CHAPTER XIV
As Lydia began to emerge from her depression she clung to Evans, who had first made her see that she could not think anything human alien to herself. The disciplined little Englishwoman, sincere and without self-pity, seemed the purveyor of wisdom. She saw her own mistakes clearly. William—William was the pale young footman, about whom they talked a good deal—had urged her for a long time to pick up a ten-dollar bill now and then or a forgotten bit of jewelry. She had never felt any temptation to do so until Lydia had been so indifferent about the loss of the bracelet. What was the use of caring so much about the safety of the jewels if the owner cared so little?
"Oh, that bracelet!" murmured Lydia, remembering how she had last seen it in O'Bannon's hand in court. For a moment she did not follow what Evans was saying, and came back in the midst of a sentence.
"and made me see that because you were wrong that did not make me right. Then I got ready to confess. He made me see that the real harm was done and over when I took a thing that wasn't mine, and that the only way to get back was to obey the law and go to prison and get through with it as quick as I could. I owe a lot to him, Lydia—not that he preached at me, but his eyes looked right into me."
"Of whom are you speaking?" Lydia asked sharply.
"Of Mr. O'Bannon," answered Evans, and a reverent tone came into her voice.
This was too much for Lydia. She broke out, assuring Evans that she had been quite right to take the jewels. She, Lydia, now knew what a thoughtless, inconsiderate employer she had always been. But as for "that man," Evans must see that he had only tricked her into confessing in order to save himself trouble. It was a feather in his cap—to get a confession. He had not thought about saving her soul. Lydia stamped her foot in the old way but without creating any impression on the bewitched girl, who insisted on being grateful to the man who had imprisoned her.
"Is that what he is looking for from me?" thought Lydia.
Long, long winter nights in prison are excellent periods for thinking out a revenge. She saw it would not be easy to revenge herself on O'Bannon. If it were Albee it would be simple enough—she would make him publicly ridiculous. To wound that sensitive egotism would be to slay the inner man. If it were Bobby—poor dear Bobby—she would destroy his self-confidence and starve him to death through his own belief that he was worthless. But what could she do to O'Bannon but kill him—or make him love her? Perhaps threaten to kill him. She tried to think of him on his knees, pleading for his life. But no, she couldn't give the vision reality. He wouldn't go down on his knees; he wouldn't plead; he'd stand up to her in defiance and she would be forced to shoot to prove that she had meant what she said.
She had been in prison about three months when one morning word came to the kitchen that she was wanted in the reception room. This meant a visitor. It was not Miss Bennett's day. It must be a specially privileged visitor. Her guest was Albee.
Prisoners whose conduct was good enough to keep them in the first grade were allowed to see visitors once a week. Miss Bennett came regularly, and Eleanor had come more than once. Lydia was very eager to see these two, but was not eager to see anyone else. There was always a terrible moment of shyness with newcomers—an awkward ugly moment. She did not wish to see anyone who did not love her in a simple human way that swept away restraint.
She did not want to see Albee, and she was equally sure he did not want to see her but had been driven by the politician's fear of leaving behind him in his course onward and upward any smoldering fires of hatred which a little easy kindness might quench. As a matter of fact, she did not hate Albee—nor like him. She simply recognized him as a useful person whom all her life she would go on using. This coming interview must serve to attach him to her, so that if in the future she needed a powerful politician to help her destroy O'Bannon she would have one ready to her hand. She knew exactly and instinctively how to manage Albee—not by being appealing and friendly. If she were nice to him he would go away feeling that that chapter in his life was satisfactorily closed. But if she were hostile, if she made him uncomfortable, he would work to win back her friendship. Prisoner as she was, she would be his master. She arranged herself, expression and spirit alike, to meet him sternly.
She did not stop to consider the impression she might make on her visitor—in her striped dress and her prison shoes. It was never Lydia's habit to think first of the impression she was making.
