The Prisoner. Alice Brown

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      "Oh, yes," said Jeffrey. "I like it. Only you never had. Except in letters. Come in here and I'll tell you what I'm going to do."

      He had piloted the colonel into the library, and Anne and Lydia were disappearing into the dining-room where Mary Nellen was now supreme. The colonel called them, imperatively. There was such a note of necessity in his voice that they felt sure he didn't know how to deal, quite by himself, with this unknown quantity of a son.

      "Girls, come here. I have to have my girls," he said to Jeffrey, "when anything's going to be talked over. They're the head of the house and my head, too."

      The girls came proudly, if unwillingly. They knew the scowling young man didn't need them, might not want them indeed. But they were a part of Farvie, and he'd got to accept them until they found out, at least, how safe Farvie was going to be in his hands. Jeffrey wasn't thinking of them at all. He was accepting them, but they hadn't any share in his perspective. Lydia felt they were the merest little dots there. She giggled, one brief note to herself, and then sobered. She was as likely to laugh as to fume, and it began to seem very funny to her that in this drama of The Prisoner's Return she and Anne were barely to have speaking parts. The colonel sat in his armchair at the orchard window, and Jeffrey stood by the mantel and fingered a vase. Lydia, for the first time seeing his hands with a recognising eye, was shocked by them. They were not gentleman's hands, she thought. They were worn, and had calloused stains and ill-kept nails.

      "I thought you'd like to know as soon as possible what I mean to do," he said, addressing his father.

      "I'm glad you've got your plans," his father said. "I've tried to make some, but I couldn't—couldn't."

      "I want first to find out just how things are here," said Jeffrey. "I want to know how much you've got to live on, and whether these girls have anything, and whether they want to stay on with you or whether they're doing it because—" Jeffrey now had a choking sense of emotions too big for him—"because there's no other way out."

      "Do you mean," said Lydia, in a burst, before Anne's warning hand could stop her, "you want us to leave Farvie?"

      The colonel looked up with a beseeching air.

      "Good God, no!" said Jeffrey irritably. "I only want to know the state of things here. So I can tell what to do."

      The colonel had got hold of himself, and straightened in his chair. The girls knew that motion. It meant, "Come, come, you derelict old body. Get into form."

      "I've tried to write you fully," he said. "I hoped I gave you—a picture of the way we lived."

      "You did. You have," said Jeffrey, still with that air of getting nowhere and being greatly irritated by it. "But how could I know how much these girls are sacrificing?"

      "Sacrificing?" repeated the colonel helplessly, and Lydia was on the point of another explosion when Jeffrey himself held up his hand to her.

      "Wait," he said. "Let me think. I don't know how to get on with people. They only make me mad."

      That put a different face on it. Anne knew what he meant. Here he was, he for whom they had meant to erect arches of welcome, floored in a moment by the perplexities of family life.

      "Of course," said Anne. She often said "of course" to show her sympathy. "You tell it your own way."

      "Ah!" said Jeffrey, with a breath of gratitude. "Now you're talking. Don't you see——" he faced Anne as the only person present whose emotions weren't likely to get the upper hand——"don't you see I've got to know how father's fixed before I make any plans for myself?"

      Anne nodded.

      "We live pretty simply," she said, "but we can live. I keep the accounts. I can tell you how much we spend."

      The colonel had got hold of himself now.

      "I have twelve hundred a year," he said. "We do very well on that. I don't actually know how, except that Anne is such a good manager. She and Lydia have earned quite a little, dancing, but I always insisted on their keeping that for their own use."

      Here Jeffrey looked at Anne and found her pinker than she had been. Anne was thinking she rather wished she had not been so free with her offer of accounts.

      "Dancing," said he. "Yes. You wrote me. Do you like to dance?"

      He had turned upon Lydia.

      "Oh, yes," said she. "It's heavenly. Anne doesn't. Except when she's teaching children."

      "What made you learn dancing?" he asked Anne.

      "We wanted to do something," she said guiltily. She was afraid her tongue was going to betray her and tell the story of the lean year after their mother died when they found out that mother had lived a life of magnificent deception as to the ease of housekeeping on twelve hundred a year.

      "Yes," said Jeffrey, "but dancing? Why'd you pick out that?"

      "We couldn't do anything else," said Lydia impatiently. "Anne and I don't know anything in particular." She thought he might have been clever enough to see that, while too tactful to betray it. "But we look nice—together—and anybody can dance."

      "Oh!" said Jeffrey. His eyes had a shade less of gravity, but he kept an unmoved seriousness of tone.

      "About our living with Farvie," said Anne. "I can see you'd want to know."

      "Yes," said he, "I do."

      "We love to," said Anne. "We don't know what we should do if Farvie turned us out."

      "My dear!" from the colonel.

      "Why, he's our father," said Lydia, in a burst. "He's just as much our father as he is yours."

      "Good!" said Jeffrey. His voice had warmed perceptibly. "Good for you. That's what I thought."

      "If you'd rather not settle down here," said his father, in a tone of hoping Jeff would like it very much, "we shall be glad to let the house again and go anywhere you say. We've often talked of it, the girls and I."

      Jeffrey did not thank them for that, or seem to hear it even.

      "I want," said he, "to go West."

      "Well," said Farvie, with a determined cheerfulness, "I guess the girls'll agree to that. Middle West?"

      "No," said Jeffrey, "the West—if there is any West left. Somewhere where there's space." His voice fell, on that last word. It held wonder even. Was there such a thing, this man of four walls seemed to ask, as space?

      "You'd want to go alone," said Anne softly. She felt as if she were breaking something to Farvie and adjuring him to bear it.

      "Yes," said Jeffrey, in relief. "I've got to go alone."

      "My son—" said the colonel and couldn't go on. Then he did manage. "Aren't we going to live together?"

      "Not yet," said Jeffrey. "Not yet."

      The colonel had thought so much about his old age that now he was near СКАЧАТЬ