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'sincredible 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 pertainwas 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." Alstonthought 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 gravekindliness 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'llget 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'tyou 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, andanother 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."
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 hadclosed 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.
The day Jeffrey began to spade up the ground he knew he had got hold of something bigger than the handle of the spade. It was something rudely beneficent, because it kept him thinking about his body and the best way to use it, and it sent him to bed so tired he lay there aching. Not aching for long though: now he could sleep. That seemed to him the only use he could put himself to: he could work hard enough to forget he had much of an identity except this physical one. He had not expected to escape that horrible waking time between three and four in the morning when he had seen his life as an ignorant waste of youth and power. It was indeed confusion, nothing but that: the confusion of overwhelming love for Esther, of a bravado of display when he made money for them both to spend, of the arrogant sense that there was always time enough, strength enough, sheer brilliant insight enough to dance with life and drink with it and then have abundance of everything left. And suddenly the clock had struck, the rout was over and there was nothing left. It had all been forfeit. He hardly knew how he had come out of prison so drained of courage when he had been so roistering with it before he went in. Sometimes he had thought, at three o'clock in the morning, that it was Esther who had drained him: she, sweet, helpless, delicate flower of life. She had not merely been swayed by the wind that worsted him. She had perhaps been broken by it. Or at least it had done something inexplicable which he, entirely out of communication with her, had not been able to understand. And he had come back to find her more lovely thanever, and wearing no mark of the inner cruelties he had suffered and had imagined she must share with him.
He believed that his stay in prison had given him an illuminating idea of what hell really is: the vision of heaven and a certainty of the closed door. Confronted with an existence pared down to the satisfying of its necessities, he had loathed the idea of luxury while he hated the daily meagreness. Life had stopped for him when he entered inexorable bounds. It could not, he knew, be set going. Some clocks have merely stopped. Others are smashed. It had been the only satisfaction of his craving instincts to build up a scheme of conduct for the prison paper: but it had been the vision of a man lost to the country of his dreams and destined to eternal exile. Now all these aches and agonies of the past were lulled by the surge of tired muscles. He worked like a fury and the colonel, according to his strength, worked with him. They talked little, and chiefly about the weather prospects and the ways of the earth. Sometimes Anne would appear, and gently draw the colonel in, to advise her about something, and being in, he was persuaded to an egg-nog or a nap. But he also was absorbed, she saw, though he went at a slower pace than Jeff. He who had been old seemed to be in physical revolt; he was not sitting down to wait for death. He was going to dig the ground, even if he dug his grave, and not look up to see what visitant was waiting for him. It might be the earthly angel of a renewed and sturdy life. It might be the last summoner. But death, he told himself stoutly, though in a timorous bravado, waited for all.
Jeffrey's manuscript was laid aside. On Sundays he was too tired to write, too sleepy at night. For Lydia and Anne, it was, so far as family life went, a time of arrested intercourse. Their men were planting and could not talk to them, or tired and could not talk then. Thecolonel had even given up pulling out classical snags for Mary Nellen. He would do it in the evening, he said; but every evening he was asleep. Lydia had developed an astounding intimacy with Madame Beattie, and Anne was troubled. She told Alston Choate, who came when he thought there was a chance of seeing her alone, because he was whole-heartedly sorry for her, at the mercy of the vagaries of the little devil, as he permitted himself to call Lydia in his own mind.
"Madame Beattie," Anne said, "isn't a fit companion for a young girl. She can't be."
Alston remembered the expression of satiric good-humour on Madame Beattie's face, and was not prepared wholly to condemn her. He thought she could be a good fellow by habit without much trying, and he was very sure that, with a girl, she would play fair. But if he had heard Madame Beattie this morning in June, as she took Lydia to drive, he might not have felt so assured. These drives had become a matter of custom now. At first, Madame Beattie had taken Denny and an ancient victoria, but she tired of that.
"The man's as curious as a cat," she said to Lydia. "He can move his ears. That's to hear better. Didn't you see him cock them round at us? Can you drive?"
"Yes, Madame Beattie," said Lydia. "I love to."
"Then we'll have a phaeton, and you shall drive."
Nobody knew there was a phaeton left in Addington. But nobody had known there was a victoria, and when Madame Beattie had set her mind upon each, it was in due course forthcoming, vehicles apparently of an equal age and the same extent of disrepair. So they set forth together, the strange couple, and jogged, as Madame Beattie said. She would send the unwilling Sophy, who had a theory that she was to serve Esther and nobody else, andthat scantily, over with a note. The Blake house had no telephone. Jeff, for unformulated reasons, owned to a nervous distaste for being summoned. And the note would say:
"Do you want to jog?"
