Читать книгу The Prisoner - Alice Brown - Страница 4

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The next morning brought a confusion of arriving freight, and Denny was supplicated to provide workmen, clever artificers in the opening of boxes and the setting up of beds. He was fired by a zeal not all curiosity, a true interest assuaged by certainty more enlivening yet.

"I know who ye be," he announced to the colonel. This was on his arrival with the first load. "I ain't lived in town very long, or I should known it afore. It's in the paper."

Mr. Blake frowned slightly and seemed to freeze all over the surface he presented to the world. He walked away without a reply, but Lydia, who had not heard, came up at this point to ask Denny if he knew where she could find a maid.

"Sure I do," said Denny, who was not Irish but consorted with common speech. "My wife's two sisters, Mary Nellen, Prince Edward girls."

"We don't want two," said Lydia. "My sister and I do a lot of the work."

"The two of them," said Denny, "come for the price of one. They're studyin' together to set up a school in Canada, and they can't be separated. They'd admire to be with nice folks."

"Mary? did you say?" asked Lydia.

"Mary Nellen."

"Mary and Ellen?"

"Yes, Mary Nellen. I'll send 'em up."

That afternoon they came, pleasant-faced square little trudges with shiny black hair and round myopic eyes. This near-sightedness when they approached the unclassified, resulted in their simultaneously making up the most horrible faces, the mere effort of focusing. Mary Nellen—for family affection, recognising their complete twin-ship, always blended them—were aware of this disfiguring habit, but relegated the curing of it to the day of their future prosperity. They couldn't afford glasses now, they said. They'd rather put their money into books. This according and instantaneous grimace Lydia found engaging. She could not possibly help hiring them, and they appeared again that night with two battered tin boxes and took up residence in the shed chamber.

There had been some consultation about the disposition of chambers. It resolved itself into the perfectly reasonable conclusion that the colonel must have the one he had always slept in, the southeastern corner.

"But there's one," said Lydia, "that's sweeter than the whole house put together. Have you fallen in love with it, Anne? It's that low, big room back of the stairs. You go down two steps into it. There's a grape-vine over the window. Whose chamber is that, Farvie?"

He stood perfectly still by the mantel, and the old look of introspective pain, almost of a surprised terror, crossed his face. Then they knew. But he delayed only a minute or so in answering.

"Why," said he, "that was Jeff's room when he lived at home."

"Then," said Anne, in her assuaging voice, "he must have it again."

"Yes," said the colonel. "I think you'd better plan it that way."

They said no more about the room, but Anne hunted out a set of Dickens and a dog picture she had known as belonging to Jeff, who was the own son of the colonel, and took them in there. Once she caught Lydia in the doorway looking in, a strangled passion in her face, as if she were going back to the page of an old grief.

"Queer, isn't it?" she asked, and Anne, knowing all that lay in the elision, nodded silently.

Once that afternoon the great brass knocker on the front door fell, and Mary Nellen answered and came to Lydia to say a gentleman was there. Should he be asked in? Mary Nellen seemed to have an impression that he was mysteriously not the sort to be admitted. Lydia went at once to the door whence there came to Anne, listening with a worried intensity, a subdued runnel of talk. The colonel, who had sat down by the library window with a book he was not reading, as if he needed to soothe some inner turmoil of his own by the touch of leathern covers, apparently did not hear this low-toned interchange. He glanced into the orchard from time to time, and once drummed on the window when a dog dashed across and ran distractedly back and forth along the brick wall. When Anne heard the front door close she met Lydia in the hall.

"Was it?" she asked.

Lydia nodded. Her face had a flush; the pupils of her eyes were large.

"Yes," said she. "His paper wanted to know whether Jeff was coming here and who was to meet him. I said I didn't know."

"Did he ask who you were?"

"Yes. I told him I'd nothing to say. He said he understood Jeff's father was here, and asked if he might see him. I said, No, he couldn't see anybody."

"Was he put out?" Anne had just heard Mary Nellen use the phrase. Anne thought it covered a good deal.

"No," said Lydia. She lifted her plump hands and threaded the hair back from her forehead, a gesture she had when she was tired. It seemed to spur her brain. "No," she repeated, in a slow thoughtfulness, "he was a kind of gentleman. I had an idea he was sorry for me, for us all, I suppose. I was sorry for him, too. He was trying to earn his living and I wouldn't let him."

"You couldn't."

"No," said Lydia, rather drearily, "I couldn't. Do you think Farvie heard?"

"I think not. He didn't seem to."

