Lydia did run away and really ran, home, to see if the dear surroundings
of her life were intact after all she had heard. Since this temporary
seclusion in a melodramatic tale, she almost felt as if she should never
again see the vision of Mary Nellen making cake or Anne brushing her
long hair and looking like a placid saint. The library was dim, but she
heard interchanging voices there, and knew Jeffrey and his father were
in tranquil talk. So she sped upstairs to Anne's room, and there Anne
was actually brushing her hair and wearing precisely that look of
evening peace Lydia had seen so many times.
"I thought I'd go to bed early," she said, laying down the brush and
gathering round her hair to braid it. "Why, Lyd!"
It was a hot young messenger invading her calm. Anne looked like one
who, the day done, was placidly awaiting night; but Lydia was the day
itself, her activities still unfinished.
"I've found it out," she announced. "All of it. She made him do it."
Then, while Anne stared at her, she sat down and told her story,
vehemently, with breaks of breathless inquiry as to what Anne might
think of a thing like this, finally with dragging utterance, for her
vitality was gone; and at the end, challenging Anne with a glance, she
turned cold: for it came over her that Anne did not believe her.
Anne began braiding her hair again. During Lydia's incredible story she
had let it slip from her hand. And Lydia could see the fingers that
braided were trembling, as Anne's voice did, too.
"What a dreadful old woman!" said Anne.
"Madame Beattie?" Lydia asked quickly. "Oh, no, she's not, Anne. I like
her."
"Like her? A woman like that? She doesn't even look clean."
Lydia answered quite eagerly.
"Oh, yes, Anne, I really like her. I thought I didn't when I heard her
talk. Sometimes I hated her. But I understand her somehow. And she's
clean. Really she is. It's the kind of clothes she wears." Lydia, to her
own surprise at this tragic moment, giggled a little here. Madame
Beattie, when in full fig, as she had first seen her, looked to her like
pictures of ancient hearses with plumes. "She's all right," said Lydia.
"She's just going to have what belongs to her, that's all. And if I were
in her place and felt as she does, I would, too."
Anne, with an air of now being ready for bed, threw the finished braid
over her back. She was looking at Lydia with her kind look, but, Lydia
could also see, compassionately.
"But, Lyd," she said, "the reason I call her a dreadful old woman is
that she's told you all this rigmarole. It makes me quite hot. She
sha'n't amuse herself by taking you in like that. I won't have it."
"Anne," said Lydia, "it's true. Don't you see it's true?"
"It's a silly story," said Anne. She could imagine certain things,
chiefly what men and women would like, in order to make them
comfortable, but she had no appetite for the incredible. "Do you suppose
Esther would have stolen her aunt's diamonds? Or was it pearls?"
"Yes, I do," said Lydia stoutly. "It's just like her."
"She might do other things, different kinds of things that are just as
bad. But stealing, Lyd! Why, think! Esther's a lady."
"Ladies are just like anybody else," said Lydia sulkily. She thought she
might have to consider that when she was alone, but at this moment the
world was against her and she had to catch up the first generality she
could find.
"And for a necklace to be so valuable," said Anne, "valuable enough for
Jeff to risk everything he had to try to pay for it--"
Lydia felt firmer ground. She read the newspapers and Anne did not.
"Now, Anne," said she, "you're 'way off. Diamonds cost thousands and
thousands of dollars, and so do pearls."
"Why, yes," said Anne, "royal jewels or something of that sort. But a
diamond necklace brought here to Addington in Madame Beattie's bag--"
Lydia got up and went over to her. Her charming face was hot with anger,
and she looked, too, so much a child that she might in a minute stamp
her foot or scream.
"Why, you simpleton!" said she.
"Lydia!" Anne threw in, the only stop-gap she could catch at in her
amaze. This was her "little sister", but of a complexion she had never
seen.
"Don't you know what kind of a person Madame Beattie is? Why, she's a
princess. She's more than a princess. She's had kings and emperors
wallowing round the floor after her, begging to kiss her hand."
Anne looked at her. Lydia afterward, in her own room, thought, with a
gale of hysterical laughter, "She just looked at me." And Anne couldn't
find a word to crush the little termagant. Everything that seemed to
pertain was either satirical, as to ask, "Did she tell you so?" or
compassionate, implying cerebral decay. But she did venture the
compassion.
