The next morning, a sweet one of warmth and gently drifting leaves,
Esther went to call on Lydia, and Madame Beattie, with a satirical grin,
looked after her from the window. Madame Beattie's understanding of the
human mind had given her a dramatic hold on the world when the world
loved her, and it was mechanically serving her now in these little deeds
that were only of a mean importance, though, from the force of habit,
she played the game so hard. Esther was very fresh and pretty in her
white dress with an artful parasol that cast a freshening glow. She had
the right expression, too, the calmness of one who makes a commonplace
morning call.
And it was not Lydia who saw her coming. It was Jeff, in his working
blouse and shabby trousers, standing on a cool corner of the veranda and
finishing his morning smoke before he went out to picking early apples.
Esther knew at precisely what instant he caught sight of her, and saw
him knock out his pipe into the garden bed below the veranda and lay it
on the rail. Then he waited for her, and she was almost amusedly
prepared for his large-eyed wonder and the set of the jaw which betrayed
his certainty of having something difficult to meet. It was not thus he
had been used to greet her on sweet October mornings in those other
days. Suddenly he turned with a quick gesture of the hand as if he were
warning some one back, and Esther, almost at the steps, understood that
he had heard Lydia coming and had tried to stop her. Lydia evidently
had not understood and ran innocently out on some errand of her own.
Seeing Esther, she halted an appreciable instant. Then something as
quickly settled itself in her mind, and she advanced and stood at the
side of Jeff. Esther furled her parasol and came up the steps, and her
face did not for an instant change in its sweet seriousness. She looked
at Lydia with a faint, almost, it might seem, a pitying smile.
"I thought," said she, "after what I said, I ought to come, to reassure
you."
Neither Jeff nor Lydia seemed likely to move, and Esther stood there
looking from one to the other with her concerned air of having something
to do for them. It was only a moment, yet it seemed to Lydia as if they
had been communing a long time, in some hidden fashion, and learning
amazingly to understand each other. That is, she was understanding
Esther, and the outcome terrified her. Esther seemed more dangerous than
ever, bearing gifts. But Lydia could almost always do the sensible thing
in an emergency and keep emotion to be quelled in solitude.
"Come in," said she, "and sit down. Jeff, won't you move the chairs into
the shady corner? We'd better not go into the library. Farvie's there."
Jeff awoke from his tranced surprise and the two women followed him to
the seclusion of the vines. There Esther took the chair he set for her,
and looked gravely at Lydia, as she said:
"I was very hasty. I told him--" She indicated Jeff with a little
gesture. It seemed she found some significance in the informality of the
pronoun--"I told him I had found out who took the necklace. I knew of
course he would tell you. And I came to keep you from being troubled."
"Lydia," said Jeff, with the effect of stepping quickly in between them,
"go into the house. This is something that doesn't concern you in the
least."
Lydia, very pale now, was looking at Esther, in a fixed antagonism. Her
hands were tightly clasped. She looked like a creature braced against a
blow. But Esther seemed of all imaginable persons the least likely to
deliver a blow of any sort. She was gracefully relaxed in her chair, one
delicate hand holding the parasol and the other resting, with the
fingers upcurled like lily petals, on her knee.
"No," said Lydia, not looking at Jeff, though she answered him, "I
sha'n't go in. It does concern me. That's what she came for. She's told
you so. To accuse me of taking it."
With the last words, a little scorn ran into her voice. It was a scorn
of what Esther might do, and it warmed her and made her suddenly feel
equal to the moment.
"No," said Esther, in her softest tone, a sympathetic tone, full of a
grave concern. "It was only to confess I ought not to have said it.
Whatever I knew, I ought to have kept it to myself. For there was the
necklace. You had sent it back. You had done wrong, but what better
could you do than send it back? And I understand--" she glowed a little
now, turning to Jeff--"I understand how wonderful it was of you to take
it on yourself."
Jeff was frowning, and though facing her, looking no further than the
lily-petalled hand. Esther was quite sure he was dwelling on the hand
with inevitable appreciation. She had a feeling that he was frowning
because it distracted him from his task of pleasing Lydia and at the
same time meeting her own sympathetic tribute. But he was not. Esther
knew a great many things about men, but she was naively unconscious of
their complete detachment from feminine allurements when they are
summoned to affairs.
"Esther," said Jeff, before Lydia could speak, "just why are you here?"
"I told you," said Esther, with a pretty air of pained surprise. "To
tell Lydia she mustn't be unhappy."
Then Lydia found her tongue.