But it was with redoubled solicitude that they threw their joint energies into making supper inviting, so that the colonel might at least get a shred of easement out of a pleasant meal. Mary Nellen, who amicably divided themselves between the task of cooking and serving, forwarded their desires, making faces all the time at unfamiliar sauce-pans, and quite plainly agreed with them that men were to be comforted by such recognised device. Anne and Lydia were deft little housewives. They had a sober recognition of the pains that go to a well-ordered life, and were patient in service. Their father had no habit of complaint if the machinery creaked and even caused the walls to shudder with faulty action. Yet they knew their gentle ways contributed to his peace.

After supper, having seen that he was seated and ready for the little talk they usually had in the edge of the evening, Lydia wondered whether she ought to tell him a reporter had run them down; but while she balanced the question there came another clanging knock and Mary Nellen beckoned her. This one was of another stamp. He had to get his story, and he had overborne Mary Nellen and penetrated to the hall. Lydia could hear the young inexorable voice curtly talking down Mary Nellen and she closed the library door behind her. But when the front door had shut after the invader and Lydia came back, again with reddened cheeks and distended eyes, the colonel went to it and shot the bolt.

"That's enough for to-night," said he. "The next I'll see, but not till morning."

"You know we all thought it best you shouldn't," Anne said, always faintly interrogative. "So long as we needn't say who we are. They'd know who you were."

"His father," said Lydia, from an indignation disproportioned to the mild sadness she saw in the colonel's face. "That's what they'd say: his father. I don't believe Anne and I could bear that, the way they'd say it. I don't believe Jeff could either."

The colonel had, even in his familiar talk with them, a manner of old-fashioned courtesy.

"I didn't think it mattered much myself who saw them," he said, "when you proposed it. But now it has actually happened I see it's very unfitting for you to do it, very unfitting. However, I don't believe we shall be troubled again to-night."

But their peace had been broken. They felt irrationally like ill-defended creatures in a state of siege. The pretty wall-paper didn't help them out, nor any consciousness of the blossoming orchard in the chill spring air. The colonel noted the depression in his two defenders and, by a spurious cheerfulness, tried to bring them back to the warmer intimacies of retrospect.

"It was in this very room," he said, "that I saw your dear mother first."

Lydia looked up, brightly ready for diversion. Anne sat, her head bent a little, responsive to the intention of his speech.

"I was sitting here," said he, "alone. I had, I am pretty sure, this very book in my hand. I wasn't reading it. I couldn't read. The maid came in and told me a lady wanted to see me."

"What time of the day was it, Farvie?" Lydia asked, with her eager sympathy.

"It was the late afternoon," said he. "In the early spring. Perhaps it was a day like this. I don't remember. Well, I had her come in. Before I knew where I was, there she stood, about there, in the middle of the floor. You know how she looked."

"She looked like Lydia," said Anne. It was not jealousy in her voice, only yearning. It seemed very desirable to look like Lydia or their mother.

"She was much older," said the colonel. "She looked very worried indeed. I remember what she said, remember every word of it. She said, 'Mr. Blake, I'm a widow, you know. And I've got two little girls. What am I going to do with them?'"

"She did the best thing anybody could," said Lydia. "She gave us to you."

"I have an idea I cried," said the colonel. "Really I know I did. And it broke her all up. She'd come somehow expecting Jeff's father to account for the whole business and assure her there might be a few cents left. But when she saw me dribbling like a seal, she just ran forward and put her arms round me. And she said, 'My dear! my dear!' I hear her now."

"So do I," said Anne, in her low tone. "So do I."

"And you never'd seen each other before," said Lydia, in an ecstasy of youthful love for love. "I call that great."

"We were married in a week," said the colonel. "She'd come to ask me to help her, do you see? but she found I was the one that needed help. And I had an idea I might do something for her by taking the responsibility of her two little girls. But it was no use pretending. I didn't marry her for anything except, once I'd seen her, I couldn't live without her."

"Wasn't mother darling!" Lydia threw at him, in a passionate sympathy.

"You're like her, Lydia," said Anne again.

But Lydia shook her head.

"I couldn't hold a candle to mother," said she. "My eyes may be like hers. So is my forehead. So's my mouth. But I'm no more like mother——"

"It was her sympathy," said their father quietly, seeming to have settled it all a long time before. "She was the most absolutely loving person. You girls may be like her in that, too. I'm sure you're inconceivably good to me."

"I'd like to love people to death," said Lydia, with the fierceness of passion not yet named and recognised, but putting up its beautiful head now and then to look her remindingly in the eyes. "I'd like to love everybody. You first, Farvie, you and Anne. And Jeff. I'm going to love Jeff like a house-a-fire. He doesn't know what it is to have a sister. When he comes in I'm going to run up to him as if I couldn't wait to get him into the room, and kiss him and say, 'Here we are, Jeff. I'm Lyddy. Here's Anne.' You kiss him, too, Anne."

"Why," said Anne softly, "I wonder."

