Part 2 (1/2)

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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 a.s.sure 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 pa.s.sionate 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.”