"I'm not unhappy," she said, with a brutality of incisiveness which
offers the bare fact with no concern for its effect. "I took the
necklace. But I don't know," said Lydia, with one of her happy
convictions that she really had a legal mind and might well follow its
inspirations, "I don't know whether it is stealing to take a thing away
from a person who has stolen it herself."
"Lydia!" said Jeff warningly.
He hardly knew why he was stopping her. Certainly not in compassion for
Esther; she, at this moment, was merely an irritating cause of a spoiled
morning. But Lydia, he felt, like a careering force that had slipped
control, must be checked before she did serious harm.
"You know," said Lydia, now looking Esther calmly in the eye, "you know
you were the first to steal the necklace. You stole it years ago, from
Madame Beattie. No, I don't know whether it's stealing to take it from
you when you'd no business to have it anyway. I must ask some one."
Lydia was no longer pale with apprehension. The rose was on her cheek.
Her eyes glowed with mischief and the lust of battle. Once she darted a
little smiling look at Jeff. "Come on," it seemed to say. "I can't be
worse off than I am. Let's put her through her paces and get something
out of it--fun, at least."
Esther looked back at her in that pained forbearance which clothed her
like a transfiguring atmosphere. Then she drew a sharp breath.
"Jeff!" she said, turning to him.
The red had mounted to his forehead. He admired Lydia, and with some
wild impulse of his own, loved her bravado.
"Oh, come, Lydia," he said. "We can't talk like that. If Esther means to
be civil--"
Yet he did not think Esther meant to be civil. Only he was hard pushed
between the two, and said the thing that came to him. But it came empty
and went empty to them, and he knew it.
"She doesn't mean to be civil," said Lydia, still in her wicked
enjoyment. "I don't know what she does mean, but it's not to be nice to
me. And I don't know what she's come for--" here her old vision of Jeff
languishing unvisited in the dungeon of her fancy rose suddenly before
her and she ended hotly--"after all this time."
Again Esther turned to Jeff and spoke his name, as if summoning him in a
situation she could not, however courageous, meet alone. But Lydia had
thought of something else.
"I don't know what you can do to me," she said, "and I don't much care.
Except for Farvie and Anne. But I know this. If you can arrest me for
stealing from you something you'd stolen before, why then I shall say
right off I did it. And when I do it, I shall tell all I know about the
necklace and how you took it from Madame Beattie--and oh, my soul!" said
Lydia, rising from her chair and putting her finger tips together in an
unconsidered gesture, "there's Madame Beattie now."
Esther too rose, murder in her heart but still a solicitous sadness in
her eyes, and turned, following Lydia's gaze, to the steps where Denny
had drawn up and Madame Beattie was alighting from the victoria. Jeff,
going forward to meet her, took courage since Denny was not driving
away. Whatever Madame Beattie had come to do, she meant to make quick
work of it.
"Jeff," said Esther, at his elbow, "Jeff, I must go. This is too painful
for everybody. I can't bear it."
"That's right," said Jeff in the kindness of sudden relief. "Run along."
Madame Beattie had decided otherwise. At the top of the steps in her
panoply of black chiffon, velvet, ostrich feathers--clothes so rich in
the beginning and so well made that they seemed always too unchanged to
be thrown away and so went on in a squalid perpetuity--she laid a hand
on Esther's wrist.
"Come, come, Esther," said she, "don't run away. I came to see you as
much as anybody."
Esther longed to shake off the masterful old hand, but she would not. A
sad passivity became her best unless she relinquished every possible
result of the last ten minutes. And it must have had some result. Jeff
had, at least, been partly won. Surely there was an implied intimacy in
his quick undertone when he had bade her run along. So Madame Beattie
went on cheerfully leading her captive and yet, with an art Esther hated
her for, seeming to keep the wrist to lean on, and Lydia, who had
brought another chair, greeted the new visitor with an unaffected
pleasure. She still liked her so much that it was not probable anything
Madame Beattie could say or do would break the tie. And Madame Beattie
liked her: only less than the assurance of her own daily comfort. The
pure stream of affection had got itself sadly sullied in these later
years. She hardly thought now of the way it started among green hills
under a morning sun.
She seated herself, still not releasing Esther until she also had sunk
into a chair by her side, and refreshed herself from a little
viniagrette. Then she winked her eyes open in a way she had, as if
returning from distant considerations and said cheerfully:
"I suppose you're talking about that stupid necklace."
