Part 65 (1/2)

”Good girl!” Madame Beattie called to her, from her room. ”Well begun is half done.”

Esther did not answer. Neither did she take the trouble to hate Aunt Patricia for saying it. She went instantly to her gla.s.s, and smiled into it. The person who smiled back at her was young and very engaging.

Esther liked her. She thought she could trust her to do the best thing possible.

Jeff went home and stood just inside his gateway to wait for Lydia. He judged that she had been going to Amabel's, and now, her thoughts thrown out of focus by meeting him with Esther, she would give up her visit and come home to be sad a little by herself. He was right. She came soon, walking fast, after her habit, a determined figure. He had had time to read her face before she drew its veil of proud composure, and he found in it what he had expected: young sorrow, the anguish of the heart stricken and with no acquired power of staunching its own wounds. When she saw him her face hardly changed, except that the mournful eyes sought his. Had Esther got power over him? the eyes asked, and not out of jealousy, he believed. The little creature was like a cheris.h.i.+ng mother. If Esther had gained power she would fight it to the uttermost, not to possess him but to save his intimate self. Esther might pursue it into fastnesses, but it should be saved. To Jeff, in that instant of meeting the questioning eyes, she seemed an amazing person, capable of exacting a tremendous loyalty. He didn't feel like explaining to her that Esther hadn't got him in the least. The clarity of understanding between them was inexpressibly precious to him. He wouldn't break it by muddling a.s.sertions.

”I've been to Amabel's,” he said. ”You were going there, too, weren't you?”

Lydia's face relaxed and cleared a little. She looked relieved, perhaps from the mere kindness of his voice.

”I didn't go,” she said. ”I didn't feel like it.”

”No,” said Jeff. ”But now we're home again, both of us, and we're glad.

Couldn't we cut round this way and sit under the wall a little before Anne sees us and makes us eat things?”

He took her hand, this time of intention to make her feel befriended in the intimacy of their common home, and they skirted the fence and went across the orchard to the bench by the brick wall. As they sat there and Jeff gave back her little hand he suddenly heard quick breaths from her and then a sob or two.

”Lydia,” said he. ”Lydia.”

”I know it,” said Lydia.

She sought out her handkerchief and seemed to attack her face with it, she was so angry at the tears.

”You're not hurt,” said Jeff. ”Truly you're not hurt, Lydia. There's been nothing to hurt you.”

Soon her breath stopped catching, and she gave her eyes a final desperate scrub. By that time Jeff had begun to talk about the land and what he hoped to do with it next year. He meant at least to prune the orchard and maybe set out dwarfs. At first Lydia did not half listen, knowing his purpose in distracting her. Then she began to answer. Once she laughed when he told her the colonel, in learning to dig potatoes, had sliced them with the hoe. Father, he told her, was what might be called a library agriculturist. He was reading agricultural papers now.

He could answer almost any question you asked. As for bugs and their natural antidotes, he knew them like a book. He even called himself an agronomist. But when it came to potatoes! By and by they were talking together and he had succeeded in giving her that homely sense of intimacy he had been striving for. She forgot the pang that pierced her when she saw him walking beside the woman who owned him through the law. He was theirs, hers and her father's and Anne's, because they knew him as he was and were desperately seeking to succour his maimed life.

But as she was going to sleep a curious question asked itself of Lydia.

Didn't she want him to go back to his wife and be happy with her, if that could be? Lydia had no secrets from herself, no emotional veilings.

She told herself at once that she didn't want it at all. No Esther made good as she was fair, by some apt miracle, could be trusted with the man she had hurt. According to Lydia, Esther had not in her even the seeds of such compa.s.sion as Jeff deserved.

x.x.xV

When the cold weather came and Alston Choate and Weedon Moore became rival candidates for the mayoralty of Addington, strange things began to happen. Choate, cursing his lot inwardly, but outwardly deferential to his mother who had really brought it on him, began to fulfil every last requirement of the zealous candidate. He even learned to make speeches, not the lucid exponents of the law that belonged to his court career, but prompt addresses, apparently unconsidered, at short notice. The one innovation he drew the line at was the flattering recognition of men he had never, in the beaten way of life, recognised before. He could not, he said, kiss babies. But he would tell the town what he thought it needed, coached, he ironically added when he spoke the expansive truth at home, by his mother and Jeff. They were ready to bring kindling to boil the pot, Mrs. Choate in her grand manner of beckoning the ancient virtues back, Jeff, as Alston told, him, hammer and tongs. Jeff also began to make speeches, because, at one juncture when Alston gave out from hoa.r.s.eness--his mother said it was a psychological hoa.r.s.eness at a moment when he realised overwhelmingly how he hated it all--Jeff had taken his place and ”got” the men, labourers all of them, as Alston never had.

”It's a mistake,” said Mrs. Choate afterward when he came to the house to report, and ask how Alston was, and the three sat eating one of Mary's quick suppers. ”You're really the candidate. Those men know it.

They know it's you behind Alston, and they're going to take him patiently because you tell them to. But they don't half want him.”

Jeff was very fine now in his robustness, fit and strong, no fat on him and good blood racing well. He was eating bread and b.u.t.ter heartily, while he waited for Mary to serve him savoury things, and Mrs. Choate looked discontentedly at Mary bending over his plate, all hospitality, with the greater solicitude because he was helping Alston out. Mrs.

Choate wished the nugatory Esther were out of the way, and she could marry Mary off to Jeff. Mary, pale, yet wholesome, fair-haired, with the definite Choate profile, and dressed in her favourite smoke colour and pale violet, her mother loved conscientiously, if impatiently. But she wished Mary, who had not one errant inclination, might come to her some day and say, ”Mother, I am desperately enamoured of an Italian fruit-seller with Italy in his eyes.” Mrs. Choate would have explained to her, with a masterly common-sense, that such vagrom impulses meant, followed to conclusions, s.h.i.+pwreck on the rocks of cla.s.s misunderstanding; but it would have warmed her heart to Mary to have so to explain. But here was Mary to whom no eccentricity ever had to be elucidated. She could not even have imagined a fruit-seller outside his heaven-decreed occupation of selling fruit. Mrs. Choate smiled a little to herself, wondering what Mary would say if she could know her mother was willing to consign the inconvenient Esther to perpetual limbo and marry her to handsome Jeff. ”Mother!” she could imagine her horrified cry. It would all be in that.

Jeff was more interested in his eating than in answering Mrs. Choate with more than an encouraging:

”We've got 'em, I think. But I wish,” he said, ”we had more time to follow up Weedie. What's he saying to 'em?”

”Ask Madame Beattie,” said Alston, with more distaste than he could keep out of his voice. ”I saw her last night on the outskirts of his crowd, sitting in Denny's hack.”