"Lydia, don't you think you'd better go to bed?"
"Yes," said Lydia promptly, and went out and shut the door.
And on the way to her room, Anne noted, she was singing, or in a fashion
she had in moments of triumph, tooting through closed lips, like a
trumpet, the measures of a march. In half an hour Anne followed her, to
listen at her door. Lydia was silent. Anne hoped she was asleep.
In the morning there was the little termagant again with that same
triumph on her face, talking more than usual at the breakfast table, and
foolishly, as she hadn't since Jeffrey came. It had always been
understood that Lydia had times of foolishness; but it had seemed, after
Jeffrey appeared among them clothed in tragedy, that everything would be
henceforth on a dignified, even an austere basis. But here she was,
chaffing the colonel and chattering childish jargon to Anne. Jeffrey
looked at her, first with a tolerant surprise. Then he smiled. Seeing
her so light-hearted he was pleased. This was a Lydia he approved of. He
need neither run clear of her poetic emotions nor curse himself for
calling on them. He went out to his hoeing with an unformulated idea
that the tension of social life had let up a little.
Lydia did no dusting of tables or arranging of flowers in a vase. By a
hand upon Anne's arm she convoyed her into the hall, and said to her:
"Get your hat. We're going to see Mr. Alston Choate."
"What for?" asked Anne.
"I'm going to tell him what Madame Beattie told me." Lydia's colour was
high. She looked prodigiously excited, and as if something was so
splendid it could hardly be true. And then, as Anne continued to stare
at her with last night's stare, she added, not as if she launched a
thunderbolt, but as giving Anne something precious that would please her
very much: "I'm going to engage him for Jeffrey's case. Get your hat,
Anne. Or your parasol. My nose doesn't burn as yours does. Come, come."
She stood there impatiently tapping her foot as she used to, years ago,
when mother was slow about taking her out in the p'ram. Anne turned
away.
"You're a Silly Billy," said she. "You're not going to see Mr. Choate."
"Won't you go with me?" Lydia inquired.
"No, of course I sha'n't. And you won't go, either."
"Yes, I shall," said Lydia. "I'm gone."
And she was, out of the door and down the walk. Anne, following
helplessly a step, thought she must be running, she was so quickly lost.
But Lydia was not running. With due respect, taught her by Anne, for the
customs of Addington, she had put on her head the little
white-rose-budded hat she had snatched from the hall and fiercely pinned
it, and she was walking, though swiftly, in great decorum to Madison
Street where the bank was and the post-office and the best stores, and
upstairs in the great Choate building, the office of Alston Choate.
Lydia tapped at the office door, but no one answered. Then she began to
dislike her errand, and if it had not been for the confounding of Anne,
perhaps she would have gone home. She tapped again and hurt her
knuckles, and that brought her courage back.
"Come in," called a voice, much out of patience, it seemed. She opened
the door and there saw Alston Choate, his feet on the table, reading
"Trilby." Alston thought he had a right to at least one chapter; he had
opened his mail and dictated half a dozen letters, and the stenographer,
in another room, was writing them out. He looked up under a frowning
brow, and seeing her there, a Phillis come to town, shy, rosy,
incredible, threw his book to the table and put down his feet.
"I beg your pardon," said he, getting up, and then Lydia, seeing him in
the attitude of conventional deference, began to feel proper supremacy.
She spoke with a demure dignity of which the picturesque value was well
known to her.
"I've come to engage you for our case."
He stared at her an instant as Anne had, and she sinkingly felt he had
no confidence in her. But he recovered himself. That was not like Anne.
She had not recovered at all.
"Will you sit down?" he said.
He drew forward a chair. It faced the light, and Lydia noted, when he
had taken the opposite one, that they were in the technical position for
inquisitor and victim. He waited scrupulously, and when she had seated
herself, also sat down.
"Now," said he.
It was gravely said, and reconciled Lydia somewhat to the hardness of
her task. At least he would not really make light of her, like Anne.
Only your family could do that. She sat there charming, childlike even,
all soft surfaces and liquid gleam of eyes, so very young that she was
wistful in it. She hesitated in her beginning.
