The Prisoner Part 47

"She isn't tremendously old."

"Oh, but she looks so. When you see her in her nightcap--it's horrible, the whole thing, grandmother and all, and here I am shut up with it."

"I'm sorry," said Alston, in a low tone. "I'm devilish sorry."

"And I want to go away," said Esther, her voice rising hysterically, so that Alston nervously hoped she wouldn't cry. "But I can't do that. I haven't enough to live on, away from here, and I'm afraid."

"Esther," said he, daring at last to bring out the doubt that a.s.sailed him when he mused over her by himself, "just what do you mean by saying you are afraid?"

"You know," said Esther, almost in a whisper. She had herself in hand now.

"Yes. But tell me again. Tell me explicitly."

"I'm afraid," said Esther, "of him."

"Of your husband? If that's it, say it."

"I'm afraid of Jeff. He's been in here. I told you so. He took hold of me. He dragged me by my wrists. Alston, how can you make me tell you!"

The appeal sickened him. He got up and walked away to the mantel where the candles were, and stood there leaning against the shelf. He heard her catch her breath, and knew she was near sobs. He came back to his chair, and his voice had resumed so much of its judicial tone that her breath grew stiller in accord.

"Esther," said he, "you'd better tell me everything."

"I can't," said she, "everything. You are--" the rest came in a startling gush of words--"you are the last man I could tell."

It was a confession, a surrender, and he felt the tremendous weight of it. Was he the last man she could tell? Was she then, poor child, withholding herself from him as he, in decency, was aloof from her? He pulled himself together.

"Perhaps I can't do anything for you," he said, "in my own person. But I can see that other people do. I can see that you have counsel."

"Alston," said she, in what seemed to him a beautiful simplicity, "why can't you do anything for me?"

This was so divinely childlike and direct that he had to tell her.

"Esther, don't you see? If you have grounds for action against your husband, could I be the man to try your case? Could I? When you have just said I am the last man you could tell? I can't get you a divorce----" he stopped there. He couldn't possibly add, "and then marry you afterward."

"I see," said Esther, yet raging against him inwardly. "You can't help me."

"I can help you," said Alston. "But you must be frank with me. I must know whether you have any case at all. Now answer me quite simply and plainly. Does Jeff support you?"

"Oh, no," said Esther.

"He gives you no money whatever?"

"None."

"Then he's a bigger rascal than I've been able to think him."

"I believe----" said Esther, and stopped.

"What do you believe?"

"I think the money must come from his father. He sends it to me."

"Then there is money?"

"Why, yes," said Esther irritably, "there's some money, or how could I live?"

"But you told me there was none."

"How do you think I could live here with grandmother and expect her to dress me? Grandmother's very old. She doesn't see the need of things."

"It isn't a question of what you can live on," said Alston. "It's a question of Jeff's allowing you money, or not allowing you money. Does he, or does he not?"

"His father sends me some," said Esther, in a voice almost inaudible. It sounded sulky.

"Regularly?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Don't you know?"

"Yes. He sends it regularly."

"How often?"

"Four times a year."

"Haven't you every reason to believe that money is from Jeff?"

"No," said Esther. "I haven't any reason to think so at all. His father signs the cheques."

"Isn't it probable that his father would do that when Jeff was in prison, and that he should continue doing it now?"

Esther did not answer. There was something in the silence of the room, something in the peculiar feel of the atmosphere that made Alston certain she had balked. He recognised that pause in the human animal under inquisition, and for a wonder, since he had never been wound up to breaking point himself, knew how it felt. The machinery in the brain had suddenly stopped. He was not surprised that Esther could not go on. It was not obstinacy that deterred her. It was panic. He had put her, he knew, to too harsh a test. Now he had to soothe her affrighted mind and bring it back to its clear uses; and since he could honestly do it, as the lawyer exercising professional medicine, he gave himself gladly to the task.

"Esther," he said, "it is infernal to ask you these personal questions.

But you will have to bring yourself to answer them if we are to decide whether you have any case and whether I can send you to another man. But if you do engage counsel, you'll have to talk to him freely. You'll have to answer all sorts of questions. It's a pretty comprehensive thing to admit the law into your private life, because you've got to give it every right there. You'll be questioned. And you'll have to answer."

Esther sat looking at him steadily. As she looked, her pale cheek seemed to fill and flush and a light ran into her eyes, until the glow spilled over and dazzled him, like something wavering between him and her. He had never seen that light in her eyes, nor indeed the eyes of any woman, nor would he have said that he could bear to see it there unsummoned.

Yet had he not summoned it unconsciously, hard as he was trying to play the honest game between an unattached woman and a man who sees her fetters where she has ceased to see them, but can only feel them gall her? Had not the inner spirit of him been speaking through all this interview to the inner spirit of her, and was she not willing now to let it cry out and say to him, "I am here "? Esther was willing to cry out.

In the bewilderment of it, he did not know whether it was superb of her, though he would have felt it in another woman to be shameless. The l.u.s.trous lights of her eyes dwelt upon him, unwavering. Then her lips confirmed them.

"Well," said Esther, "isn't it worth it?"

Alston got up and rather blindly went out of the room. In the street, after the summer breeze had been touching his forehead and yet not cooling it, he realised he was carrying his hat in his hand, and put it on hastily. He was Addington to the backbone, when he was not roaming the fields of fiction, and one of the rules of Addington was against looking queer. He walked to his office and let himself in. The windows were closed and the room had the crude odour of public life: dust, stale tobacco and books. He threw up the windows and hesitated an instant by the gas jet. It was his habit, when the outer world pressed him too heavily, to plunge instantly into a book. But books were no anodyne for the turmoil of this night. Nor was the light upon these familiar furnishings. He sat down by the window, laid his arms on the sill and looked out over the meadows, unseen now but throwing their damp exhalations up to him through the dark. His heart beat hard, and in the physical vigour of its revolt he felt a fierce pleasure; but he was shamed all through in some way he felt he could not meet. Had he seen a new Esther to-night, an Esther that had not seemed to exist under the soft lashes of the woman he thought he knew so well? He had a stiffly drawn picture of what a woman ought to be. She really conformed to Addington ideals. He believed firmly that the austere and n.o.ble dwelt within woman as Addington had framed her. It would have given him no pleasure to find a savage hidden under pretty wiles. But Alston believed so sincerely in the control of man over the forces of life, of which woman was one, that, if Esther had stepped backward from her bright estate into a barbarous challenge, it was his fault, he owned, not hers.

He should have guided her so that she stayed within hallowed precincts.

He should have upheld her so that she did not stumble over these pitfalls of the earth. It is a pity those ideals of old Addington that made Alston Choate believe in women as little lower than the angels and, if they proved themselves lower, not really culpable because they are children and not rightly guided--it is a pity that garden cannot keep on blooming even out of the midden of the earth. But he had kept the garden blooming. Addington had a tremendous grip on him. It was not that he had never seen other customs, other manners. He had travelled a reasonable amount for an Addington man, but always he had been able to believe that Eden is what it was when there was but one man in it and one woman. There was, of course, too, the serpent. But Alston was fastidious, and he kept his mind as far away from the serpent as possible. He thought of his mother and sister, and instantly ceased thinking of them, because to them Esther was probably a sweet person, and he knew they would not have recognised the Esther he saw to-night.

Perhaps, though he did not know this, his mother might.