Chapter 32

In less than ten minutes, he walked into Miss Amabel's library again, a little breathless, with eyes shining somewhat and his nostrils big, it might be thought, from haste. She had composed herself, and he knew her confidence was neither to be repeated nor enlarged upon. There she sat awaiting him, dignity embodied, a little more tense than usual and her head held high. All her ancestors might have been assembled about her, invisible but exacting, and she accounting to them for the indignity that had befallen her, and assuring them it was to her, as it would have been to them, incredible. She was even a little stiff with Jeff at first, because she had told him what she would naturally have hidden, like a disgraceful secret. Jeff understood her perfectly. She had met Weedon Moore on philanthropic grounds, an equal so long as they were both avowed philanthropists. But when the little man aspired unduly and ventured to pull at the hem of her maiden gown, Christian tolerance went by the board and she was Addington and he was Weedon Moore. She would never be able to summon Christian virtues to the point of a community of interests with him again. Jeff understood Moore, too, Moore who was probably on his way home at the moment getting himself together after a disconcerting bodily shock such as he had not encountered since their old school days when he had done "everything--and told of it ". He had counted on her sympathy over his defeat, and chosen that moment to make his incredible plea.

"Did you do what you had forgotten?" Amabel asked.

"Yes," said Jeff glibly. "I did it quite easily. I've come to tell you the news. Perhaps you know it already. Alston Choate's elected."

"Yes," said Miss Amabel, in a stately manner. "I had just heard it."

"I'm going round there," said Jeff, "to congratulate his mother. It's her campaign, you know. He never'd have run if it hadn't been for her."

"I didn't know Mrs. Choate had any such interest in local affairs," said Amabel.

She was aware Jeff was smoothing her down, ruffled feather after feather, and she was pathetically grateful. If she hadn't kept a strong grip on herself, her lip would have been quivering still.

"In a way she's not. She doesn't care about Addington as we do, but she hates to see old traditions go to the dogs. I've an idea she'll stand behind Alston and really run the show. Put on your bonnet and come with me. It's a shame to stay in the house a night like this."

She still knew his purpose and acquiesced in it. He hated to leave her to solitary thoughts of the indignity Moore had offered her, and also she hated to be left. She put on her thick cloak and her bonnet--there were no assumptions with Miss Amabel that she wasn't over sixty--and they went forth. But Mrs. Choate was not at home, nor was Mary. The maid thought they had gone down town for the return. Jeff told her Mr. Choate was to be mayor--no one in Addington seemed to pay much attention to the rest of the ticket that year--and she returned quite prosaically, "God save us!"

"Save us from Alston?" asked Jeff, as they went away, and Miss Amabel forgot Moore and laughed.

They went on down town with the purpose of seeing life, as Jeff said, and got into a surge of shiny-eyed Mill Enders who looked to Jeff as if they were commiserating him although it was his candidate that won. Andrea, indeed, in the moment of their meeting and parting almost wept over him. And face to face they met Lydia.

"I've lost Farvie," she said, "and Anne. Can't I come with you?"

So they went on together, Lydia much excited and Miss Amabel puzzled, in her wistful way, at finding social Addington and working Addington shoulder to shoulder in their extraordinary interest in the election though never in the common roads of life.

"But why the deuce," said Jeff, "Andrea and his gang look so mournful I can't see."

"Why," said Lydia, "don't you know? They voted for you, and their votes were thrown out."

"For me?"

"Yes, Madame Beattie told them to. She'd planned it before she went away, but somehow it fell through. They were to put stickers on the ballot, but at the last the stickers scared them, and they just wrote in your name."

"Lydia," said Jeff, "you're making this up."

"Oh, no, I'm not," said Lydia. "Mr. Choate told me. I knew it was going to happen, but he's just told me how it was. They wrote 'Prisoner Blake' in all kinds of scrawls and skriggles. They didn't know they'd got to write your real name. I call it a joke on Madame Beattie."

To Lydia it looked like a joke on herself also, though a sorry one. She thought it very benevolent of Madame Beattie to have prepared such a dramatic surprise, and that it was definite ill-fortune for Jeff to have missed the full effect of it. But the earth to Lydia was a flare of dazzling roads all leading from Jeff; he might take any one of them.

To Amabel the confusion of voting was a matter of no interest, and Jeff said nothing. Lydia was not sure whether he had even really heard. Then Amabel said if there were going to be speeches she hardly thought she cared for them, and they walked home with her and left her at the door, though not before she had put a kind hand on Jeff's shoulder and told him in that way how grateful she was to him. After she had gone in Jeff, so curious he had to say it before they started to walk away, turned upon Lydia.

"How do you know so much about her?" he began.

"Madame Beattie? We used to talk together," said Lydia demurely.

"You knew her confounded plans?"

"Some of them."

"And never told?"

"They were secrets," said Lydia. "Come, let's walk along."