"I understand," she said, "that everything I say to you will be in
confidence. O Mr. Choate!" she implored him, with a sudden breaking of
her self-possession, "you wouldn't tell, would you?"
Alston Choate did not allow a glint to lighten the grave kindliness of
his glance. Perhaps he felt no amusement; she was his client and very
sweet.
"Never," said he, in the manner of an uncle to a child. "Tell me
anything you like. I shall respect your confidence."
"I saw Madame Beattie last night," said Lydia; and she went on to tell
what Madame Beattie had said. She warmed to it, and being of a dramatic
type, she coloured the story as Madame Beattie might have done. There
was a shade of cynicism here, a tang of worldliness there; and it
sounded like the hardest fact. But when she came to Esther, she saw his
glance quicken and fasten on hers the more keenly, and when she told him
Madame Beattie believed the necklace had not been lost at all, he was
looking at her with astonishment even.
"You say--" he began, and made her rehearse it all again in snatches. He
cross-examined her, not, it seemed, as if he wished to prove she lied,
but to take in her monstrous truth. And after they had been over it two
or three times and she felt excited and breathless and greatly fagged by
the strain of saying the same thing in different ways, she saw in his
face the look she had seen in Anne's.
"Why," she cried out, in actual pain, "you don't believe me."
Choate didn't answer that. He sat for a minute, considering gravely, and
then threw down the paper knife he had been bending while she talked. It
was ivory, and it gave a little shallow click on the table and that,
slight as it was, made her nerves jump. She felt suddenly that she was
in deeper than she had expected to be.
"Do you realise," he began gravely, "what you accuse Mrs. Blake of?"
Lydia had not been used to think of her by that name and she asked, with
lifted glance:
"Esther?"
"Yes. Mrs. Jeffrey Blake."
"She took the necklace," said Lydia. She spoke with the dull obstinacy
that made Anne shake her sometimes and then kiss her into kindness, she
was so pretty.
But Alston Choate, she saw, was not going to find it a road to
prettiness. He was after the truth like a dog on a scent, and he didn't
think he had it yet.
"Madame Beattie," he said, "tells you she believes that Esther--" his
voice slipped caressingly on the word with the lovingness of usage, and
Lydia saw he called her Esther in his thoughts--"Madame Beattie tells
you she believes that Esther did this--this incredible thing."
The judicial aspect fell away from him, and the last words carried only
the man's natural distaste. Lydia saw now that whether she was believed
or not, she was bound to be most unpopular. But she stood to her guns.
"Madame Beattie knows it. Esther owned it, I told you."
"Owned it to Madame Beattie?"
"To Jeff, anyway. Madame Beattie says so."
"Do you think for a moment she was telling you the truth?"
"But that's just the kind of women they are," said Lydia, at once
reckless and astute. "Esther's just the woman to take a necklace, and
Madame Beattie's just the woman to tell you she's taken it."
"Miss Lydia," said Choate gravely, "I'm bound to warn you in advance
that you mustn't draw that kind of inference."
Lydia lost her temper. It seemed to her she had been talking plain fact.
"I shall draw all the inferences I please," said she, "especially if
they're true. And you needn't try to mix me up by your law terms, for I
don't understand them."
"I have been particularly careful not to," said Choate rather stiffly;
but still, she saw, with an irritating proffer of compassion for her
because she didn't know any better. "I am being very unprofessional
indeed. And I still advise you, in plain language, not to draw that sort
of inference about a lady--" There he hesitated.
"About Esther?" she inquired viciously.
"Yes," said he steadily, "about Mrs. Jeffrey Blake. She is a
gentlewoman."
So Anne had said: "Esther is a lady." For the moment Lydia felt more
imbued with the impartiality of the law than both of them. Esther's
being a lady had, she thought, nothing whatever to do with her stealing
a necklace, if she happened to like necklaces. She considered herself a
lady, but she could also see herself, under temptation, doing a
desperado's deeds. Not stealing a necklace: that was tawdry larceny. But
she could see herself trapping Esther in a still place and cutting her
dusky hair off so that she'd betray no more men. For she began to
suspect that Alston Choate, too, was caught in the lure of Esther's
inexplicable charm. Lydia was at the moment of girlhood nearly done
where her accumulated experience, half of it not understood, was
prepared to spring to life and crystallise into clearest knowledge. She
was a child still, but she was ready to be a woman. Alston Choate now
was gazing at her with his charming smile, and Lydia hardened under it,
certain the smile was meant for mere persuasiveness.