She was brought to the matron's room, and then crossing the hall she entered the bare reception room, with its chill, white mantelpiece, the fireplace blocked by a sheet of metal, its empty center table and stiff straight-backed chairs. She entered without any anticipation of what was in store for her, and saw a tall figure just turning from the window. It was O'Bannon. She had just a blurred vision of his gray eyes and the hollows in his cheeks. Then her wrists and knees seemed to melt, her heart turned over within her; everything grew yellow, green and black, and she fainted—falling gently full length at the feet of the district attorney.
When she came to she was in her own cell. She turned her head slowly to right and left.
"Where is that man?" she said. She was told he had gone.
Of course he had gone—gone without waiting for her recovery, without speaking to anyone else. There was the proof that he was vindictive; that he had come to humiliate her, to feast his eyes on her distress. He had hardly dared hope that she would faint at his feet. There was real cruelty for you, she thought—to ruin a woman's life and then to come and enjoy the spectacle. What a story for him to go home with, to remember and smile over, to tell, perhaps, to his mother or Eleanor!
"The poor girl!" he might say with tones of false pity in his voice. "At the mere sight of me she fainted dead away and lay at my feet in her prison dress, her hands coarsened by hard work"
This last proof of her utter defenselessness infuriated her. She was justified in her revenge, whatever it might be. The thought of it ran through all her dreams like a secret romance.
It began to take shape in her mind as political ruin. She knew from Eleanor that he had ambitions. He had taken the district attorneyship with the intention of making it lead to higher political office. She had fancies of defeating him in a campaign, using all the tragedy of her own experience to rouse the emotions of audiences. Easier to destroy him within his own party by Albee's help—easier, but not so spectacular. He might not know who had done it unless she went to him and explained. Over that interview her mind often lingered.
As her ideas of retribution took shape she became happier in her daily life, as if the thought of O'Bannon sucked up all the poison in her nature and left her other relations sweeter.
If Lydia had but known it, her revenge was complete when she fell at his feet. The months she had spent in prison had been paradise compared to the months he had spent at large. The verdict in the case had hardly been rendered before he had begun to be tortured by doubts as to his own motives. It was no help to him that his reason offered him a perfect defense. The girl was a criminal—reckless, irresponsible and untruthful, more deserving of punishment than most of the defendants who came into court. If there were any personal animus in his prosecution there was an excuse for it in the fact that Albee had certainly come to him with the intention of exerting dishonorable pressure in her behalf. Everyone he saw—his mother, Eleanor, Foster, Judge Homan—all believed that he had followed the path of duty in spite of many shining temptations to be weakly pitiful. But he himself knew—and gradually came to admit—that he had done what he passionately desired to do. Even he could not look deeply enough into his own heart to understand his motives, but he began to be aware of a secret growing remorse poisoning his inner life.
The thought of her in prison was never out of his mind, and it was a nightmare prison he thought of. In the first warm September days he imagined the leaden, airless heat of cells. When October turned suddenly cold and windy he remembered how she was accustomed to playing golf on the windy links and how he had once seen her driving from a tee near the roadside with her skirts wrapped about her by her vigorous swing. He gave up playing bridge—the memories were too poignant. And after Eleanor had once mentioned that Lydia was fond of dancing he could not listen to a strain of dance music. Christmas was a particularly trying time to him, with all its assumption of rejoicing—a prison Christmas!
During the holidays he was in New York for a few days. His theory was that lack of exercise was the reason for his not sleeping better. He used to take long walks in the afternoon and evening so as to go to bed tired.
One afternoon at twilight he was walking round the reservoir in the Park when he recognized something familiar in a trim little figure approaching him—something that changed the beat of his heart. It was Miss Bennett. He stopped her, uncertain of his reception.
"Is that Mr. O'Bannon?" she said, staring up at him in the dim light.