Lydia always wanted to, and she found it the more engaging because Madame Beattie told her it drove Esther to madness and despair.
"She's furious," said Madame Beattie, with her lisp. "It's very silly of her. She doesn't want to go with me herself. Not that I'd have her. But you are an imp, my dear, and I like you."
This warm morning, full of sun and birds, they were jogging up Haldon Hill, a way they took often because it only led down again and motorists avoided it. Madame Beattie, still thickly clad and nodded over by plumes, lounged and held her parasol with the air of ladies in the Bois. Lydia, sitting erect and hatless, looked straight ahead, though the reins were loose, anxiously piercing some obscurity if she might, but always a mental one. Her legal affairs were stock still. Alston Choate talked with her cordially, though gravely, about her case, dissuading her always, but she was perfectly aware he was doing nothing. When she taxed him with it, he reminded her that he had told her there was nothing to do. But he assured her everything would be attempted to save her father and Anne from anxiety, and incidentally herself. About this Madame Beattie was asking her now, as they jogged under the flicker of leaves.
"What has that young man done for you, my dear, young Choate?"
"Nothing," said Lydia.
She put her lips together and thought what she would do if she were Jeff.
"But isn't he agitating anything?"
"Agitating?"
"Yes. That's what he must do, you know. That's all he can do."
Lydia turned reproachful eyes upon her.
"You think so, too," she said.
"Why, yes, dear imp, I know it. Jeff's case is ancient history. We can't do anything practical about it, so what we want is to agitate—agitate—until he leaves his absurd plaything—carrots, is it, or summer squash?—and gets into business in a civilised way. The man's a genius, if only his mind wakes up. Let him think we're going to spread the necklace story far and wide, let him see Esther about to be hauled before public opinion—"
"He doesn't love Esther," said Lydia, and then savagely bit her lip.
"Don't you believe it," said Madame Beattie sagely. "She's only to crook her finger. Agitate. Why, I'll do it myself. There's that dirty little man that wants an interview for his paper. I'll give him one."
"Weedon Moore?" asked Lydia. "Anne won't let me know him."
"Well, you do know him, don't you?"
"I saw him once. But when I threaten to take Jeff's case to him, if Mr. Choate won't stir himself, Anne says I sha'n't even speak to him. He isn't nice, she thinks. I don't know who told her."
"Choate, my dear," said Madame Beattie. "He's afraid Moore will get hold of you. He's blocking your game, that's all."
Madame Beattie, the next day, did go to Weedon Moore's office. He was unprepared for her and so the more agonisingly impressed. Here was a rough-spoken lady who, he understood, was something like a princess inother countries, and she was offering him an interview.
Madame Beattie showed she had the formula, and could manage quite well alone.
"The point is the necklace," said she, sitting straight and fanning herself, regarding him with so direct a gaze that he pressed his knees in nervous spasms. "You don't need to ask me how old I am nor whether I like this country. The facts are that I was given a very valuable necklace—by a Royal Personage. Bless you, man! aren't you going to take it down?"
"Yes, yes," stammered Moore. "I beg your pardon."
He got block and pencil, and though the attitude of writing relieved him from the necessity of looking at her, he felt the sweat break out on his forehead and knew how it was dampening his flat hair.
"The necklace," said Madame Beattie, "became famous. I wore it just enough to give everybody a chance to wonder whether I was to wear it or not. The papers would say, 'Madame Beattie wore the famous necklace.'"
"Am I permitted to say—" Weedon began, and then wondered how he could proceed.
"You can say anything I do," said Madame Beattie promptly. "No more. Of course not anything else. What is it you want to say?"
Weedon dropped the pencil, and under the table began to squeeze inspiration from his knees.
"Am I permitted," he continued, aghast at the liberty he was taking, "to know the name of the giver?"
"Certainly not," said Madame Beattie, but without offence. "I told you a Royal Personage. Besides, everybody knows. If your people here don't, it's because the're provincial and it doesn't matter whether they know it or not. I will continue. The necklace, I told you, became almost as famous as I. Then there was trouble."
"When?" ventured Weedon.
"Oh, a long time after, a very long time. The Royal Personage was going to be married and her Royal Highness—"
"Her Royal Highness?"
