Chapter 8

"Then," said Jeff, including her abruptly, "you've the whip-hand. You can get Moore out of it. What's he in it for anyway? Did you have to take him over with the business?"

Miss Amabel was plainly grieved.

"Now why should you want to turn him out of it?" she asked, really of Choate who had started the attack. "Mr. Moore is a very able young man, of the highest ideals."

Jeff laughed. It was a kindly laugh. Anne was again sure he loved Miss Amabel.

"I can't see Moore changing much after twenty-five," he said to Choate, who confirmed him briefly:

"Same old Weedie."

"Mr. Moore is not popular," said Miss Amabel, with dignity, turning now to Farvie. "He never has been, here in Addington. He comes of plain people."

"That's not it, Miss Amabel," said Choate gently. "He might have been spawned out of the back meadows or he might have been--a Bracebridge." He bowed to her with a charming conciliation and Miss Amabel sat a little straighter. "If we don't accept him, it's because he's Weedon Moore."

"We were in school with him, you know: in college, too," said Jeff, with that gentleness men always accorded her, men of perception who saw in her the motherhood destined to diffuse itself, often to no end: she was so noble and at the same time so helpless in the crystal prison of her hopes. "We knew Weedie like a book."

Miss Amabel took on an added dignity, proportioned to the discomfort of her task. Here she was defending Weedon Moore whom her outer sensibilities rejected the while his labelled virtues moved her soul. Sometimes when she found herself with people like these to-night, manifestly her own kind, she was tired of being good.

"I don't know any one," said she, "who feels the prevailing unrest more keenly than Weedon Moore."

At that instant, Mary Nellen, her eyes brightening as these social activities increased, appeared in the doorway, announcing doubtfully:

"Mr. Moore."

Jeffrey, as if actually startled, looked round at Choate who was unaffectedly annoyed. Anne, rising to receive the problematic Moore, thought they had an air of wondering how they could repel unwarranted invasion. Miss Amabel, in a sort of protesting, delicate distress, was loyally striving to make the invader's path plain.

"I told him I was coming," she said. "It seems he had thought of dropping in." Then Anne went out on the heels of Mary Nellen, hearing Miss Amabel conclude, as she left, with an apologetic note unfamiliar to her soft voice, "He wants you to write something, Jeff, for the _Argosy_."

Anne, even before seeing him, became conscious that Mary Nellen regarded the newcomer as undesirable; and when she came on him standing, hat in hand, she agreed that Weedon Moore was, in his outward integument, exceedingly unpleasant: a short, swarthy, tubby man, always, she was to note, dressed in smooth black, and invariably wearing or carrying, with the gravity of a funeral mourner, what Addington knew as a "tall hat". When the weather gave him countenance, he wore a black coat with a cape. One flashing ring adorned his left hand, and he indulged a barbaric taste in flowing ties. Seeing Anne, he spoke at once, and if she had not been prepared for him she must have guessed him to be a man come on a message of importance. There was conscious emphasis in his voice, and there needed to be if it was to accomplish anything: a high voice, strident, and, like the rest of him, somehow suggesting insect life. He held out his hand and Anne most unwillingly took it.

"Miss French," said he, with no hesitation before her name, "how is Jeff?"

The mere inquiry set Anne vainly to hoping that he need not come in. But he gave no quarter.

"I said I'd run over to-night, paper or no paper. I'm frightfully busy, you know, cruelly, abominably busy. But I just wanted to see Jeff."

"Won't you come in?" said Anne.

Even then he did not abandon his hat. He kept his hold on it, bearing it before him in a way that made Anne think absurdly of shields and bucklers. When, in the library, she turned to present him, as if he were an unpleasant find she had got to vouch for somehow, the men were already on their feet and Jeff was setting forward a chair. She could not help thinking it was a clever stage business to release him from the necessity of shaking hands. But Moore did not abet him in that informality. His small hand was out, and he was saying in a sharp, strained voice, exactly as if he were making a point of some kind, an oratorical point:

"Jeff, my dear fellow! I'm tremendously glad to see you."

