Chapter 3

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.

IV

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 æsthetic 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.