The Prisoner Part 26

The homely touch almost conquered him. He thought perhaps such a fierce little barbarian might even find it better to eat bitter bread with her own than to wander out into strange flowery paths.

"Are you going to heaven, too, Lydia?" he ventured. "With Anne?"

"I'm going everywhere my folks go," she said, with composure. "Now I can't talk any more. I told Mary Nellen I'd dust while they do the silver."

The atmosphere of a perfectly conventional living was about them.

Jeffrey had to adjure himself to keep awake to the difficulties he alone had made. He had come out to confess to her the lawlessness of his mind toward her, and she was deciding merely to go on living with him and her father, which meant, in the first place, dusting for Mary Nellen. They walked along the orchard in silence, and Jeffrey, with relief, also took a side track to the obvious. Absently his eyes travelled along the orchard's level length, and his great thought came to him. The ground did it. The earth called to him. The dust rose up impalpably and spoke to him.

"Lydia," said he, "I see what to do."

"What?"

The startled brightness in her eyes told him she feared his thought, and, not knowing, as he did, how great it was, suspected him of tragic plans for going away.

"I'll go to work on this place. I'll plough it up. I'll raise things, and father and I'll dig."

As he watched her interrogatively the colour faded from her face. The relief of hearing that homespun plan had chilled her blood, and she was faint for an instant with the sickness of hearty youth that only knows it feels odd to itself and concludes the strangeness is of the soul. But she did not answer, for Anne was at the window, signalling.

"Come in," said Lydia. "She wants us."

Miss Amabel, in a morning elegance of black muslin and silk gloves, was in the library. Anne looked excited and the colonel, there also, quite pleasurably stirred. Lydia was hardly within the door when Anne threw the news at her.

"Dancing cla.s.ses!"

"At my house," said Miss Amabel. She put a warm hand on Lydia's shoulder and looked down at her admiringly: wistfully as well. "Can anything,"

the look said, "be so young, so unthinkingly beautiful and have a right to its own richness? How could we turn this dower into the treasury of the poor and yet not impoverish the child herself?" "We'll have an Italian cla.s.s and a Greek. And there are others, you know, Poles, Armenians, Syrians. We'll manage as many as we can."

They sat down to planning cla.s.ses and hours, and Jeffrey, looking on, noted how keen the two girls were, how intent and direct. They balked at money. If the cla.s.ses were for the poor, they proposed giving their time as Miss Amabel gave her house. But she disposed of that with a conclusive gravity, and a touch, Jeffrey was amused to see, of the Addington manner. Miss Amabel was pure Addington in all her unconsidered impulses. She wanted to give, not to receive. Yet if you reminded her that giving was the prouder part, she would vacate her ground of privilege with a perfect simplicity sweet to see. When she got up Jeffrey rose with her, and though he took the hand she offered him, he said:

"I'm going along with you."

And they were presently out in Addington streets, walking together almost as it might have been when they walked from Sunday school and she was "teacher ". He began on her at once.

"Amabel, dear, what are you running with Weedon Moore for?"

She was using her parasol for a cane, and now, in instinctive remonstrance, she struck it the more forcibly on the sidewalk and had to stop and pull it out from a worn s.p.a.ce between the bricks.

"I'm glad you spoke of Weedon," she said. "It's giving me a chance to say some things myself. You know, Jeffrey, you're very unjust to Weedon."

"No, I'm not," said Jeff.

"Alston Choate is, too."

"Choate and I know him, better than you or any other woman can in a thousand years."

"You think he's the same man he was in college."

"Fellows like Moore don't change. There's something inherently rotten in 'em you can't sweeten out."

"Jeffrey, I a.s.sure you he has changed. He's a power for good. And when he gets his nomination, he'll be more of a power yet."

"Nomination. For what?"

"Mayor."

"Weedon Moore mayor of this town? Why, the cub! We'll duck him, Choate and I." They were climbing the rise to her red brick house, large and beautiful and kindly. It really looked much like Miss Amabel herself, a little unkempt, but generous and belonging to an older time. They went in and Jeffrey, while she took off her bonnet and gloves, stood looking about him in the landscape-papered hall.

"Go into the east room, dear," said she. "Why, Jeff, what is it?"

He was standing still, looking now up the stairs.

"Oh," said he, "I believe I'm going to cry. It hasn't changed--any more than you have. You darling!"

Miss Amabel put her hand on his shoulder, and he drew it to his lips; and then she slipped it through his arm and they went into the east room together, which also had not changed, and Jeff took his accustomed place on the sofa under the portrait of the old judge, Miss Amabel's grandfather. Jeff shook off sentiment, the softness he could not afford.

"I tell you I won't have it," he said. "Weedon Moore isn't going to be mayor of this town. Besides he can't. He hasn't been in politics--"

"More or less," said she.

"Run for office?"

"Yes."

"Ever get any?"

"No."

"There! what d'I tell you?"

"But he has a following of his own now," said she, in a quiet triumph, he thought. "Since he has done so much for labour."

"What's he done?"

"He has organised--"

"Strikes?"

"Yes. He's been all over the state, working."

"And talking?"

"Why, yes, Jeff! Don't be unjust. He has to talk."

"Amabel," said Jeffrey, with a sudden seriousness that drew her renewed attention, "have you the slightest idea what kind of things Moore is pouring into the ears of these poor devils that listen to him?"

She hesitated.

"Have you, now?" he insisted.