Chapter 15

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_ CHAPTER XV

Next morning Anne, after listening at the colonel's door and hearing nothing, decided not to tap. She went on downstairs to be saluted by a sound she delighted in: a low humming. It came from the library where her father was happily and most villainously attacking the only song he knew: "Lord Lovell." Anne's heart cleared up like a smiling sky. She went in to him, and he, at the window, his continued humming like the spinning of a particularly eccentric top, turned and greeted her, and he seemed to be very well and almost gay. He showed no sign of even remembering yesterday, and when presently Jeffrey came in and then Lydia, they all behaved, Anne thought, like an ordinary family with no queer problems round the corner.

After breakfast Jeffrey turned to Lydia and said quite simply: "Come into the orchard and walk a little."

But to Lydia, Anne saw, with a mild surprise, his asking must have meant something not so simple. Her face flushed all over, and a misty sweetness, like humility and gratitude, came into her eyes. Jeffrey, too, caught that morning glow, only to find his task the sadder. How to say things to her! and after all, what was it possible to say? They went down into the orchard, and Lydia, by his side, paced demurely. He saw she was trying to fit her steps to his impatient stride, and shortened up on it. He felt very tender toward Lydia. At last, when it seemed as if they might be out of range of the windows, and, he unreasonably felt, more free, he broke out abruptly:

"I've got a lot of things to say to you." Lydia glanced up at him with that wonderful, exasperating look, half humility, and waited. It seemed to her he must have a great deal to say. "I don't believe it's possible for you--for a girl--to understand what it would be for a man in my place to come home and find everybody so sweet and kind. I mean you--and Anne."

Now he felt nothing short of shame. But she took him quickly enough. He didn't have to go far along the shameful road. She glanced round at him again, and, knowing what the look must be, he did not meet it. He could fancy well the hurt inquiry leaping into those innocent eyes.

"What have I done," she asked, and his mind supplied the accusatory inference, "that you don't love me any more?"

He hastened to answer.

"You've been everything that's sweet and kind." He added, whether wisely or not he could not tell, what seemed to him the truth: "I haven't got hold of myself. I thought it would be an easy stunt to come back and stay a while and then go away and get into something permanent. But it's no such thing. Lydia, I don't understand people very well. I don't understand myself. I'm afraid I'm a kind of blackguard."

"Oh, no," said Lydia gravely. "You're not that."

She did not understand him, but she was, in her beautiful confidence, sure he was right. She was hurt. There was the wound in her heart, and that new sensation of its actually bleeding; but she had a fine courge of her own, and she knew grief over that inexplicable pang must be put away until the sight of it could not trouble him.

"I'm going to ask you a question," said Jeffrey shortly, in his distaste for asking it at all. "Do you want me to take father away with me, you and Anne?"

"Are you going away?" she asked, in an irrepressible tremor.

"Answer me," said Jeffrey.

She was not merely the beautiful child he had thought her. There was something dauntless in her, something that could endure. He felt for her a quick passion of comradeship and the worship men have for women who seem to them entirely beautiful and precious enough to be saved from disillusion.

"If I took him away with me--and of course it would be made possible," he was blundering over this in decency--"possible for you to live in comfort--wouldn't you and Anne like to have some life of your own? You haven't had any. Like other girls, I mean."

She threw her own question back to him with a cool and clear decision he hadn't known the soft, childish creature had it in her to frame.

"Does he want us to go?"

"Good God, no!" said Jeffrey, faced, in the instant, by the hideous image of ingratitude she conjured up, his own as well as his father's.

"Do you?"

"Lydia," said he, "you don't understand. I told you you couldn't. It's only that my sentence wasn't over when I left prison. It's got to last, because I was in prison."

"Oh, no! no!" she cried.

"I've muddled my life from the beginning. I was always told I could do things other fellows couldn't. Because I was brilliant. Because I knew when to strike. Because I wasn't afraid. Well, it wasn't so. I muddled the whole thing. And the consequence is, I've got to keep on being muddled. It's as if you began a chemical experiment wrong. You might go on messing with it to infinity. You wouldn't come out anywhere."

"You think it's going to be too hard for us," she said, with a directness he thought splendid.

