The Prisoner Part 73

It stung him to a miserable sorrow for her and a hurt pride of his own.

"For G.o.d's sake, no!" he said. "You're going to be by yourself, poor child! Run away with Anne."

So Esther rose unwillingly, and Anne took her up to the s.p.a.cious chamber where firelight was dancing on the wall and Lydia had completed all sorts of hospitable offices. Lydia was there still, shrinking shyly into the background, as having no means of communication with an Esther to whom she had been hostile. But Esther turned them both out firmly, if with courtesy.

"Please go," she said to Anne. "Please let me be."

This seemed to Anne quite natural. She knew she herself, if she were troubled, could get over it best alone.

"Mayn't I come back?" she asked. "When you're in bed?"

"No," Esther said. "I am so tired I shall sleep. You're very kind. Good night."

She saw them to the door with determination even, and they went downstairs and sat in the dining-room in an excited silence, because it seemed to them Jeff might want to see his father and talk over things.

But Jeff and his father were sitting on opposite sides of the table, the colonel pretending to read and Jeff with his elbows on the table, his head resting on his hands. How was he to finish what he had begun? For she hated him, he believed, with a childish hatred of the discomfort he had brought her. If there were some hot betrayal of the blood that had driven her to Reardon he almost thought, despite Addington and its honesties and honours, he would not lift his hand to keep her. Addington was very strong in him that night, the old decent loyalties to the edifice men and women have built up to protect themselves from the beast in them. Yet how would it have stood the a.s.sault of honest pa.s.sion, sheer human longing knocking at its walls? If she could but love a man at last! but this was no more love than the puerile effort of a meagre discontent to make itself more safe, more closely cherished, more luxuriously served.

"Father," said he at last, breaking the silence where the clock ticked and the fire stirred.

"Yes," said the colonel. He did not put down his book or move his finger on it. He meant, to the last line of precaution, to invite Jeff's confidence.

"Whatever she does," said Jeff, "I'm to blame for it."

"Don't blame yourself any more," the colonel said. "We won't blame anybody."

He did not even venture to ask what Esther would be likely to do.

"I don't understand--" said Jeff, and then paused and the sentence was never finished. But what he did not understand was the old problem: how accountability could be exacted from the irresponsible, how an ascetic loyalty to law could be demanded of a woman who was nothing but a sweet bouquet of primitive impulses, flowered out of youth and natural appet.i.tes. He saw what she was giving up with Reardon: luxury, a kindly and absolutely honest devotion. If she went to him it would be to what she called happiness. If he kept her out of the radius of disapproval, she might never feel a shadow of regret. But Reardon would feel the shadow. Jeff knew him well enough to believe that. It would be the old question of revolt against the edifice men have built. You thought you could storm it, and it would capitulate; but when the winter rigours came, when pa.s.sion died and self got shrunken to a meagre thing, you would seek the shelter of even that cold courtyard.

"Yes," he said aloud, "I've got to do it."

All that evening they sat silent, the four of them, as if waiting for an arrival, an event. At eleven Anne came in.

"I've been up and listened," she said. "She's perfectly quiet. She must be asleep."

Jeff rose.

"Come, father," he said. "You'll be drowsy as an owl to-morrow. We'd better get up early, all of us."

"Yes," said Anne. She knew what he meant. They had, somehow, a distasteful, puzzling piece of work cut out for them. They must be up to cope with this strange Esther.

Lydia fell asleep almost, as the cosy saying goes, as soon as her head touched the pillow. She was dead tired. But in what seemed to her the middle of the night, she heard a little noise, and flew out of bed, still dazed and blinking. She thought it was the click of a door. But Esther's door was shut, the front door, too, for she crept into the hall and peered over the railing. She went to the hall window and looked out on the dark shrubbery above the snow, and the night was still and the scene so kind it calmed her. But she could not see, beyond the shrubbery, the black figure running softly down the walk. Lydia went back to bed, and when the "midnight" hooted she drew the clothes closer about her ears and thought how glad she was to be so comfortable. It was not until the next morning that she knew the "midnight" had carried Esther with it.