"Besides," he said, "the necklace wasn't yours. You don't want to bring
Mrs. Blake to book for stealing a necklace which isn't your own?"
"But I'm not doing it for myself," said Lydia instantly. "It's for
Jeffrey."
"But, Jeffrey--" Alston paused. He wanted to put it with as little
offence as might be. "Jeffrey has been tried for a certain offence and
found guilty."
"He wasn't really guilty," said Lydia. "Can't you see he wasn't? Esther
stole the necklace, and Madame Beattie wanted it paid for, and Jeffrey
tried to do it and everything went to pieces. Can't you really see?"
She asked it anxiously, and Alston answered her with the more gentleness
because her solicitude made her so kind and fair.
"Now," said he, "this is the way it is. Jeffrey pleaded guilty and was
sentenced. If everything you say is true--we'll assume it is--he would
have been tried just the same, and he would have been sentenced just the
same. I don't say his counsel mightn't have whipped up a lot of sympathy
from the jury, but he wouldn't have got off altogether. And besides, you
wouldn't have had him escape in any such conceivable way. You wouldn't
have had him shield himself behind his wife."
Lydia was looking at him with brows drawn tight in her effort to get
quite clearly what she thought might prove at any instant a befogged
technicality. But it all sounded reasonable enough, and she gratefully
understood he was laying aside the jurist's phraseology for her sake.
"But," said she, "mightn't Esther have been tried for stealing the
necklace?"
He couldn't help laughing, she seemed so ingenuously anxious to lay
Esther by the heels. Then he sobered, for her inhumanity to Esther
seemed to him incredible.
"Why, yes," said he, "if she had been suspected, if there'd been
evidence--"
"Then I call it a wicked shame she wasn't," said Lydia. "And she's got
to be now. If it isn't my business, it's Madame Beattie's, and I'll ask
her to do it. I'll beg it of her."
With that she seemed still more dangerous to him, like an explosive put
up in so seemly a package that at first you trust it until you see how
impossible it is to handle. He spoke with a real and also a calculated
impressiveness.
"Miss Lydia, will you let me tell you something?"
She nodded, her eyes fixed on his.
"One thing my profession has taught me. It's so absolutely true a thing
that it never fails. And it's this: it is very easy to begin a course of
proceeding, but, once begun, it's another thing to stop it. Now before
you start this ball rolling--or before you egg on Madame Beattie--let's
see what you're going to get out of it."
"I don't expect to get anything," said Lydia, on fire. "I'm not doing it
for myself."
"Let's take the other people then. Your father is a man of reputation.
He's going to be horrified. Jeff is going to be broken-hearted under an
attack upon his wife."
"He doesn't love her," said Lydia eagerly. "Not one bit."
Choate himself believed that, but he stared briefly at having it thrown
at him with so deft a touch. Then he went on.
"Mrs. Blake is going to be found not guilty."
"Why is she?" asked Lydia calmly. It seemed to her the cross-questioning
was rightly on her side.
"Why, good God! because she isn't guilty!" said Alston with violence,
and did not even remember to be glad no legal brother was present to
hear so irrational an explosion. He hurried on lest she should call
satiric attention to its thinness. "And as for Madame Beattie, she'll
get nothing out of it. For the necklace being lost, she won't get that."
"Oh," said Lydia, the more coolly, as she noted she had nettled him on
the human side until the legal one was fairly hidden, "but we don't
think the necklace is lost."
"Who don't?" he asked, frowning.
"Madame Beattie and I."
"Where do you think it is then?"
"We think Esther's got it somewhere."
"But you say she lost it."
"I say she said she lost it," returned Lydia, feeling the delight of
sounding more accurate every minute. "We don't think she did lose it. We
think she lied."
Alston Choate remembered Esther as he had lately seen her, sitting in
her harmonious surroundings, all fragility of body and sweetness of
feeling, begging him to undertake the case that would deliver her from
Jeffrey because she was afraid--afraid. And here was this horribly
self-possessed little devil--he called her a little devil quite plainly
in his mind--accusing that flower of gentleness and beauty of a vulgar
crime.
