The Prisoner Part 23

Whether the name hit them like blasphemy, whether the interpreter caught fire from it or Moore gave a signal, he could not tell. But suddenly he was being hustled. He was pulled down from the car with a gentle yet relentless force, was conscious that he was being removed and must submit. There were sounds now, the quick syllables of the southern races, half articulate to the uninstructed ear but full of idiom and pa.s.sion, and through his own silent struggle he was aware that the interpreter was soothing, directing, and inexorably guiding the a.s.sault.

They took him, a resistless posse of them, beyond the gap, and the automobile followed slowly and pa.s.sed him just outside. It halted, and Moore addressed him hesitatingly:

"I could take you back to town."

Moore didn't want to say this, but he remembered Miss Amabel and the two charming girls, all adoring Jeff, and his ever-present control bade him be civilised. Jeff did not answer. He was full of a choking rage and blind desire for them to get their hands off him. Not in his imprisonment even had he felt such debas.e.m.e.nt under control as when these lithe creatures hurried him along. Yet he knew then that his rage was not against them, innocent servitors of a higher power. It was against the mean dominance of Weedon Moore.

The car pa.s.sed swiftly on and down the road to town.

Then the men left him as suddenly as trained dogs whistled from their prey. He felt as if he had been merely detained, gently on the whole, at the point the master had designated, and looked about for the interpreter. It seemed to him if he could have speech with that man he could tell him in a sentence what Weedon Moore was, and charge him not to deliver these ignorant creatures of another race into his mucky hands. But if the interpreter was there he could not be distinguished.

Jeff called, a word or two, not knowing what to say, and no one answered. The crowd that had been eagerly intent on a common purpose, to get him out of the debating place, split into groups. Individuals detached themselves, silently and swiftly, and melted away. Jeff heard their footsteps on the road, and now the voices began, quietly but with an eager emphasis. He was left alone by the darkened field, for even the moon, as if she joined the general verdict, slipped under a cloud.

Jeff stood a moment nursing, not his anger, but a clearheaded certainty that something must be done. Something always had to be done to block Weedon Moore. It had been so in the old days when Moore was not dangerous: only dirty. Now he was debasing the ignorant mind. He was a demagogue. The old never-formulated love for Addington came back to Jeff in a rush, not recognised as love an hour ago, only the careless affection of usage, but ready, he knew, to spring into something warmer when her dear old bulwarks were a.s.sailed. You don't usually feel a romantic pa.s.sion for your mother. You allow her to feed you and be patronised by you and stand aside to let victorious youth pa.s.s on. But see unworthy hands touching her worn dress--the hands of Weedon Moore!--and you s.n.a.t.c.h it from their grasp.

Jeff still stood there thinking. This, the circus-ground was where he and the other boys had trysted in a delirious ownership of every possible "show", where they had met the East and gloated on nature's poor eccentricities. Now here he was, a man suddenly set in his purpose to deliver the old town from Weedon Moore. They couldn't suffer it, he and the rest of the street of solid mansions dating back to ancient dignities. These foreign children who had come to work for them should not be bred in disbelief in Addington traditions which were as good as anything America had to offer. Jeff was an aristocrat from skin to heart, because he was sensitive, because he loved beauty and he didn't want the other man to come too close; he didn't like tawdry ways to press upon him. But while he had been shut into the seclusion of his own thoughts, these past years, he had learned something. He had strengthened pa.s.sions that hardly knew they were alive until now events awoke them. One was the worship of law, and one was that savage desire of getting to the place where we love law so much that we welcome punishment. He recalled himself from this dark journey back into his cell, and threw up his head to the heavens and breathed in air. It was the air of freedom. Yet it was only the freedom of the body. If he forgot now the beauty of that austere G.o.ddess, the law, then was he more a prisoner than when he had learned her face in loneliness and pain. He walked out of the grounds and along the silent road, advised through keen memory, by sounds and scents, of spots he had always known, and went into the town and home. There were lights, but for all the sight of people Addington might have been abed.

He opened the front door softly and out of the library Anne came at once as if she had been awaiting him.

"Oh," she said, in a quick trouble breaking bounds, though gently, now there was another to share it, "I'm afraid Farvie's sick."

XIV

"What is it?" said he. "What's the matter?"

But Anne, after a second glance at his tired face, was all concern for him.

"Have you had something to eat?" she asked.

He put that aside, and said remindingly:

"What is it about father?"

