her, could no more sing--or dance--than the cat. She found the cat, in
the way of metaphor, a mysteriously useful animal. But the very
embroidery of Esther's mode of speech forbade her invoking that
eccentric aid. Lydia was not eager to quarrel. She would have been
horrified if circumstance had ever provoked her into a rash word to her
father, and with Anne she was a dove of peace. But Esther by a word, it
seemed, by a look, had the power of waking her to unholy revolt. She
thought it was because Esther was so manifestly not playing fair. Why
couldn't she say she wouldn't have Jeff in the house, instead of sitting
here and talking like a nurse in a sanitarium, about bedridden
grandmothers?
"It isn't because we don't want him to come to us," said Lydia.
"Farvie's been living for it all these years, and Anne and I don't talk
of anything else."
"Isn't that interesting!" said Esther, though not as if she put a
question. "And you're no relation at all." She made it, for the moment,
seem rather a breach of taste to talk of nothing else but a man to whom
Lydia wasn't a sister, and Lydia's face burned in answer. A wave of
childish misery came over her. She wished she had not come. She wished
she knew how to get away. And while she took in Esther's harmony of
dress, her own little odds and ends of finery grew painfully cheap to
her. But the telephone bell rang in the next room, and Esther rose and
excused herself. While she was gone, Lydia sat there with her little
hands gripped tightly. Now she wished she knew how to get out of the
house another way, before Esther should come back. If it were not for
the credit of the family, she would find the other way. Meantime
Esther's voice, very liquid now that she was not talking to a sister
woman, flowed in to her and filled her with a new distrust and hatred.
"Please come," said Esther. "I depend upon it. Do you mean you weren't
ever coming any more?"
When she appeared again, Lydia was quivering with a childish anger. She
had risen, and stood with her hands clasped before her. So she was in
the habit of standing before her dancing class until the music should
begin and lead her through the measures. She was delightful so and, from
long training, entirely self-possessed.
"Good-bye," said she.
"Don't go," said Esther, in a conventional prettiness, but no such
beguilement as she had wafted through the telephone. "It's been so
pleasant meeting you."
Again Lydia had her ungodly impulse to contradict, to say: "No, it
hasn't either. You know it hasn't." But she turned away and, head a
little bent, walked out of the house, saying again, "Good-bye."
When she got out into the dusk, she went slowly, to cool down and think
it over. It wouldn't do for the colonel and Anne to see her on the swell
of such excitement, especially as she had only defeat to bring them. She
had meant to go home in a triumphant carelessness and say: "Oh, yes, I
saw her. I just walked right in. That's what you ought to have done,
Farvie. But we had it out, and I think she's ready to do the decent
thing by Jeff." No such act of virtuous triumph: she had simply been a
silly girl, and Anne would find it out. Near the corner she met the man
she had seen on her way in coming, and he looked at her again with that
solicitous air of being ready to take off his hat. She went on with a
consciousness of perhaps having achieved an indiscretion in coming out
bareheaded, and the man proceeded to Esther's door. He was expected.
Esther herself let him in.
Reardon had not planned to go to see her at that hour. He had meant to
spend it at the club, feet up, trotting over the path of custom, knowing
to a dot what men he would find there and what each would say. Old Dan
Wheeler would talk about the advisability of eating sufficient
vegetables to keep your stomach well distended. Young Wheeler would
refer owlishly to the Maries and Jennies of an opera troupe recently in
Addington, and Ollie Hastings, the oldest bore, would tell long stories,
and wheeze. But Reardon was no sooner in his seat, with his glass beside
him, than he realised he was disturbed, in some unexpected way. It might
have been the pretty girl he met going into Esther's; it might have been
the thought of Esther herself, the unheard call from her. So he left his
glass untasted and telephoned her: "You all right?" To which Esther
replied in a doubtful purr. "Want me to come up?" he asked, as he
thought, against his will. And he swallowed a third of his firewater at
a gulp and went to find her. He knew what he should find,--an Esther who
bade him remember, by all the pliancy of her attractive body and every
tone of her voice, how irreconcilably hard it was that she should have a
husband pardoned out of prison, a husband of whom she was afraid.
Lydia found Anne waiting at the gate.
"Why, where've you been?" asked Anne, with all the air of a prim mother.
"Walking," said Lydia meekly.
"You'd better have come with us," said Anne. "It was very nice. Farvie
told me things."
