The Prisoner Part 21

He dropped her wrist.

"Oh, come into the library," said Madame Beattie. "I can't stand. My knees are creaking. Come, Esther, ask your husband in."

Madame Beattie, billowing along in the witch-patterned silk and clicking on prodigiously high heels and Esther with her head haughtily up, led the way, and Jeff, following them, sat down as soon as they had given him leave by doing it, and looked about the room with a faint foolish curiosity to note whether it, too, had changed. Madame Beattie thrust out a pretty foot, and Esther, perched on the piano stool, looked rigidly down at her trembling hands. She was very pale. Suddenly she recovered herself, and turned to Madame Beattie.

"He had just come," she said. "He came in. I didn't ask him to. He had not--" a little note like fright or triumph beat into her voice--"he had not--kissed me."

She turned to him as if for a confirmation he could not in honesty refuse her, and Madame Beattie burst into a laugh, one of perfect acceptance of things as they are, human frailties among the first.

"Esther," she said, "you're a little fool. If you want a divorce what do you give yourself away for? Your counsel wouldn't let you."

The whole implication was astounding to Jeff; but the only thing he could fix definitely was the concrete possibility that she had counsel.

"Who is your counsel, Esther?" he asked her.

But Esther had gone farther than discretion bade.

"I am not obliged to say," she answered, with a stubbornness equal to his own, whatever that might prove. "I am not obliged to say anything.

But I do think I have a right to ask you to tell Aunt Patricia that I have not taken you back, in any sense whatever. Not--not condoned."

She slipped on the word and he guessed that it had been used to her and that although she considered it of some value, she had not technically taken it in.

"What had you to condone in me, Esther?" he asked her gently. Suddenly she seemed to him most pathetic in her wilful folly. She had always been, she would always be, he knew, a creature who ruled through her weakness, found it an a.s.set, traded on it perhaps, and whereas once this had seemed to him enchanting, now, in the face of ill-fortune it looked pitifully inadequate and base.

"I was afraid of you," she insisted. "I am now."

"Well!" said Jeff. He found himself smiling at Madame Beattie, and she was answering his smile. Perhaps it was rather the conventional tribute on his part, to conceal that he might easily have thrown himself back in his chair behind the shelter of his hands, or gone down in any upheaval of primal emotions; and perhaps he saw in her answer, if not sympathy, for she was too impersonal for that, a candid understanding of the little scene and an appreciation of its dramatic quality. "Then," said he, after his monosyllable, "there is nothing left me but to go." When he had risen, he stood looking down at his wife's beautiful dusky head.

Incredible to think it had ever lain on his breast, or that the fact of its cheris.h.i.+ng there made no difference to her embryo heart! A tinge of irony came into his voice. "And I am willing to a.s.sure Madame Beattie,"

he proceeded, "in the way of evidence, that you have not in any sense taken me back, nor have you condoned anything I may have done."

As he was opening the outer door, in a confusion of mind that communicated itself disturbingly to his eyes and ears, he seemed to hear Madame Beattie adjuring Esther ruthlessly not to be a fool.

"Why, he's a man, you little fool," he heard her say, not with pa.s.sion but a negligent scorn ample enough to cover all the failings of their common s.e.x. "He's more of a man than he was when he went into that hideous place. And after all, who sent him there?"

Jeff walked out and closed the door behind him with an exaggerated care.

It hardly seemed as if he had the right, except in a salutary humbleness, even to touch a door which shut in Esther to the G.o.ds of home. He went back to his father's house, and there was Lydia singing as she dusted the library. He walked in blindly not knowing whether she was alone; but here was a face and a voice, and his heart was sore. Lydia, at sight of him, laid down her cloth and came to meet him. Neither did she think whether they were alone, though she did remember afterward that Farvie had gone into the orchard for his walk. Seeing Jeff's face, she knew some mortal hurt was at work within him, and like a child, she went to him, and Jeff put his face down on her cheek, and his cheek, she felt, was wet. And so they stood, their arms about each other, and Lydia's heart beat in such a sick tumult of rage and sorrow that it seemed to her she could not stand so and uphold the heavy weight of his grief. In a minute she whispered to him:

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes."

