Chapter 25

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_ CHAPTER XXV

The colonel thrived, about this time, on that fallacious feeling, born of hope eternal, that he was growing young. It is one of the precautionary lies of nature, to keep us going, that, the instant we are tinkered in any part, we ignore its merely being fitted up for shortened use. Hope eternal tells us how much stronger it is than it was before. If you rub unguent into your scanty hair you can feel it grow, as a poet hears the grass. A nostrum on your toil-hardened hands brings back, to keen anticipation, the skin of youth. All mankind is prepared to a perfect degree of sensitiveness for response to the quack doctor's art. We believe so fast that he need hardly do more than open his mouth to cry his wares. The colonel, doing a good day's work and getting tired enough to sleep at night, felt, on waking, as if life were to last the measure of his extremest appetite. The household went on wings, so clever and silent was Anne in administration and so efficient Mary Nellen. Only Anne was troubled in her soul because Lydia would go slipping away for these secret sessions with Madame Beattie. She even proposed going with her once or twice, but Lydia said she had put it off for that night; and next time she slipped away more cleverly. Once in these calls Lydia met Esther at the head of the stairs, and they said "How do you do?" in an uncomfortable way, Esther with reproving dignity and Lydia in a bravado that looked like insolence. And then Esther sent for Alston Choate, and in the evening he came.

Esther was a pathetic pale creature, as she met him in the dusk of the candle-lighted room, little more than a child, he thought, as he noted her round arms and neck within the film of her white dress. Esther did not need to assume a pathos for the moment's needs. She was very sorry for herself. They sat there by the windows, looking out under the shade of the elms, and for a little neither spoke. Esther had some primitive feminine impulses to put down. Alston had an extreme of pity that gave him fervencies of his own. To Esther it was as natural as breathing to ask a man to fight her battles for her, and to cling to him while she told him what battles were to be fought. Alston had the chafed feeling of one who cannot follow with an unmixed ardency the lines his heart would lead him. He was always angry, chiefly because she had to suffer so, after the hideousness of her undeserved destiny, and yet he saw no way to help that might not make a greater hardship for her. At last she spoke, using his name, and his heart leaped to it.

"Alston, what am I going to do?"

"Things going badly?" he asked her, in a voice moved enough to hearten her. "What is it that's different?"

"Everything. Aunt Patricia has those horrible men come here and talk with her--"

"It's ridiculous of her," said Alston, "but there's no harm in it. They're not a bad lot, and she's an old lady, and she won't stay here forever."

"Oh, yes, she will. She gets her food, at least, and I don't believe she could pay for even that abroad. And this sort of thing amuses her. It's like gipsies or circus people or something. It's horrible."

"What does your grandmother say?"

"Nothing."

"She must stand for it, in a way, or Madame Beattie couldn't do it."

"I don't believe grandmother understands fully. She's so old."

"She isn't tremendously old."

"Oh, but she looks so. When you see her in her nightcap--it's horrible, the whole thing, grandmother and all, and here I am shut up with it."

"I'm sorry," said Alston, in a low tone. "I'm devilish sorry."

"And I want to go away," said Esther, her voice rising hysterically, so that Alston nervously hoped she wouldn't cry. "But I can't do that. I haven't enough to live on, away from here, and I'm afraid."

"Esther," said he, daring at last to bring out the doubt that assailed him when he mused over her by himself, "just what do you mean by saying you are afraid?"

"You know," said Esther, almost in a whisper. She had herself in hand now.

"Yes. But tell me again. Tell me explicitly."

"I'm afraid," said Esther, "of him."

"Of your husband? If that's it, say it."

"I'm afraid of Jeff. He's been in here. I told you so. He took hold of me. He dragged me by my wrists. Alston, how can you make me tell you!"

The appeal sickened him. He got up and walked away to the mantel where the candles were, and stood there leaning against the shelf. He heard her catch her breath, and knew she was near sobs. He came back to his chair, and his voice had resumed so much of its judicial tone that her breath grew stiller in accord.

"Esther," said he, "you'd better tell me everything."

"I can't," said she, "everything. You are--" the rest came in a startling gush of words--"you are the last man I could tell."

It was a confession, a surrender, and he felt the tremendous weight of it. Was he the last man she could tell? Was she then, poor child, withholding herself from him as he, in decency, was aloof from her? He pulled himself together.

"Perhaps I can't do anything for you," he said, "in my own person. But I can see that other people do. I can see that you have counsel."

"Alston," said she, in what seemed to him a beautiful simplicity, "why can't you do anything for me?"

This was so divinely childlike and direct that he had to tell her.

"Esther, don't you see? If you have grounds for action against your husband, could I be the man to try your case? Could I? When you have just said I am the last man you could tell? I can't get you a divorce----" he stopped there. He couldn't possibly add, "and then marry you afterward."

"I see," said Esther, yet raging against him inwardly. "You can't help me."

"I can help you," said Alston. "But you must be frank with me. I must know whether you have any case at all. Now answer me quite simply and plainly. Does Jeff support you?"

"Oh, no," said Esther.

"He gives you no money whatever?"

"None."

"Then he's a bigger rascal than I've been able to think him."

"I believe----" said Esther, and stopped.

"What do you believe?"

"I think the money must come from his father. He sends it to me."

"Then there is money?"

"Why, yes," said Esther irritably, "there's some money, or how could I live?"