"Yes," said Lydia, "I wish I had."
"Without your hat, too," pursued Anne anxiously. "I don't know whether
they do that here." Lydia remembered Reardon, and thought she knew.
They went to bed early, in a low state of mind. The colonel was tired,
and Anne, watching him from above as he toiled up the stairs, wondered
if he needed a little strychnia. She would remember, she thought, to
give it to him in the morning. After they had said good-night, and the
colonel, indeed, was in his bed, she heard the knocker clang and slipped
down the stairs to answer. Halfway she stopped, for Mary Nellen, candle
in hand, had arrived from the back regions, and was, with admirable
caution, opening the door a crack. But immediately she threw it wide,
and tossed her own reassurance over her shoulder, back to Anne.
"Mr. Alston Choate. To see your father."
So Anne came down the stairs, and Mr. Choate, hat in hand, apologised
for calling so late. He was extremely busy. He had to be at the office
over time, but he didn't want to-day's sun to go down and he not have
welcomed Mr. Blake. Anne had a chance, in the space of his delivering
this preamble, to think what a beautiful person he was. He had a young
face lighted by a twisted whimsical smile, and a capacious forehead,
built out a little into knobs of a noble sort, as if there were ample
chambers behind for the storing away of precedent. Altogether he would
have satisfied every aesthetic requirement: but he had a broken nose. The
portrait painter lusted for him, and then retired sorrowfully. But the
nose made him very human. Anne didn't know its eccentricity was the
result of breakage, but she saw it was quite unlike other noses and
found it superior to them.
Alston Choate spent every waking minute of his life in the practice of
law and the reading of novels; he was either digging into precedent,
expounding it, raging over its futilities, or guiltily losing himself in
the life of books. What he really loved was music and the arts, and he
dearly liked to read about the people who had leisure to follow such
lures, time to be emotional even, and indulge in pretty talk. Yet law
was the giant he had undertaken to wrestle with, and he kept his grip.
Sometime, he thought, the cases would be all tried or the feet of
litigants would seek other doors. The wave of middle age would toss him
to an island of leisure, and there he would sit down and hear music and
read long books.
As he saw Anne coming down the stairs, he thought of music personified.
A crowd of adjectives rose in his mind and, like attendant graces,
grouped themselves about her. He could imagine her sitting at archaic
instruments, calling out of them, with slim fingers, diaphanous
melodies. Yet the beauty that surrounded her like a light mantle she had
snatched up from nature to wear about her always, did not displace the
other vision of beauty in his heart. It did not even jostle it. Esther
Blake was, he knew, the sum of the ineffable feminine.
While he made that little explanation of his haste in coming and his
fear that it was an untoward time, Anne heard him with a faint smile,
all her listening in her upturned face. She was grateful to him. Her
father, she knew, would be the stronger for men's hands to hold him up.
She returned a little explanation. Father was so tired. He had gone to
bed. Then it seemed to her that Choate did a thing unsurpassed in
splendour.
"You are one of the daughters, aren't you?" he said.
"Yes," she answered. "I'm Anne."
Mary Nellen had delivered the candle to her hand, and she stood there
holding it in a serious manner, as if it lighted some ceremonial. Then
it was that Choate made the speech that clinched his hold upon her
heart.
"When do you expect your brother?"
Anne's face flooded. He was not acting as if Jeff, coming from an
unspeakable place, mustn't be mentioned. He was asking exactly as if
Jeff had been abroad and the ship was almost in. It was like a pilot
boat going out to see that he got in safely. And feeling the
circumstance greatly, she found herself answering with a slow
seriousness which did, indeed, carry much dignity.
"We are not sure. We think he may come directly through; but, on the
other hand, he may be tired and not feel up to it."
Choate smiled his irregular, queer smile. He was turning away now.
"Tell him I shall be in soon," he said. "I fancy he'll remember me.
Good-night."
Lydia was hanging over the balustrade.
"Who was it?" she asked, as Anne went up.
Anne told her and because she looked dreamy and not displeased, Lydia
asked:
"Nice?"
"Oh, yes," said Anne. "You've heard Farvie speak of him. Exactly what
Farvie said."
Lydia had gone some paces in undressing. She stood there in a white
wrapper, with her hair in its long braid, and stared at Anne for a
considering interval.
"I think I'd better tell you," said she. "I've been to see her."
