"Mustn't go there?" said Jeff almost foolishly, the thing seemed to him so queer. "Mustn't see my wife, because she says she is afraid of me?"

"Because she _is_ afraid of you," corrected Choate impulsively, in what he might have told himself was his liking for the right word. But he had a savage satisfaction in saying it. For the instant it made it seem as if he were defending Esther.

"I'd give a good deal," said Jeff slowly, "to hear just how Esther told you she was afraid of me. When was it, for example?"

"It was at no one time," said Choate unwillingly. Yet it seemed to him Jeff did deserve candour at all their hands.

"You mean it's been a good many times?"

"I mean I've been, in a way, her adviser since--"

"Since I've been in jail. That's very good of you, Choate. But do you gather Esther has told other people she is afraid of me, or that she has told you only?"

"Why, man," said Choate impatiently, "I tell you I've been her adviser.

Our relations are those of client and counsel. Of course she's said it to n.o.body but me."

"Not to Reardon," Jeff's inner voice was commenting satirically. "What would you think if you knew she had said it to Reardon, too? And how many more? She has spun her pretty web, and you're a prisoner. So is Reardon. You've each a special web. You are not allowed to meet."

He laughed out, and Alston looked at him in a sudden offence. It seemed to Alston that he had been sacrificing all sorts of delicacies that Jeff might be justly used, and the laugh belittled them both. But Jeff at that instant saw, not Alston, but a new vision of life. It might have been that a tide had rushed in and wiped away even the prints of Esther's little feet. It might have been that a wind blew in at the windows of his mind and beat its great wings in the corners of it and winnowed out the chaff. As he saw life then his judgments softened and his irritations cooled. Nothing was left but the vision of life itself, the uncomprehended beneficence, the consoler, the illimitable beauty we look in the face and do not see. For an instant perhaps he had caught the true proportions of things and knew at last what was worth weeping over and what was matter for a healthy mirth. It was all mirth perhaps, this show of things Lord G.o.d had set us in. He had not meant us to take it dumbly. He had hoped we should see at every turn how queer it is, and yet how orderly, and get our comfort out of that. He had put laughter behind every door we open, to welcome us. Grief was there, too, but if we fully understood Lord G.o.d and His world, there would be no grief: only patience and a gay waiting on His time. And all this came out of seeing Alston Choate, who thought he was a free man, hobbled by Esther's web.

Jeffrey got up and Alston looked at him in some concern, he was so queer, flushed, laughing a little, and with a wandering eye. At the door he stopped.

"About Weedie," he said. "We shall have to do something to Weedie.

Something radical. He's not going to be mayor of Addington. And I rather think you'll have to get into politics. You'd be mayor yourself if you'd get busy."

Jeffrey had no impulse to-day to go and ask Esther if she were afraid of him as he had when Reardon told him the same tale. He wasn't thinking of Esther now. He was hugging his idea to his breast and hurrying with it, either to entrust it to somebody or to wrap it up in the safety of pen and ink while it was so warm. And when he got home he came on Lydia, sitting on the front steps, singing to herself and cuddling a kitten in the curve of her arm. Lydia with no cares, either of the house or her dancing cla.s.s or Jeff's future, but given up to the idleness of a summer afternoon, was one of the most pleasing sights ever put into the hollow of a lovely world. Jeffrey saw her, as he was to see everything now, through the medium of his new knowledge. He saw to her heart and found how sweet it was, and how full of love for him. He saw Circe's island, and knew, since the international codes hold good, he must remember his allegiance to it. He still owned property there; he must pay his taxes.

But this Eden's garden which was Lydia was his chosen home. He was glad to see it so. He must, he knew, hereafter see things as they are. And they would not be tragic to him. They would be curious and funny and dear: for they all wore the mantle of life. He sat down on a lower step, and Lydia looked at him gravely, yet with pleasure, too.

"Lydia," said he, "do you know what they're calling me, these foreigners Madame Beattie's training with?"

She nodded.

"The Prisoner," said Jeff. "That's what I am--The Prisoner."

She hastened to rea.s.sure him.

"They don't do it to be hateful. It's in love. That's what they mean it in--love."

Jeff made a little gesture of the hand, as if he tossed off something so lightly won.

"Never mind how they mean it. That's not what I'm coming to. It's that they call me The Prisoner. Well, ten minutes ago it just occurred to me that we're all prisoners. I saw it as it might be a picture of life and all of us moving in it. Alston Choate's a prisoner to Esther. So's Reardon. Only it's not to Esther they're prisoners. It's to the big force behind her, the sorcery of nature, don't you see? Blind nature."

