Jeffrey began to dig, and his father, without definite intention,
followed him about and quite eagerly accepted lighter tasks. They
consulted Denny as to recognised ways of persuading the earth, and
summoned a ploughman and his team, and all day Jeffrey walked behind the
plough, not holding it, for of that art he was ignorant, but in pure
admiration. He asked questions about planting, and the ploughman, being
deaf, answered in a forensic bellow, so that Addington, passing the
brick wall in its goings to and fro, heard, and communicated to those at
home that Jeffrey Blake, dear fellow, was going back to the land.
Jeffrey did, as he had cynically foreseen, become a cause. All persons
of social significance came to call, and were, without qualification,
kind. Sometimes he would not see them, but Anne one day told him how
wrong he was. If he hid himself he put a burden on his father, who stood
in the breach, and talked even animatedly, renewing old acquaintance
with a dignified assumption of having nothing to ignore. But when the
visitors were gone the red in his cheek paled something too much, and
Anne thought he was being unduly strained.
After that Jeffrey doggedly stayed by. He proved rather a silent host,
but he stood up to the occasion, and even answered the general query
whether he was going into business by the facer that he and his father
had gone into it. They were market-gardening. The visitors regretted
that, so far as Addington manners would permit, because they had
noticed the old orchard was being ploughed, and that of course meant
beans at least. Some of the older ladies recalled stories of dear Doctor
Blake's pacing up and down beside the wall. They believed you could even
find traces of the sacred path; but one day Jeffrey put an end to that
credulous ideal by saying you couldn't now anyway, since it had been
ploughed. Then, he saw, he hurt Addington and was himself disquieted.
Years ago he had been amused when he hit hard against it and they flew
apart equally banged; now he was grown up, whether to his advantage or
not, and it looked to him as if Addington ought by this time to be grown
up too.
It was another Addington altogether from the one he had left, though a
surface of old tradition and habit still remained to clothe it in a
semblance of past dignity and calm. Not a public cause existed in the
known world but Addington now had a taste of it, though no one but Miss
Amabel did much more than talk with fervour. The ladies who had once
gone delicately out to teas and church, as sufficient intercourse with
this world and preparation for the next, now had clubs and classes where
they pounced on subjects not even mentionable fifty years ago, and shook
them to shreds in their well-kept teeth. There was sprightly talk about
class-consciousness, and young women who, if their incomes had been
dissipated by inadequate trusteeship, would once have taught school
according to a gentle ideal, now went away and learned to be social
workers, and came back to make self-possessed speeches at the Woman's
Club and present it with new theories to worry. This all went on under
the sanction of Addington manners, and kept concert pitch rather high.
On all topics but one Addington agreed to such an extent that discussion
really became more like axioms chanted in unison; but when it came to
woman suffrage society silently but exactly split. There were those who
would stick at nothing, even casting a vote. There were those who said
casting a vote was unwomanly, and you couldn't possibly leave the baby
long enough to do it. Others among the antis were reconciled to its
coming, if it came slowly enough not to agitate us. "Of course," said
one of these, a Melvin who managed her ample fortune with the acumen of
a financier, "it will come sometime. But we are none of us ready. We
must delay it as long as we can." So she and the like-minded drove into
the country round and talked about preventing the extension of the
suffrage to women until hard-working, meagre-living people who had not
begun to think much about votes, save as a natural prerogative of man,
thought about them a great deal, and incidentally learned to organise
and lobby, and got a very good training for suffrage when it should
come. It did no harm, nor did the fervour of the other side do good. The
two parties got healthfully tired with the exercise and "go" of it all,
and at least they stirred the pot. But whatever they said or did,
suffragists and antis never, so to speak, "met". The subject, from some
occult sense of decorum, was tabu. If an anti were setting forth her
views when a suffragist entered the room she instantly ceased and began
to talk about humidity or the Balkans. A suffragist would no more have
marshalled her arguments for the overthrow of an equal than she would
have corrected a point of etiquette. But each went out with zeal into
New England villages for the conversion of social underlings.
When they elected Jeffrey into a cause they did it with a rush, and they
also elected his wife. Through her unwelcoming door poured a stream of
visitors, ostensibly to call on Madame Beattie, but really, as Esther
saw with bitterness, to recommend this froward wife to live with her
husband. Feeling ran very high there. Addington, to a woman, knew
exactly the ideal thing for Esther to have done. She should have
"received" him--that was the phrase--and helped him build up his
life--another phrase. This they delicately conveyed to her in accepted
innuendos Addington knew how to handle. Esther once told Aunt Patricia
there were women selected by the other women to "do their dirty work ".