There was but one person who could have been meant, and yet that was so
impossible that Anne stared and asked:
"Who?"
They had always spoken of Esther as Esther, among themselves, quite
familiarly, but now Lydia felt she would die rather than mention her
name.
"She is a hateful woman," said Lydia, "perfectly hateful."
"But what did you go for?" Anne asked, in a gentle perplexity.
"To find out," said Lydia, in a savage tearfulness, "what she means to
do."
"And what does she?"
"Nothing."
V
The house, almost of its own will, slid into order. Mary Nellen was a
wonderful person. She arranged and dusted and put questions to Anne as
to Cicero and Virgil, and then, when Anne convoyed her further, to the
colonel, and he found a worn lexicon in the attic and began to dig out
translations and chant melodious periods. The daughters could have
hugged Mary Nellen, bright-eyed and intent on advancement up the hill of
learning, for they gave him something to do to mitigate suspense until
his son should come. And one day at twilight, when they did not know it
was going to be that day at all, but when things were in a complete
state of readiness and everybody disposed to start at a sound, the front
door opened and Jeffrey, as if he must not actually enter until he was
bidden, stood there and knocked on the casing. Mary Nellen, having more
than mortal wit, seemed to guess who he was, and that the colonel must
not be startled. She appeared before Lydia in the dining-room and gave
her a signalling grimace. Lydia followed her, and met the man, now a
step inside the hall. Lydia, too, knew who it was. She felt the blood
run painfully into her face, and hoped he didn't see how confused she
was with her task of receiving him exactly right after all this time of
preparation. There was no question of kissing or in any way sealing her
sisterly devotion. She gave him a cold little hand, and he took it with
the same bewildered acquiescence. She looked at him, it seemed to her, a
long time, perhaps a full minute, and found him wholly alien to her
dreams of the wronged creature who was to be her brother. He was of a
good height, broad in the shoulders and standing well. His face held
nothing of the look she had always wrought into it from the picture of
his college year. It was rather square. The outline at least couldn't be
changed. The chin, she thought, was lovable. The eyes were large and
blue; stern, it seemed, but really from the habit of the forehead that
had been scarred with deepest lines. The high cheekbones gave him an odd
look as if she saw him in bronze. They stared at each other and Jeffrey
thought he ought to assure her he wasn't a tramp, when Lydia found her
voice.
"I'll tell Farvie," said she. She turned away from him, and immediately
whirled back again. "I've got to do it carefully. You stay here."
But in the library where the colonel sat over Mary Nellen's last classic
riddle, she couldn't break it at all.
"He's come," she said.
The colonel got up and Virgil slid to the floor.
"Where is he?" he called, in a sharp voice. It was a voice touched with
age and apprehension. The girls hadn't known how old a man he was until
they heard him calling for his son. Jeffrey heard it and came in with a
few long steps, and his father met him at the door. To the two girls
Jeff seemed astonished at the emotion he was awakening. How could he be,
they wondered, when this instant of his release had been so terrible and
so beautiful for a long time? The tears came rushing to their eyes, as
they saw Farvie. He had laid aside all his gentle restraint, and put his
shaking hands on Jeffrey's shoulders. And then he called him by the name
he had been saying over in his heart for these last lean years:
"My son! my son!"
If they had kissed, Lydia would not have been surprised. But the two
men looked at each other, the colonel took down his hands, and Jeffrey
drew forward a chair for him.
"Sit down a minute," he said, quite gently, and then the girls knew that
he really had been moved, though he hadn't shown it, and, ready to seize
upon anything to love in him, they decided they loved his voice. When
they had got away out of the room and stood close together in the
dining-room, as if he were a calamity to be fled from, that was the only
thing they could think of to break their silence.
"He's got a lovely voice," said Anne, and Lydia answered chokingly:
"Yes."
"Do you think he sings?" Anne pursued, more, Lydia knew, to loosen the
tension than anything. "Farvie never told us that."
But Lydia couldn't answer any more, and then they both became aware that
Mary Nellen had hurried out some supper from the pantry and put quite an
array of candles on the table. She had then disappeared. Mary Nellen had
great delicacy of feeling. Anne began to light the candles, and Lydia
went back to the library. The colonel and Jeffrey were sitting there
like two men with nothing in particular to say, but, because they
happened to be in the same room, exchanging commonplaces.
"Supper's in the dining-room," said Lydia, in a weak little voice.
