The Prisoner Part 8

"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 s.p.a.ce." 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 s.p.a.ce?

"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 saying: "You know I haven't so very many years," but he held on to himself.

"He's got to go alone," said Anne. "But he'll come back."

"Yes," said Lydia, from the habit they had learned of heartening Farvie, "he'll come back."

But she was hotly resolving that he should learn his duty and stay here.

Let her get a word with him alone.

"What I'm going to do out there I don't know," said Jeffrey. "But I am going to work, and I'm going to turn in enough to keep you as you ought to be. I want to stay here a little while first."

The colonel was rejuvenated by delight. Lydia wondered how anybody could see that look on his face and not try to keep it there.

"I've got," said Jeffrey, "to write a book."

"Oh, my son," said the colonel, "that's better than I hoped. The newspapers have had it all, how you've changed the prison paper, and how you built up a scheme of prison government, and I said to myself, 'When he comes out, he'll write a book, and good will come of it, and then we shall see that, under Providence, my son went to prison that he might do that.'"

He was uplifted with the wonder of it. The girls felt themselves carried along at an equal pace. This was it, they thought. It was a part of the providences that make life splendid. Jeffrey had been martyred that he might do a special work.

"Oh, no," said he, plainly bored by the inference. "That's not it. I'm going to write the life of a fellow I know."

"Who was he?" Anne asked, with a serious uplift of her brows.

"A defaulter."

"In the Federal Prison?"

"Yes."

VI

He looked at them, quite unconscious of the turmoil he had wakened in them. Lydia was ready to sound the top note of revolt. Her thoughts were running a definite remonstrance: "Write the life of another man when you should be getting your evidence together and proving your own innocence and the injustice of the law?" Anne was quite ready to believe there must be a cogent reason for writing the life of his fellow criminal, but she wished it were not so. She, too, from long habit of thought, wanted Jeffrey to attend to his own life now he had a chance. The colonel, she knew, through waiting and hoping, had fallen into an att.i.tude of mind as wistful and expectant as hers and Lydia's. The fighting qualities, it seemed, had been ground out of him. The fostering ones had grown disproportionately, and sometimes, she was sure, they made him ache, in a dull way, with ruth for everybody.

"Did the man ask you to write his life?" he inquired.

"No," said Jeffrey. "I asked him if I could. He agreed to it. Said I might use his name. He's no family to squirm under it."

"You feel he was unjustly sentenced," the colonel concluded.

"Oh, no. He doesn't either. He mighty well deserved what he got. Been better perhaps if he'd got more. What I had in mind was to tell how a man came to be a robber."

Lydia winced at the word. Jeffrey had been commonly called a defaulter, and she was imperfectly reconciled to that: certainly not to a branding more ruthless still.

"I've watched him a good deal," said Jeffrey. "We've had some talk together. I can see how he did what he did, and how he'd do it again.

It'll be a study in criminology."

"When does he--come out?" Anne hesitated over this. She hardly knew a term without offence.

"Next year."

"But," said she, "you wouldn't want to publish a book about him and have him live it down?"

"Why shouldn't I?" asked Jeffrey, turning on her. "He's willing."

"He can't be willing," Lydia broke in. "It's frightful."

"Well, he is," said Jeffrey. "There's nothing you could do to him he'd mind, if it gave him good advertising."

"What does he want to do," asked the colonel, "when he comes out?"

"Get into the game again. Make big money. And if it's necessary, steal it. Not that he wants to bunco. He's had his dose. He's learned it isn't safe. But he'd make some das.h.i.+ng _coup_; he couldn't help it. Maybe he'd get nabbed."

"What a horrid person!" said Lydia. "How can you have anything to do with him?"

"Why, he's interesting," said Jeffrey, in a way she found brutal. "He's a criminal. He's got outside."