V
The refuge, considered officially, was impressed. That any fugitive, let alone one who had outwitted pursuit, should freely present herself at the gatehouse, spiced its drab annals with originality. Jean Fanshaw, no less than Sophie Powell, had achieved distinction. The refuge dissembled its emotion, however. An escape was an escape, with draconic penalties no more to be stayed than the march of a glacier or the changes of the moon.
But even the refuge—from the vantage-point of a supposed ventilator reached by a secret stair—discerned that the prisoner of the guardhouse was unaccountably not the rebel of Cottage No. 6. The girl who dropped from the window would have found this duress maddening. Four brick walls were its horizon; its furnishing was a mattress thrust through a grudging door at night and withdrawn when the dim glow, filtering through a ground-glass disk in the ceiling, heralded the return of another day. It was always twilight within, for the occupations of a guardhouse require little light. Text-books, no other print, were sometimes permitted, but even these arid pastimes were not for Jean; the school taught nothing she had not mastered. Her resources were two: she might knit or she might think. She usually chose the latter.
Another thing puzzled the refuge—still considered officially. It was no novelty for a song to rise to the pseudo-ventilator (inmates so punished often sang out of bravado when first confined), but it was quite unprecedented for a girl with no couch but the floor, no outlook save the walls, no employment except knitting, companioned solely by her thoughts, to croon the words of a rollicking popular air as if she were content.
Jean, too, wondered unceasingly. Why had her old ideas of life cheapened? Save one chance stranger, men had met her on the footing of boyish good-fellowship which she required of them: why should this no longer seem wholly desirable? Why had she relished a chivalrous insistence on her sex? Why had she taken pride in the practice of a menial feminine art? Why had all things womanly shifted value? Why, above all, did she feel no regret that these things should be? Yet content was scarcely the word for her frame of mind. Her thoughts were a yeasty ferment out of which the unknown youth of the forest, whose very name was a mystery, began presently to emerge as an ideal figure. And this ideal man had on his part a conception of ideal womanhood! Here was the germinal truth at last.
While she pondered, two solitary weeks which by popular account should have been unspeakable, slipped magically away. She dreaded their end, for she knew that in the adamantine scheme of things six months of prison life, at very least, awaited her. Even to the average refuge girl the prison signified degradation; to Jean it also spelled Stella Wilkes. The abhorred contact did not begin at once, however, since it fell out that in runaway cases the powers were wont to decree yet another fortnight of isolation following the transfer from the guardhouse. But isolation in the prison was a relative term. The building's sights could be shut away; its sounds penetrated every cranny.
Such sounds! One of them broke Jean's light slumber her first night under the prison roof. It was a strand in the woof of her dreams at first, a monotonous, tuneless plaint, strangely exotic, like nothing earthly except the wailing of savage women who mourn their dead. She lay half awake for an interval, the weird chant clutching at her heart. Then, as it rose, waxing shriller with each repetition, she sat bolt upright with hair prickling and flesh acreep. It was a menace to the living, not a requiem; a virulent explicit curse.
"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"
The prison stirred.
"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"