But what she really meant was that Addington had a middle-aged few of
the old stock who, with an arrogant induration in their own position,
out of which no attacking humour could deliver them, held, as they
judged, the contract to put questions. These it was who would ask Esther
over a cup of tea: "Are you going on living in this house, my dear?" or:
"Shall you join your husband at his father's? And will his father and
the step-children stay on there?" And the other women, of a more
circuitous method or a more sensitive touch, would listen and, Esther
felt sure, discuss afterward what the inquisitors had found out: with an
amused horror of the inquisitors and a grateful relish of the result.
Esther sometimes thought she must cry aloud in answer; but though a
flush came into her face and gave her an added pathos, she managed, in a
way of gentle obstinacy, to say nothing, and still not to offend. And
Madame Beattie sat by, never saving her, as Esther knew she might, out
of her infernal cleverness, but imperturbably and lightly amused and
smoking cigarettes all over the tea things. As a matter of fact, the tea
things and their exquisite cloth were unpolluted, but Esther saw
figuratively the trail of smoke and ashes, like a nicotian Vesuvius,
over the home. She still hated cigarettes, which Addington had not yet
accepted as a feminine diversion, though she had the slight comfort of
knowing it forgave in Madame Beattie what it would not have tolerated
in an Addingtonian. "Foreign ways," the ladies would remark to one
another. "And she really is a very distinguished woman. They say she
visits everywhere abroad."
Anne and Lydia were generally approved as modest and pretty girls; and
Miss Amabel's classes in national dances became an exceedingly
interesting feature of the town life. Anne and Lydia were in this
dancing scheme all over. They were enchanted with it, the strangeness
and charm of these odd citizens of another world, and made friends with
little workwomen out of the shops, and went home with them to see old
pieces of silver and embroidery, and plan pageants--this in the limited
English common to them. Miss Amabel, too, was pleased, in her wistful
way that always seemed to be thanking you for making things come out
decently well. She had one big scheme: the building up of homespun
interests between old Addington and these new little aliens who didn't
know the Addington history or its mind and heart.
One night after a dancing class in her dining-room the girls went, with
pretty good-nights, and Anne with them. She was hurrying down town on
some forgotten errand, and refused Lydia's company. For Lydia was tired,
and left alone with Miss Amabel, she settled to an hour's laziness. She
knew Miss Amabel liked having her there, liked her perhaps better than
Anne, who was of the beautiful old Addington type and not so piquing.
Lydia had, across her good breeding, a bizarre other strain, not
bohemian, not gipsy, but of a creature who is and always will be, even
beyond youth, new to life. There were few conventions for Lydia. She did
not instinctively follow beaten paths. If the way looked feasible and
pleasant, she cut across.
"You're a little tired," said Miss Amabel, hesitating. She knew this was
violating the etiquette of dancing. To be tired, Anne said, and Lydia,
too, was because you hadn't the "method".
"It isn't the dancing," said Lydia at once, as Miss Amabel knew she
would.
"No. But you've seemed tired a good deal of the time lately. Does
anything worry you?"
"No," said Lydia soberly. She looked absent-minded, as if she sought
about for what did worry her.
"You don't think your father's working too hard, planting?"
"Oh, no! It's good for him. He gets frightfully tired. They both do. But
Farvie sleeps and eats and smokes. And laughs! That's Jeffrey. He can
always make Farvie laugh." She said the last rather wonderingly, because
she knew Jeffrey hadn't, so far as she had seen him, much light give and
take and certainly no hilarity of his own. "But I suppose," she added
wisely, as she had many times to herself, "Farvie's so pleased even to
look at him and think he's got him back."
Miss Amabel disposed a pillow more invitingly on the old sofa that had
spacious hollows in it, and Lydia obeyed the motion and lay down. It was
not, she thought, because she was tired. Only it would please Miss
Amabel. But the heart had gone out of her. If she looked as she felt,
she realised she must be wan. But it takes more than the sorrows of
youth to wash the colour out of it. She felt an impulse now to give
herself away.
"It's only," she said, "we're not getting anywhere. That worries me."
"With your work?" Miss Amabel was waving a palm-leaf fan, from no
necessity but the tranquillity induced by its rhythmic sway.
"Oh, no. About Jeffrey. Didn't you know we meant to clear him, Anne and
I?"
"Clear him, dear? What of?"
"Why, what he was accused of," said Lydia.
"But he had his trial, you know. He was found guilty. He pleaded guilty,
dear. That was why he was sentenced."
"Oh, but we all know why he pleaded guilty," said Lydia. "It was to save
somebody else."
