Chapter 11

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_ CHAPTER XI

Reardon stood there in his middle-aged ease, the picture of a man who has nothing to do more hazardous than to take care of himself. His hands were exceedingly well-kept. His cravat, of a dull blue, was suited to his fresh-coloured face, and, though this is too far a quest for the casual eye, his socks also were blue, an admirable match. Jeff was not accustomed, certainly in these later years, to noting clothes; but he did feel actually unkempt before this mirror of the time. Yet why? For in the old days also Reardon had been rather vain of outward conformity. He had striven then to make up by every last nicety of dress and manner for the something his origin had lacked. It was not indeed the perfection of his dress that disconcerted; it was the kind of man Reardon had grown to be: for of him the clothes did, in their degree, testify. Jeffrey was conscious that every muscle in Reardon's body had its just measure of attention. Reardon had organised the care of that being who was himself. He had provided richly for his future, wiped out his past where it threatened to gall him, and was giving due consideration to his present. He meant supremely to be safe, and to that end he had entrenched himself on every side. Jeff felt a very disorganised, haphazard sort of being indeed before so complete a creature. And Reardon, so far from breaking into the old intimacy that Jeff had seen still living behind them in a sunny calm, only waiting for the gate to be opened on it again, stood there distinctly embarrassed and nothing more.

"Jeff!" said he. "How are you?" That was not enough. He found it lacking, and added, with a deepened shade of warmth, "How are you, old man?"

Now he put out his hand, but it had been so long in coming that Jeff gave no sign of seeing it.

"I'll walk along with you," he said.

"No, no." Reardon was calling upon reserves of decency and good feeling. "You'll do nothing of the sort. Come in."

"No," said Jeff. "I was walking. I'll go along with you."

Now Reardon came down the steps and put an insistent hand on his shoulder.

"Jeff," said he, "come on in. You surprised me. That's the truth. I wasn't prepared. I hadn't looked for you."

Jeff went up the steps; it seemed, indeed, emotional to do less. But at the door he halted and his eyes sought the chairs at hand.

"Can't we," said he, "sit down here?"

Reardon, with a courteous acquiescence, went past one of the chairs, leaving it for him, and dropped into another. Jeff took his, and found nothing to say. One of them had got to make a civil effort. Jeff, certain he had no business there, took his hand at it.

"This was the old Pelham house?"

Reardon assented, in evident relief, at so remote a topic.

"I bought it six years ago. Had it put in perfect repair. The plumbing cost me--well! you know what old houses are."

Jeff turned upon him.

"Jim," said he quietly, "what's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter," said Reardon, blustering. "My dear boy! I'm no end glad to see you."

"Oh, no," said Jeff. "No, you're not. You've kicked me out. What's the reason? My late residence? Oh, come on, man! Didn't expect to see me? Didn't want to? That it?"

Suddenly the telephone rang, and the English man-servant came out and said, with a perfect decorum:

"Mrs. Blake at the telephone, sir."

Jeff was looking at Reardon when he got the message and saw his small blue eyes suffused and the colour hot in his cheeks. The blond well-kept man seemed to be swelling with embarrassment.

"Excuse me," he said, got up and went inside, and Blake heard his voice in brief replies.

When he came back, he looked harassed, fatigued even. His colour had gone down and left him middle-aged. Jeff had not only been awaiting him, but his glance had, as well. His eyes were fixed upon the spot where Reardon's face, when he again occupied his chair, would be ready to be interrogated.

"What Mrs. Blake?" Jeff asked.

Reardon sat down and fussed with the answer.

"What Mrs. Blake?" he repeated, and flicked a spot of dust from his trousered ankle lifted to inspection.

"Yes," said Jeff, with an outward quiet. "Was that my wife?"

Again the colour rose in Reardon's face. It was the signal of an emotion that gave him courage.

"Why, yes," he said, "it was."

"What did she want?"

"Jeff," said Reardon, "it's no possible business of yours what Esther wants."

"You call her Esther?"

"I did then."

An outraged instinct of possession was rising in Reardon. Esther suddenly meant more to him than she had in all this time when she had been meaning a great deal. Alston Choate had power to rouse this primitive rage in him, but he could always conquer it by reasoning that Alston wouldn't take her if he could get her. There were too many inherited reserves in Alston. Actually, Reardon thought, Alston wouldn't really want a woman he had to take unguardedly. But here was the man who, by every rigour of conventional life, had a right to her. It could hardly be borne. Reardon wasn't used to finding himself dominated by primal impulses. They weren't, his middle-aged conclusions told him, safe. But now he got away from himself slightly and the freedom of it, while it was exciting, made him ill at ease. The impulse to speak really got the better of him.

"Look here, Blake," he said--and both of them realised that it was the first time he had used that surname; Jeff had always been a boy to him--"it's very unwise of you to come back here at all."

