Chapter 31

Lydia had never thought much about things that were wicked. Either they were brave things to do and you did them if you wanted to, or they were underhand, hideous things and then you didn't want to do them. But suddenly Esther seemed to her something floating, tossed and driven to be caught up and saved from being swamped by what seas she knew not. Jeff walked over to the dark figure by the truck. Whether he had expected it to be Esther he could not have said, but even as it shrank from him he knew.

"Come," said he. "Come home with me."

Esther stood perfectly silent like a shrinking wild thing endowed with a protective catalepsy.

"Esther," said he, "I know where you're going. You mustn't go. You sha'n't. Come home with me."

And as she did not move or answer he put his arm through hers and guided her away. Just beyond the corner of the station in a back eddy of solitude, she flung him off and darted three or four steps obliquely before he caught her up and held her. Lydia, standing in the shadow, her heart beating hard, heard his unmoved voice.

"Esther, you're not afraid of me? Come home with me. I won't touch you if you'll promise to come. I can't let you go. I can't. It would be the worst thing that ever happened to you."

"How do you know," she called, in a high hysterical voice, "where I'm going?"

"You were going with somebody you mustn't go with," said Jeff. "We won't talk about him. If he were here I shouldn't touch him. He's only a fool. And it's your fault if you're going. But you mustn't go."

"I am going," said Esther, "to New York, and I have a perfect right to. I shall spend a few days and get rested. Anybody that tells you anything else tells lies."

"The train is coming," said Jeff. "Stand here, if you won't walk away with me, and we'll let it go."

She tried again to wrench herself free, but she could not. Lydia, standing in the shadow, felt a passionate sympathy. He was kind, Lydia saw, he was compelling, but if he could have told the distracted creature he had something to offer her beyond the bare protection of an honourable intent, then she might have seen another gate open besides the one that led nowhere. Almost, at that moment, Lydia would have had him sorry enough to put his arms about her and offer the semblance of love that is divinest sympathy. The train stopped for its appointed minutes and went on.

"Come," said Jeff, "now we'll go home."

She turned and walked with him to the corner. There she swerved.

"No," said Jeff, "you're coming with me. That's the place for you. They'll be good to you, all of them. They're awfully decent. I'll be decent, too. You sha'n't feel you've been jailed. Only you can't walk off and be a prisoner to--him. Things sha'n't be hard for you. They shall be easier."

Lydia, behind, could believe he was going on in this broken flow of words to soothe her, reassure her. "Oh," Lydia wanted to call to him, "make love to her if you can. I don't care. Anything you want to do I'll stand by, if it kills me. Haven't I said I'd die for you?"

But at that moment of high excitement Lydia didn't believe anything would kill her, even seeing Jeff walk away from her with this little wisp of wrong desires to hold and cherish.

Jeff took Esther up the winding path, opened the door and led her into the library where his father sat yawning. Lydia slipped round the back way to the kitchen and took off her hat and coat.

"Cold!" she said to Mary Nellen, to explain her coming, and warmed her hands a moment before she went into the front hall and put her things away.

"Father," said Jeff, with a loud cheerfulness that sounded fatuous in his own ears, "here's Esther. She's come to stay."

The colonel got on his feet and advanced with his genial courtesy and outstretched hand. But Esther stood like a stone and did not touch the hand. Anne came in, at that moment, Lydia following. Anne had caught Jeff's introduction and looked frankly disconcerted. But Lydia marched straight up to Esther.

"I've always been hateful to you," she said, "whenever I've seen you. I'm not so hateful now. And Anne's a dear. Farvie's lovely. We'll all do everything we can to make it nice for you."