"Of course. Do you suppose he would have been allowed to marry a commoner? That was always the point. She made a row, very properly. The necklace was famous and some of the gems in it are historic. She was a thrifty person. I don't blame her for it. She wasn't going to see historic jewels drift back to the rue de la Paix. So they made me a proposition."
Moore was forgetting to be shy. He licked his lips, the story promised so enticingly.
"As I say," Madame Beattie pursued, "they made me a proposition." She stopped and Moore, pencil poised, looked at her inquiringly. She closed her fan, with a decisive snap, and rose. "There," said she, "you can elaborate that. Make it as long as you please, and it'll do for one issue."
Weedon felt as if somehow he had been done.
"But you haven't told me anything," he implored. "Everybody knows as much as that."
"I reminded you of that," said Madame Beattie. "But I know several things everybody doesn't know. Now you do as I tell you. Head it: 'The True Story of Patricia Beattie's Necklace. First Instalment.' And you'll sell a paper to every man, woman and baby in this ridiculous town. And when the next day's paper doesn't have the second instalment, they'll buy the next and the next to see if it's there."
"But I must have the whole in hand," pleaded Weedon.
"Well, you can't. Because I sha'n't give it to you. Not till I'm ready. You can publish a paragraph fromtime to time: 'Madame Beattie under the strain of recollection unable to continue her reminiscences. Madame Beattie overcome by her return to the past.' I'm a better journalist than you are."
"I'm not a journalist," Weedon ventured. "I practise law."
"Well, you run the paper, don't you? I'm going now. Good-bye."
And so imbued was he with the unassailable character of her right to dictate, that he did publish the fragment, and Addington bought it breathlessly and looked its amused horror over the values of the foreign visitor.
"Of course, my dear," said the older ladies—they called each other "my dear" a great deal, not as a term of affection, but in moments of conviction and the desire to impress it—"of course her standards are not ours. Nobody would expect that. But this is certainly going too far. Esther must be very much mortified."
Esther was not only that: she was tearful with anger and even penetrated to her grandmother's room to rehearse the circumstance, and beg Madam Bell to send Aunt Patricia away. Madam Bell was lying with her face turned to the wall, but the bedclothes briefly shook, as if she chuckled.
"You must tell her to go," said Esther again. "It's your house, and it's a scandal to have such a woman living in it. I don't care for myself, but I do care for the dignity of the family." Esther, Madam Bell knew, never cared for herself. She did things from the highest motives and the most remote. "Will you," Esther insisted, "will you tell her to leave?"
"No," said grandmother, from under the bedclothes. "Go away and call Rhoda Knox."
Esther went, angry but not disconcerted. The resultof her invasion was perhaps no more bitter than she had expected. She had sometimes talked to grandmother for ten minutes, meltingly, adjuringly, only to be asked, at a pause, to call Rhoda Knox. To-day Rhoda, with a letter in her hand, was just outside the door.
"Would you mind, Mrs. Blake," she said, "asking Sophy to mail this?"
Esther did mind, but she hardly ventured to say so. With bitterness in her heart, she took the letter and went downstairs. Everybody, this swelling heart told her, was against her. She still did not dare withstand Rhoda, for the woman took care of grandmother perfectly, and if she left it would be turmoil thrice confounded. She hated Rhoda the more, having once heard Madame Beattie's reception of a request to carry a message when she was going downstairs.
"Certainly not," said Madame Beattie. "That's what you are here for, my good woman. Run along and take down my cloak and put it in the carriage."
Rhoda went quite meekly, and Esther having seen, exulted and thought she also should dare revolt. But she never did.
And now, having gone to grandmother in her mortification and trouble, she knew she ought to go to Madame Beattie with her anger. But she had not the courage. She could hear the little satiric chuckle Madame Beattie would have ready for her. And yet, she knew, it had to be done. But first she sent for Weedon Moore. The interview had but just been published, and Weedon, coming at dusk, was admitted by Sophy to the dining-room, where Madame Beattie seldom went. Esther received him with a cool dignity. She was pale. Grandmother would no doubt have said she made herself pale in the interest of pathos; but Esther was truly suffering. Moore, fussy,flattered, ill at ease, stood before her, holding his hat. She did not ask him to sit down. There was an unspoken tradition in Addington, observed by everybody but Miss Amabel, that Moore was not, save in cases of unavoidable delay, to be asked to sit. He passed his life, socially, in an upright posture. But Esther began at once, fixing her mournful eyes on his.
