What Alston Choate did, after ten minutes' frowning thought, was to sit
down and write a note to Madame Beattie. But as he dipped his pen he
said aloud, half admiring and inconceivably irritated: "The little
devil!" He sent the note to Madame Beattie by a boy charged to give it,
if possible, into her hand, and in an hour she was there in his office,
ostrich plumes and all. She was in high feather, not adequately to be
expressed by the plumes, and at once she told him why.
"I believe that little wild-fire's been here to see you already. Has
she? and talking about necklaces?"
Madame Beattie was sitting upright in the office chair, fanning herself
and regarding him with a smile as sympathetic as if she had been the
cause of no disturbing issue.
"You'll pardon me for asking you to come here," said Alston. "But I
didn't know how to get at you without Mrs. Blake's knowledge."
"Of course," said Madame Beattie composedly. "She was there when the
note came, and curious as a cat."
"I see," said Alston, tapping noiselessly with his helpful paper knife,
"that you guess I've heard some rumours that--pardon me, Madame
Beattie--started from you."
"Yes," said she, "that pretty imp has been here. Quite right. She's a
clever child. Let her stir up something, and they may quiet it if they
can."
"Do you mind telling me," said Alston, "what this story is--about a
necklace?"
"I've no doubt she's told you just as well as I could," said Madame
Beattie. "She sat and drank it all in. I bet ten pounds she remembered
word for word."
"As I understand, you say--"
"Don't tell me I 'say.' I had a necklace worth more money than I dared
tell that imp. She wouldn't have believed me. And my niece Esther is as
fond of baubles as I am. She stole the thing. And she said she lost it.
And it's my opinion--and it's the imp's opinion--she's got it somewhere
now."
Alston tapped noiselessly, and regarded her from under brows judicially
stern. He wished he knew recipes for frightening Madame Beattie. But, he
suspected, there weren't any. She would tell the truth or she would not,
as she preferred. He hadn't any delusions about Madame Beattie's
cherishing truth as an abstract duty. She was after results. He made a
thrust at random.
"I can't see your object in stirring up this matter. If you had any
ground of evidence you'd have made your claim and had it settled long
ago."
"Not fully," said Madame Beattie, fanning.
"Then you were paid something?"
"Something? How far do you think 'something' would go toward paying for
the loss of a diamond necklace? Evidently you don't know the history of
that necklace. If you were an older man you would. The papers were full
of it for years. It nearly caused a royal separation--they were
reconciled after--and I was nearly garroted once when the thieves
thought I had it in a hand-bag. There are historic necklaces and this is
one. Did you ever hear of Marie Antoinette's?"
"Yes," said Alston absently. He was thinking how to get at her in the
house where she lived. How would some of his novelists have written out
Madame Beattie and made her talk? "And Maupassant's." This he said
ruminatingly, but the lawyer in him here put down a mark. "Note," said
the mark, "Maupassant's necklace. She rose to that." There was no doubt
of it. A quick cross-light, like a shiver, had run across her eyes. "You
know Maupassant's story," he pursued.
"I know every word of Maupassant. Neat, very neat."
"You remember the wife lost the borrowed necklace, and she and her
husband ruined themselves to pay for it, and then they found it wasn't
diamonds at all, but paste."
"I remember," said Madame Beattie composedly. "But if it had been a
necklace such as mine an imitation would have cost a pretty penny."
"So it wasn't the necklace itself," he hazarded. "You wouldn't have
brought a priceless thing over here. It was the imitation."
Madame Beattie broke out, a shrill staccato, into something like anger.
But it might not have been anger, he knew, only a means of hostile
communication.
"You are a rude young man to put words into my mouth, a rude young man."
"I beg your pardon," said Alston. "But this is rather a serious matter.
And I do want to know, as a friend of Mrs. Jeffrey Blake."
"And counsel confided in by that imp," she supplied shrewdly.
"Yes, counsel retained by Miss Lydia French. I want to know whether you
had with you here in America the necklace given you by--" Here he
hesitated. He wondered whether, according to her standards, he was
unbearably insulting, or whether the names of royal givers could really
be mentioned.
"A certain Royal Personage," said Madame Beattie calmly.
"Or," said Alston, beginning after a safe hiatus, "whether you had had
an imitation made, and whether the necklace said to be lost was the
imitation."