The city beyond the bare trees had begun to turn into a sort of universal lilac mist, punctuated with yellow dots of light. It was too dark for Miss Bennett to see any change in O'Bannon's appearance, anything ravaged and worn, anything suggesting an abnormal strain. Miss Bennett, though kind and gentle, was not imaginative about turbulent, irregular emotions, such as she herself did not experience. She was not on the lookout for danger signals.
She did not feel unfriendly to O'Bannon. On the contrary she admired him. She could, as she said, see his side of it. She prided herself on seeing both sides of every question. She greeted him cordially as soon as she was sure it was he. He turned and walked with her. They had the reservoir to themselves.
Miss Bennett thought it more tactful not to refer to Lydia. She began talking about the beauty of the city. Country people always spoke as if all natural beauty were excluded from towns, but for her part
O'Bannon suddenly interrupted her.
"Have you seen Miss Thorne lately?" he said in a queer, quick, low tone.
When Benny felt a thing she could always express it. This was fortunate for her because when she expressed it she relieved the acuteness of her own feeling. She very naturally, therefore, sought the right phrase, even sometimes one of an almost indecent poignancy, because the more poignantly she made the other person feel the more sure she could be of her own relief. Then, too, she was not sorry that O'Bannon should understand just what it was he had done—his duty, perhaps, but he might as well know the consequences.
"Have I seen her?" she exclaimed. "Oh, Mr. O'Bannon!" There was a pause as if it were too terrible to go on with, but of course she did go on. "I see her every week. She's like an animal in a trap. Perhaps you never saw one—in a trap, I mean. Lydia had a gray wolfhound once, and in the woods it strayed away and got caught in a mink trap. It was almost dead when we found it, but so patient and hopeless. She's getting to be like that—each week a little more patient than the week before—she who was never patient. Oh, Mr. O'Bannon, I feel sometimes as if I couldn't bear it—the way they've ground it out of her in a few months! She seems like an old woman in a lovely young woman's body. They haven't spoiled that—at least they haven't yet."
She wiped her eyes with a filmy handkerchief, and her step became brisker. She felt better. For a moment she had got rid of the pathos of the situation. O'Bannon, she saw, had taken up her burden. He walked along beside her silent for a few steps, and then suddenly took off his hat, murmured something about being late for an engagement and left her, disappearing down the steep slope of the reservoir.
He wandered restlessly up and down like a man in physical pain. No reality, he finally decided, could be as terrible as the visions which, with the help of Miss Bennett, his imagination kept calling before him. That night he took the train, and in the middle of the next morning arrived at the prison gates.
There was no difficulty about his seeing the prisoner. His explanation that he was passing by on his way to see the warden about one of the men prisoners was not required. The matron agreed readily to send for Lydia. It seemed to him a long time before she came. He stood staring out of the window, stray sentences leaping up in his mind—"not less than three nor more than seven years"—"an animal in a trap"—"an old woman in a lovely young woman's body." He heard steps approaching and his pulses began to beat thickly and heavily. He turned round, and as he did so she fell at his feet.
The matron came in, running at the sound of her fall. O'Bannon picked her up limp as a rag doll in his arms and carried her back to her cell. Under most circumstances he would have noticed that the cell was bright and large, but now he only compared it, with a pang at his heart, to that large, luxurious, deserted bedroom of Lydia's in which he had once interviewed Evans.
The matron drove him away before Lydia recovered consciousness. He waited in the outer room, heard that she was perfectly well, and then took his miserable departure. He got back to New York late that night, and the next day he resigned his position as district attorney.
Eleanor read of his resignation first in the local paper, and came to his mother for an explanation; but Mrs. O'Bannon was as much surprised as anyone. Without acknowledging it, both women were frightened at the prospect of O'Bannon's attempting, without backing, to build up a law practice in New York. Both dreaded the effect upon him of failure. Both would have advised against his resigning his position. Perhaps for this very reason neither had been consulted.
The two women who loved him parted with specious expressions of confidence. Doubtless Dan would make a great success of it, they said. He was brilliant, and worked so hard.