"Not exactly to save her," said Miss Amabel. "She wouldn't have been
tried, you know. She wasn't guilty in that sense. Of course she was,
before the fact. But that's not being legally guilty. It's only morally
so."
Lydia was staring at her with wide eyes.
"Do you mean Esther?" she asked.
"Why, yes, of course I mean Esther."
"But I don't. I mean that dreadful man."
She put her feet to the floor and sat upright, smoothing her hair with
hurried fingers. At least if she could talk about it with some one who
wasn't Anne with whom she had talked for years knowing exactly what Anne
would say at every point, it seemed as if she were getting, even at a
snail's pace, upon her road. But Miss Amabel was very dense.
"My dear," said she, "I don't know what you mean."
"I mean the man that was in the scheme with him, in a way, and got out
and sold his shares while they were up, and let the crash come on
Jeffrey when he was alone."
"James Reardon?"
Lydia hated him too much to accept even a knowledge of his name.
"He was a promoter, just as Jeffrey was," she insisted, with her pretty
sulkiness. "He was the one that went West and looked after the mines.
And if there was nothing in them, he knew it. But he let Jeffrey go on
trying to--to place the shares--and when Jeffrey went under he was
safely out of the way. And he's guilty."
Miss Amabel looked at her thoughtfully and patiently.
"I'm afraid he isn't guilty in any sense the law would recognise," she
said. "You see, dear, there are things the law doesn't take into
account. It can't. You believe in Jeffrey. So do I. But I think you'll
have to realise Jeffrey lost his head. And he did do wrong."
"Oh, how can you say a thing like that?" cried Lydia, in high passion.
"And you've known him all your life."
Miss Amabel was not astute. Her nobility made it a condition of her mind
to be unsuspecting. She knew the hidden causes of Jeffrey's downfall.
She was sure his father knew, and it never seemed to her that these two
sisters were less than sisters to him. What she herself knew, they too
must have learned; out of this believing candour she spoke.
"You mustn't forget there was the necklace, and Madame Beattie expecting
to be paid."
Lydia was breathless in her extremity of surprise.
"What necklace?" asked she.
"Don't you know?"
Miss Amabel's voice rose upon the horror of her own betrayal.
"What do you mean?" Lydia was insisting, with an iteration that sounded
like repeated onslaughts, a mental pounce, to shake it out of her. "What
do you mean?"
Miss Amabel wore the dignified Addington aloofness.
"I am very sorry," said she. "I have been indiscreet."
"But you'll tell me, now you've begun," panted Lydia. "You'll have to
tell me or I shall go crazy."
"We must both control ourselves," said Miss Amabel, with a further
retreat to the decorum of another generation. "You are not going crazy,
Lydia. We are both tired and we feel the heat. And I shall not tell
you."
Lydia ran out of the room. There was no other word for the quickness of
her going. She fled like running water, and having worn no hat, she
found herself bareheaded in the street, hurrying on to Esther's. An
instinct told her she could only do her errand, make her assault, it
seemed, on those who knew what she did not, if she never paused to weigh
the difficulties: her hatreds, too, for they had to be weighed. Lydia
was sure she hated Madame Beattie and Esther. She would not willingly
speak to them, she had thought, after her last encounters. But now she
was letting the knocker fall on Esther's door, and had asked the
discreet maid with the light eyelashes, who always somehow had an air of
secret knowledge and amusement, if Madame Beattie were at home, and gave
her name. The maid, with what seemed to Lydia's raw consciousness an
ironical courtesy, invited her into the library and left her there in
its twilight tranquillity. Lydia stood still, holding one of her
pathetically small, hard-worked hands over her heart, and shortly, to
her gratitude, Sophy was back and asked her to go up to Madame Beattie's
room.
The maid accompanying her, Lydia went, with her light step, afraid of
itself lest it turn coward, and in the big dark room at the back of the
house, its gloom defined by the point of light from a shaded reading
candle, she was left, and stood still, almost wishing for Sophy whose
footfalls lessened on the stairs. There were two bits of light in the
room, the candle and Madame Beattie's face. Madame Beattie had taken off
her toupee, and for Lydia she had not troubled to put it on. She lay on
the bed against pillows, a down quilt drawn over her feet, regardless of
the seasonable warmth, and a disorder of paper-covered books about her.
One she held in her ringed hand, and now she put it down, her eyeglasses
with it, and turned the candle so that the light from the reflector fell
on Lydia's face.
"I wasn't sure which girl it was," she said, in a tone of mild
good-nature. "It's not the good one. It's you, mischief. Come and sit
down."
Madame Beattie did not apologise for giving audience in her bedchamber.