Anne thought Jeff might not shake hands with him at all. But she saw him steal a shamefaced look at Miss Amabel and immediately, as if something radical had to be done when it came to the friend of a beloved old girl like her, strike his hand into Moore's, with an emphasis the more pronounced for his haste to get it over. Moore seemed enraptured at the handshake and breathless over the occasion. Having begun shaking hands he kept on with enthusiasm: the colonel, Miss Amabel and Lydia had to respond to an almost fervid greeting.

Only Choate proved immune. He had vouchsafed a cool: "How are you, Weedie?" when Moore began, and that seemed all Moore was likely to expect. Then they all sat down and there was, Lydia decided, as she glanced from one to another, no more pleasure in it. There was talk. Moore chatted so exuberantly, his little hands upon his fattish knees, that he seemed to squeeze sociability out of himself in a rapture of generous willingness to share all he had. He asked the colonel how he liked Addington, and was not abashed at being reminded that the colonel had known Addington for a good many years.

"Still it's changed," said Moore, regarding him almost archly. "Addington isn't the place it was even a year ago."

"I hope we've learned something," said Miss Amabel earnestly and yet prettily too.

"My theory of Addington," said Choate easily, "is that we all wish we were back in the Addington of a hundred years ago."

"You'd want to be in the dominant class," said Moore. There was something like the trammels of an unwilling respect over his manner to Choate; yet still he managed to be rallying. "When the old merchants were coming home with china and bales of silk and Paris shoes for madam. And think of it," said he, raising his sparse eyebrows and looking like a marionette moulded to express something and saying it with painful clumsiness, almost grotesquerie, "the ships are bringing human products now. They're bringing us citizens, bone and sinew of the republic, and we cry back to china and bales of silk."

"I didn't answer you, Moore," said Choate, turning to him and speaking, Lydia thought, with the slightest arrogance. "I should have wanted to belong to the governing class--of course."

"Now!" said Miss Amabel. She spoke gently, and she was, they saw, pained at the turn the talk had taken. "Alston, why should you say that?"

"Because I mean it," said Alston. His quietude seemed to carry a private message to Moore, but he turned to her, as he spoke and smiled as if to ask her not to interpret him harshly. "Of course I should have wanted to be in the dominant class. So does everybody, really."

"No, my dear," said Miss Amabel.

"No," agreed Choate, "you don't. The others like you didn't. I won't embarrass you by naming them. You want to sit submerged, you others, and be choked by slime, if you must be, and have the holy city built up on your shoulders. But the rest of us don't. Moore here doesn't, do you, Weedie?"

Weedon gave a quick embarrassed laugh.

"You're so droll," said he.

"No," said Choate quietly, "I'm not being droll. Of course I want to belong to the dominant class. So does the man that never dominated in his life. He wants to overthrow the over-lords so he can rule himself. He wants to crowd me so he can push into a place beside me."

Moore laughed with an overdone enjoyment.

"Excellent," he said, squeezing the words out of his knees. "You're such a humourist."

If he wanted to be offensive, that was the keenest cut he could have delivered.

"I have often thought," said the colonel, beginning in a hesitating, deferent way that made his utterance rather notable, "that we saddle what we call the lower orders with motives different from our own."

"Precisely," Choate clipped in. "We used to think, when they committed a perfectly logical crime, like stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread, that it was absolutely different from anything we could have done. Whereas in their places we should have tried precisely the same thing. Just as cleanliness is a matter of bathtubs and temperature. We shouldn't bathe if we had to break the ice over a quart of water and then go out and run a trolley car all day."

Lydia's face, its large eyes fixed upon him, said so plainly "I don't believe it" that he laughed, with a sudden enjoyment of her, and, after an instant of wider-eyed surprise, she laughed too.

"And here's Miss Amabel," Choate went on, in the voice it seemed he kept for her, "going to the outer extreme and believing, because the labouring man has been bled, that he's incapable of bleeding you. Don't you think it, Miss Amabel. He's precisely like the rest of us. Like me. Like Weedon here. He'll sit up on his platform and judge me like forty thousand prophets out of Israel; but put him where I am and he'll cling with his eyelids and stick there. Just as I shall."

Miss Amabel looked deeply troubled and also at a loss.