Anne stood at the foot of the stairs. She had the air of defending the way, lest he rush up before he was intelligently prepared.

"We don't know what it is. He went all to pieces. It was just after you had gone. I found him there, shaking. He just said to me: 'I'll go to bed.' So I helped him. That's all I know."

Jeff felt an instant and annoyed compunction. He had dashed off, to the tune of his own wild mood, and left his father to the a.s.saults of emotions perhaps as overwhelming and with no young strength to meet them.

"I'll go up," said he. "Did you call a doctor?"

"No. He wouldn't let me."

Jeff ran up the stairs and found Lydia in a chair outside the colonel's door. She looked pathetically tired and anxious. And so young: if she had arranged herself artfully to touch the sympathies she couldn't have done it to more effect. Her round arms were bare to the elbow, her hands were loosely clasped, and she was sitting, like a child, with her feet drawn up under her on the rung of the chair. She looked at him in a solemn relief but, he saw with a relief of his own, no sensitiveness to his presence apart from the effect it might have on her father.

"He's asleep," she said, in a whisper. "I'm sitting here to listen."

Jeffrey nodded at her in a bluff way designed to express his certainty that everything was going to be on its legs again now he had come home.

For the first time he felt like the man in the house, and the thin tonic braced him. He opened the door of his father's room and went in. The colonel's voice came at once:

"That you, Jeff?"

"Yes," said Jeff. He sat down by the bedside in the straight-backed chair that had evidently been comfortable enough for the sisters'

anxious watch. "What's the matter, father?"

The colonel moved slightly nearer the edge of the bed. His eyes brightened, Jeff noted by the light of the shaded lamp. He was glad to get his son home again.

"Jeff," said he, "I've been lying here making up my mind I'd tell you."

Jeffrey rose and closed the door he had left open a crack out of courtesy to the little watcher there. He came back to the bed, not with a creaking caution, but like a man bringing a man's rude solace. He could not believe his father was seriously undone. But, whatever was the matter, the colonel was glad to talk. Perhaps, loyal as he was, even he could scarcely estimate his own desire to turn from soft indulgences to the hard contact of a man's intelligence.

"Jeff," said he, "I'm in a bad place. I've met the last enemy."

"Oh, no, you haven't," said Jeff, at random. "The last enemy is Death.

That's what they say, don't they? Well, you're years and years to the good. Don't you worry."

"Ah, but the last enemy isn't Death," said the colonel wisely. "Don't you think it. The last enemy is Fear. Death's only the executioner. Fear delivers you over, and then Death has to take you, whether or no. But Fear is the arch enemy."

Sane as he looked and spoke, this was rather impalpable, and Jeffrey began to doubt his own fitness to deal with psychologic quibbles. But his father gave short shrift for questioning.

"I'm afraid," he said quite simply.

"What are you afraid of?" Jeff felt he had to meet him with an equal candour.

"Everything."

They looked at each other a moment and then Jeff essayed a mild, "Oh, come!" because there was nothing more to the point.

"I've taken care of myself," said the colonel, with more vigour, "till I'm punk. I can't stand a knockdown blow. I couldn't stand your going away. I went to bed."

"Is my going a knockdown blow?"

There was something pathetic in hearing that, but pleasurable, too, in a warm, strange way.

"Why, yes, of course it is."

"Well, then," said Jeff, "don't worry. I won't go."

"Oh, yes, you will," said the colonel instantly, "or you'll be punk. I'd rather go with you. I told you that. But it wouldn't do. I should begin to pull on you. And you'd mother me as they do, these dear girls."

"Yes," said Jeffrey thoughtfully. "Yes. They're dear girls."

"There's nothing like them," said the colonel. "There never was anything like their mother." Then he stopped, remembering she was not Jeff's mother, too. But Jeff knew all about his own mother, the speed and shine and bewildering impulse of her, and how she was adored. But n.o.body could have been soothed and brooded over by her, that gallant fiery creature. Whatever she might have become if she had lived, love of her then was a fight and a devotion, flowers and stars and dreams. "And it isn't a thing for me to take, this sort of attachment, Jeff. I ought to give it. They ought to be having the kind of time girls like. They ought not to be coddling an old man badly hypped."

Jeff nodded here, comprehendingly. Yes, they did need the things girls like: money, clothes, fun. But he vaulted away from that disquieting prospect, and faced the present need.

"Have you had anything to eat?"