The colonel was about to rise, but Jeffrey said:
"Not for me."
"Have you had something?" his father asked, and Jeffrey answered:
"None for me--thank you."
The last two words seemed to be an afterthought. Lydia wondered if he
hadn't felt like thanking anybody in years. There seemed to be nothing
for her to do in this rigid sort of reunion, and she went back to Anne
in the dining-room.
"He doesn't want anything," she said. "We can clear away."
They did it in their deft fashion of working together, and then sat down
in the candlelight, making no pretence of reading or talk. All the time
they could hear the two voices from the library, going on at regular
intervals. At ten o'clock they were still going on, at eleven. Lydia
felt a deadly sleepiness, but she roused then and said, in the midst of
a yawn:
"I'm afraid Farvie'll be tired."
"Yes," said Anne. "I'll go and speak to them."
She went out of the room, and crossed the hall in her delicate,
soft-stepping way. She seemed to Lydia astonishingly brave. Lydia could
hear her voice from the other room, such a kind voice but steadied with
a little clear authority.
"You mustn't get tired, Farvie."
The strange voice jumped in on the heels of hers, as if it felt it ought
to be reproved.
"Of course not. I'd no idea how late it was."
Anne turned to Jeffrey. Lydia, listening, could tell from the different
direction of the voice.
"Your room is all ready. It's your old room."
There was a pin-prick of silence and then the strange voice said
quickly: "Thank you," as if it wanted to get everything, even
civilities, quickly over.
Lydia sat still in the dining-room. The candles had guttered and gone
down, but she didn't feel it possible to move out of her lethargy. She
was not only sleepy but very tired. Yet the whole matter, she knew, was
that this undramatic homecoming had deadened all her expectations. She
had reckoned upon a brother ready to be called brother; she had meant to
devote herself to him and see Anne devote herself, with an equal mind.
And here was a gaunt creature with a sodden skin who didn't want
anything they could do. She heard him say "Good-night." There was only
one good-night, which must have been to the colonel, though Anne was
standing by, and then she heard Anne, in a little kind voice, asking her
father if he wouldn't have something hot before he went to bed. No, he
said. He should sleep. His voice sounded exhilarated, with a thrill in
it of some even gay relief, not at all like the voice that had said
good-night. And Anne lighted his candle for him and watched him up the
stairs, and Lydia felt curiously outside it all, as if they were playing
the play without her. Anne came in then and looked solicitously at the
guttered candles of which one was left with a winding-sheet, like a
tipsy host that had drunk the rest under the table, and appeared to be
comforting the others for having made such a spectacle of themselves to
no purpose. Lydia was so sleepy now that there seemed to be several
Annes and she heard herself saying fractiously:
"Oh, let's go to bed."
Through the short night she dreamed confusedly, always a dream about
offering Farvie a supper tray, and his saying: "No, I never mean to eat
again." And then the tray itself seemed to be the trouble, and it had to
be filled all over. But nobody wanted the food.
In the early morning she awoke with the sun full upon her, for she had
been too tired the night before to close a blind. She got out of bed and
ran to the window. The night had been so confusing that she felt in very
much of a hurry to see the day. Her room overlooked the orchard,
outlined by its high red wall. For the first time, the wall seemed to
have a purpose. A man in shirt and trousers was walking fast inside it,
and while she looked he began to run. It was Jeffrey, the real Jeffrey,
she felt sure; not the Jeffrey of last night who had been so far from
her old conception of him that she had to mould him all over now to fit
him into the orchard scene. He was running in a foolish, half-hearted
way; but suddenly he seemed to call upon his will and set his elbows and
ran hard. Lydia felt herself panting in sympathy. She had a distaste for
him, too, even with this ache of pity sharper than any she had felt
while she dreamed about him before he came. What did he want to do it
for? she thought, as she watched him run. Why need he stir up in her a
deeper sorrow than any she had felt? She stepped back from her stand
behind the curtain, and began to brush her hair. She wasn't very happy.
It was impossible to feel triumphant because he was out of prison. She
had lost a cherished dream, that was all. After this she wouldn't wake
in the morning thinking: "Some day he'll be free." She would think:
"He's come. What shall we do with him?"
When she went down she found everybody had got up early, and Mary
Nellen, with some prescience of it, had breakfast ready. Jeff, now in
his coat, stood by the dining-room door with his father, talking in a
commonplace way about the house as it used to be, and the colonel was
professing himself glad no newer fashions had made him change it in
essentials.