"Yes. It would be infernally hard. And what are you going to get out of it? Go away, Lydia. Live your life, you and Anne, and marry decent men and let me fight it out."

"I sha'n't marry," said Lydia. "You know that."

He could have groaned at her beautiful wild loyalty. The power of the universe had thrown them together, and she was letting that one minute seal her unending devotion. But her staunchness made it easier to talk to her. She could stand a good deal, the wind and rain of cruel fact. She wouldn't break.

"Lydia," said he, "you are beautiful to me. But I can't let you go on seeming beautiful, if--if you're so divinely kind to me and believing, and everything that's foolish--and dear."

"You mean," said Lydia, "you're afraid I should think wrong thoughts about you--because there's Esther. Oh, I know there's Esther. But I didn't mean to be wicked. And you didn't. It was so--so above things. So above everything."

Her voice trembled too much for her to manage it. He glanced at her and saw her lip was twitching violently, and savagely thought a man sometime would have a right to kiss it. And yet what did he care? To kiss a woman's lips was a madness or a splendour that passed. He knew there might be, almost incredibly, another undying passion that did last, made up of endurance and loyalty and the free rough fellowship between men. This girl, this soft yet unyielding thing, was capable of that. But she must not squander it on him who was bankrupt. Yet here she was, in her house of dreams, tended by divine ministrants of the ideal: the old lying servitors that let us believe life is what we make it and deaf to the creatures raging there outside who swear it is made irrevocably for us. He was sure they lied, these servitors in the house of maiden dreams. Yet how to tell her so! And would he do it if he could?

"You see," he said irrelevantly, "I want you to have your life."

"It will be my life," she said. "To take care of Farvie, as we always have. To make things nice for you in the house. I don't believe you and Farvie'd like it at all without Anne and me."

She was announcing, he saw, quite plainly, that she didn't want a romantic pact with him. They had met, just once, for an instant, in the meeting of their lips, and Lydia had simply taken that shred of triumphant life up to the mountain-top to weave her nest of it: a nest where she was to warm all sorts of brooding wonders for him and for her father. There was nothing to be done with her in her innocence, her ignorance, her beauty of devotion.

"It doesn't make any difference about me," he said. "I'm out of the running in every possible way. But it makes a lot of difference about you and Anne."

"It doesn't make any difference to Anne," said Lydia astutely, "because she's going to heaven, and so she doesn't care about what she has here."

He was most amusedly anxious to know whether Lydia also was going to heaven.

"Do you care what happens to you here?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered instantly. "I care about staying with my folks."

The homely touch almost conquered him. He thought perhaps such a fierce little barbarian might even find it better to eat bitter bread with her own than to wander out into strange flowery paths.

"Are you going to heaven, too, Lydia?" he ventured. "With Anne?"

"I'm going everywhere my folks go," she said, with composure. "Now I can't talk any more. I told Mary Nellen I'd dust while they do the silver."

The atmosphere of a perfectly conventional living was about them. Jeffrey had to adjure himself to keep awake to the difficulties he alone had made. He had come out to confess to her the lawlessness of his mind toward her, and she was deciding merely to go on living with him and her father, which meant, in the first place, dusting for Mary Nellen. They walked along the orchard in silence, and Jeffrey, with relief, also took a side track to the obvious. Absently his eyes travelled along the orchard's level length, and his great thought came to him. The ground did it. The earth called to him. The dust rose up impalpably and spoke to him.

"Lydia," said he, "I see what to do."

"What?"

The startled brightness in her eyes told him she feared his thought, and, not knowing, as he did, how great it was, suspected him of tragic plans for going away.

"I'll go to work on this place. I'll plough it up. I'll raise things, and father and I'll dig."

As he watched her interrogatively the colour faded from her face. The relief of hearing that homespun plan had chilled her blood, and she was faint for an instant with the sickness of hearty youth that only knows it feels odd to itself and concludes the strangeness is of the soul. But she did not answer, for Anne was at the window, signalling.

"Come in," said Lydia. "She wants us."

Miss Amabel, in a morning elegance of black muslin and silk gloves, was in the library. Anne looked excited and the colonel, there also, quite pleasurably stirred. Lydia was hardly within the door when Anne threw the news at her.

"Dancing classes!"