She was looking at him with the terrified patience of one compelled to listen and yet afraid of hearing what threatens the safe crystal of her own bright dream: that apprehensive look of woman, patient in listening, but beseeching the speaker voicelessly not to kill warm personal certainties with the abstractions he thinks he has discovered. Jeffrey did not understand the look. He was enamoured of his abstraction.

"And all the mill hands have been slaves to Weedon Moore because he told them lies, and now they're prisoners to Madame Beattie because she's telling them another kind of lie, G.o.d knows what. And Addington is prisoner to catch-words."

"But what are we prisoner to?" Lydia asked sharply, as if these things were terrifying. "Is Farvie a prisoner?"

"Why, father, G.o.d bless him!" said Jeff, moved at once, remembering what his father had to fight, "he's prisoner to his fear of death."

"And Anne? and I?"

Jeff sat looking at her in an abstracted thoughtfulness.

"Anne?" he repeated. "You? I don't know. I shouldn't dare to say. I've no rights over Anne. She's so good I'm shy of her. But if I find you're a prisoner, Lydia, I mean you shall be liberated. If nature drives you on as it drives the rest of us to worship something--somebody--blindly, and he's not worth it, you bet your life I'll save you."

She leaned back against the step above, her face suddenly sick and miserable. What if she didn't want to be saved? the sick face asked him.

Lydia was a truth-teller. She loved Jeff, and she plainly owned it to herself and felt surprisingly at ease over it. She was born to the dictates of nice tradition, but when that inner warmth told her she loved Jeff, even though he was bound to Esther, she didn't even hear tradition, if it spoke. All she could possibly do for Jeff, who unconsciously appealed to her every instant he looked at her with that deep frown between his brows, seemed little indeed. Should she say she loved him? That would be easy. But were his generalities about life strong enough to push her and her humilities aside? That was hard to bear.

"And," he was saying, "once we know we're prisoners, We can be free."

"How?" said Lydia hopefully. "Can we do the things we like?"

"No, by G.o.d! there's only one way of getting free, and that's by putting yourself under the law."

Lydia's heart fell beyond plummet's sounding. She did not want to put herself under any stricter law than that of heart's devotion. She had been listening to it a great deal, of late. They were sweet things it told her, and not wicked things, she thought, but all of humble service and unasked rewards.

Jeff was roaming on, beguiled by his new thoughts and the sound of his own voice.

"It's perfectly true what I used to write in that beggarly prison paper.

The only way to be really free is to be bound--by law. It's the big paradox. Do you know what I'm going to do?"

She shook her head. He was probably, her apprehensive look said, going to do something that would take him out of the pretty paradise where she longed to set him galloping on the road to things men ought to have.

"I am going in to tear up the stuff I'm writing about that man I knew there in the prison. What does G.o.d Almighty care about him? I'm going to write a book and call it 'Prisoners,' and show how I was a prisoner myself, to money, and luxury, and the game and--" he would not mention Esther, but Lydia knew where his mind stumbled over the thought of her--"and how I got my medicine. And how other fellows will have to take theirs, these fellows Weedie's gulling and Addington, because it's a fool wrapped up in its own conceit and stroking the lion's cub till it's grown big enough to eat us."

He got up and Lydia called to him:

"What is the lion's cub?"

"Why, it's the people. And Weedon Moore is showing it how hungry it is by chucking the raw meat at it and the saucers of blood. And pretty soon it'll eat us and eat Weedie too."

He went in and up the stairs and Lydia fancied she heard the tearing of papers in his room.

XXIV

The dry branch has come alive. The young Jeff Lydia had known through Farvie was here, miraculously full of hope and laughter. Jeff was as different after that day as a man could be if he had been buried and revived and cast his grave-clothes off. He measured everything by his new idea and the answers came out pat. The creative impulse shot up in him and grew. He knew what it was to be a prisoner under penalty, every cruel phase of it; and now that he saw everybody else in bonds, one to an unbalanced law of life we call our destiny, one to cant, one to greed, one to untended impulse, he was afire to let the prisoners out.