Jeff had been fumbling at the back of Esther's veil and Anne now, seeing some strange significance in the moment, put her quick fingers to work. The veil came off, and Esther stood there, white, stark, more tragic than she had ever looked in all the troubles of her life. The colonel gave a little exclamation of sorrow over her and drew up the best chair to the fire, and Anne pushed back the lamp on the table so that its light should not fall directly on her face. Then there were commonplace questions and answers. Where had Jeff been? How many miles did he think he had walked? And in the midst of the talk, while Lydia was upstairs patting pillows and lighting the fire in the spare-chamber, Esther suddenly began to cry in a low, dispirited way, no passion in it but only discouragement and physical overthrow. These were real enough tears and they hurt Jeff to the last point of nervous irritation.

"Don't," he said, and then stopped while Anne knelt beside her and, in a rhythmic way, began to rub one of her hands, and the colonel stared into the fire.

"Perhaps if you went upstairs!" Anne said to her gently. "I could really rub you if you were in bed and Lydia'll bring up something nice and hot."

"No, no," moaned Esther. "You're keeping me a prisoner. You must let me go." Then, as Jeff, walking back and forth, came within range of her glance, she flashed at him, "You've no right to keep me prisoner."

"No," said Jeff miserably, "maybe not. But I've got to make sure you're safe. Stay to-night, Esther, and to-morrow, when you're rested, we'll talk it over."

"To-morrow," she muttered, "it will be too late."

"That's it," said Jeff, understanding that it would be too late for her to meet Reardon. "That's what I mean it shall be."

Anne got on her feet and held out a hand to her.

"Come," she said. "Let's go upstairs."

Esther shrank all over her body and gave a glance at Jeff. It was a cruel glance, full of a definite repudiation.

"No, no," she said again, in a voice where fear was intentionally dominant.

It stung him to a miserable sorrow for her and a hurt pride of his own.

"For God's sake, no!" he said. "You're going to be by yourself, poor child! Run away with Anne."

So Esther rose unwillingly, and Anne took her up to the spacious chamber where firelight was dancing on the wall and Lydia had completed all sorts of hospitable offices. Lydia was there still, shrinking shyly into the background, as having no means of communication with an Esther to whom she had been hostile. But Esther turned them both out firmly, if with courtesy.

"Please go," she said to Anne. "Please let me be."

This seemed to Anne quite natural. She knew she herself, if she were troubled, could get over it best alone.

"Mayn't I come back?" she asked. "When you're in bed?"

"No," Esther said. "I am so tired I shall sleep. You're very kind. Good night."

She saw them to the door with determination even, and they went downstairs and sat in the dining-room in an excited silence, because it seemed to them Jeff might want to see his father and talk over things. But Jeff and his father were sitting on opposite sides of the table, the colonel pretending to read and Jeff with his elbows on the table, his head resting on his hands. How was he to finish what he had begun? For she hated him, he believed, with a childish hatred of the discomfort he had brought her. If there were some hot betrayal of the blood that had driven her to Reardon he almost thought, despite Addington and its honesties and honours, he would not lift his hand to keep her. Addington was very strong in him that night, the old decent loyalties to the edifice men and women have built up to protect themselves from the beast in them. Yet how would it have stood the assault of honest passion, sheer human longing knocking at its walls? If she could but love a man at last! but this was no more love than the puerile effort of a meagre discontent to make itself more safe, more closely cherished, more luxuriously served.

"Father," said he at last, breaking the silence where the clock ticked and the fire stirred.

"Yes," said the colonel. He did not put down his book or move his finger on it. He meant, to the last line of precaution, to invite Jeff's confidence.

"Whatever she does," said Jeff, "I'm to blame for it."

"Don't blame yourself any more," the colonel said. "We won't blame anybody."

He did not even venture to ask what Esther would be likely to do.

"I don't understand--" said Jeff, and then paused and the sentence was never finished. But what he did not understand was the old problem: how accountability could be exacted from the irresponsible, how an ascetic loyalty to law could be demanded of a woman who was nothing but a sweet bouquet of primitive impulses, flowered out of youth and natural appetites. He saw what she was giving up with Reardon: luxury, a kindly and absolutely honest devotion. If she went to him it would be to what she called happiness. If he kept her out of the radius of disapproval, she might never feel a shadow of regret. But Reardon would feel the shadow. Jeff knew him well enough to believe that. It would be the old question of revolt against the edifice men have built. You thought you could storm it, and it would capitulate; but when the winter rigours came, when passion died and self got shrunken to a meagre thing, you would seek the shelter of even that cold courtyard.