"At my house," said Miss Amabel. She put a warm hand on Lydia's shoulder and looked down at her admiringly: wistfully as well. "Can anything," the look said, "be so young, so unthinkingly beautiful and have a right to its own richness? How could we turn this dower into the treasury of the poor and yet not impoverish the child herself?" "We'll have an Italian class and a Greek. And there are others, you know, Poles, Armenians, Syrians. We'll manage as many as we can."

They sat down to planning classes and hours, and Jeffrey, looking on, noted how keen the two girls were, how intent and direct. They balked at money. If the classes were for the poor, they proposed giving their time as Miss Amabel gave her house. But she disposed of that with a conclusive gravity, and a touch, Jeffrey was amused to see, of the Addington manner. Miss Amabel was pure Addington in all her unconsidered impulses. She wanted to give, not to receive. Yet if you reminded her that giving was the prouder part, she would vacate her ground of privilege with a perfect simplicity sweet to see. When she got up Jeffrey rose with her, and though he took the hand she offered him, he said:

"I'm going along with you."

And they were presently out in Addington streets, walking together almost as it might have been when they walked from Sunday school and she was "teacher ". He began on her at once.

"Amabel, dear, what are you running with Weedon Moore for?"

She was using her parasol for a cane, and now, in instinctive remonstrance, she struck it the more forcibly on the sidewalk and had to stop and pull it out from a worn space between the bricks.

"I'm glad you spoke of Weedon," she said. "It's giving me a chance to say some things myself. You know, Jeffrey, you're very unjust to Weedon."

"No, I'm not," said Jeff.

"Alston Choate is, too."

"Choate and I know him, better than you or any other woman can in a thousand years."

"You think he's the same man he was in college."

"Fellows like Moore don't change. There's something inherently rotten in 'em you can't sweeten out."

"Jeffrey, I assure you he has changed. He's a power for good. And when he gets his nomination, he'll be more of a power yet."

"Nomination. For what?"

"Mayor."

"Weedon Moore mayor of this town? Why, the cub! We'll duck him, Choate and I." They were climbing the rise to her red brick house, large and beautiful and kindly. It really looked much like Miss Amabel herself, a little unkempt, but generous and belonging to an older time. They went in and Jeffrey, while she took off her bonnet and gloves, stood looking about him in the landscape-papered hall.

"Go into the east room, dear," said she. "Why, Jeff, what is it?"

He was standing still, looking now up the stairs.

"Oh," said he, "I believe I'm going to cry. It hasn't changed--any more than you have. You darling!"

Miss Amabel put her hand on his shoulder, and he drew it to his lips; and then she slipped it through his arm and they went into the east room together, which also had not changed, and Jeff took his accustomed place on the sofa under the portrait of the old judge, Miss Amabel's grandfather. Jeff shook off sentiment, the softness he could not afford.

"I tell you I won't have it," he said. "Weedon Moore isn't going to be mayor of this town. Besides he can't. He hasn't been in politics--"

"More or less," said she.

"Run for office?"

"Yes."

"Ever get any?"

"No."

"There! what d'I tell you?"

"But he has a following of his own now," said she, in a quiet triumph, he thought. "Since he has done so much for labour."

"What's he done?"

"He has organised--"

"Strikes?"

"Yes. He's been all over the state, working."

"And talking?"

"Why, yes, Jeff! Don't be unjust. He has to talk."

"Amabel," said Jeffrey, with a sudden seriousness that drew her renewed attention, "have you the slightest idea what kind of things Moore is pouring into the ears of these poor devils that listen to him?"

She hesitated.

"Have you, now?" he insisted.

"Well, no, Jeffrey. I haven't heard him. There's rather a strong prejudice here against labour meetings. So Weedon very wisely talks to the men when he can get them alone."

"Why wisely? Why do you say that?"

"Because we want to spread knowledge without rousing prejudice. Then there isn't so much to fight."

"What kind of knowledge is Weedon Moore spreading? Tell me that."

Her plain face glowed with the beauty of her aspiration.

"He is spreading the good tidings," she said softly, "good tidings of great joy."

"Don't get on horseback, dear," he said, inexorably, but fondly. "I'm a plain chap, you know. I have to have plain talk. What are the tidings?"

She looked at him in a touched solemnity.