"Mr. Moore, I am distressed about the interview in your paper."
Moore, standing, could not squeeze inspiration out of his knees, and missed it sorely.
"Mrs. Blake," said he, "I wouldn't have distressed you for the world."
"I can't speak to my aunt about it," said Esther. "I can't trust myself. I mustn't wound her as I should be forced to do. So I have sent for you. Mr. Moore, has she given you other material?"
"Not a word," said Weedon earnestly. "If you could prevail upon her—" There he stopped, remembering Esther was on the other side.
"I shall have to be very frank with you," said Esther. "But you will remember, won't you, that it is in confidence?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Moore. He had never fully risen above former conditions of servitude when he ran errands and shovelled paths for Addington gentry. "You can rely on me."
"My aunt," said Esther delicately, with an air of regret and several other picturesque emotions mingled carefully, "my aunt has one delusion. It is connected with this necklace, which she certainly did possess at one time. She imagines things about it, queer things, where it went and where it is now. But you mustn't let her tell you about it, and if she insists you mustn't allow it to get into print.It would be taking advantage, Mr. Moore. Truly it would." And as a magnificent concession she drew forward a chair, and Weedon, without waiting to see her placed, sank into it and put his hands on his knees. "You must promise me," Esther half implored, half insisted. "It isn't I alone. It's everybody that knows her. We can't, in justice to her, let such a thing get into print."
Weedon was much impressed, by her beauty, her accessibility and his own incredible position of having something to accord. But he had a system of mental bookkeeping. There were persons who asked favours of him, whom he put down as debtors. "Make 'em pay," was his mentally jotted note. If he did them an obliging turn, he kept his memory alert to require the equivalent at some other time. But he did not see how to make Esther pay. So he could only temporise.
"I'd give anything to oblige you, Mrs. Blake," he said, "anything, I assure you. But I have to consider the paper. I'm not alone there, you know. It's a question of other people."
Esther was familiar with that form of withdrawal. She herself was always escaping by it.
"But you own the paper," she combated him. "Everybody says so."
"I have met with a great deal of misrepresentation," he replied solemnly. "Justice is no more alive to-day than liberty." Then he remembered this was a sentence he intended to use in his speech to-night on the old circus-ground, and added, as more apposite, "I'd give anything to serve you, Mrs. Blake, I assure you I would. But I owe a certain allegiance—a certain allegiance—I do, really."
With that he made his exit, backing out and bowing ridiculously over his hat. And Esther had hardly time to weigh her defeat, for callers came. They began earlyand continued through the afternoon, and they all asked for Madame Beattie. It was a hot day and Madame Beattie, without her toupée and with icedeau sucréebeside her, was absorbedly reading. She looked up briefly, when Sophy conveyed to her the summons to meet lingering ladies below, and only bade her: "Excuse me to them. Say I'm very much engaged."
Then she went on reading. Esther, when the message was suavely but rather maliciously delivered by Sophy, who had a proper animosity for her social betters, hardly knew whether it was easier to meet the invaders alone or run the risk of further disclosure if Madame Beattie appeared. For though no word was spoken of diamonds or interviews or newspapers, she could follow, with a hot sensitiveness, the curiosity flaring all over the room, like a sky licked by harmless lightnings. When a lady equipped in all the panoply of feminine convention asked for grandmother's health, she knew the thought underneath, decently suppressed, was an interest, no less eager for being unspoken, in grandmother's attitude toward the interview. Sometimes she wanted to answer the silent question with a brutal candour, to say: "No, grandmother doesn't care. She was perfectly horrible about it. She only laughed." And when the stream of callers had slackened somewhat she telephoned Alston Choate, and asked if he would come to see her that evening at nine. She couldn't appoint an earlier hour because she wasn't free. And immediately after that, Reardon telephoned her and asked if he might come, rather late, he hesitated, to be sure of finding her alone. And when she had to put him off to the next night, he spoke of the interview as "unpardonable ". He was coming, no doubt, to bring his condolence.
Jeffrey himself had not seen the interview. He had only a mild interest in Addington newspapers, and Anne had carefully secreted the family copy lest the colonel should come on it. But on the afternoon when Esther was receiving subtly sympathetic townswomen, Jeffrey, between the rows of springing corn, heard steps and looked up from his hoeing. It was Lydia, theArgosyin hand. She was flushed not only with triumph because something had begun at last, but before this difficulty of entering on the tale with Jeff. Pretty child! his heart quickened at sight of her in her blue dress, sweet arms and neck bare because Lydia so loved freedom. But, in that his heart did respond to her, he spoke the more brusquely, showing he had no right to find her fair.
