The Prisoner

								

over the window. Whose chamber is that, Farvie?"
He stood perfectly still by the mantel, and the old look of
introspective pain, almost of a surprised terror, crossed his face. Then
they knew. But he delayed only a minute or so in answering.
"Why," said he, "that was Jeff's room when he lived at home."
"Then," said Anne, in her assuaging voice, "he must have it again."
"Yes," said the colonel. "I think you'd better plan it that way."
They said no more about the room, but Anne hunted out a set of Dickens
and a dog picture she had known as belonging to Jeff, who was the own
son of the colonel, and took them in there. Once she caught Lydia in the
doorway looking in, a strangled passion in her face, as if she were
going back to the page of an old grief.
"Queer, isn't it?" she asked, and Anne, knowing all that lay in the
elision, nodded silently.
Once that afternoon the great brass knocker on the front door fell, and
Mary Nellen answered and came to Lydia to say a gentleman was there.
Should he be asked in? Mary Nellen seemed to have an impression that he
was mysteriously not the sort to be admitted. Lydia went at once to the
door whence there came to Anne, listening with a worried intensity, a
subdued runnel of talk. The colonel, who had sat down by the library
window with a book he was not reading, as if he needed to soothe some
inner turmoil of his own by the touch of leathern covers, apparently did
not hear this low-toned interchange. He glanced into the orchard from
time to time, and once drummed on the window when a dog dashed across
and ran distractedly back and forth along the brick wall. When Anne
heard the front door close she met Lydia in the hall.
"Was it?" she asked.
Lydia nodded. Her face had a flush; the pupils of her eyes were large.
"Yes," said she. "His paper wanted to know whether Jeff was coming here
and who was to meet him. I said I didn't know."
"Did he ask who you were?"
"Yes. I told him I'd nothing to say. He said he understood Jeff's father
was here, and asked if he might see him. I said, No, he couldn't see
anybody."
"Was he put out?" Anne had just heard Mary Nellen use the phrase. Anne
thought it covered a good deal.
"No," said Lydia. She lifted her plump hands and threaded the hair back
from her forehead, a gesture she had when she was tired. It seemed to
spur her brain. "No," she repeated, in a slow thoughtfulness, "he was a
kind of gentleman. I had an idea he was sorry for me, for us all, I
suppose. I was sorry for him, too. He was trying to earn his living and
I wouldn't let him."
"You couldn't."
"No," said Lydia, rather drearily, "I couldn't. Do you think Farvie
heard?"
"I think not. He didn't seem to."
But it was with redoubled solicitude that they threw their joint
energies into making supper inviting, so that the colonel might at least
get a shred of easement out of a pleasant meal. Mary Nellen, who