"Yes," he said aloud, "I've got to do it."

All that evening they sat silent, the four of them, as if waiting for an arrival, an event. At eleven Anne came in.

"I've been up and listened," she said. "She's perfectly quiet. She must be asleep."

Jeff rose.

"Come, father," he said. "You'll be drowsy as an owl to-morrow. We'd better get up early, all of us."

"Yes," said Anne. She knew what he meant. They had, somehow, a distasteful, puzzling piece of work cut out for them. They must be up to cope with this strange Esther.

Lydia fell asleep almost, as the cosy saying goes, as soon as her head touched the pillow. She was dead tired. But in what seemed to her the middle of the night, she heard a little noise, and flew out of bed, still dazed and blinking. She thought it was the click of a door. But Esther's door was shut, the front door, too, for she crept into the hall and peered over the railing. She went to the hall window and looked out on the dark shrubbery above the snow, and the night was still and the scene so kind it calmed her. But she could not see, beyond the shrubbery, the black figure running softly down the walk. Lydia went back to bed, and when the "midnight" hooted she drew the clothes closer about her ears and thought how glad she was to be so comfortable. It was not until the next morning that she knew the "midnight" had carried Esther with it.

XL

It was strangely neutral, the hue of the moment when they discovered she had gone. They had not called her in the morning, but Anne had listened many times at the door, and Lydia had prepared a choice tray for her, and Mary Nellen tried to keep the coals at the right ardour for toasting. Jeff had stayed in the house, walking uneasily about, and at a little after ten he came out of his chair as if he suddenly recognised the folly of staying in it so apathetically.

"Go up," he said to Lydia. "Knock. Then try the door."

Lydia got no answer to her knock, and the door yielded to her. There was the bed untouched, on the hearth the cold ashes of last night's fire. She stood stupidly looking until Jeff, listening at the foot of the stairs, called to her and then himself ran up. He read the chill order of the room and his eyes came back to Lydia's face.

"Oh," said Lydia, "will he be good to her?"

"Yes," said Jeff, "he'll be good enough. That isn't it. What a fool I am! I ought to have watched her. But Esther wasn't daring. She never did anything by herself. I couldn't get to New York now--" He paused to calculate.

He ran downstairs, and without speaking to his father, on an irrational impulse, over to Madam Bell's. There he came unprepared upon the strangest sight he had ever seen in Addington. Sophy, her cynical, pert face actually tied up into alarm, red, creased and angry, was standing in the library, and Madam Bell, in a wadded wrapper and her nightcap, was counting out money into her trembling hand. To Sophy, it was as terrifying as receiving money from the dead. She had always looked upon Madam Bell as virtually dead, and here she was ordering her to quit the house and giving her a month's wages, with all the practicality of a shrewd accountant. Madam Bell was an amazing person to look at in her wadded gown and felt slippers, with the light of life once more flickering over her parchment face.

"Rhoda Knox is gone," she announced to Jeff, the moment he walked in. "I sent her yesterday. This girl is going as soon as she can pack."

Jeff gave Sophy a directing nod and she slipped out of the room. She was as afraid of him as of the masterful dead woman in the quilted wrapper. Anything might happen since the resurrection of Madam Bell.

"Where is she?" asked Jeff, when he had closed the door.

"Esther?" said Madam Bell. "Gone. She's taken every stitch she had that was worth anything. Martha told me she was going for good."

"Who's Martha? Oh, yes, yes--Madame Beattie."

The light faded for an instant from the parchment face.

"Don't tell me," she sharply bade him, "Esther's coming back?"

"No," said Jeff. "If she does, she shall come to me."