"I only think, Alston," she said, "that so much insight, so much of the deepest knowledge comes of pain. And the poor have suffered pain so many centuries. They've learned things we don't know. Look how they help one another. Look at their self-sacrifice."

"Look at your own self-sacrifice," said Choate.

"Oh, but they know," said she. The flame of a great desire was in her face. "I don't know what it is to be hungry. If I starved myself I shouldn't know, because in somebody's pantry would be the bread-box I could put my hand into. They know, Alston. It gives them insight. When they remember the road they've travelled, they're not going to make the mistakes we've made."

"Oh, yes, they are," said Choate. "Pardon me. There are going to be robbers and pirates and Napoleons and get-rich-quicks born for quite a while yet. And they're not going to be born in my class alone--nor Weedon's."

Weedon squirmed at this, and even Jeff thought it rather a nasty cut. But Jeff did not know yet how well Choate knew Weedon in the ways of men. And Weedon accepted no rebuff. He turned to Jeff, distinctly leaving Choate as one who would have his little pleasantries.

"Jeff," he said, "I want you to do something for the _Argosy_."

Jeff at once knew what.

"Queer," he said, "how you all think I've got copy out of jail."

Anne resented the word. It was not jail, she thought, a federal prison where gentlemen, when they have done wrong or been, like Jeff, falsely accused, may go with dignity.

"My dear," said Miss Amabel, in a manner at once all compassion and inexorable demand, "you've got so much to tell us. You men in that--place," she stumbled over the word and then accepted it--"discussed the ideal republic. You made it, by discussing it."

"Yes," said Choate, in voice of curious circumspection as if he hardly knew what form even of eulogy might hurt, "it was an astonishing piece of business. You can't expect people not to notice a thing like that."

"I can't help it," said Jeff. "I don't want such a row made over it."

Whether the thing was too intimate, too near his heart still beating sluggishly it might be, from prison air, could not be seen. But Miss Amabel, exquisitely compassionate, was yet inexorable, because he had something to give and must not withhold.

"The wonderful part of it is," she said, "that when you have built up your ideal government, prison ceases to be prison. There won't be punishment any more."

"Oh, don't you make that mistake," said Jeff, instantly, moved now too vitally to keep out of it. "There are going to be punishments all along the line. The big punishment of all, when you've broken a law, is that you're outside. If it's a small break, you're not much over the sill. If it's a big break, you're absolutely out. Outside, Amabel, outside!" He never used the civil prefix before her name, and Anne wondered again whether the intimacy of the letters accounted for this sweet informality. "You're banished. What's worse than that?"

"Oh, but," said she, her plain, beautiful face beaming divinity on him as one of the children of men, "I don't want them to be banished. If anybody has sinned--has broken the law--I want him to be educated. That's all."

"Look here," said Jeff, He bent forward to her and laid the finger of one trade-stained hand in the other palm. "You're emasculating the whole nation. Let us be educated, but let us take our good hard whacks."

"Hear! hear!" said Choate, speaking mildly but yet as a lawyer, who spent his life in presenting liabilities for or against punishment. "That's hot stuff."

"I believe in law," said Jeff rapidly. "Sometimes I think that's all I believe in now."

Anne and Lydia looked at him in a breathless waiting upon his words. He had begun to justify himself to their crescent belief in him, the product of the years. His father also waited, but tremulously. Here was the boy he had wanted back, but he had not so very much strength to accord even a fulfilled delight. Jeff, forgetful of everybody but the old sybil he was looking at, sure of her comprehension if not her agreement, went on.

"I'd rather have bad laws than no laws. I believe in Sparta. I believe in the Catholic Church, if only because it has fasts and penances. We've got to toe the mark. If we don't, something's got to give it to us good and hard, the harder the better, too. Are we children to be let off from the consequences of what we've done? No, by God! We're men and we've got to learn."

Suddenly his eyes left Miss Amabel's quickened face and he glanced about him, aware of the startled tensity of gaze among the others. Moore, with a little book on his knee, was writing rapidly.

"Notes?" Jeff asked him shortly. "No, you don't."