In the old royal days before the downfall of her kingdom she had
accorded it to greater than Lydia French. Lydia's breath came so fast
now that it hurt her. She stepped forward, but she did not take the low
chair which really had quite a comfortable area left beyond Madame
Beattie's corset and stockings. She stood there in the circle of light
and said desperately:
"What was it about your necklace?"
She had created an effect. Madame Beattie herself gasped.
"For God's sake, child," said she, "what do you know about my necklace?"
"I don't know anything," said Lydia. "And I want to know everything that
will help Jeff."
She broke down here, and cried bitterly. Madame Beattie lay there
looking at her, at first with sharp eyes narrowed, as if she rather
doubted whose emissary Lydia might be. Then her face settled into an
astonished yet astute calm and wariness.
"You'll have to sit down," said she. "It's a long story." So Lydia sank
upon the zone left by the corset and stockings. "Who's been talking to
you?" asked Madame Beattie: but Lydia looked at her and dumbly shook her
head. "Jeff?"
"No. Oh, no!"
"His father?"
"Farvie? Not a word."
Madame Beattie considered.
"What business is it of yours?" she asked.
Lydia winced. She was used to softness from Anne and the colonel. But
she controlled herself. If she meant to enter on the task of exonerating
Jeffrey, she must, she knew, make herself impervious to snubs.
"Anne and I are doing all we can to help Jeffrey," she said. "He doesn't
know it. Farvie doesn't know it. But there's something about a necklace.
And it had ever so much to do with Jeffrey and his case. And I want to
know."
Madame Beattie chuckled. Her worn yellowed face broke into satirical
lines, hateful ones, Lydia thought. She was like a jeering unpleasant
person carved for a cathedral and set up among the saints.
"I'll tell you about my necklace," said she. "I'm perfectly willing to.
Perhaps you can do something about it. Something for me, too."
It was a strange, vivid picture: that small arc of light augmenting the
dusk about them, and Lydia sitting rapt in expectation while Madame
Beattie's yellowed face lay upon the obscurity, an amazing portraiture
against the dark. It was a picture of a perfect consistency, of youth
and innocence and need coming to the sybil for a reading of the leaves
of life.
"You see, my dear," said Madame Beattie, "years ago I had a necklace
given me--diamonds." She said it with emotion even. No one ever heard
her rehearse her triumphs on the lyric stage. They were the foundation
of such dignity as her life had known; but the gewgaws time had flung at
her she did like, in these lean years, to finger over. "It was given me
by a Royal Personage. He had to do a great many clever things to get
ahead of his government and his exchequer to give me such a necklace.
But he did."
"Why did he?" Lydia asked.
It was an innocent question designed to keep the sybil going. Madame
Beattie's eyes narrowed slightly. You could see what she had been in the
day of her power.
"He had to," said she, with an admiringly dramatic simplicity. "I wanted
it."
"But--" began Lydia, and Madame Beattie put up a small hand with a
gesture of rebuttal.
"Well, time went on, and he needed the necklace back. However, that
doesn't belong to the story. Some years ago, just before your Jeff got
into trouble, I came over here to the States. I was singing then more or
less." A concentrated power, of even a noble sort, came into her face.
There was bitterness too, for she had to remember how disastrous a
venture it had been. "I needed money, you understand. I couldn't have
got an audience over there. I thought here they might come to hear
me--to say they'd heard me--the younger generation--and see my jewels. I
hadn't many left. I'd sold most of them. Well, I was mistaken. I
couldn't get a house. The fools!" Scorn ate up her face alive and opened
it out, a sneering mask. They were fools indeed, she knew, who would not
stir the ashes of such embers in search of one spark left. "I'm a very
strong woman. But I rather broke down then. I came here to Esther. She
was the only relation I had, except my stepsister, and she was off
travelling. Susan was always ashamed of me. She went to Europe on
purpose. Well, I came here. And Esther wished I was at the bottom of the
sea. But she liked my necklace, and she stole it."
Esther, as Lydia had seen her sitting in a long chair and eating candied
fruit, had been a figure of such civilised worth, however odious, that
Lydia said involuntarily, in a loud voice:
"She couldn't. I don't believe it."
"Oh, but she did," said Madame Beattie, looking at her with the coolness
of one who holds the cards. "She owned she did."
"To you?"
"To Jeff. He was madly in love with her then. Married, you understand,
but frightfully in love. Yes, she owned it. I always thought that was
why he wasn't sorry to go to jail. If he'd stayed out there was the
question of the necklace. And Esther. He didn't know what to do with
her."
