The Prisoner Part 17

Weedon squirmed at this, and even Jeff thought it rather a nasty cut.

But Jeff did not know yet how well Choate knew Weedon in the ways of men. And Weedon accepted no rebuff. He turned to Jeff, distinctly leaving Choate as one who would have his little pleasantries.

"Jeff," he said, "I want you to do something for the _Argosy_."

Jeff at once knew what.

"Queer," he said, "how you all think I've got copy out of jail."

Anne resented the word. It was not jail, she thought, a federal prison where gentlemen, when they have done wrong or been, like Jeff, falsely accused, may go with dignity.

"My dear," said Miss Amabel, in a manner at once all compa.s.sion and inexorable demand, "you've got so much to tell us. You men in that--place," she stumbled over the word and then accepted it--"discussed the ideal republic. You made it, by discussing it."

"Yes," said Choate, in voice of curious circ.u.mspection as if he hardly knew what form even of eulogy might hurt, "it was an astonishing piece of business. You can't expect people not to notice a thing like that."

"I can't help it," said Jeff. "I don't want such a row made over it."

Whether the thing was too intimate, too near his heart still beating sluggishly it might be, from prison air, could not be seen. But Miss Amabel, exquisitely compa.s.sionate, was yet inexorable, because he had something to give and must not withhold.

"The wonderful part of it is," she said, "that when you have built up your ideal government, prison ceases to be prison. There won't be punishment any more."

"Oh, don't you make that mistake," said Jeff, instantly, moved now too vitally to keep out of it. "There are going to be punishments all along the line. The big punishment of all, when you've broken a law, is that you're outside. If it's a small break, you're not much over the sill. If it's a big break, you're absolutely out. Outside, Amabel, outside!" He never used the civil prefix before her name, and Anne wondered again whether the intimacy of the letters accounted for this sweet informality. "You're banished. What's worse than that?"

"Oh, but," said she, her plain, beautiful face beaming divinity on him as one of the children of men, "I don't want them to be banished. If anybody has sinned--has broken the law--I want him to be educated.

That's all."

"Look here," said Jeff, He bent forward to her and laid the finger of one trade-stained hand in the other palm. "You're emasculating the whole nation. Let us be educated, but let us take our good hard whacks."

"Hear! hear!" said Choate, speaking mildly but yet as a lawyer, who spent his life in presenting liabilities for or against punishment.

"That's hot stuff."

"I believe in law," said Jeff rapidly. "Sometimes I think that's all I believe in now."

Anne and Lydia looked at him in a breathless waiting upon his words. He had begun to justify himself to their crescent belief in him, the product of the years. His father also waited, but tremulously. Here was the boy he had wanted back, but he had not so very much strength to accord even a fulfilled delight. Jeff, forgetful of everybody but the old sybil he was looking at, sure of her comprehension if not her agreement, went on.

"I'd rather have bad laws than no laws. I believe in Sparta. I believe in the Catholic Church, if only because it has fasts and penances. We've got to toe the mark. If we don't, something's got to give it to us good and hard, the harder the better, too. Are we children to be let off from the consequences of what we've done? No, by G.o.d! We're men and we've got to learn."

Suddenly his eyes left Miss Amabel's quickened face and he glanced about him, aware of the startled tensity of gaze among the others. Moore, with a little book on his knee, was writing rapidly.

"Notes?" Jeff asked him shortly. "No, you don't."

He got up and extended his hand for the book, and Moore helplessly, after a look at Miss Amabel, as if to ask whether she meant to see him bullied, delivered it. Jeff whirled back two leaves, tore them out, crumpled them in his hand and tossed them into the fireplace.

"You can't do that, Moore," he said indifferently, and Choate murmured a monosyllabic a.s.sent.

Moore never questioned the bullying he so prodigally got. He never had at college even; he was as ready to fawn the next day. It seemed as if the inner man were small, too small for sound resentment. Jeff sat down again. He looked depressed, his countenance without inward light. But Lydia and Anne had rediscovered him. Again he was their hero, reclothed indeed in finer mail. Miss Amabel rose at once. She shook hands with the colonel, and asked Anne and Lydia to come to see her.

"Don't you do something, you two girls?" she asked, with her inviting smile. "I'm sure Jeff wrote me so."

"We dance," said Lydia, in a bubbling bright voice, as if she had run forward to be sure to get the chance of answering. "Let us come and dance for you. We can dance all sorts of things."

And Lydia was so purely childlike and dear, after this talk of punishments and duties, that involuntarily they all laughed and she looked abashed.

"Perhaps you know folk-dances," said Miss Amabel.

"Oh, yes," said Lydia, getting back her spirit. "There isn't one we don't know."

And they laughed again and Miss Amabel tied on her bonnet and went away attended by Choate, with Weedon Moore a pace behind, holding his hat, until he got out of the house, as it might be at a grotesque funeral.

Miss Amabel had called back to Lydia:

"You must come and train my cla.s.ses in their national dancing."

Lydia, behind the colonel and Jeff as they stood at the front door, seized Anne's hand and did a few ecstatic little steps.

The colonel was bright-eyed and satisfied with his evening. "Jeff," said he, before they turned to separate, "I always thought you were meant for a writer."

Jeff looked at him in a dull denial, as if he wondered how any man, life being what it is, could seek to bound the lot of another man. His face, flushed darkly, was seamed with feeling.

"Father," said he, in a voice of mysterious reproach, "I don't know what I was meant to be."

X

It was Lydia who found out what Jeff meant himself to be, for the next day, in course of helping Mary Nellen, she went to his door with towels.

Mr. Jeffrey had gone out, Mary Nellen said. She had seen him spading in the orchard, and if Miss Lydia wanted to carry up the towels! there was the dusting, too. Lydia, at the open door, stopped, for Jeff was sitting at his writing table, paper before him. He flicked a look at her, absently, as at an intruder as insignificant as undesired, and because the sacredness of his task was plain to her she took it humbly. But Jeff, then actually seeing her, rose and put down his pen.

"I'll take those," he said.

It troubled him vaguely to find her and Anne doing tasks. He had a worried sense that he and the colonel were living on their kind offices, and he felt like a.s.suring Lydia she shouldn't carry towels about for either of them long. Then, as she did not yield them but looked, housekeeper-wise, at the rack still loaded with its tumbled reserves, he added:

"Give them here."

"You mustn't leave your writing," said Lydia primly if shyly, and delivered up her charge.

Jeff stepped out after her into the hall. He had left dull issues at his table, and Lydia seemed very sweet, her faith in him chiefly, though he didn't want any more of it.

"Don't worry about my writing," said he.

"Oh, no," she answered, turning on him the clarity of her glance. "I shouldn't. Authors never want it talked about."

"That's not it," said he. She found him tremendously in earnest. "I'm not an author."

"But you will be when this is written."

"I don't know," he said, "how I can make you see. The whole thing is so foreign to your ideas about books and life. It only happened that I met a man--in there--" he hesitated over it, not as regarding delicacies but only as they might affect her--"a man like a million others, some of 'em in prison, more that ought to be. Well, he talked to me. I saw what brought him where he was. It was picturesque."