He got up and extended his hand for the book, and Moore helplessly, after a look at Miss Amabel, as if to ask whether she meant to see him bullied, delivered it. Jeff whirled back two leaves, tore them out, crumpled them in his hand and tossed them into the fireplace.

"You can't do that, Moore," he said indifferently, and Choate murmured a monosyllabic assent.

Moore never questioned the bullying he so prodigally got. He never had at college even; he was as ready to fawn the next day. It seemed as if the inner man were small, too small for sound resentment. Jeff sat down again. He looked depressed, his countenance without inward light. But Lydia and Anne had rediscovered him. Again he was their hero, reclothed indeed in finer mail. Miss Amabel rose at once. She shook hands with the colonel, and asked Anne and Lydia to come to see her.

"Don't you do something, you two girls?" she asked, with her inviting smile. "I'm sure Jeff wrote me so."

"We dance," said Lydia, in a bubbling bright voice, as if she had run forward to be sure to get the chance of answering. "Let us come and dance for you. We can dance all sorts of things."

And Lydia was so purely childlike and dear, after this talk of punishments and duties, that involuntarily they all laughed and she looked abashed.

"Perhaps you know folk-dances," said Miss Amabel.

"Oh, yes," said Lydia, getting back her spirit. "There isn't one we don't know."

And they laughed again and Miss Amabel tied on her bonnet and went away attended by Choate, with Weedon Moore a pace behind, holding his hat, until he got out of the house, as it might be at a grotesque funeral.

Miss Amabel had called back to Lydia:

"You must come and train my classes in their national dancing."

Lydia, behind the colonel and Jeff as they stood at the front door, seized Anne's hand and did a few ecstatic little steps.

The colonel was bright-eyed and satisfied with his evening. "Jeff," said he, before they turned to separate, "I always thought you were meant for a writer."

Jeff looked at him in a dull denial, as if he wondered how any man, life being what it is, could seek to bound the lot of another man. His face, flushed darkly, was seamed with feeling.

"Father," said he, in a voice of mysterious reproach, "I don't know what I was meant to be."

X

It was Lydia who found out what Jeff meant himself to be, for the next day, in course of helping Mary Nellen, she went to his door with towels. Mr. Jeffrey had gone out, Mary Nellen said. She had seen him spading in the orchard, and if Miss Lydia wanted to carry up the towels! there was the dusting, too. Lydia, at the open door, stopped, for Jeff was sitting at his writing table, paper before him. He flicked a look at her, absently, as at an intruder as insignificant as undesired, and because the sacredness of his task was plain to her she took it humbly. But Jeff, then actually seeing her, rose and put down his pen.

"I'll take those," he said.

It troubled him vaguely to find her and Anne doing tasks. He had a worried sense that he and the colonel were living on their kind offices, and he felt like assuring Lydia she shouldn't carry towels about for either of them long. Then, as she did not yield them but looked, housekeeper-wise, at the rack still loaded with its tumbled reserves, he added:

"Give them here."

"You mustn't leave your writing," said Lydia primly if shyly, and delivered up her charge.

Jeff stepped out after her into the hall. He had left dull issues at his table, and Lydia seemed very sweet, her faith in him chiefly, though he didn't want any more of it.

"Don't worry about my writing," said he.

"Oh, no," she answered, turning on him the clarity of her glance. "I shouldn't. Authors never want it talked about."

"That's not it," said he. She found him tremendously in earnest. "I'm not an author."

"But you will be when this is written."

"I don't know," he said, "how I can make you see. The whole thing is so foreign to your ideas about books and life. It only happened that I met a man--in there--" he hesitated over it, not as regarding delicacies but only as they might affect her--"a man like a million others, some of 'em in prison, more that ought to be. Well, he talked to me. I saw what brought him where he was. It was picturesque."

"You want other people to understand," said Lydia, bright-eyed, now she was following him. "For--a warning."

His frown was heavy. Now he was trying to follow her.

"No," he said, "you're off there. I don't take things that way. But I did see it so plain I wanted everybody to see it, too. Maybe that was why I did want to write it down. Maybe I wanted to write it for myself, so I should see it plainer. It fascinated me."