"But he made her give it back," said Lydia, out of agonised certainty
that she must above all believe in him.
"He couldn't. She said she'd lost it."
Lydia stared at her, and her own face went white. Now the picture of
youth and age confronting each other was of the sybil dealing inexorable
hurts and youth anguished in the face of them.
"She said she'd lost it," Madame Beattie went on, in almost chuckling
enjoyment of her tale. "She said it had bewitched her. That was true
enough. She'd gone to New York. She came back by boat. Crazy thing for a
woman to do. And she said she stayed on deck late, and stood by the rail
and took the necklace out of her bag to hold it up in the moonlight. And
it slipped out of her hands."
"Into the water?"
"She said so."
"You don't believe it." Lydia read that clearly in the contemptuous old
face.
"Well, now, I ask you," said Madame Beattie, "was there ever such a
silly tale? A young woman of New England traditions--yes, they're
ridiculous, but you've got to reckon with them--she comes home on a Fall
River boat and doesn't even stay in her cabin, but hangs round on decks
and plays with priceless diamonds in the moonlight. Why, it's enough to
make the cat laugh."
Madame Beattie, in spite of her cosmopolitan reign, was at least local
enough to remember the feline similes Lydia put such dependence on, and
she used this one with relish. Lydia felt the more at home.
"But what did she do with it?" she insisted.
"I don't know," said Madame Beattie idly. "Put it in a safety deposit in
New York perhaps. Don't ask me."
"But don't you care?" cried Lydia, all of a heat of wonder--terror also
at melodramatic thieving here in simple Addington.
"I can care about things without screaming and sobbing," said Madame
Beattie briefly. "Though I sobbed a little at the time. I was a good
deal unstrung from other causes. But of course I laid it before Jeff, as
her husband--"
"He must have been heartbroken."
"Well, he was her husband. He was responsible for her, wasn't he? I told
him I wouldn't expose the creature. Only he'd have to pay me for the
necklace."
The yellow-white face wavered before Lydia. She was trying to make her
brain accept the raw material Madame Beattie was pouring into it and
evolve some product she could use.
"But he couldn't pay you. He'd just got into difficulties. You said so."
"Bless you, he hadn't got into any difficulty until Esther pushed him in
by helping herself to my necklace. He turned crazy over it. He hadn't
enough to pay for it. So he went into the market and tried a big _coup_
with all his own money and the money he was holding--people subscribed
for his mines, you know, or whatever they were--and that minute there
was a panic. And the courts, or whatever it was, got hold of him for
using the mails for fraudulent purposes or whatever, and he lost his
head. And that's all there was about it."
Lydia's thoughts were racing so fast it seemed to her that she--some
inner determined frightened self in her--was flying to overtake them.
"Then you did it," she said. "You! you forced him, you pushed him--"
"To pay me for my necklace," Madame Beattie supplied. "Of course I did.
It was a very bad move, as it proved. I was a fool; but then I might
have known. Old Lepidus told me the conjunction was bad for me."
"Who was Lepidus?"
"The astrologer. He died last month, the fool, and never knew he was
going to. But he'd encouraged me to come on my concert tour, and when
that went wrong I lost confidence. It was a bad year, a bad year."
A troop of conclusions were rushing at Lydia, all demanding to be fitted
in.
"But you've come back here," she said, incredulous that things as they
actually were could supplement the foolish tale Madame Beattie might
have stolen out of a silly book. "You think Esther did such a thing as
that, and yet you're here with her in this house."
"That's why I'm here," said Madame Beattie patiently. "Jeff's back
again, and the necklace hasn't been fully paid for. I've kept my word to
him. I haven't exposed his wife, and yet he hasn't recognised my not
doing it."
The vision of Jeffrey fleeing before the lash of this implacable
taskmaster was appalling to Lydia.
"But he can't pay you," said she. "He's no money. Not even to settle
with his creditors."
"That's it," said Madame Beattie. "He's got to make it. And I'm his
first creditor. I must be paid first."
"You haven't told him so?" said Lydia, in a manner of fending her off.
"It isn't time. He hasn't recovered his nerve. But he will, digging in
that absurd garden."
"And when you think he has, you'll tell him?"
"Why, of course." Madame Beattie reached for her book and smoothed the
pages open with a beautiful hand. "It'll do him good, too. Bring him out
of thinking he's a man of destiny, or whatever it is he thinks. You tell
him. I daresay you've got some influence with him. That's why I've gone
into it with you."
"But you said you promised him not to tell all this about Esther. And
you've told me."
"That's why. Get him to work. Spur him up. Talk about his creditors. Now
run away. I want to read."