The Prisoner Part 37

Lydia turned away from him, and he could fancy the bright tears dropping as she walked. "Oh, dear!" he heard her say. "Oh, dear!"

"Lydia!" he called, in an impatience of tenderness and misery. "Come back here. Don't you know I'd do anything on earth I could for you? But there's nothing I can do. You wouldn't ask a lame man to dance. There!

that shows you. When it comes to dancing you can understand. I'm a cripple, Lydia. Don't you see?"

She had turned obediently, and now she smeared the tears away with one small hand.

"You don't understand," she said. "You don't understand a thing. We've thought of it all this time, Anne and I, how you'd come out and be proved not guilty--"

"But, Lydia," he said gravely, "I was guilty. And besides being guilty of things the courts condemned me for, I was guilty of things I had to condemn myself for afterward. I wasn't a criminal merely. I was a waster and a fool."

"Yes," said Lydia, looking at him boldly, "and if you were guilty who made you so? Who pushed you on?"

She had never entirely abandoned her theory of Reardon. He and Esther, in her suspicion, stood side by side. Looking at him, she rejoiced in what she thought his confirmation. The red had run into his face and he looked at her with brightened eyes.

"You don't know anything about it," he said harshly. "I did what I did.

And I got my medicine. And if there's a decent impulse left in me to-day, it was because I got it."

Lydia walked away through the soft dirt and felt as if she were dancing.

He had looked guilty when she had asked him who pushed him on. He and she both knew it was Esther, and a little more likelihood of Madame Beattie's blackguarding Esther in print must rouse him to command the situation.

Jeffrey finished his row, and then hurried into the house. It was the late afternoon, and he went to his room and dressed, in time for supper.

Lydia, glancing at him as he left the table, thought exultantly: "I've stirred him up, at least. Now what is he going to do?"

Jeffrey went strolling down the drive, and quickened his steps when the shrubbery had him well hidden from the windows. Something a.s.sured him it was likely Weedon Moore lived still in the little sharp-gabled house on a side street where he had years ago. His mother had been with him then, and Jeff remembered Miss Amabel had scrupulously asked for her when Moore came to call. The little house was unchanged, brightly painted, gay in diamond trellis-work and picked out with scarlet tubs of hydrangea in the yard. A car stood at the gate, and Weedon, b.u.t.toning his coat, was stepping in. The car ran past, and Jeff saw that the man beside Moore was the interpreter of that night at the old circus-ground.

"So," he thought, "more ginger for the labouring man."

He turned about and walking thoughtfully, balked of his design, reflected with distaste that grew into indignation on Moore's incredible leaders.h.i.+p. It seemed monstrous. Here was ignorance fallen into the hands of the demagogue. It was an outrage on the decencies. And then Madame Beattie waved to him from Denny's hack, and he stepped into the road to speak to her.

"I was going to see you," she said. "Get in here."

Jeff got in and disposed his length as best he might in the cramped interior, redolent now of varied scents, all delicate but mingled to a suffocating potency.

"Tell him to drive along outside the town," she bade. "Were you going to see me?"

"No," said Jeffrey, after executing her order. "I've told you I can't go to see you."

"Because Esther made that row? absurd! It's Susan's house."

"I'm not likely to go into it," said Jeff drily, "unless I am summoned."

"She's a fool."

"But I don't mind telling you where I was going," said Jeff. "I was going to lick Weedon Moore--or the equivalent."

"Not on account of my interview?" said Madame Beattie, laughing very far down in her anatomy. Her deep laugh, Jeff always felt, could only have been attained by adequate support in the diaphragm. "Bless you, dear boy, you needn't blame him. I went to him. Went to his office. Blame me."

"Oh, I blame you all right," said Jeff, "but you're not a responsible person. A chap that owns a paper is."

"I wish you'd met him," she said, in great enjoyment. "Where'd he go, Jeffrey? Can't we find him now?"

"I suspect he went to the old circus-ground. I caught him there talking to Poles and Finns and Italians and Greeks, telling them the country was no good and they owned it."

"Why, the fellow can't speak to them." Madame Beattie, being a fluent linguist, had natural scorn of a tubby little New Englander who said "ma'am ".

"Oh, he had an interpreter."

"We'll drive along there," said Madame Beattie. "You tell Denny. I should dearly like to see them. Poles, do you say? I didn't know there were such people in town."

Jeffrey, rather curious himself, told Denny, and they bowled c.u.mbrously along. He felt in a way obliged to proffer a word or two about the interview.

"What the devil made you do it anyway?" he asked her; but Madame Beattie chuckled and would not answer.

XXI

All the way along, in the warm twilight, Madame Beattie was gay over the prospect of being fought for. With the utmost precision and unflagging spirit she arranged a plausible cause for combat, and Jeffrey, not in the least intending to play his allotted part, yet enjoyed the moment fully.

"You shall do it," Madame Beattie a.s.sured him, as if she permitted him to enter upon a task for which there was wide compet.i.tion. "You shall thrash him, and he will put it in his paper, and the European papers will copy."

"I haven't much idea the _Argosy_ is read in foreign capitals," Jeff felt bound to a.s.sure her.

"Oh, but we can cable it. The French journals--they used to be very good to me."

With that her face darkened, not in a softening melancholy, but old bitterness and defeat. She was not always able to ignore the contrast between the spring of youth and this meagre eld. Jeffrey saw the tremendous recognition she a.s.suredly had had, grown through the illusive fructifying of memory into something overwhelming, and he was glad starved vanity might once more be fed. She seemed to him a most piteous spectacle, youth and power in ruins, and age too poor to nourish even a vine to drape the crumbling walls.

"Patricia Beattie," she continued, "again a _casus belli_. Combat between two men--" "There won't be any combat," Jeff reminded her. "If I kick Weedie, he'll take it lying down. That's Weedie."

"I shall stand by," said Madame Beattie. "If you go too far I shall interfere. So you can go as far as you like."

"I do rather want to know what Weedie's at," said Jeff. "But I sha'n't kick him. He doesn't deserve it at one time any more than another, though he has different degrees of making himself offensive."

She was ingenuously disappointed. She even reproached him:

"You said you were going to do it."

"That was in my haste," said Jeffrey. "I can't lick him with a woman standing by. I should feel like a fool."

Denny was drawing up at the circus-ground.

"Well," said Madame Beattie, "you've disappointed me tremendously.

That's all I can say."

It was dark now, and though the season was more advanced, Jeffrey could imagine that this was the moment of his arrival that other night, save that he was not now footsore or dull in the mind. But the same dusk of crowding forms lay thickly on the field, and there, he knew, was the stationary car; there were the two figures standing in it, Moore and his interpreter. He could fill out the picture with a perfect accuracy, Moore gesticulating and throwing frenzy into his high-pitched voice, which now came stridently. Madame Beattie breathed out excitement.

Nothing so spiced had ever befallen her in Addington.