As the door clanged behind her O'Bannon turned and walked out of court, and getting into his car drove away westward. At two in the morning Eleanor was waked by a telephone from Mrs. O'Bannon. Dan had not come home. She was afraid something had happened to him. A man in his position had many enemies. Did Eleanor think that some friend or lover of that Thorne girl——
Oh, no, Eleanor was sure not!
The next morning—for a small town holds few secrets—she knew that O'Bannon had returned at six o'clock, drunk.
"Oh, dear heaven," thought Eleanor, "must he re-travel that road?"
CHAPTER XIII
Lydia and her guard arrived at the prison early in the evening. She had been travelling all through the hot, bright September day. For the first hour she had been only aware of the proximity of the guard, of the crowded car, the mingled smell of oranges and coal smoke, the newspaper on the floor, trodden by every foot, containing probably an account of her departure for her long imprisonment. Then, her eyes wandering to the river, she suddenly remembered that it would be years before she saw mountains and flowing water again. Perhaps she would never see them again.
During the previous winter she had gone with Benny and Mrs. Galton to visit a prison in a neighboring state—a man's prison. It was considered an unfortunate example. Scenes from that visit came back to her in a series of pictures. A giant negro highwayman weaving at an immense loom with a heavy, hopeless regularity. Black, airless punishment cells—"never used nowadays," the warden had said lightly, and had been corrected by a low murmur from the keeper; two of them were in use at the moment. The tiers of ordinary cells, not so very much better, with their barred loopholes. And the smells—the terrible prison smells. At their best, disinfectant and stale soap; at worst—Lydia never knew that it was possible to remember a smell as she now remembered that one. But most of all she remembered the chalky pallor of some of the prisoners, some obviously tubercular, others twitching with nervous affections. She doubted coolly if many people were strong enough to go through years of that sort of thing.
So she would look at the river as if she might never see it again.
They were already in the Highlands, and the hills on the eastern side—her side of the river—were throwing a morning shadow on the water, while across the way the white marble buildings at West Point shone in the sunlight. Storm King with its abrupt bulk interposed itself between the two sections of new road—the road which Lydia had so much desired to see finished. She and Bobby had had a plan to motor along it to the Emmonses some day—Newburgh. There was a hotel there where she had stopped once for luncheon on her way to Tuxedo from somewhere or other. Then presently the bridge at Poughkeepsie, and then the station at which she had got out when she had spent Sunday with the Emmonses, the day Evans had been arrested and had confessed to that man——There was the very pillar she had waited beside while the chauffeur looked up her bags. Now the river began to narrow, there were marshy islands in it, and huge shaky ice houses along the brink. It all unrolled before her like a picture that she was never going to see again. Then Albany, set on its hills, and the train, turning sharply, rumbled over the bridge into the blackened station. Almost everybody in the car got out here, for the train stopped some time; but she and her guard remained sitting silently side by side. Then presently they were going on again, through the beautiful wide fertile valley of the Mohawk——They were getting near, very near. She felt not frightened but physically sick. She wondered if her hair would be cut short. Of course it would. It seemed to her like an indignity committed by O'Bannon's own hand.