Part 5 (1/2)

”Without your hat, too,” pursued Anne anxiously. ”I don't know whether they do that here.” Lydia remembered Reardon, and thought she knew.

They went to bed early, in a low state of mind. The colonel was tired, and Anne, watching him from above as he toiled up the stairs, wondered if he needed a little strychnia. She would remember, she thought, to give it to him in the morning. After they had said good-night, and the colonel, indeed, was in his bed, she heard the knocker clang and slipped down the stairs to answer. Halfway she stopped, for Mary Nellen, candle in hand, had arrived from the back regions, and was, with admirable caution, opening the door a crack. But immediately she threw it wide, and tossed her own rea.s.surance over her shoulder, back to Anne.

”Mr. Alston Choate. To see your father.”

So Anne came down the stairs, and Mr. Choate, hat in hand, apologised for calling so late. He was extremely busy. He had to be at the office over time, but he didn't want to-day's sun to go down and he not have welcomed Mr. Blake. Anne had a chance, in the s.p.a.ce of his delivering this preamble, to think what a beautiful person he was. He had a young face lighted by a twisted whimsical smile, and a capacious forehead, built out a little into k.n.o.bs of a n.o.ble sort, as if there were ample chambers behind for the storing away of precedent. Altogether he would have satisfied every aesthetic requirement: but he had a broken nose. The portrait painter l.u.s.ted for him, and then retired sorrowfully. But the nose made him very human. Anne didn't know its eccentricity was the result of breakage, but she saw it was quite unlike other noses and found it superior to them.

Alston Choate spent every waking minute of his life in the practice of law and the reading of novels; he was either digging into precedent, expounding it, raging over its futilities, or guiltily losing himself in the life of books. What he really loved was music and the arts, and he dearly liked to read about the people who had leisure to follow such lures, time to be emotional even, and indulge in pretty talk. Yet law was the giant he had undertaken to wrestle with, and he kept his grip.

Sometime, he thought, the cases would be all tried or the feet of litigants would seek other doors. The wave of middle age would toss him to an island of leisure, and there he would sit down and hear music and read long books.

As he saw Anne coming down the stairs, he thought of music personified.

A crowd of adjectives rose in his mind and, like attendant graces, grouped themselves about her. He could imagine her sitting at archaic instruments, calling out of them, with slim fingers, diaphanous melodies. Yet the beauty that surrounded her like a light mantle she had s.n.a.t.c.hed up from nature to wear about her always, did not displace the other vision of beauty in his heart. It did not even jostle it. Esther Blake was, he knew, the sum of the ineffable feminine.

While he made that little explanation of his haste in coming and his fear that it was an untoward time, Anne heard him with a faint smile, all her listening in her upturned face. She was grateful to him. Her father, she knew, would be the stronger for men's hands to hold him up.

She returned a little explanation. Father was so tired. He had gone to bed. Then it seemed to her that Choate did a thing unsurpa.s.sed in splendour.

”You are one of the daughters, aren't you?” he said.

”Yes,” she answered. ”I'm Anne.”

Mary Nellen had delivered the candle to her hand, and she stood there holding it in a serious manner, as if it lighted some ceremonial. Then it was that Choate made the speech that clinched his hold upon her heart.

”When do you expect your brother?”

Anne's face flooded. He was not acting as if Jeff, coming from an unspeakable place, mustn't be mentioned. He was asking exactly as if Jeff had been abroad and the s.h.i.+p was almost in. It was like a pilot boat going out to see that he got in safely. And feeling the circ.u.mstance greatly, she found herself answering with a slow seriousness which did, indeed, carry much dignity.

”We are not sure. We think he may come directly through; but, on the other hand, he may be tired and not feel up to it.”

Choate smiled his irregular, queer smile. He was turning away now.

”Tell him I shall be in soon,” he said. ”I fancy he'll remember me.

Good-night.”

Lydia was hanging over the bal.u.s.trade.

”Who was it?” she asked, as Anne went up.

Anne told her and because she looked dreamy and not displeased, Lydia asked:

”Nice?”

”Oh, yes,” said Anne. ”You've heard Farvie speak of him. Exactly what Farvie said.”

Lydia had gone some paces in undressing. She stood there in a white wrapper, with her hair in its long braid, and stared at Anne for a considering interval.

”I think I'd better tell you,” said she. ”I've been to see her.”