Lydia broke into a little laugh, she did not in the least know why,
except that Madame Beattie was always so amusing to her. Madame Beattie
gave her a nod as if in acknowledgment of the tribute of applause,
continuing:
"Now I've come to be disagreeable. Esther has been agreeable, I've no
doubt. Jeff, I hope you're being nice to her."
A startled look came into Lydia's eyes. Why should Madame Beattie want
Jeff to be nice to her when she knew how false Esther had been and would
always be?
"Esther," continued Madame Beattie, "has been a silly child. She took my
necklace, years ago, and Jeff very chivalrously engaged to pay me for it
and--"
"That will do," said Jeff harshly. "We all know what happened years ago.
Anyhow Esther does. And I do. We'll leave Lydia out of this. I don't
know what you've come here to say, Madame Beattie, but whatever it is, I
prefer it should be said to me. I'm the only one it concerns."
"No, you're not," said Lydia, swelling with rage at everybody who would
keep her from him. "I'm concerned. I'm concerned more than anybody."
Esther glanced up at her quickly and Madame Beattie shook her head.
"You've been a silly child, too," she said. "You took the necklace to
give it back to me. Through Jeff, I understand."
"No, I didn't," said Lydia, in a passion to tell the truth at a moment
when it seemed to her they were all willing, for one result or another,
to turn and twist it. "I gave it back to Jeff so he could carry it to
you and say, 'Here it is. I've paid you a lot of money on it--'"
"Who told you that?" flashed Esther. She had forgotten her patient calm.
"I told her," said Madame Beattie. "Don't be jealous, Esther. Jeff never
would have told her in the world. He's as dumb as a fish."
"And so he could say to you," Lydia went on breathlessly, "'Here's the
horrid thing. And now you've got it I don't owe you money but'"--here
one of her legal inspirations came to her and she added
triumphantly--"'if anything, you owe me.'"
"You're a good imp," said Madame Beattie, in careless commendation, "but
if everybody told the truth as you do there wouldn't be any drama. Now
I'm going to tell the truth. This is just what I propose doing, and what
I mean somebody else shall do. I've got the necklace. Good! But I don't
want it. I want money."
"I have told you," said Jeff, "to sell it. If it's worth what you say--"
"I have told you," said Madame Beattie, "that I can't. It is a question
of honour," she ended somewhat pompously. Yet it was only a dramatic
pomposity. Jeff saw that. "When it was given me by a certain Royal
Personage," she continued and Jeff swore under his breath. He was tired
of the Royal Personage--"I signed an agreement that the necklace should
be preserved intact and that I would never let it go into other hands.
We've been all over that."
Jeff moved uneasily in his chair. He thought there were things he might
say to Madame Beattie if the others were not present.
"But," said Madame Beattie dramatically, "Esther stole it. Lydia here,
from the sweetest and most ridiculous of motives, stole it from Esther.
Nobody knows that but us three and that cold-blooded fish, Alston
Choate. He won't tell. But unless Jeff--you, Jeff dear--unless Jeff
makes himself responsible for my future, I propose to tell the whole
story of the necklace in print and make these two young women wish I
hadn't. Better protect them, Jeff. Better make yourself responsible for
Aunt Patricia."
"You propose telling it in print," said Jeff slowly. "You said so
yesterday. But I ought to have warned you then that Weedon Moore won't
print it--not after I've seen him. He knows I'd wring his neck."
"There are plenty of channels," said Madame Beattie, with an unmoved
authority. "Journals here, journals abroad. Why, Jeff!" suddenly her
voice rose in a shrill note and startled them. Her face convulsed and a
deeper hue ran into it. "I'm a personage, Jeff. The world is my friend.
You seem to think because I've lost my voice I'm not Patricia Beattie.
But I am. I am Patricia Beattie. And I have power."
Lydia made a movement toward her and laid her hands together,
impetuously, in applause. Whether Madame Beattie were willing, as it had
seemed a second ago, to sacrifice her for the sake of squeezing money
out of Jeff, she did not care. Something dramatic in her discerned its
like in the other woman and responded. But Jeff, startled for an
instant, felt only the brutal impulse to tell Madame Beattie if the
world were so much her friend, it might support her. And here appeared
the last person any of them desired to see if they were to fight matters
to a finish: the colonel in his morning calm, his finger, even so early,
between the leaves of a book. As the year had waned and there was not
so much outside work to do he had betaken himself to his gentler
pursuits, and in the renewed health of his muscles felt himself a better
man. He had his turn of being startled, there was no doubt of that.