"Don't you know, Jeff," she said, "the working-man has been going on in misery all these centuries because he hasn't known his own power? It's like a man's dying of thirst and not guessing the water is just inside the rock and the rock is ready to break. He's only to look and there are the lines of cleavage." She sought in the soft silk bag that was ever at her hand, took out paper and pen and jotted down a line.

"What are you writing there?" Jeffrey asked, with a certainty that it had something to do with Moore.

"What I just said," she answered, with a perfect simplicity. "About lines of cleavage. It's a good figure of speech, and it's something the men can understand."

"For Moore? You're writing it for Moore?"

"Yes." She slipped the pad into her bag.

"Amabel," said he, helpless between inevitable irritation and tenderest love of her, "you are a perfectly unspoiled piece of work from the hand of God Almighty. But if you're running with Weedon Moore, you're going to do an awful lot of harm."

"I hope not, dear," she said gravely, but with no understanding, he saw, that her pure intentions could lead her wrong.

"I've heard Weedon Moore talking to the men."

She gave him a look of acute interest.

"Really, Jeff? Now, where?"

"The old circus-ground. I heard him. And he's pulling down, Amabel. He's destroying. He's giving those fellows an idea of this country that's going to make them hate it, trample it--" He paused as if the emotion that choked him made him the more impatient of what caused it.

"That's it," said she, her own face settling into a mournful acquiescence. "We've earned hate. We must accept it. Till we can turn it into love."

"But he's preaching discontent."

"Ah, Jeffrey," said she, "there's a noble discontent. Where should we be without it?"

He got up, and shook his head at her, smilingly, tenderly. She had made him feel old, and alien to this strange new day.

"You're impossible, dear," said he, "because you're so good. You've only to see right things to follow them and you believe everybody's the same."

"But why not?" she asked him quickly. "Am I to think myself better than they are?"

"Not better. Only more prepared. By generations of integrity. Think of that old boy up there." He glanced affectionately at the judge, a friend since his childhood, when the painted eyes had followed him about the room and it had been a kind of game to try vainly to escape them. "Take a mellow soil like your inheritance and the inheritance of a lot of 'em here in Addington. Plant kindness in it and decency and--"

"And love of man," said Miss Amabel quietly.

"Yes. Put it that way, if you like it better. I mean the determination to play a square game. Not to gorge, but make the pile go round. Plant in that kind of a soil and, George! what a growth you get!"

"I don't find fewer virtues among my plainer friends."

"No, no, dear! But you do find less--less background."

"That's our fault, Jeff. We've made their background. It's a factory wall. It's the darkness of a mine."

"Exactly. Knock a window in here and there, but don't chuck the reins of government into the poor chaps' hands and tell 'em to drive to the devil."

Her face flamed at him, the bonfire's light when prejudice is burned.

"I know," she said, "but you're too slow. You want them educated first. Then you'll give them something--if they deserve it."

"I won't give them my country--or Weedon Moore's country--to manhandle till they're grown up, and fit to have a plaything and not smash it."

"I would, Jeffrey."

"You would?"

"Yes. Give them power. They'll learn by using it. But don't waste time. Think of it! All the winters and summers while they work and work and the rest of us eat the bread they make for us."

"But, good God, Amabel! there isn't any curse on work. If your Bible tells you so, it's a liar. You go slow, dear old girl; go slow."

"Go slow?" said Amabel, smiling at him. "How can I? Night and day I see those people. I hear them crying out to me."

"Well, it's uncomfortable. But it's no reason for your delivering them over to demagogues like Weedon Moore."

"He's not a demagogue."

There was a sad bravado in her smile, and he answered with an obstinacy he was willing she should feel.

"All the same, dear, don't you try to make him tetrarch over this town. The old judge couldn't stand for that. If he were here to-day he wouldn't sit down at the same table with Weedie, and he wouldn't let you."

She followed him to the door; her comfortable hand was on his arm.

"Weedon will begin his campaign this fall," she said. Evidently she felt bound to define her standpoint clearly.

"Where's his money?" They were at the door and Jeffrey turned upon her. "Amabel, you're not going to stake that whelp?"

She flushed, from guilt, he knew.

"I am not doing anything unwise," she said, with the Addington dignity.

Thereupon Jeffrey went away sadly. _

Read next: Chapter 16

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