"Here they are," said he. "Here are the girls."
Anne, while Lydia entered from the hall, was coming the other way, from
the kitchen where she had been to match conclusions with Mary Nellen
about bacon and toast. Anne was flushed from the kitchen heat, and she
had the spirit to smile and call, "Good morning." But Lydia felt halting
and speechless. She had thought proudly of the tact she should show when
this moment came, but she met it like a child. They sat down, and Anne
poured coffee and asked how Farvie had slept. But before anybody had
begun to eat, there was a knock at the front door, and Mary Nellen,
answering it, came back to Anne, in a distinct puzzle over what was to
be done now:
"It's a newspaper man."
Lydia, in her distress, gave Jeffrey a quick look, to see if he had
heard. He put his napkin down. His jaw seemed suddenly to set.
"Reporters?" he asked his father.
The fulness had gone out of Farvie's face.
"I think you'd better let me see them," he began, but Jeffrey got up and
pushed back his chair.
"No," said he. "Go on with your breakfast."
They heard him in the hall, giving a curt greeting. "What do you want?"
it seemed to say. "Get it over."
There was a deep-toned query then, and Jeffrey answered, without
lowering his voice, in what seemed to Lydia and Anne, watching the
effect on their father, a reckless, if not a brutal, disregard of
decencies:
"Nothing to say. Yes, I understand. You fellows have got to get a story.
But you can't. I've been pardoned out, that's all. I'm here. That ends
it."
It didn't end it for them. They kept on proffering persuasive little
notes of interrogative sound, and possibly they advanced their claim to
be heard because they had their day's work to do.
"Sorry," said Jeff, yet not too curtly. "Yes, I did write for the prison
paper. Yes, it was in my hands. No, I hadn't the slightest intention of
over-turning any system. Reason for doing it? Why, because that's the
way the thing looked to me. Not on your life. I sha'n't write a word for
any paper. Sorry. Good-bye."
The front door closed. It had been standing wide, for it was a warm
morning, but Lydia could imagine he shut it now in a way to make more
certain his tormentors had gone. While he was out there her old sweet
sympathy came flooding back, but when he strode into the room and took
up his napkin again, she stole one glance at him and met his scowl and
didn't like him any more. The scowl wasn't for her. It was an
introspective scowl, born out of things he intimately knew and couldn't
communicate if he tried.
The colonel had looked quite radiantly happy that morning. Now his
colour had died down, leaving in his cheeks the clear pallor of age, and
his hands were trembling. It seemed that somebody had to speak, and he
did it, faintly.
"I hope you are not going to be pursued by that kind of thing."
"It's all in the day's work," said Jeffrey.
He was eating his breakfast with a careful attention to detail. Anne
thought he seemed like a painstaking child not altogether sure of his
manners. She thought, too, with her swift insight into the needs of man,
that he was horribly hungry. She was not, like Lydia, on the verge of
impulse all the time, but she broke out here, and then bit her lip:
"I don't believe you did have anything to eat last night."
Lydia gave a little jump in her chair. She didn't see how Anne dared
bait the scowling martyr. He looked at Anne. His scowl continued. They
began to see he perhaps couldn't smooth it out. But he smiled a little.
"Because I'm so hungry?" he asked. His voice sounded kind. "Well, I
didn't."
Lydia, now conversation had begun, wanted to be in it.
"Why not?" asked she, and Anne gave a little protesting note.
"I don't know," said Jeffrey, considering. "I didn't feel like it."
This he said awkwardly, but they all, with a rush of pity for him,
thought they knew what he meant. He had eaten his food within
restraining walls, probably in silence, and to take up the kind
ceremonial of common life was too much for him. Anne poured him another
cup of coffee.
"Seen Jim Reardon?" Jeffrey asked his father.
Anne and Lydia could scarcely forbear another glance at him. Here was
Reardon, the evil influence behind him, too soon upon the scene. They
would not have had his name mentioned until it should be brought out in
Jeffrey's vindication.
"No," said the colonel. "Alston Choate called."
"I wonder what Reardon's doing now?" Jeffrey asked.
But his father did not know.
Jeffrey finished rapidly, and then leaned back in his chair, looked out
of the window and forgot them all. Lydia felt one of her disproportioned
indignations. She was afraid the colonel was not going to have the
beautiful time with him their hopes had builded. The colonel looked
older still than he had an hour ago.