Esther here! his eyes were all for her. It meant something significant,
they seemed to say. Why, except for an emphatic reason, should she,
after this absence, have come to Jeff? He even seemed to be ignoring
Madame Beattie as he stepped forward to Esther, with outstretched hand.
There was a welcome in his manner, a pleasure it smote Lydia's heart to
see. She knew what the scene meant to him: some shadowy renewal of the
old certainties that had made Jeff's life like other men's. For an
instant under the spell of the colonel's belief, she saw Jeff going back
and loving Esther as if the break had never been. It seemed incredible
that any one could look at her as the colonel was looking now, with
warmth, even with gratitude, after she had been so hateful. And Esther
was receiving it all with the prettiest grace. She might even have been
pinning the olive leaf into her dress.
"Well," said he. "Well!"
Lydia was maliciously glad that even he could find nothing more to say.
"What a pleasant morning," he ended lamely yet safely, and conceived the
brilliant addition, "You'll stay to dinner." As he said it he was
conscious, too late, that dinner was several hours away. And meantime
Esther stood and looked up in his eyes with an expression for which
Lydia at once mentally found a name: soulful, that was what it was, she
viciously decided.
Madame Beattie gave a little ironic crow of laughter.
"Sit down, Esther," she said, "and let Mr. Blake shake hands with me.
No, I can't stay to dinner. Esther may, if she likes, but I've business
on my hands. It's with that dirty little man Jeff's got such a prejudice
against."
"Not Weedon Moore," conjectured the colonel. "If you've any law
business, Madame Beattie, you'd far better go to Alston Choate. Moore's
no kind of a man."
"He's the right kind for me," said Madame Beattie. "No manners, no
traditions, no scruples. It's a dirty job I've got for him, and it takes
a dirty man to do it."
She had risen now, and was smiling placidly up at the colonel. He
frowned at her, involuntarily. He was ready to accept Madame Beattie's
knowing neither good nor evil, but she seemed to him singularly
unpleasant in flaunting that lack of bias. She was quite conscious of
his distaste, but it didn't trouble her. Unproductive opinions were
nothing to her now, especially in Addington.
"You're not going, too," said the colonel, as Esther rose and followed
her. "I hoped--" But what he hoped he kept himself from saying.
"I must," said Esther, with a little deprecatory look and another
significant one at Madame Beattie's back. "Good-bye."
She threw Lydia, in her scornful silence there in the background, a
smile and nod.
"But--" the colonel began. Again he had to stop. How could he ask her to
come again when he was in the dark about her reason for coming at all?
"I have to go," she said. "I really have to, this time."
Meantime Jeff, handing Madame Beattie into the carriage, had had his
word with her.
"You'll do nothing until I see you."
"If you see me moderately soon," said Madame Beattie pleasantly.
"Esther, are you coming?"
"No," said Esther, with a scrupulous politeness. "No, thank you. I shall
walk."
But before she went, and well in the rear of the carriage, so that even
Denny should not see, she gave Jeff one look, a suffused, appealing look
that bade him remember how unhappy she was, how unprotected and, most of
all, how feminine. She and the carriage also had in the next instant
gone, and Jeff went stolidly back up the steps. There was sweat on his
forehead and he drew his breath like a man dead-tired.
"My son," began the colonel.
"Don't," said Jeff shortly. He knew what his father would like to do:
ask, in the sincerest sympathy, why Esther had come, discuss it and
decide with him whether she was to come again and stay, whether it would
be ill or well for him. The red mounted to the colonel's forehead, and
Jeff put a hand on his shoulder. He couldn't help remembering that his
father had called him "son" in a poignancy of sympathy all through the
trials of the past, and it hurt to hear it now. It linked that time with
this, as Madame Beattie, in her unabashed self-seeking, linked it.
Perhaps he was never to escape. A prisoner, that was what he was. They
were all prisoners, Madame Beattie to her squalid love of gain, Esther
to her elementary love of herself, Lydia--he looked at her as she stood
still in the background like a handmaid waiting. Why, Lydia was a
prisoner, as he had thought before, only not, as he had believed then,
to the glamour of love, but love, actual love for him, the kind that
stands the stress of all the homely services and disillusioning. A smile
broke over his face, and Lydia, incredulously accepting it, gave a
little sob that couldn't be prevented in time, and took one dancing
step. She ran up to the colonel, and pulled him away from Jeff. It
seemed as if she were about to make him dance, too.
"Don't bother him, Farvie," said she. "He's out of prison! he's out of
prison!"
She had said it, the cruel word, and Jeff knew she could not possibly
have ventured it if she did not see in him something fortunate and
free.