"Very unwise?" Jeff repeated, in an unmixed amazement, "to come back to Addington? My father's here."

"Your father needn't have been here," pursued Reardon doggedly. Entered upon what seemed a remonstrance somebody ought to make, he was committed, he thought, to going on. "It was an exceedingly ill-judged move for you all, very ill-judged indeed."

Jeff sat looking at him from a sternness that made a definite setting for the picture of his wonder. Yet he seemed bent only upon understanding.

"I don't say you came back to make trouble," Reardon went on, pursued now by the irritated certainty that he had adopted a course and had got to justify it. "But you're making it."

"How am I making it?"

"Why, you're making her damned uncomfortable."

"Who?"

Reardon had boggled over the name. He hardly liked to say Esther again, since it had been ill-received, and he certainly wouldn't say "your wife". But he had to choose and did it at a jump.

"Esther," he said, fixing upon that as the least offensive to himself.

"How am I making my wife uncomfortable?" Jeff inquired.

"Why, here you are," Reardon blundered, "almost within a stone's throw. She can't even go into the street without running a chance of meeting you."

Jeff threw back his head and laughed.

"No," he said, "she can't, that's a fact. She can't go into the street without running the risk of meeting me. But if you hadn't told me, Reardon, I give you my word I shouldn't have thought of the risk she runs. No, I shouldn't have thought of it."

Reardon drew a long breath. He had, it seemed to him, after all done wisely. The note of human brotherhood came back into his voice, even an implication that presently it might be actually soothing.

"Well, now you do see, you'll agree with me. You can't annoy a woman. You can't keep her in a state of apprehension."

Jeff had risen, and Reardon, too, got on his feet. Jeff seemed to be considering, and very gravely, and Reardon, frowning, watched him.

"No," said Jeff. "No. Certainly you can't annoy a woman." He turned upon Reardon, but with no suggestion of resentment. "What makes you think I should annoy her?"

"Why, it isn't what you'd wilfully do." Now that the danger of violence was over, Reardon felt that he could meet his man with a perfect reasonableness, and tell him what nobody else was likely to. "It's your being here. She can't help going back. She remembers how things used to be. And then she gets apprehensive."

"How they used to be," Jeff repeated thoughtfully. He sounded stupid standing there and able, apparently, to do nothing better than repeat. "How was that? How do you understand they used to be?"

Reardon lost patience. You could afford to, evidently, with so numb an antagonist.

"Why, you know," he said. "You remember how things used to be."

Jeff looked full at him now, and there was a curious brightness in his eyes.

"I don't," he said. "I should have said I did, but now I hear you talk I give you my word I don't. You'll have to tell me."

"She never blamed you," said Reardon expansively. He was beginning to pity Jeff, the incredible density of him, and he spoke incautiously. "She understood the reasons for it. You were having your business worries and you were harassed and nervous. Of course she understood. But that didn't prevent her from being afraid of you."

"Afraid of me!" Jeff took a step forward and put one hand on a pillar of the porch. The action looked almost as if he feared to trust himself, finding some weakness in his legs to match this assault upon the heart. "Esther afraid of me?"

Reardon, feeling more and more benevolent, dilated visibly.

"Most natural thing in the world. You can see how it would be. I suppose her mind keeps harking back, going over things, you know; and here you are on the same street, as you might say."

"No," said Jeff, stupidly, as if that were the case in point, "it isn't the same street."

He withdrew his hand from the pillar now with a decisiveness that indicated he had got to depend on his muscles at once, and started down the steps. Reardon made an indeterminate movement after him and called out something; but Jeff did not halt. He went along the driveway, past the proudly correct shrubs and brilliant turf and into the street. He had but the one purpose of getting to Esther as soon as possible. As he strode along, he compassed in memory all the seasons of passion from full bloom to withering since he saw her last. When he went away from her to fulfil his sentence, he had felt that identity with her a man must recognise for a wife passionately beloved. He had left her in a state of nervous collapse, an ignoble, querulous breakdown, due, he had to explain to himself, to her nature, delicately strung. There was nothing heroic about the way she had taken his downfall. But the exquisite music of her, he further tutored himself, was not set to martial strains. She was the loveliness of the twilight, of the evening star. And then, when his days had fallen into a pallid sequence, she had kept silence. It was as if there had been no wife, no Esther. At first he made wild appeals to her, to his father for the assurance that she was living even. Then one day in the autumn when he was watching a pale ray of sunshine that looked as if it had been strained through sorrow before it got to him, the verdict, so far as his understanding went, was inwardly pronounced. His mind had been working on the cruel problem and gave him, unsought, the answer. That was what she meant to do: to separate her lot from his. There never would be an Esther any more. There never had been the Esther that made the music of his strong belief in her.