"What shall we do, my son?" he asked. "Go for a walk--in the orchard?"
A walk in the street suddenly occurred to him as the wrong thing to
offer a man returned to the battery of curious eyes.
"If you like," said Jeffrey indifferently. "Do you take one after
breakfast?"
He spoke as if it were entirely for his father, and Anne and Lydia
wondered, Anne in her kind way and the other hotly, how he could forget
that all their passionate interests were for him alone.
"Not necessarily," said the colonel. They were rising. "I was thinking
of you--my son."
"What makes you call me that?" Jeffrey asked curiously.
They were in the hall now, looking out beyond the great sun patch on the
floor, to the lilac trees.
"What did I call you?"
"Son. You never used to."
Lydia felt she couldn't be quick enough in teaching him how dull he was.
"He calls you so because he's done it in his mind," she said, "for years
and years. Your name wasn't enough. Farvie felt so--affectionate."
The last word sounded silly to her, and her cheeks were so hot they
seemed to scald her eyes and melt out tears in them. Jeffrey gave her a
little quizzical look, and slipped his arm through his father's. Anne,
at the look, was suddenly relieved. He must have some soft emotions, she
thought, behind the scowl.
"Don't you like it?" the colonel asked him. He straightened consciously
under the touch of his son's arm.
"Oh, yes," said Jeffrey. "I like it. Only you never had. Except in
letters. Come in here and I'll tell you what I'm going to do."
He had piloted the colonel into the library, and Anne and Lydia were
disappearing into the dining-room where Mary Nellen was now supreme. The
colonel called them, imperatively. There was such a note of necessity in
his voice that they felt sure he didn't know how to deal, quite by
himself, with this unknown quantity of a son.
"Girls, come here. I have to have my girls," he said to Jeffrey, "when
anything's going to be talked over. They're the head of the house and my
head, too."
The girls came proudly, if unwillingly. They knew the scowling young man
didn't need them, might not want them indeed. But they were a part of
Farvie, and he'd got to accept them until they found out, at least, how
safe Farvie was going to be in his hands. Jeffrey wasn't thinking of
them at all. He was accepting them, but they hadn't any share in his
perspective. Lydia felt they were the merest little dots there. She
giggled, one brief note to herself, and then sobered. She was as likely
to laugh as to fume, and it began to seem very funny to her that in this
drama of The Prisoner's Return she and Anne were barely to have speaking
parts. The colonel sat in his armchair at the orchard window, and
Jeffrey stood by the mantel and fingered a vase. Lydia, for the first
time seeing his hands with a recognising eye, was shocked by them. They
were not gentleman's hands, she thought. They were worn, and had
calloused stains and ill-kept nails.
"I thought you'd like to know as soon as possible what I mean to do," he
said, addressing his father.
"I'm glad you've got your plans," his father said. "I've tried to make
some, but I couldn't--couldn't."
"I want first to find out just how things are here," said Jeffrey. "I
want to know how much you've got to live on, and whether these girls
have anything, and whether they want to stay on with you or whether
they're doing it because--" Jeffrey now had a choking sense of emotions
too big for him--"because there's no other way out."
"Do you mean," said Lydia, in a burst, before Anne's warning hand could
stop her, "you want us to leave Farvie?"
The colonel looked up with a beseeching air.
"Good God, no!" said Jeffrey irritably. "I only want to know the state
of things here. So I can tell what to do."
The colonel had got hold of himself, and straightened in his chair. The
girls knew that motion. It meant, "Come, come, you derelict old body.
Get into form."
"I've tried to write you fully," he said. "I hoped I gave you a--a
picture of the way we lived."
"You did. You have," said Jeffrey, still with that air of getting
nowhere and being greatly irritated by it. "But how could I know how
much these girls are sacrificing?"
"Sacrificing?" repeated the colonel helplessly, and Lydia was on the
point of another explosion when Jeffrey himself held up his hand to her.
"Wait," he said. "Let me think. I don't know how to get on with people.
They only make me mad."
That put a different face on it. Anne knew what he meant. Here he was,
he for whom they had meant to erect arches of welcome, floored in a
moment by the perplexities of family life.
"Of course," said Anne. She often said "of course" to show her sympathy.
"You tell it your own way."