Lydia felt a helpless yearning, because things were being so hard for him. She wished for Anne who always knew, and with a word could help you out when your elucidation failed.

"You see," Jeff was going on, "there's this kind of a brute born into the world now, the kind that knows how to make money, and as soon as he's discovered his knack, he's got the mania to make more. It's an obligation, an obsession. Maybe it's only the game. He's in it, just as much as if he'd got a thousand men behind him, all looting territory. It might be for a woman. But it's the game. And it's a queer game. It cuts him off. He's outside."

And here Lydia had a simple and very childlike thought, so inevitable to her that she spoke without consideration.

"You were outside, too."

Jeff gave a little shake of the head, as if that didn't matter now he was here and explaining to her.

"And the devil of it is, after they're once outside they don't know they are."

"Do you mean, when they've done something and been found guilty and--"

"I mean all along the line. When they've begun to think they'll make good, when they've begun to play the game."

"For money?"

"Yes, for money, for pretty gold and dirty bills and silver. That's what it amounts to, when you get down to it, behind all the bank balances and equities. There's a film that grows over your eyes, you look at nothing else. You don't think about--" his voice dropped and he glanced out at the walled orchard as if it were even a sacred place--"you don't think about grass, and dirt, and things. You're thinking about the game."

"Well," said Lydia joyously, seeing a green pathway out, "now you've found it's so, you don't need to think about it any more."

"That's precisely it," said he heavily. "I've got to think about it all the time. I've got to make good."

"In the same way?" said Lydia, looking up at him childishly. "With money?"

"Yes," said he, "with money. It's all I know. And without capital, too. And I'm going to keep my head, and do it within the law. Yes, by God! within the law. But I hate to do it. I hate it like the devil."

He looked so hard with resolution that she took the resolution for pride, though she could not know whether it was a fine pride or a heaven-defying one.

"You won't do just what you did before?" asserted Lydia, out of her faith in him.

"Oh, yes, I shall."

She opened terrified eyes upon him.

"Be a promoter?"

"I don't know what I shall be. But I know the money game, and I shall have to play it and make good."

She ventured a question touching on the fancies that were in her mind, part of the bewildering drama that might attend on his return. She faltered it out. It seemed too splendid really to assault fortune like that. And yet perhaps not too splendid for him. This was the question.

"And pay back--" There she hesitated, and he finished for her.

"The money I lost in a hole? Well, we'll see." This last sounded indulgent, as if he might add, "little sister ".

Lydia plucked up spirit.

"There's something else I hoped you'd do first."

"What is it?"

"I want you to prove you're innocent."

She found herself breathless over the words. They brought her very near him, and after all she was not sure what kind of brother he was, save that he had to be supremely loved. He looked pale to her now, of a yellowed, unhappy hue, and he was staring at her fixedly.

"Innocent!" he repeated. "What do you mean by innocent?"

Lydia took heart again, since he really did invite her on.

"Why, of course," she said, "we all know--Farvie and Anne and I--we know you never did it."

"Did what?"

"Lost all that money. Took it away from people."

The softness of her voice was moving to him. He saw she meant him very well indeed.

"Lydia," said he, "I lost the money. Don't make any mistake about that."

"Yes, you were a promoter," she reminded him. "You were trying to get something on the market." She seemed to be assuring him, in an agonised way, of his own good faith. "And people bought shares. And you took their money. And--" her voice broke here in a sob of irrepressible sympathy--"and you lost it."

"Yes," said he patiently. "I found myself in a tight place and the unexpected happened--the inconceivable. The market went to pieces. And of course it was at the minute I was asked to account for the funds I had. I couldn't. So I was a swindler. I was tried. I was sentenced, and I went to prison. That's all."

"Oh," said Lydia passionately, "but do you suppose we don't know you're not the only person concerned? Don't you suppose we know there's somebody else to blame?"

Jeff turned on her a sudden look so like passion of a sort that she trembled back from him. Why should he be angry with her? Did he stand by Reardon to that extent?

"What do you mean?" he asked her. "Who's been talking to you?"

"We've all been talking," said Lydia, with a frank simplicity, "Farvie and Anne and I. Of course we've talked. Especially Anne and I. We knew you weren't to blame."