He went away without another word, and Madam Bell called after him:

"Tell Amabel to look round and get me some help. I won't have one of these creatures that have been ruling here--except the cook. Tell Amabel to come and see me."

Jeff did remember to do that, but not until he had telephoned New York, and got his meagre fact. One of the boats sailing that morning had, among its passengers, J. L. Reardon and Mrs. Reardon. He did not inquire further. All that day he stayed at home, foolishly, he knew, lest some message come for him, not speaking of his anxiety even to Lydia, and very much let alone. That Lydia must have given his father some palliating explanation he guessed, for when Jeff said to him:

"Father, Esther's gone abroad," the colonel answered soothingly:

"Yes, my son, I know. It is in every way best."

* * * * *

The next week came the election, and Jeff had not got into the last grip of contest. He had meant to do some persuasive speaking for Alston. He thought he could rake in all Madame Beattie's contingent, now that she was away, still leaving them so friendly. But he was dull and absent-minded. Esther's going had been a defeat another braver, cleverer man, he believed, need not have suffered. At Lydia he had hardly looked since the day of Esther's going. To them all he was a closed book, tight-lipped, a mask of brooding care. Lydia thought she understood. He was raging over what he might have done. Nothing was going to make Lydia rage, she determined. She had settled down into the even swing of her one task: to help him out, to watch him, above all, whatever the emergency, to be ready.

Once, when Jeff was trying to drag his flagging energies into election work again, he met Andrea, and stopped to say he would be down at Mill End that night. But Andrea seemed, while keeping his old fealty, betokened by shining eyes and the most open smiles, to care very little about him in a political capacity. He even soothingly suggested that he should not come. Better not, Andrea said. Too much work for nothing. They knew already what to do. They understood.

"Understand what?" Jeff asked him.

They had been told before the signora went, said Andrea. She had explained it all. They would vote, every man of them. They knew how.

"It's easy enough to learn how," said Jeff impatiently. "The thing is to vote for the right man. That's what I'm coming down for."

Andrea backed away, deferentially implying that Jeff would be most welcome always, but that it was a pity he should be put to so much pains. And he did go, and found only a few scattering listeners. The others, he learned afterward, were peaceably at a singing club of their own. They had not, Jeff thought, with mortification, considered him of enough importance to listen to.

Weedon Moore, in these last days, seemed to be scoring; at least circumstance gave him his own head and he was much in evidence. He spoke a great deal, flamboyantly, on the wrongs suffered by labour, and his own consecration to the holy joy of righting them. He spoke in English wholly, because Andrea, with picturesque misery, had regretted his own inability to interpret. Andrea's throat hurt him now, he said. He had been forbidden to interpret any more. Weedie mourned the defection of Andrea. It had, he felt, made a difference, not only in the size but the responsiveness of his audiences. Sometimes he even felt they came to be amused, or to lull his possible suspicion of having lost their old allegiance. But they came.

That year every man capable of moving on two legs or of being supported into a carriage, turned out to vote. Something had been done by infection. Jeff had done it through his fervour, and Madame Beattie a thousand times more by pure dramatic eccentricity. People were at least amusedly anxious to see how it was going, and old Addingtonians felt it a cheerful duty to stand by Alston Choate. The Mill Enders voted late, all of them, so late that Weedon Moore, who kept track of their activities, wondered if they meant to vote at all. But they did vote, they also to the last man, and a rumour crept about that some irregularity was connected with the ballot. But whatever they did, it was by concerted action, after a definite design. Weedon Moore, an agitated figure, meeting Jeff, was so worried and excited by it that he had to cackle his anxiety.

"What are they doing?" he said, stopping before Jeff on the pavement. "They've got up some damned thing or other. It's illegal, Blake. I give you my word it's illegal."

"What is it?" Jeff inquired, looking down on Weedie with something of the feeling once popularly supposed to be the desert of toads before that warty personality had been advertised as beneficent to gardens.

"I don't know what it is," said Moore, almost weeping. "But it's some damned trick, and I'll be even with them."

"If they elect you--" Jeff began coldly.

