The Prisoner

								

amicably divided themselves between the task of cooking and serving,
forwarded their desires, making faces all the time at unfamiliar
sauce-pans, and quite plainly agreed with them that men were to be
comforted by such recognised device. Anne and Lydia were deft little
housewives. They had a sober recognition of the pains that go to a
well-ordered life, and were patient in service. Their father had no
habit of complaint if the machinery creaked and even caused the walls to
shudder with faulty action. Yet they knew their gentle ways contributed
to his peace.
After supper, having seen that he was seated and ready for the little
talk they usually had in the edge of the evening, Lydia wondered whether
she ought to tell him a reporter had run them down; but while she
balanced the question there came another clanging knock and Mary Nellen
beckoned her. This one was of another stamp. He had to get his story,
and he had overborne Mary Nellen and penetrated to the hall. Lydia could
hear the young inexorable voice curtly talking down Mary Nellen and she
closed the library door behind her. But when the front door had shut
after the invader and Lydia came back, again with reddened cheeks and
distended eyes, the colonel went to it and shot the bolt.
"That's enough for to-night," said he. "The next I'll see, but not till
morning."
"You know we all thought it best you shouldn't," Anne said, always
faintly interrogative. "So long as we needn't say who we are. They'd
know who you were."
"His father," said Lydia, from an indignation disproportioned to the
mild sadness she saw in the colonel's face. "That's what they'd say: his
father. I don't believe Anne and I could bear that, the way they'd say
it. I don't believe Jeff could either."
The colonel had, even in his familiar talk with them, a manner of
old-fashioned courtesy.
"I didn't think it mattered much myself who saw them," he said, "when
you proposed it. But now it has actually happened I see it's very
unfitting for you to do it, very unfitting. However, I don't believe we
shall be troubled again to-night."
But their peace had been broken. They felt irrationally like
ill-defended creatures in a state of siege. The pretty wall-paper didn't
help them out, nor any consciousness of the blossoming orchard in the
chill spring air. The colonel noted the depression in his two defenders
and, by a spurious cheerfulness, tried to bring them back to the warmer
intimacies of retrospect.
"It was in this very room," he said, "that I saw your dear mother
first."
Lydia looked up, brightly ready for diversion. Anne sat, her head bent a
little, responsive to the intention of his speech.
"I was sitting here," said he, "alone. I had, I am pretty sure, this
very book in my hand. I wasn't reading it. I couldn't read. The maid
came in and told me a lady wanted to see me."
"What time of the day was it, Farvie?" Lydia asked, with her eager
sympathy.