"Ah!" said Jeffrey, with a breath of gratitude. "Now you're talking.
Don't you see----" he faced Anne as the only person present whose
emotions weren't likely to get the upper hand----"don't you see I've got
to know how father's fixed before I make any plans for myself?"
Anne nodded.
"We live pretty simply," she said, "but we can live. I keep the
accounts. I can tell you how much we spend."
The colonel had got hold of himself now.
"I have twelve hundred a year," he said. "We do very well on that. I
don't actually know how, except that Anne is such a good manager. She
and Lydia have earned quite a little, dancing, but I always insisted on
their keeping that for their own use."
Here Jeffrey looked at Anne and found her pinker than she had been. Anne
was thinking she rather wished she had not been so free with her offer
of accounts.
"Dancing," said he. "Yes. You wrote me. Do you like to dance?"
He had turned upon Lydia.
"Oh, yes," said she. "It's heavenly. Anne doesn't. Except when she's
teaching children."
"What made you learn dancing?" he asked Anne.
"We wanted to do something," she said guiltily. She was afraid her
tongue was going to betray her and tell the story of the lean year after
their mother died when they found out that mother had lived a life of
magnificent deception as to the ease of housekeeping on twelve hundred a
year.
"Yes," said Jeffrey, "but dancing? Why'd you pick out that?"
"We couldn't do anything else," said Lydia impatiently. "Anne and I
don't know anything in particular." She thought he might have been
clever enough to see that, while too tactful to betray it. "But we look
nice--together--and anybody can dance."
"Oh!" said Jeffrey. His eyes had a shade less of gravity, but he kept an
unmoved seriousness of tone.
"About our living with Farvie," said Anne. "I can see you'd want to
know."
"Yes," said he, "I do."
"We love to," said Anne. "We don't know what we should do if Farvie
turned us out."
"My dear!" from the colonel.
"Why, he's our father," said Lydia, in a burst. "He's just as much our
father as he is yours."
"Good!" said Jeffrey. His voice had warmed perceptibly. "Good for you.
That's what I thought."
"If you'd rather not settle down here," said his father, in a tone of
hoping Jeff would like it very much, "we shall be glad to let the house
again and go anywhere you say. We've often talked of it, the girls and
I."
Jeffrey did not thank them for that, or seem to hear it even.
"I want," said he, "to go West."
"Well," said Farvie, with a determined cheerfulness, "I guess the
girls'll agree to that. Middle West?"
"No," said Jeffrey, "the West--if there is any West left. Somewhere
where there's space." His voice fell, on that last word. It held wonder
even. Was there such a thing, this man of four walls seemed to ask, as
space?
"You'd want to go alone," said Anne softly. She felt as if she were
breaking something to Farvie and adjuring him to bear it.
"Yes," said Jeffrey, in relief. "I've got to go alone."
"My son--" said the colonel and couldn't go on. Then he did manage.
"Aren't we going to live together?"
"Not yet," said Jeffrey. "Not yet."
The colonel had thought so much about his old age that now he was near
saying: "You know I haven't so very many years," but he held on to
himself.
"He's got to go alone," said Anne. "But he'll come back."
"Yes," said Lydia, from the habit they had learned of heartening Farvie,
"he'll come back."
But she was hotly resolving that he should learn his duty and stay here.
Let her get a word with him alone.
"What I'm going to do out there I don't know," said Jeffrey. "But I am
going to work, and I'm going to turn in enough to keep you as you ought
to be. I want to stay here a little while first."
The colonel was rejuvenated by delight. Lydia wondered how anybody could
see that look on his face and not try to keep it there.
"I've got," said Jeffrey, "to write a book."
"Oh, my son," said the colonel, "that's better than I hoped. The
newspapers have had it all, how you've changed the prison paper, and how
you built up a scheme of prison government, and I said to myself, 'When
he comes out, he'll write a book, and good will come of it, and then we
shall see that, under Providence, my son went to prison that he might do
that.'"
He was uplifted with the wonder of it. The girls felt themselves carried
along at an equal pace. This was it, they thought. It was a part of the
providences that make life splendid. Jeffrey had been martyred that he
might do a special work.
"Oh, no," said he, plainly bored by the inference. "That's not it. I'm
going to write the life of a fellow I know."
"Who was he?" Anne asked, with a serious uplift of her brows.
"A defaulter."
"In the Federal Prison?"
"Yes."