The Prisoner Part 60

"We've got to be punished anyhow," said his mother. "And I suppose the only punishment we should feel is the punishment of money and blood."

"Let's run away, mother," said Alston. "Let's pick up Mary and run away to Europe."

"Oh, no," said she. "They're going to fight harder than we are. Don't you see there's an ogre over there grinning at them and sharpening his claws? They've got to fight Germany."

"England can manage Germany," said Alston, "through the pocket.

Industrial wars are the only ones we shall ever see."

"If you can bank on that you're not so clever as I am," said his mother.

"I see the cloud rising. Every morning it lies there thick along the east. There's going to be war, and whether we're righteous enough to stand up against the ogre, G.o.d knows."

Alston was impressed, in spite of himself. His mother was not given to prophecy or pa.s.sionate a.s.severation.

"But anyhow," said she, "you can't run away, for they're going to ask you to stand for mayor."

"The d.i.c.kens they are! Who said so?"

"Amabel. She was in here this afternoon, as guileless as a child. Weedon Moore told her they were going to ask you to stand and she hoped you wouldn't."

"Why?"

"Because Moore's the rival candidate, and she thinks he has an influence with the working-man. She thinks the general cause of humanity would be better served by Moore. That's Amabel."

"She needn't worry," said Alston, getting up. "I shouldn't take it."

"Alston," said his mother, "there's your chance. Go out into the rough-and-tumble. Get on a soap box. Tell the working-man something that will make him think you haven't lived in a library all your life. It may not do him any good, but it'll save your soul alive."

She had at last surprised him. He was used to her well-bred acquiescence in his well-bred actions. She knew he invited only the choice between two equally irreproachable goods: not between the good and evil. Alston had a vague uncomfortable besetment that his mother would have had a warmer hope for him if he had been tempted of demons, tortured by doubts. Then she would have bade him take refuge on heights, even have dragged him there. But she knew he was living serenely on a plain.

Alston thought there ought to be some sympathy accorded men who liked living on a plain.

"Good Lord!" said he, looking down at her and liking her better with every word she said. "You scare me out of my boots. You're a firebrand on a mountain."

"No," said his mother. "I'm a decent Addington matron with not a hundredth part of a chance of jolting the earth unless you do it for me.

I can't jolt for myself because I'm an anti. There's Mary. Hear the ice clink. I'll draw in my horns. Mary'd take my temperature."

Alston stayed soberly at home and read a book that evening, his nerves on edge, listening for a telephone call. It did not come, but still he knew Esther was willing him to her.

Esther sat by the window downstairs, in the dusk, in a fever of desire to know what, since the afternoon, he was thinking of her, and for the first time there was a little fleeting doubt in her heart whether she could make him think something else. As to Alston, she had the hesitations of an imperfect understanding. There were chambers where he habitually dwelt, and these she never entered at all. His senses were keenly yet fastidiously alive. They could never be approached save through shaded avenues she found it dull to traverse, and where she never really kept her way without great circ.u.mspection. The pa.s.sion of men was, in her eyes, something practically valuable. She did not go out to meet it through an overwhelming impetus of her own. It was a way of controlling them, of buying what they had to give: comforts and pretty luxuries. She would have liked to live like an adored child, all her whims supplied, all her vanities fed. And here in this little circle of Addington Alston Choate was the one creature who could lift her out of her barren life and give her ease at every point with the recognition of the most captious world.

And she was willing him. As the evening wore on, she found she was breathing hard and her wrists were beating with loathing of her own situation and hatred of those who had made it for her, if she could allow herself to think she hated. For Esther had still to preserve the certainty that she was good. Madame Beattie, up there with her night-light and her book, she knew she hated. Of Jeff she did not dare to think, he made her wrists beat so, and of Alston Choate she knew it was deliberately cruel of him not to come. And then as if her need of something kind and unquestioning had summoned him, a step fell on the walk, and she saw Reardon, and went herself to let him in. There he was, florid, large, and a little anxious.

"I felt," said he, "as if something had happened to you."

She stood there under the dim hall-light, a girlish creature in her white dress, but with wonderful colour blooming in her cheeks. He could not know that hate had brought it there. She seemed to him the flower of her own beauty, rich, overpowering. She held the door open for him, and when he had followed her into the library, she turned and put both her hands upon his arm, her soft nearness like a perfume and a breath. To Reardon, she was immeasurably beautiful and as far as that above him.