"They won't elect me," said Moore, from his general overthrow. "Six months ago every man Jack of 'em was promised to me. Somebody's tampered with 'em. I don't know whether it's you or Madame Beattie. She led me on, a couple of weeks ago, into telling her what I knew about trickery at the polls--"

"All you knew?" Jeff could not resist saying. "All you know about trickery, Weedie?"

"As a lawyer," said Weedie, "I told her about writing in names. I told her about stickers--"

"What did she want to know for?" Jeff asked. He, too, was roused to sudden startled interest.

"You know as much as I do. She was interested in my election, said she was speaking for me, wanted to know how we managed to crowd in an extra name not on the ballot. Had heard of that. It worried her, she said. Blake, that old woman is as clever as the devil."

Jeff made his way past the fuming candidate and walked on, speculating. Madame Beattie had assuredly done something. She had left the inheritance of her unleashed energy, in some form, behind her.

He did not go home that late afternoon and in the early evening strolled about the streets, once meeting Choate and passing on Weedie's agonised forecast. Alston was mildly interested. He thought she couldn't have done anything effective. Her line seemed to be the wildly dramatic. Stage tricks wouldn't tip the scales, when it came to balloting. Whatever she had done, Alston, in his heart, hoped it would defeat him, and leave him to the rich enjoyment of his play-day office and his books. His mother could realise then that he had done his best, and leave him to a serene progress toward middle age. But when he got as far as that he remembered that his defeat would magnify Weedon Moore and miserably concluded he ought rather to suffer the martyrdom of office. Would Anne like him if he were defeated? He, too, was wandering about the town, and the bravado of his suit to her came back to him. It was easy to seek her out, it seemed so natural to be with her, so strange to live without her. Laughing a little, though nervously, at himself, he walked up the winding pathway to her house and asked for her. No, he would not come in, if she would be so good as to come to him. Anne came, the warmth of the firelight on her cheeks and hands. She had been sitting by the hearth reading to the colonel. Alston took her hands and drew her out to him.

"It's not very cold," he said. "One minute, Anne. Won't you love me if I am not a mayor?"

Anne didn't answer. She stood there, her hands in his, and Alston thought she was the stillest thing he had ever seen.

"You might be a snow maiden," he said. "Or an ice maiden. Or marble. Anne, I've got to melt you if you're snow and ice. Are you?" Then all he could think of was the old foolishness, "Darling Anne."

When he kissed her, immediately upon this, it was in quite a commonplace way, as if they were parting for an hour or so and had the habit of easy kissing.

"Why don't you speak," said Alston, in a rage of delight in her, "you little dumb person, you?"

Anne did better. She got her hands out of his and lifted them to draw his face again to hers.

"How silly we are," said Anne. "And the door is swinging open, and it'll let all the cold in on Farvie's feet."

Alston said a few more things of his own, wild things he was surprised at and forgot immediately and that she was always to remember, and they really parted now with the ceremonial of easy kissing. But both of them had forgotten about mayors.

Jeff, with the returns to take her, that night before going home ran in to Amabel. He believed he ought to be the first to tell her. She would be disappointed, for after all Weedon Moore was her candidate. As he got to the top of the steps Moore came scuttling out at the front door and Jeff stood aside to let him pass. He walked in, calling to her as he went. She did not answer, but he found her in the library, standing, a figure of quivering dignity, of majesty hurt and humbled. When she saw him Amabel's composure broke, and she gave a sob or two, and then twice said his name.

"What is it?" said Jeff.

He went to her and she faced him, the colour running over her face.

"That man--" she said, and stopped.

"Moore?"

"Yes. He has insulted me."

"Moore?" he repeated.

"He has asked me--Jeff, I am a woman of sixty and over--he has asked me to marry him."

"Wait a minute," said Jeff. "I've forgotten something."

He wheeled away from her and ran out and down the path after Weedie Moore. Weedie's legs, being short, had not covered ground very fast. Jeff had no trouble in overtaking him.