XL

It was strangely neutral, the hue of the moment when they discovered she had gone. They had not called her in the morning, but Anne had listened many times at the door, and Lydia had prepared a choice tray for her, and Mary Nellen tried to keep the coals at the right ardour for toasting. Jeff had stayed in the house, walking uneasily about, and at a little after ten he came out of his chair as if he suddenly recognised the folly of staying in it so apathetically.

"Go up," he said to Lydia. "Knock. Then try the door."

Lydia got no answer to her knock, and the door yielded to her. There was the bed untouched, on the hearth the cold ashes of last night's fire.

She stood stupidly looking until Jeff, listening at the foot of the stairs, called to her and then himself ran up. He read the chill order of the room and his eyes came back to Lydia's face.

"Oh," said Lydia, "will he be good to her?"

"Yes," said Jeff, "he'll be good enough. That isn't it. What a fool I am! I ought to have watched her. But Esther wasn't daring. She never did anything by herself. I couldn't get to New York now--" He paused to calculate.

He ran downstairs, and without speaking to his father, on an irrational impulse, over to Madam Bell's. There he came unprepared upon the strangest sight he had ever seen in Addington. Sophy, her cynical, pert face actually tied up into alarm, red, creased and angry, was standing in the library, and Madam Bell, in a wadded wrapper and her nightcap, was counting out money into her trembling hand. To Sophy, it was as terrifying as receiving money from the dead. She had always looked upon Madam Bell as virtually dead, and here she was ordering her to quit the house and giving her a month's wages, with all the practicality of a shrewd accountant. Madam Bell was an amazing person to look at in her wadded gown and felt slippers, with the light of life once more flickering over her parchment face.

"Rhoda Knox is gone," she announced to Jeff, the moment he walked in. "I sent her yesterday. This girl is going as soon as she can pack."

Jeff gave Sophy a directing nod and she slipped out of the room. She was as afraid of him as of the masterful dead woman in the quilted wrapper.

Anything might happen since the resurrection of Madam Bell.

"Where is she?" asked Jeff, when he had closed the door.

"Esther?" said Madam Bell. "Gone. She's taken every st.i.tch she had that was worth anything. Martha told me she was going for good."

"Who's Martha? Oh, yes, yes--Madame Beattie."

The light faded for an instant from the parchment face.

"Don't tell me," she sharply bade him, "Esther's coming back?"

"No," said Jeff. "If she does, she shall come to me."

He went away without another word, and Madam Bell called after him:

"Tell Amabel to look round and get me some help. I won't have one of these creatures that have been ruling here--except the cook. Tell Amabel to come and see me."

Jeff did remember to do that, but not until he had telephoned New York, and got his meagre fact. One of the boats sailing that morning had, among its pa.s.sengers, J. L. Reardon and Mrs. Reardon. He did not inquire further. All that day he stayed at home, foolishly, he knew, lest some message come for him, not speaking of his anxiety even to Lydia, and very much let alone. That Lydia must have given his father some palliating explanation he guessed, for when Jeff said to him:

"Father, Esther's gone abroad," the colonel answered soothingly:

"Yes, my son, I know. It is in every way best."

The next week came the election, and Jeff had not got into the last grip of contest. He had meant to do some persuasive speaking for Alston. He thought he could rake in all Madame Beattie's contingent, now that she was away, still leaving them so friendly. But he was dull and absent-minded. Esther's going had been a defeat another braver, cleverer man, he believed, need not have suffered. At Lydia he had hardly looked since the day of Esther's going. To them all he was a closed book, tight-lipped, a mask of brooding care. Lydia thought she understood. He was raging over what he might have done. Nothing was going to make Lydia rage, she determined. She had settled down into the even swing of her one task: to help him out, to watch him, above all, whatever the emergency, to be ready.

Once, when Jeff was trying to drag his flagging energies into election work again, he met Andrea, and stopped to say he would be down at Mill End that night. But Andrea seemed, while keeping his old fealty, betokened by s.h.i.+ning eyes and the most open smiles, to care very little about him in a political capacity. He even soothingly suggested that he should not come. Better not, Andrea said. Too much work for nothing.

They knew already what to do. They understood.

"Understand what?" Jeff asked him.

They had been told before the signora went, said Andrea. She had explained it all. They would vote, every man of them. They knew how.