The Prisoner

								

She slipped her hand through the colonel's arm, and they both stood
there at his elbow like rosy champions, bound to stick to him to the
last, and the bird sang and something eased up in his mind. He seemed to
be let off, in this spring twilight, from an exigent task that had shown
no signs of easing. Yet he knew he was not really let off. Only the
girls were throwing their glamour of youth and hope and bravado over the
apprehensive landscape of his fortune as to-morrow's sun would snatch a
rosier light from the apple blooms.
"My great-grandfather built the wall," said he. He was content to go
back to an older reminiscent time when there were, for him, no roads of
gloom. "He was a minister, you know: very old-fashioned even then, very
direct, knew what he wanted, saw no reason why he shouldn't have it. He
wanted a place to meditate in, walk up and down, think out his sermons.
So he built the wall. The townspeople didn't take to it much at first,
father used to say. But they got accustomed to it. He wouldn't care."
"There's a grape-vine over a trellis," said Anne softly. She spoke in a
rapt way, as if she had said, "There are angels choiring under the
trees. We can hum their songs."
"It makes an arbour. Farvie'll sit there and read his Greek," said
Lydia. "We can't leave this place to-night. It would be ridiculous, now
we've found it. It wouldn't be safe either. Places like this bust up and
blow away."
"We can get up the beds to-morrow," said Anne. "Then we never'll leave
it for a single minute as long as we live. I want to go ever the house.
Farvie, can't we go over the house?"
They went up the rotten steps, Lydia with a last proprietary look at
the orchard, as if she sealed it safe from all the spells of night, and
entered at the front door, trying, at her suggestion, to squeeze in
together three abreast, so they could own it equally. It was a still,
kind house. The last light lay sweetly in the room at the right of the
hall, a large square room with a generous fireplace well blackened and
large surfaces of old ivory paint. There was a landscape paper here, of
trees in a smoky mist and dull blue skies behind a waft of cloud. Out of
this lay the dining-room, all in green, and the windows of both rooms
looked on a gigantic lilac hedge, and beyond it the glimmer of a white
colonial house set back in its own grounds. The kitchen was in a
lean-to, a good little kitchen brown with smoke, and behind that was the
shed with dark cobwebbed rafters and corners that cried out for hoes and
garden tools. Lydia went through the rooms in a rush of happiness, Anne
in a still rapt imagining. Things always seemed to her the symbols of
dearer things. She saw shadowy shapes sitting at the table and breaking
bread together, saw moving figures in the service of the house, and
generations upon generations weaving their webs of hope and pain and
disillusionment and hope again. In the shed they stood looking out at