The Prisoner Part 48

Mrs. Choate was a large, almost masculine looking woman, very plain indeed, Addington owned, but with beautiful manners. She was not like Alston, not like his sister, who had a highbred charm, something in the way of Alston's own. Mother was different. She was of the Griswolds who had land in Cuba and other islands, and were said to have kept slaves there while the Choates were pouring blood into the abolitionist cause.

There was a something about mother quite different from anybody in Addington. She conformed beautifully, but you would have felt she understood your not conforming. She never came to grief over the neutralities of the place, and you realised it was because she expressed so few opinions. You might have said she had taken Addington for what it was and exhausted it long ago. Her gaze was an absent, yet, of late years, a placid one. She might have been dwelling upon far-off islands which excited in her no desire to be there. She was too cognisant of the infinite riches of time that may be supposed to make up eternity. If she was becalmed here in Addington, some far-off day a wind would fill her sails and she might seek the farther seas. And, like her son, she read novels.

Alston, going home at midnight, saw the pale glimmer in her room and knew she was at it there. He went directly upstairs and stopped at her door, open into the hall. He was not conscious of having anything to say. Only he did feel a curious hesitation for the moment. Here in Addington was an Esther whom he had just met for the first time. Here was another woman who had not one of Esther's graces, but whom he adored because she was the most beautiful of mothers. Would she be horrified at the little strange animal that had looked at him out of Esther's eyes?

He had never seen his mother shocked at anything. But that, he told himself, was because she was so calm. The Woman's Club of Addington could have told him it was because she had poise. She looked up, as he stood in the doorway, and laid her book face downward on the bed.

Usually when he came in like this she moved the reading candle round, so that the hood should s.h.i.+eld his eyes. But to-night she gently turned it toward him, and Alston did not realise that was because his f.a.gged face and disordered hair had made her anxious to understand the quicker what had happened to him.

I "Sit down," she said.

And then, having fairly seen him, she did turn the hood. Alston dropped into the chair by the bedside and looked at her. She was a plain woman, it is true, but of heroic lines. Her iron-grey hair was brushed smoothly back into its two braids, and her nightgown, with its tiny edge, was of the most p.r.o.nouncedly sensible cut, of high neck and long sleeves. Yet there was nothing uncouth about her in her elderly ease of dress and manner. She was a wholesome woman, and the heart of her son turned pathetically to her.

"Mary gone to bed?" he asked.

"Yes," said Mrs. Choate. "She was tired. She's been rehearsing a dance with those French girls and their cla.s.s."

Alston lay back in his chair, regarding her with hot, tired eyes. He wanted to know what she thought of a great many things: chiefly whether a woman who had married Jeff Blake need be afraid of him. But there was a well-defined code between his mother and himself. He was not willing to trap her into honest answers where he couldn't put honest questions.

"Mother," said he, and didn't know why he began or indeed that he was going to say just that at all, "do you ever wish you could run away?"

She gave the corner of the book a pat with one beautiful hand.

"I do run away," she said. "I was a good many miles from here when you came in. And I shall be again when you are gone. Among the rogues, such as we don't see."

"What is it?"

"Mysteries of Paris."

"That's our vice, isn't it," said Alston, "yours and mine, novel reading?"

"You're marked with it," said she.

There was something in the quiet tone that arrested him and made him look at her more sharply. The tone seemed to say she had not only read novels for a long time, but she had had to read them from a grave design. "It does very well for me," she said, "but it easily mightn't for you. Alston, why don't you run away?"

Alston stared at her.

"Would you like to go abroad?" he asked her then, "with Mary? Would you like me to take you?"

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Choate. "Mary wouldn't want to. She's bewitched with those French girls. And I don't want to. I couldn't go the only way I'd like."

"You could go any way you chose," said Alston, touched. He knew there was a war chest, and it irked him to think his mother wouldn't have it tapped for her.

"Oh, no," said she. "I should need to be slim and light, and put on short petticoats and ride horses and get away from tigers. I don't want to shoot them, but I'd rather like to get away from them."

"Mother," said Alston, "what's come over you? Is it this book?"

She laughed, in an easy good-humour.

"Books don't come over me," said she. "I believe it's that old Madame Beattie."

"What's Madame Beattie done that any--" he paused; Esther's wrongs at Madame Beattie's hands were too red before him--"that any lady would be willing to do?"

"I really don't know, Alston," said his mother frankly. "It's only that when I think of that old party going out every night--"

"Not every night."

"Well, when she likes, and getting up on a platform and telling goodness knows what to the descendants of the oldest civilisations, and their bringing her home on their shoulders--"

"No, no, mother, they don't do that."

"I tell you what it makes me feel, Alston: it makes me feel _fat_."

"Madame Beattie weighs twenty pounds more than you do, and she's not so tall by three inches."

"And then I realise that when women say they want to vote, it isn't because they're all piously set on saving the country. It's because they've peeped over the fence and got an idea of the game, and they're crazy to be in it."

"But, mother, there's no game, except a dirty one of graft and politics.

There's nothing in it."

"No," said Mrs. Choate. "There isn't in most games. But people play them."

"You don't think Amabel is in it for the game?"

"Oh, no! Amabel's a saint. It wouldn't take more than a basket of wood and a bunch of matches to make her a martyr."

"But, mother," said Alston, "you belong to the antis."

"Do I?" asked his mother. "Yes, I believe I do."

"Do you mean to say you're not sincere?"

"Why, yes, of course I'm sincere. So are they. Only, doesn't it occur to you they're having just as much fun organising and stirring the pot as if it was the other pot they were stirring? Besides they att.i.tudinise while they stir, and say they're womanly. And they like that, too."

"Do you think they're in it for the game?"

"No, no, Alston, not consciously. n.o.body's in it for the game except your Weedon Moores. Any more than a nice girl puts on a ribbon to trap her lover. Only nature's behind the girl, and nature's behind the game.

She's behind all games. But as to the antis--" said Mrs. Choate impatiently, "they've gone on putting down cards since the rules were changed."

Alston rose and stood looking down at her. She glanced up brightly, met his eyes and laughed.

"All is," said she, in a current phrase even cultured Addington had caught from its "help" from the rural radius outside, "I just happened to feel like telling you if you want to run away, you go. And if I weighed a hundred and ten and were forty-five, I'd go with you.

Actually, I should advise you, if you're going to stay here, to stir the pot a little now it's begun to boil so hard."

"Get into politics?" he asked, remembering Jeff.

"Maybe."

She smiled at him, pleasantly, not as a mother smiles, but an implacable mistress of destiny. In spite of her large tolerance, there were moments when she did speak. So she had looked when he said, as a boy, that he shouldn't go to gymnasium, and she had told him he would. And he went.

Again, when he was in college and had fallen in with a set of ultra-moderns and swamped himself in decoration and the beguilements of a spurious art, he had seen that look; then she had told him the cla.s.sics were not to be neglected. Now here was the look again. Alston began to have an uncomfortable sense that he might have to run for office in spite of every predilection he ventured to cherish. He could have thrown himself on the floor and bellowed to be let alone.

"But keep your head, dear," she was saying. "Keep your head. Don't let any man--or woman either--lose it for you. That's the game, Alston, really."