"You needn't stop to wonder," said Lydia. "You do it. He's going to realise he's got sisters anyway—and a father."

The same thought sprang at once into their three minds. It was not uncommon. They lived so close together, in such a unison of interests, that their minds often beat accordingly. Anne hesitatingly voiced the question.

"Do you think Esther'll meet him?"

"Impossible to say," the colonel returned, and Lydia's nipped lips and warlike glance indicated that she found it hideously impossible to say.

"I intend to find out," said she.

"I have an idea," said her father, as if he were in the kindest manner heading her off from a useless project, "that I'd better make a call on her myself, perhaps at once."

"She wouldn't see you when you came before," Lydia reminded him, in a hot rebellion against Jeff's wife who had not stood by him in his downfall. In the space of time that he had been outside the line of civilised life, an ideal of Jeff had been growing up in her own mind as in Anne's. They saw him as the wronged young chevalier without reproach whom a woman had forsaken in his need. Only a transcript of their girlish dreams could have told them what they thought of Jeff. His father's desolation without him, the crumbling of his father's life from hale middle age to fragile eld, this whirling of the leaves of time had seemed to bring them to a blazoned page where Jeff's rehabilitation should be wrought out in a magnificent sequence. The finish to that volume only: Jeff's life would begin again in the second volume, to be annotated with the approbation of his fellows. He would be lifted on the hands of men, their plaudits would upbear his soul, and he would at last triumph, sealed by the sanction of his kind. They grew intoxicated over it sometimes, in warm talks when their father was not there. He talked very little: a few words now and then to show what he thought of Jeff, a phrase or two where he unconsciously turned for them the page of the past and explained obscurities in the text they couldn't possibly elucidate alone—these they treasured and made much of, as the antiquary interprets his stone language. He never knew what importance they laid on every shred of evidence about Jeff. Perhaps if he had known he would have given them clearer expositions. To him Jeff was the dearest of sons that ever man begot, strangely pursued by a malign destiny accomplished only through the very chivalry and softness of the boy's nature. No hero, though; he would never have allowed his girls to build on that. And in all this rehabilitation of Jeff, as the girls saw it, there was one dark figure like the black-clad mourner at the grave who seems to deny the tenet of immortality: his wife, who had not stood by him and who was living here in Addington with her grandmother, had insisted on living with grandmother, in fact, as a cloak for her hardness. Sometimes they felt if they could sweep the black-clad figure away from the grave of Jeff's hopes, Jeff, in glorious apotheosis, would rise again.

"What a name for her—Esther!" Lydia ejaculated, with an intensity of hatred Anne tried to waft away by a little qualifying murmur. "Esther! Esthers are all gentle and humble and beautiful."

"She is a very pretty woman," said her father, with a wise gentleness of his own. Lydia often saw him holding the balance for her intemperate judgments, his grain of gold forever equalising her dross. "I think she'd be called a beautiful woman. Jeff thought she was."

"Do you actually believe, Farvie," said Lydia, "that she hasn't been to see him once in all these hideous years?"

"I know it," said he. "However, we mustn't blame her. She may be a timid woman. We must stand by her and encourage her and make it easier for her to meet him now. Jeff was very much in love with her. He'll understand her better than we do."

"I don't understand her at all," said Lydia, "unless you're going to let us say she's selfish and a traitor and——"

"No, no," said Anne. "We don't know her. We haven't even seen her. We must do what Farvie says, and then what Jeff says. I feel as if Jeff had thought things out a lot."

"Yes," said Lydia, and bit her lip on the implied reason that he'd had plenty of time.

"Yes," said the colonel gravely, in his own way. "I'd better go over there early to-morrow afternoon. Before the reporters get at her."

"Maybe they've done it already," Lydia suggested, and the gravity of his face accorded in the fear that it might be so.

Lydia felt no fear: a fiery exultation, rather. She saw no reason why Esther should be spared her share of invasion, except, indeed, as it might add to the publicity of the thing.

"You'll tell her, Farvie," Anne hesitated, "just what we'd decided to do about his coming—about meeting him?"

"Yes," said he. "In fact, I should consult her. She must have thought out things for herself, just as he must. I should tell her he particularly asked us not to meet him. But I don't think that would apply to her. I think it would be a beautiful thing for her to do. If reporters are there——"

"They will be," Lydia interjected savagely.

"Well, if they are, it wouldn't be a bad thing for them to report that his wife was waiting for him. It would be right and simple and beautiful. But if she doesn't meet him, certainly we can't. That would give rise to all kinds of publicity and pain. I think she'll see that."

"I don't think she'll see anything," said Lydia. "She's got a heart like a stone."

"Oh, don't say that," Anne besought her, "in advance."

"It isn't in advance," said Lydia. "It's after all these years."