"Well, then I'll tell you plainly," said Madame Beattie, in a cheerful
concession, "I didn't have an imitation made. And you're quite within
the truth with your silly 'said to be's.' For it was said to be lost.
Esther said it. And she no more lost it than she went to New York that
time to climb the Matterhorn. Do you know Esther?"
"Yes," said Alston with a calculated dignity, "I know her very well."
"Oh, I mean really know her, not enough to take her in to dinner or
snatch your hat off to her."
"Yes, I really know her."
"Then why should you assume she's not a liar?" Madame Beattie asked this
with the utmost tranquillity. It almost robbed the insult of offence.
But Alston's face arrested her, and she burst out laughing. "My dear
boy," said she, "you deal with evidence and you don't know a liar when
you see her. Esther isn't all kinds of a liar. She isn't an amusing one,
for instance. She hasn't any imagination. Now if I thought it would make
you jump, I should tell you there was a tiger sitting on the top of that
bookcase. I should do it because it would amuse me. But Esther never'd
think of such a thing." She was talking to him now with perfect
good-humour because he actually had glanced up at the bookcase, and it
was tribute to her dramatic art. "She tells only the lies she has to.
Esther's the perfect female animal hiding under things when there's
something she's afraid of in the open and then telling herself she hid
because she felt like being alone. The little imp wouldn't do that,"
said Madame Beattie admiringly. "She wouldn't be afraid of anything, or
if she was she'd fight the harder. I shouldn't want to see the blood
she'd draw."
Alston was looking at her in a fixed distaste.
"Esther is your niece," he began.
"Grandniece," interrupted Madame Beattie.
"She's of your blood. And at present you are her guest--"
"Oh, no, I'm not. The house is Susan's. Susan and I are step-sisters.
Half the house ought to have been left to me, only Grandfather Pike knew
I was worshipped, simply worshipped in Paris, and he wrote me something
scriptural about Babylon."
"At any rate," said Alston, "you are technically visiting your niece,
and you come here and tell me she is a thief and a liar."
"You sent for me," said Madame Beattie equably. "And I actually walked
over. I thought it would be good for me, but it wasn't. Isn't that a
hack out there? If it's that Denny, I think I'll get him to take me for
a little drive. Don't come down."
But Alston went in a silence he recognised as sulky, and put her into
the carriage with a perfect solicitude.
"I must ask you," he said stiffly before he closed the carriage door,
"not to mention this to Mrs. Blake."
"Bless you, no," said Madame Beattie. "I'm going to let you stir the
pot, you and that imp. Tell him to drive out into the country somewhere
for half an hour. I suppose I've got to get the air."
But he was not to escape that particular coil so soon. Back in his
office again, giving himself another ten minutes of grave amused
consideration, before he called the stenographer, he looked up, at the
opening of the door, and saw Anne. She came forward at once and without
closing the door, as if to assure him she would not keep him long. There
was no misreading the grave trouble of her face. He met her, and now
they shook hands, and after he had closed the door he set a chair for
her. But Anne refused it.
"I came to tell you how sorry I am to have troubled you so," she began.
"Of course Lydia won't go on with this. She won't be allowed to. I don't
know what could stop her," Anne admitted truthfully. "But I shall do
what I can. Farvie mustn't be told. He'd be horrified. Nor Jeff. I must
see what I can do."
"You are very much troubled," said Alston, in a tone of grave concern.
It seemed to him Anne was a perfect type of the gentlewoman of another
time, not even of his mother's perhaps, but of his grandmother's when
ladies were a mixture of fine courage and delicate reserve. That type
had, in his earliest youth, seemed inevitable. If his mother had escaped
from it, it was because she was the inexplicable wonder of womankind,
unlike the rest and rarer than all together.
Anne looked at him, pleading in her eyes.
"Terribly," she said, "terribly troubled. Lydia has always been
impulsive, but not unmanageable. And I don't in the least know what to
do."
"Suppose you leave it with me," said Alston, his deference an exquisite
balm to her hurt feeling. Then he smiled, remembering Lydia. "I don't
know what to do either," he said. "Your sister's rather terrifying. But
I think we're safe enough so long as she doesn't go to Weedon Moore."
Anne was wordlessly grateful, but he understood her and not only went to
the door with her but down the stairs as well. And she walked home
treasuring the memory of his smile.