Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/550

542 no other confidant beside honest, stupid Sandy, he talked to him like a man who seriously thought of abandoning his labor, and retiring to that land across the sea for which his wife had pined during ten homesick years.

Sandy, who might have regarded himself in the light of an "humble instrument," had he been capable of a particle of vanity or presumption, told Elizabeth Montier, with whom he had held many a conference concerning prison matters, since Manuel first began to walk along the southern garden-walk, where the flower-beds lay against the prison-wall. What was her answer? It came instantly, without premeditation or precaution,—

"Then we must take his place, Sandy."

"We, Miss?" said Sandy, with even greater consternation than surprise.

"Yes," she replied, too much absorbed by what she was thinking, to mind him and his blunders,—"papa must take the prison."

"Oh!"—and Sandy blushed through his tan at his absurd mistake. Then he laughed, for he saw that she had not noticed it. Then he looked grave, and wondering, and doubtful. The idea of Adolphus Montier's pretty wife and pretty daughter changing their pretty home for life in the dark prison startled him. He seemed to think it no less wrong than strange. But he did not express that feeling out and out; he was hindered, as he glanced sideways at the young girl who gazed so solemnly, so loftily, before her. At what she was looking he could not divine. He saw nothing.

"I wouldn't be overly quick about that," said he, cautiously.

"No danger!" was the prompt reply.

"For I tell you, of all the places I ever see, that prison makes me feel the queerest. I believe it's one reason I let the flower-garden go so long," owned Sandy. He did not speak these words without an effort; and never had Elizabeth seen him so solemn. She also was grave,—but not after his manner of gravity.

"You see what I did with the poor flower-beds, Sandy," said she. "Wait now till you see what happens to the prison."

But it is one thing to purpose, and another to execute. Far easier for Elizabeth to declare than to conduct an heroic design. One thing prevented rest day and night,—the knowledge that Laval's intended resignation must be followed by a new application and appointment. With such a degree of sympathy had the condition of the captive inspired her, that the idea of the bare possibility of cruelty or neglect or brutality assuming the jailer's authority seemed to lay upon her all the responsibility of his future. She must act, for she dared not hesitate.

One evening Adolphus took his horn, and, attended by wife and child, went out to walk. He meant to send a strain from the highest of the accessible coast-rocks. But Elizabeth changed his plan. The time was good for what she had to say. Instead of expending his enthusiasm on a flourish of notes, he was called upon to manifest it in a noble resolution.

When Elizabeth invited her father to a prospect sylvan rather than marine, to the shady path on the border of the wood between it and the prison, Montier, easily drawn from any plan that concerned his own inclination merely, let his daughter lead, and she was responsible for all that followed in the history of that little family. So love defers to love, with divine courtesy, through all celestial movements.

After playing a few airs, Montier's anticipated evening ended, and another set in. The sympathies of a condition, the opposite to that of which he had been so happily conscious, pressed too closely against him. The musician could not, for the life of him, have played with becoming spirit through any one of all the strains of victory he knew.

Near him, under a tulip-tree, sat Pauline, with her knitting in her hand, the image of peace. Not so Elizabeth. She