If they knew they were bound they could throw off these besetments of mortality and walk in beauty. Old Addington, the beloved, must free herself. Too long had she been held by the traditions she had erected into forms of worship. The traditions lasted still, though now n.o.body truly believed in them. She was beating her shawms and cymbals in the old way, but to a new tune, and the tune was not the song of liberty, he believed, but a child's lullaby. In that older time she had decently covered discomfiting facts, a.s.serted that she believed revealed religion, and blessed G.o.d, in an ingenuous candour, for setting her feet in paths where she could walk decorously. But now that she was really considering new G.o.ds he wanted her to take herself in hand and find out what she really worshipped. What was G.o.d and what was Baal? Had she the nerve to burn her sacrifices and see? He began to understand her better every day he lived with her. Poor old Addington! she had been suddenly a.s.saulted by the clamour of the times; it told her shameful things were happening, and she had, with her old duteous responsiveness, s.n.a.t.c.hed at remedies. The rich, she found, had robbed the poor. Therefore let there be no more poverty, though not on that account less riches. And here the demagogue arose and bade her shirk no issue, even the red flag. G.o.d Himself, the demagogue informed her, gives in His march of time spectacular ill.u.s.tration of temporal vanity. The earthquake ruins us, the flood engulfs us, fire and water are His ministers to level the pomp of power. Therefore, said the demagogue, forget the sweet abidingness of home, the brooding peace of edifices, the symbolic uses of matter to show us, though we live but in tents of a night, that therein is a sign of the Eternal City. Down with property. Addington had learned to distrust one sort of individual, and she instantly believed she could trust the other individual who was as unlike him as possible. Because Dives had been numb to human needs, Lazarus was the new-discovered leader. And the pitiful part of it all was that though Addington used the alphabet and spoke the language of "social unrest", it did it merely with the relish of playing with a new thing. It didn't make a jot of difference in its daily living. It didn't exert itself over its local government, it didn't see the Weedon Moores were honeycombing the soil with sedition. It talked, and talked, and knew the earth would last its time.

When Jeffrey tore up the life of his fellow prisoner he did it as if he tore his own past with it. He sat down to write his new book which was, in a way, an autobiography. He had read the enduring ones. He used to think they were crudely honest, and he meant now to tell the truth as brutally as the older men: how, in his seething youth, when he scarcely knew the face of evil in his arrogant confidence that he was strong enough to ride it bareback without falling off, if it would bring him to his ends, he leaped into the money game. And at that point, he owned ingenuously, he would have to be briefly insincere. He could unroll his own past, but not Esther's. The minute the stage needed her he realised he could never summon her. He might betray himself, not her. It was she, the voice incarnate of greed and sensuous delight, that had whipped him along his breathless course, and now he had to conceal her behind a wilful lie and say they were his own delights that lured him.

He sat there in his room writing on fiery nights when the moths crowded outside the screen and small sounds urged the freedom and soft beguilement of the season, even in the bounds of streets. The colonel, downstairs, sat in a determined patience over Mary Nellen's linguistic knots, what time he was awake long enough to tackle them, and wished Jeff would bring down his work where he could be glanced at occasionally even if he were not to be spoken to. The colonel had thought he wanted nothing but to efface himself for his son, and yet the yearning of life within him made him desire to live a little longer even by sapping that young energy. Only Lydia knew what Jeff was doing, and she gloried in it. He was writing a book, mysterious work to her who could only compa.s.s notes of social import, and even then had some ado to spell. But she read his progress by the light in his eyes, his free bearing and his broken silence. For now Jeff talked. He talked a great deal. He chaffed his father and even Anne, and left Lydia out, to her own pain. Why should he have kissed her that long ago day if he didn't love her, and why shouldn't he have kept on loving her? Lydia was asking herself the oldest question in the woman's book of life, and n.o.body had told her that nature only had the answer. "If you didn't mean it why did you do it?" This was the question Lydia heard no answer to.

Jeff was perpetually dwelling upon Addington, torn between the factions of the new and old. He asked Lydia seriously what she should recommend doing, to make good citizens out of bamboozled aliens. Lydia had but one answer. She should, she said, teach them to dance. Then you could get acquainted with them. You couldn't get acquainted if you set them down to language lessons or religious teaching, or tried to make them read the Const.i.tution. If people had some fun together, Lydia thought, they pretty soon got to understand one another because they were doing a thing they liked, and one couldn't do it so well alone. That was her recipe. Jeff didn't take much stock in it. He was not wise enough to remember how eloquent are the mouths of babes. He went to Miss Amabel as being an expert in sympathy, and found her shy of him. She was on the veranda, sh.e.l.ling peas, and in her checked muslin with father's portrait braided round with mother's hair pinning together her embroidered collar. To Jeff, clad in his blue working-clothes, she looked like motherhood and sainthood blended. He sat himself down on the lower step, clasped his knees and watched her, following the movements of her plump hands.