At first he could have dashed himself against the walls in the impotence of having such bereavement to bear with none of the natural outlets to assauge it. Then beneficent healing passions came to his aid, though not, he knew, the spiritual ones. He descended upon scorn, and finally a cold acceptance of what she was. And then she seemed to have died, and in the inexorable sameness of the days and nights he dismissed her memory, and he meditated upon life and what might be made of it by men who had still the power to make. But now hurrying to her along the quiet street, one clarifying word explained her, and, unreasoningly, brought back his love. She had been afraid--afraid of him who would, in the old phrase, have, in any sense, laid down his life for her: not less willingly, the honourable name he bore among honourable men. A sense of renewal and bourgeoning was upon him, that feeling of waking from a dream and finding the beloved is, after all, alive. The old simple words came back to him that used to come in prison when they dropped molten anguish upon his heart:

--"After long grief and pain,
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again."

At least, if he was never to feel the soft rapture of his love's acceptance, he might find she still lived in her beauty, and any possible life would be too short to teach her not to be afraid. He reached the house quickly and, with the haste of his courage, went up the steps and tried the latch. In Addington nearly every house was open to the neighbourly hand. But of late Esther had taken to keeping her bolt slipped. It had dated from the day Lydia made hostile entrance. Finding he could not walk in unannounced, he stood for a moment, his intention blank. It did not seem to him he could be named conventionally to Esther, who was afraid of him. And then, by a hazard, Esther, who had not been out for days, and yet had heard of nobody's meeting him abroad, longed for the air and threw wide the door. There she was, by a God-given chance. It was like predestined welcome, a confirming of his hardihood. In spite of the sudden blight and shadow on her face, instinctive recoil that meant, he knew, the closing of the door, he grasped her hands, both her soft white hands, and seemed, to his anguished mind, to be dragging himself in by them, and even in the face of that look of hers was over the threshold and had closed the door.

"Esther," he said. "Esther, dear!"

The last word he had never expected to use to her, to any woman again. Still she regarded him with that horrified aversion, not amazement, he saw. It was as if she had perhaps expected him, had anticipated this very moment, and yet was not ready, because, such was her hard case, no ingenuity could possibly prepare her for it. This he saw, and it ran on in a confirming horrible sequence from Reardon's speech.

"Esther!" he repeated. He was still holding her hands and feeling they had no possibility of escape from each other, she in the weakness of her fear and he in passionate ruth. "Are you afraid of me?"

That was her cue.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Were you always, dear?" he went on, carried by the tide of his despairing love. (Or was it love? It seemed to him like love, for he had not felt emotion such as this through the dry pangs of his isolation.) "Years ago, when we were together--why, you weren't afraid then?"

"Oh, yes, I was," she said. Now that she could translate his emotion in any degree, she felt the humility of his mind toward her, and began to taste her own ascendancy. He was suing to her in some form, and the instinct which, having something to give may yet withhold it, fed her sense of power.

"Why, we were happy," said Jeffrey, in an agony of wonder. "That's been my only comfort when I knew we couldn't be happy now. I made you happy, dear."

And since he hung, in a fevered anticipation, upon her answer, she could reply, still from that sense of being the arbitress of his peace:

"I never was happy, at the last. I was afraid."

He dropped her hands.

"What of?" he said to himself stupidly. "In God's name, what of?"

The breaking of his grasp had released also some daring in her. They were still by the door, but he was between her and the stairs. He caught the glance of calculation, and instinct told him if he lost her now he should never get speech of her again.

"Don't," he said. "Don't go."

Again he laid a hand upon her wrist, and anger came into her face instead of that first candid horror. She had heard something, a step upstairs, and to that she cried: "Aunt Patricia!" three times, in a piercing entreaty.

It was not Madame Beattie who came to the stair-head and looked down; it was Rhoda Knox. After the glance she went away, though in no haste, and summoned Madame Beattie, who appeared in a silk negligee of black and white swirls like witch's fires and, after one indifferent look, called jovially:

"Hullo, Jeff!"

But she came down the stairs and Esther, seeing his marauding entry turned into something like a visit under social sanction, beat upon his wrist with her other hand and cried two hot tears of angry impotence.

"For heaven's sake, Esther," Madame Beattie remarked, at the foot of the stairs, "what are you acting like this for? You look like a child in a tantrum."

Esther ceased to be in a tantrum. She had a sense of the beautiful, and not even before these two invaders would she make herself unfitting. She addressed Madame Beattie in a tone indicating her determination not to speak to Jeff again.

"Tell him to let me go."

Jeff answered. Passion now had turned him cold, but he was relentless, a man embarked on a design to which he cannot see the purpose or the end, but who means to sail straight on.

"Esther," he said, "I'm going to see you now, for ten minutes, for half an hour. You may keep your aunt here if you like, but if you run away from me I shall follow you. But you won't run away. You'll stay right here."

