"I shall take cold. I got very warm speaking. My voice—"
To neither of them now was it absurd. Though it was years since she had had a voice the habit of a passionate care was still alive in her. Jeffrey had come on another rug, and wrapped it round her. He went back to his first wonder.
"But what is there in being a prisoner to start up such a row?"
Madame Beattie had retired into the rug. She sunk her chin in it and would talk no more. Without further interchange they drew up at her house. Jeffrey got out and helped her, and she stood for a moment, pressing her hand on his arm, heavily, as an old woman leans.
"Ah, Jeffrey," said she rapidly, in a low but quite a naked tone with no lisping ornament, "this is a night. To think I should have to come back here to this God-forsaken spot for a minute of the old game. Hundreds hanging on my voice—" he fancied she had forgotten now whether she had not sung to them—"and feeling what I told them to feel. They're capital people. We'll talk to them again."
She had turned toward the door and now she came back and struck his arm violently with her hand.
"Jeff," said she passionately, "you're a fool. You've still got your youth and you won't use it. And the world looks like this—" she glanced up at the radiant sky. "Even in Addington, the moon is after us trying to seduce us to the old pleasures. You've got youth. Use it. For God's sake, use it."
Now she did go up the steps and having rung the bell for her, ignoring the grim knocker that looked as if it would take more than one summons to get past its guard, Jeff told the man to drive back for Mr. Moore. The car had gone, and still Madame Beattie rang. She knew and Jeffrey suspected suddenly that Esther was paying her out for illicit roaming. Suddenly Madame Beattie raised her voice and called twice:
"Esther! Esther!"
The sound echoed in the silent street, appallingly to one who knew what Addington streets were and what proprieties lined them. Then the door did open. Jeffrey fancied the smooth-faced maid had slipped the bolt. Esther, from what he knew of her, was not by to face the music. He heard the door shut cautiously and walked away, but not to go immediately home. What did Madame Beattie mean by telling him to use his youth? All he wanted was to hold commerce with the earth and dig hard enough to keep himself tired so that he might sleep. For since he had come out of prison he was every day more subject to this besetment of recalling the past. It was growing upon him that he had always made wrong choices. Youth, what seemed to him through the vista of vanished time a childhood even, when he was but little over twenty, had been a delirium of expectation in a world that was merely a gay-coloured spot where, if you were reasonably fit, as youth should be, you could always snatch the choicest fruit from the highest bough. Then he had met Esther, and the world stopped being a playground and became an ordered pageant, and he was the moving power, trying to make it move faster or more lightly, to please Esther who was sitting in front to see it move, and who was of a decided mind in pageants. It was always Esther who was to be pleased. These things he had not thought of willingly during his imprisonment, because it was necessary not to think, lest the discovery of the right causes that brought him there should turn his brain. But now he had leisure and freedom and a measure of solitude, and it began to strike him that heretofore, being in the pageant and seeing it move, he had not enjoyed it over much. There had been a good deal of laughter and light and colour—there had to be, since these were the fruits Esther lived on—but there had been no affectionate converse with the world. Strange old Madame Beattie! she had brought him the world to-night. She had taken strangers from its furthest quarters and welded them into a little community that laughed and shouted and thought according things. That they had hailed him, even as a prisoner, brought him a little warmth. It was mysterious, but it seemed they somehow liked him, and he went into the quiet house and to bed with the feeling of having touched a hand.