"But you told me there was none."

"How do you think I could live here with grandmother and expect her to dress me? Grandmother's very old. She doesn't see the need of things."

"It isn't a question of what you can live on," said Alston. "It's a question of Jeff's allowing you money, or not allowing you money. Does he, or does he not?"

"His father sends me some," said Esther, in a voice almost inaudible. It sounded sulky.

"Regularly?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Don't you know?"

"Yes. He sends it regularly."

"How often?"

"Four times a year."

"Haven't you every reason to believe that money is from Jeff?"

"No," said Esther. "I haven't any reason to think so at all. His father signs the cheques."

"Isn't it probable that his father would do that when Jeff was in prison, and that he should continue doing it now?"

Esther did not answer. There was something in the silence of the room, something in the peculiar feel of the atmosphere that made Alston certain she had balked. He recognised that pause in the human animal under inquisition, and for a wonder, since he had never been wound up to breaking point himself, knew how it felt. The machinery in the brain had suddenly stopped. He was not surprised that Esther could not go on. It was not obstinacy that deterred her. It was panic. He had put her, he knew, to too harsh a test. Now he had to soothe her affrighted mind and bring it back to its clear uses; and since he could honestly do it, as the lawyer exercising professional medicine, he gave himself gladly to the task.

"Esther," he said, "it is infernal to ask you these personal questions. But you will have to bring yourself to answer them if we are to decide whether you have any case and whether I can send you to another man. But if you do engage counsel, you'll have to talk to him freely. You'll have to answer all sorts of questions. It's a pretty comprehensive thing to admit the law into your private life, because you've got to give it every right there. You'll be questioned. And you'll have to answer."

Esther sat looking at him steadily. As she looked, her pale cheek seemed to fill and flush and a light ran into her eyes, until the glow spilled over and dazzled him, like something wavering between him and her. He had never seen that light in her eyes, nor indeed the eyes of any woman, nor would he have said that he could bear to see it there unsummoned. Yet had he not summoned it unconsciously, hard as he was trying to play the honest game between an unattached woman and a man who sees her fetters where she has ceased to see them, but can only feel them gall her? Had not the inner spirit of him been speaking through all this interview to the inner spirit of her, and was she not willing now to let it cry out and say to him, "I am here "? Esther was willing to cry out. In the bewilderment of it, he did not know whether it was superb of her, though he would have felt it in another woman to be shameless. The lustrous lights of her eyes dwelt upon him, unwavering. Then her lips confirmed them.

"Well," said Esther, "isn't it worth it?"

Alston got up and rather blindly went out of the room. In the street, after the summer breeze had been touching his forehead and yet not cooling it, he realised he was carrying his hat in his hand, and put it on hastily. He was Addington to the backbone, when he was not roaming the fields of fiction, and one of the rules of Addington was against looking queer. He walked to his office and let himself in. The windows were closed and the room had the crude odour of public life: dust, stale tobacco and books. He threw up the windows and hesitated an instant by the gas jet. It was his habit, when the outer world pressed him too heavily, to plunge instantly into a book. But books were no anodyne for the turmoil of this night. Nor was the light upon these familiar furnishings. He sat down by the window, laid his arms on the sill and looked out over the meadows, unseen now but throwing their damp exhalations up to him through the dark. His heart beat hard, and in the physical vigour of its revolt he felt a fierce pleasure; but he was shamed all through in some way he felt he could not meet. Had he seen a new Esther to-night, an Esther that had not seemed to exist under the soft lashes of the woman he thought he knew so well? He had a stiffly drawn picture of what a woman ought to be. She really conformed to Addington ideals. He believed firmly that the austere and noble dwelt within woman as Addington had framed her. It would have given him no pleasure to find a savage hidden under pretty wiles. But Alston believed so sincerely in the control of man over the forces of life, of which woman was one, that, if Esther had stepped backward from her bright estate into a barbarous challenge, it was his fault, he owned, not hers. He should have guided her so that she stayed within hallowed precincts. He should have upheld her so that she did not stumble over these pitfalls of the earth. It is a pity those ideals of old Addington that made Alston Choate believe in women as little lower than the angels and, if they proved themselves lower, not really culpable because they are children and not rightly guided--it is a pity that garden cannot keep on blooming even out of the midden of the earth. But he had kept the garden blooming. Addington had a tremendous grip on him. It was not that he had never seen other customs, other manners. He had travelled a reasonable amount for an Addington man, but always he had been able to believe that Eden is what it was when there was but one man in it and one woman. There was, of course, too, the serpent. But Alston was fastidious, and he kept his mind as far away from the serpent as possible. He thought of his mother and sister, and instantly ceased thinking of them, because to them Esther was probably a sweet person, and he knew they would not have recognised the Esther he saw to-night. Perhaps, though he did not know this, his mother might.

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 shield his eyes. But to-night she gently turned it toward him, and Alston did not realise that was because his fagged 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 pronouncedly 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 class."

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 attitudinise 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. Nobody'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 classics 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."

It was such a warm impetuous tone it brought them almost too suddenly and too close together. Alston meant to kiss her, as he did almost every night, but he awkwardly could not. He went out of the room in a shy haste, and when he dropped off to sleep he was thinking, not of Esther, but of his mother. Even so he did not suspect that his mother knew he had come from Esther and how fast his blood was running. _

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