"Was she--cruel?"

"Don't! don't!" Jeff said, in a broken voice.

"Do you love her?" she went on, in an inexorable fierceness.

"No! no! no!" And then a voice that did not seem to be his and yet was his, came from him and overthrew all his old traditions of what he had been and what he must therefore be: "I only love you."

Then, Lydia knew, when she thought of it afterward, in a burning wonder, they kissed, and their tears and the kiss seemed as one, a bond against the woman who had been cruel to him and an eternal pact between themselves. And on the severing of the kiss, terrible to her in her innocence, she flung herself away from him and ran upstairs. Her flight was noiseless, as if now no one must know, but he heard the shutting of a door and the sound of a turning key.

XII

That night Anne was wakened from her sleep by a wisp of a figure that came slipping to her bedside, announced only by the cautious breathing of her name:

"Anne! Anne!" her sister was whispering close to her cheek.

"Why, Lyd," said Anne, "what is it?"

The figure was kneeling now, and Anne tried to rise on her elbow to invite Lydia in beside her. But Lydia put a hand on her shoulder and held her still.

"Whisper," she said, and then was silent so long that Anne, waiting and hearing her breathe, stared at her in the dark and wondered at her.

"What is it, lovey?" she asked at length, and Lydia's breathing hurried into sobs, and she said Anne's name again, and then, getting a little control of herself, asked the question that had brought her.

"Anne, when people kiss you, is it different if they are men?"

Now Anne did rise and turned the clothes back, but Lydia still knelt and s.h.i.+vered.

"You've been having bad dreams," said Anne. "Come in here, lovey, and Anne'll sing 'Lord Rendal.'"

"I mean," said Lydia, from her knees, "could anybody kiss me, except Farvie, and not have it like Farvie--I mean have it terrible--and I kiss him back--and--Anne, what would it mean?"

"That's a nightmare," said Anne. "Now you've got all cool and waked up, you run back to bed, unless you'll get in here."

Lydia put a fevered little hand upon her.

"Anne, you must tell me," she said, catching her breath. "Not a nightmare, a real kiss, and neither of us wanting to kiss anybody, and still doing it and not being sorry. Being glad."

She sounded so like herself in one of her fiercenesses that Anne at last believed she was wholly awake and felt a terror of her own.

"Who was it, Lydia?" she asked sternly. "Who is it you are thinking about?"

"n.o.body," said Lydia, in a sudden curt withdrawal. She rose to her feet.

"Yes, it was a nightmare."

She padded out of the room and softly closed the door, and Anne, left sitting there, felt unreasoning alarm. She had a moment's determination to follow her, and then she lay down again and thought achingly of Lydia who was grown up and was yet a child. And still, Anne knew, she had to come to woman's destiny. Lydia was so compact of sweetnesses that she would be courted and married, and who was Anne, to know how to marry her rightly? So she slept, after a troubled interval; but Lydia lay awake and stared the darkness through as if it held new paths to her desire.

What was her desire? She did not know, save that it had all to do with Jeff. He had been cruelly used. He must not be so dealt with any more.

Her pa.s.sion for his well-being, germinating and growing through the years she had not seen him, had come to flower in a hot resolve that he should be happy now. And in some way, some headlong, resistless way, she knew she was to make his happiness, and yet in her allegiance to him there was trouble and pain. He had made her into a new creature. The kiss had done it.

He would not, Lydia thought, have kissed her if it were wrong, and yet the kiss was different from all others and she must never tell. Nor must it come again. She was plighted to him, not as to a man free to love her, but to his well-being; and it was all most sacred and not to be undone. She was exalted and she was shuddering with a formless sense of the earth sway upon her. She had ever been healthy-minded as a child; even the pure imaginings of love had not beguiled her. But now something had come out of the earth or the air and called to her, and she had answered; and because it was so inevitable it was right--yet right for only him to know. Who else could understand?