His heart beating terribly in his ears, he drew her to him sure that, in her aloofness, she would reprove him. But Esther, to his infinite joy and amazement, melted into his arms and clung there.

"G.o.d!" said Reardon. She heard him saying it more than once as if entirely to himself and no smaller word would do. "You don't--" he said to her then, "you don't--care about me? It ain't possible." Reardon had reverted to oldest a.s.sociations and forgotten his verb.

She did not tell him whether she cared about him. She did not need to.

The constraining of her touch was enough, and presently they were sitting face to face, he holding her hands and leaning to hear her whispered words. For she had immediately her question ready:

"Do you think I ought to live like this--afraid?"

"Afraid?" asked Reardon. "Of him?"

"Yes. He came this afternoon. There is n.o.body to stand between us. I am afraid."

Reardon made the only answer possible, and felt the thrill of his own adequacy.

"I'll stand between you."

"But you can't," she said. "You've no right."

"There's but one thing for you to do," said Reardon. "Tell what you're telling me to a lawyer. And I'll--" he hesitated. He hardly knew how to put it so that her sense of fitness should not be offended. "I'll find the money," he ended lamely.

The small hands stayed willingly in his. Reardon was a happy man, but at the same time he was curiously ashamed. He was a clean man who ate moderately and slept well and had the proper amount of exercise, and this excess of emotion jarred him in a way that irritated him. He did blame Jeff, who was at the bottom of this beautiful creature's misery.

Still, if Jeff had not left her, she would not be sitting here now with the white hands in his. But he was conscious of a disturbing element of the unlawful, like eating a hurtful dish at dinner. Reardon had lived too long in a cultivating of the middle way to embark with joyousness on illicit possessing. As the traditions of Addington were wafting Alston Choate away from this primitive little Circe on her isle, so his acquired habits of safe and healthful living were wafting him. If his inner refusals could have been spoken crudely out they would have amounted to a miserable plea:

"Look here. It ain't because I don't want you. But there's Jeff."

For Reardon was not only a good fellow, but he had gazed with a wistful awe on the traditions of Addington's upper cla.s.s. He had tried honestly to look like the men born to it; he never owned even to himself that he felt ill at ease in it. Yet he did regard it with a reverence the men that made it were far from feeling, and he knew something was due it. He drew back, releasing gently the white hands that lay in his. He wanted to kiss them, but he was not even yet sure they were enough his to justify it. He cleared his throat.

"The man for you to go to," said he, "is Alston Choate. I don't like him, but he's square as a die. And if you can get yourself where it'll be possible to speak to you without knowing there's another man stepping between--" he hesitated, his own heart beating for her and the decencies of Addington holding him back. "Hang it, Esther," he burst forth, "you know where I stand."

"Do I?" said Esther.

She rose, and, looking wan, gave him her hand. And Reardon got out of the room, feeling rather more of a sneak than Alston had when he went away. Esther stood still until she heard the door close behind him. Then she ran out of the room and upstairs, to hide herself, if she could, from the exasperated thought of the men who had failed her. She hated them all. They owed her something, protection, or cheris.h.i.+ng tenderness.

She could not know it was Addington that had got hold of them in one way or another and kept them doggedly faithful to its own ideals. As she was stepping along the hall, Madame Beattie called her.

"Esther, stop a minute. I want you."

Esther paused, and then came slowly to the door and stood there. She looked like a sulky child, with the beauty of the child and the charm.

She hated Madame Beattie too much to gaze directly at her, but she knew what she should see if she did look: an old woman absolutely brazen in her defiance of the softening arts of dress, divested of every bewildering subterfuge, sitting in a circle of candlelight in the adequate company of her book.

"Esther," said Madame Beattie, "you may have the necklace."

Then Esther did glance quickly at her. She wondered what Madame Beattie thought she could get out of giving up the adored gewgaw into other hands.

"I don't want it," said Madame Beattie. "I'd much rather have the money for it. Get the money and bring it to me."

Esther curled her lip a little in the scorn she really felt. She could not conceive of any woman's being so lost to woman's perquisites as to confess baldly her need of money above trinkets.

"But you'd better go to the right man for it," said Madame Beattie. "It isn't Alston Choate. Jeff's the man, my dear. He's cleverer than the devil if you once get him started. Not that I think you could. He's done with you, I fancy."

Esther, still speechless, wondered if she could. It was a challenge of precisely the force Madame Beattie meant it to be.