"No, no. I want you where I can look at you, so you won't do any romancing about that old enchantress. If you know so much, tell me one thing more. She's gone. She can't hurt you."

"What is it?" asked Lydia.

"What did she tell those fellows about me?"

"Andrea?"

"Andrea and his gang. To make them treat me like a Hindoo god. No, I'll tell you how they treated me. As savages treat the first white man they've ever seen till they find he's a rotten trader."

"Oh," said Lydia, "it can't do any harm to tell you that."

"Any harm? I ought to have known it from the first. Out with it."

"Well, she told them you had been in prison, and you were sent there by Weedon Moore and his party--"

"His party? What was that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Anybody can have a party. Something like Tammany, maybe. You'd been sent to prison because it was you that had got them their decent wages, and had the nice little houses built down at Mill End. And there was a conspiracy against you, and she heard of it and came over to tell them how it was. But you were in prison because you stood up for labour."

"My word!" said Jeff. "And they believed her."

"Anybody'd believe anything from Madame Beattie," Lydia said positively. "She told them lots of stories about you, lovely stories. Sometimes she'd tell them to me afterward. She made you into a hero."

"Moses," said Jeff, "leading them out of bondage."

"Yes. Come, we can't stand here. If Miss Amabel sees us she'll think we're crazy."

They walked down the path and out between the stone pillars where he had met Esther. Jeff remembered it, and out of his wish to let Lydia into his mind said, as they passed into the street:

"I have heard from her."

Lydia's sudden happiness in the night and in his company--in knowing, too, she was well aware, that there was no Esther near--saw the cup dashed from her lips. Jeff didn't wait for her to answer.

"From the boat," he said. "It was very short. She was with him. We weren't to send her any more money. She said she had taken his name."

"How can she?" said Lydia stupidly. "She couldn't marry him."

"Maybe she thinks she can," said Jeff. He was willing to keep alive her unthinking innocence. It was not the outcome of ignorance that cramps and stultifies. He meant Lydia should be a child for a long time. "Now, see. Her going makes it possible for me to be free--legally, I mean. When I can marry, Lydia--" He stopped there. They were walking on the narrow pavement, but not even their hands touched. "Do you love me," Jeff asked, "as much as you thought? That way, I mean?"

"Yes," said Lydia. "But I know what you'd like. Not to talk about it, not to think about it much, but take care of Farvie--and you write--and both of us work on plays--and sometime--"

"Yes," said Jeff, "sometime--"

One tremendous desire, of all the desires tumultuous in him, was strongest. If Lydia was to be his--though already she seemed supremely his in all the shy fealties of the moment--not a petal of the flower of love should be lost to her. She should find them all dewy and unwithered in her bridal crown. There should not be a kiss, a hot protestation, the tawdry path of love half tasted yet long deferred. Lydia should, for the present, stay a child. His one dear thought, the thought that made him feel unimaginably free, came winging to him like a bird with messages.

"We aren't," he said, "going to be prisoners, either of us."

"No," said Lydia soberly. She knew by her talk with him and reading what he had imperfectly written, that he meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible paradox of binding himself to the law.

"We aren't going to be downed by loving each other so we can't stand up to it and say we'll wait."

"I can stand up to it," said Lydia. "I can stand up to anything--for you."

"I don't know," he said, "just how we're coming out. I mean, I don't know whether I'm coming out something you'll like or not like. How can a man be sure what's in him? Shall I wake up some time and know, because I've been a thief, I ought never to think of anything now but money--paying back, cent for cent, or cents for dollars, what I lost? I don't know. Or shall I think I'm right in not doing anything spectacular and plodding along here and working for the town? I don't know that. One thing I know--you. If I said I loved you it wouldn't be a millionth part of what I do. I'm founded on you. I'm rooted in you. There! that's enough. Stop me. That's the thing I wasn't going to do."

They were at their own gate. They halted there.

"You'd better go down and find Anne and Farvie," said Lydia.

She stood in the light from the lamp and he looked full at her. This was a Lydia he meant never to call out from her maiden veiling after to-night until the day when he could summon her for open vows and unstinted cherishing. He wanted to learn her face by heart. How was her brave soul answering him? The child face, sweet in every tint and line of it, turned to him in an unhesitating response. It was the garden of love, and, too, a pure unhindered happiness.

"I'm going in," said Lydia, "to get something ready for them to eat--Farvie and Anne. For us, too."

She took a little run away from him, and he watched her light figure until the shrubbery hid her. At the door, it must have been, she gave a clear call. Jeff answered the call, and then went on to find his father and Anne. He knew he should not see just the Lydia that had run away from him until the day she came back again, into his arms.

THE END

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+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Transcriber's note | | | | The following changes have been made in the text. | | | | 'cermony' changed to 'ceremony' | | 'paraphase' changed to 'paraphrase' | | 'hestitate' changed to 'hesitate' | | 'fleering' changed to 'fleeting' | | | | All other inconsistencies are as in the original. | | The author's spelling has been maintained. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+