"My God!" said he, under his breath.
And at that instant Anne, flushed and most sweet, hatted and gloved,
opened the door and walked in. She bowed to Alston Choate, though she
did not take his outstretched hand. He was receiving such professional
insult, Anne felt, from one of her kin that she could scarcely expect
from him the further grace of shaking hands with her. Lydia, looking at
her, saw with an impish glee that Anne, the irreproachable, was angry.
There was the spark in her eye, decision in the gesture with which she
made at once for Lydia.
"Why, Anne," said Lydia, "I never saw you mad before."
Tears came into Anne's eyes. She bit her lip. All the proprieties of
life seemed to her at stake when she must stand here before this most
dignified of men and hear Lydia turn Addington courtesies into farce.
"I came to get you," she said, to Lydia. "You must come home with me."
"I can't," said Lydia. "I am having a business talk with Mr. Choate.
I've asked him to undertake our case."
"Our case," Anne repeated, in a perfect despair. "Why, we haven't any
case."
She turned to Choate and he gave her a confirming glance.
"I've been telling your sister that, virtually," said he. "I tell her
she doesn't need my services. You may persuade her."
"Well," said Lydia cheerfully, rising, for they seemed to her much older
than she and, though not to be obeyed on that account, to be placated by
outward civilities, "I'm sorry. But if you don't take the case I shall
have to go to some one else."
"Lydia!" said Anne. Was this the soft creature who crept to her arms of
a cold night and who prettily had danced her way into public favour?
Alston Choate was looking thoughtful. It was not a story to be spread
broadcast over Addington. He temporised.
"You see," he ventured, turning again to Lydia with his delightful smile
which was, with no forethought of his own, tremendously persuasive, "you
haven't told me yet what anybody is to get out of it."
"I thought I had," said Lydia, taking heart once more. If he talked
reasonably with her, perhaps she could persuade him after all. "Why,
don't you see? it's just as easy! I do, and I've only thought of it one
night. Don't you see, Madame Beattie's here to hound Jeffrey into
paying her for the necklace. That's going to kill him, just kill him.
Anne, I should think you could see that."
Anne could see it if it were so. But Lydia, she thought, was building on
a dream. The hideous old woman with the ostrich feathers had played a
satiric joke on her, and here was Lydia in good faith assuming the joke
was real.
"And if we can get this cleared up," said Lydia calmly, feeling very
mature as she scanned their troubled faces, "Madame Beattie can just
have her necklace back, and Jeff, instead of thinking he's got to start
out with that tied round his neck, can set to work and pay his
creditors."
Alston Choate was looking at her, frowning.
"Do you realise, Miss Lydia, what amount it is Jeffrey would have to pay
his creditors? Unless he went into the market again and had a run of
unbroken luck--and he's no capital to begin on--it's a thing he simply
couldn't do. And as to the market, God forbid that he should ever think
of it."
"Yes," said Anne fervently, "God forbid that. Farvie can't say enough
against it."
Lydia's perfectly concrete faith was not impaired in the least.
"It isn't to be expected he should pay it all," said she. "He's got to
pay what he can. If he should die to-morrow with ten dollars saved
toward paying back his debts--"
"Do you happen to know what sum of money represents his debts?" Alston
threw in, as you would clutch at the bit of a runaway horse.
"I know all about it," said Lydia. She suddenly looked hot and fierce.
"I've done sums with it over and over, to see if he could afford to pay
the interest too. And it's so much it doesn't mean anything at all to me
one minute, and another time I wake up at night and feel it sitting on
me, jamming me flat. But you needn't think I'm going to stop for that.
And if you won't be my lawyer I can find somebody that will. That Mr.
Moore is a lawyer. I'll go to him."
Anne, who had been staring at Lydia with the air of never having truly
seen her, turned upon Choate, her beautiful eyes distended in a tragical
appeal.
"Oh," said she, "you'll have to help us somehow."
So Alston Choate thought. He was regarding Lydia, and he spoke with a
deference she was glad to welcome, a prospective client's due.
"I think," said he, "you had better leave the case with me."
"Yes," said Lydia. She hoped to get out of the room before Anne saw how
undone she really was. "That's nice. You think it over, and we'll have
another talk. Come along, Anne. Mary Nellen wants some lemons."