He dropped her wrist.

"Oh, come into the library," said Madame Beattie. "I can't stand. My knees are creaking. Come, Esther, ask your husband in."

Madame Beattie, billowing along in the witch-patterned silk and clicking on prodigiously high heels and Esther with her head haughtily up, led the way, and Jeff, following them, sat down as soon as they had given him leave by doing it, and looked about the room with a faint foolish curiosity to note whether it, too, had changed. Madame Beattie thrust out a pretty foot, and Esther, perched on the piano stool, looked rigidly down at her trembling hands. She was very pale. Suddenly she recovered herself, and turned to Madame Beattie.

"He had just come," she said. "He came in. I didn't ask him to. He had not--" a little note like fright or triumph beat into her voice--"he had not--kissed me."

She turned to him as if for a confirmation he could not in honesty refuse her, and Madame Beattie burst into a laugh, one of perfect acceptance of things as they are, human frailties among the first.

"Esther," she said, "you're a little fool. If you want a divorce what do you give yourself away for? Your counsel wouldn't let you."

The whole implication was astounding to Jeff; but the only thing he could fix definitely was the concrete possibility that she had counsel.

"Who is your counsel, Esther?" he asked her.

But Esther had gone farther than discretion bade.

"I am not obliged to say," she answered, with a stubbornness equal to his own, whatever that might prove. "I am not obliged to say anything. But I do think I have a right to ask you to tell Aunt Patricia that I have not taken you back, in any sense whatever. Not--not condoned."

She slipped on the word and he guessed that it had been used to her and that although she considered it of some value, she had not technically taken it in.

"What had you to condone in me, Esther?" he asked her gently. Suddenly she seemed to him most pathetic in her wilful folly. She had always been, she would always be, he knew, a creature who ruled through her weakness, found it an asset, traded on it perhaps, and whereas once this had seemed to him enchanting, now, in the face of ill-fortune it looked pitifully inadequate and base.

"I was afraid of you," she insisted. "I am now."

"Well!" said Jeff. He found himself smiling at Madame Beattie, and she was answering his smile. Perhaps it was rather the conventional tribute on his part, to conceal that he might easily have thrown himself back in his chair behind the shelter of his hands, or gone down in any upheaval of primal emotions; and perhaps he saw in her answer, if not sympathy, for she was too impersonal for that, a candid understanding of the little scene and an appreciation of its dramatic quality. "Then," said he, after his monosyllable, "there is nothing left me but to go." When he had risen, he stood looking down at his wife's beautiful dusky head. Incredible to think it had ever lain on his breast, or that the fact of its cherishing there made no difference to her embryo heart! A tinge of irony came into his voice. "And I am willing to assure Madame Beattie," he proceeded, "in the way of evidence, that you have not in any sense taken me back, nor have you condoned anything I may have done."

As he was opening the outer door, in a confusion of mind that communicated itself disturbingly to his eyes and ears, he seemed to hear Madame Beattie adjuring Esther ruthlessly not to be a fool.

"Why, he's a man, you little fool," he heard her say, not with passion but a negligent scorn ample enough to cover all the failings of their common sex. "He's more of a man than he was when he went into that hideous place. And after all, who sent him there?"

Jeff walked out and closed the door behind him with an exaggerated care. It hardly seemed as if he had the right, except in a salutary humbleness, even to touch a door which shut in Esther to the gods of home. He went back to his father's house, and there was Lydia singing as she dusted the library. He walked in blindly not knowing whether she was alone; but here was a face and a voice, and his heart was sore. Lydia, at sight of him, laid down her cloth and came to meet him. Neither did she think whether they were alone, though she did remember afterward that Farvie had gone into the orchard for his walk. Seeing Jeff's face, she knew some mortal hurt was at work within him, and like a child, she went to him, and Jeff put his face down on her cheek, and his cheek, she felt, was wet. And so they stood, their arms about each other, and Lydia's heart beat in such a sick tumult of rage and sorrow that it seemed to her she could not stand so and uphold the heavy weight of his grief. In a minute she whispered to him:

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes."

"Was she--cruel?"

"Don't! don't!" Jeff said, in a broken voice.

"Do you love her?" she went on, in an inexorable fierceness.

"No! no! no!" And then a voice that did not seem to be his and yet was his, came from him and overthrew all his old traditions of what he had been and what he must therefore be: "I only love you."

Then, Lydia knew, when she thought of it afterward, in a burning wonder, they kissed, and their tears and the kiss seemed as one, a bond against the woman who had been cruel to him and an eternal pact between themselves. And on the severing of the kiss, terrible to her in her innocence, she flung herself away from him and ran upstairs. Her flight was noiseless, as if now no one must know, but he heard the shutting of a door and the sound of a turning key. _

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