"What is it?"
Lydia, in a hurry, the only way she knew of doing it, extended the paper, previously folded to expose the headline of Madame Beattie's name. Jeff, his hoe at rest in one hand, took the paper and looked at it frowningly, incredulously. Then he read. A word or two escaped him near the end. Lydia did not quite hear what the word was, but she thought he was appropriately swearing. Her eyes glistened. She had begun to agitate. Jeff had finished and crushed the paper violently together, with no regard to folds.
"Oh, don't," said Lydia. "You can't get any more. They couldn't print them fast enough."
Jeff passed it to her with a curt gesture of relinquishing any last interest in it.
"That's Moore," he said. "It's like him."
Lydia was at once relieved. She had been afraid he wasn't going to discuss it at all.
"You don't blame her, do you?" she prompted.
"Madame Beattie?" He was thinking hard and scowling. "No."
"Anne blames her. She says no lady would have done it."
"Oh, you can't call names. That's Madame Beattie," said Jeff absently. "She's neither principles nor morals nor the kind of shame other women feel. You can't judge Madame Beattie."
"So I say," returned Lydia, inwardly delighted and resolving to lose no time in telling Anne. "I like her. She's nice. She's clever. She knows how to manage people. O Jeff, I wish you'd talk with her."
"About this?" He was still speaking absently. "It wouldn't do any good. If it amuses her or satisfies her devilish feeling toward Esther to go on talking and that slob will get it into print—and he will—you can't stop her."
"What do you mean by her feeling toward Esther?" Lydia's heart beat so that she drew a long breath to get it into swing again.
"We can't go into that," said Jeff. "It runs back a long way. Only everything she can do to worry Esther or frighten her—why, she'd do it, that's all. That's Madame Beattie."
Lydia knew this was the path that led to the necklace. Why couldn't she tell him she knew the story and enlist him on Madame Beattie's side and hers, the side that was fighting for him and nothing else? But she did not dare. All she could do was to say, her hands cold against each other and her voice choked:
"O Jeff, I wish you'd give this up."
"What?"
He was recalled now from memories the printed paper had wakened in him, and looking at her kindly. At least Lydia was sure he was, because his voice sounded so dear. She could not know his eyes were full of an adoring gentleness over her who seemed to him half child, half maiden, and tumultuously compassionate. She made a little timid gesture of the hand over the small area about them.
"This," she said. "You mustn't stay here and hoe corn. You must get into business and show people—"
Her voice choked. It refused absurdly to go on.
"Why, Lydia," said he, "I thought you knew. This is the only way for a man to keep alive. When I've got a hoe in my hand—" He could not quite explain it. He had always had a flow of words on paper, but since he had believed his life was finished his tongue had been more and more lethargic. It would not obey his brain because, after all, what could the brain report of his distrustful heart? Lydia had a moment of bitter mortification because she had not seemed to understand. Anne understood, she knew, and had tried, with infinite patience, to help on this queer experiment, both for Jeff's sake and Farvie's. Tears rushed to her eyes.
"I can't help it," she said. "I want you to be doing something real."
"Lydia!" said Jeff. His kind, persuasive voice was recalling her to some ground of conviction where she could share his certainty that things were going as well as they could. "This is almost the only real thing in the world—the ground. About everything else is a game. This isn't a game. It's making something grow that won't hurt anybody when it's grown. I can't harm anybody byplanting corn. And I can sell the corn," said Jeff, with a lighter shade of voice. Lydia knew he was smiling to please her. "Denny's going to peddle it out for me at backdoors. I'd do it myself, only I'm afraid they'd buy to help on 'poor Jeffrey Blake'."
When he spoke of the ground Lydia gave the loose dirt a little scornful kick and got the powdered dust into her neat stockings. She, too, loved the ground and all the sweet usages of homely life; but not if they kept him from a spectacular triumph. She was desperate enough to venture her one big plea.
"Jeff, you know you've got a lot of money to earn—to pay back—"
And there she stopped. He was regarding her gravely, but the moment he spoke she knew it was not in any offence.
"Lydia, I give you my word I couldn't do the kind of thing you want me to. I've found that out at last. You'd like me to cut into the market and make a lot of money and throw it back at the people I owe. I couldn't do it. My brain wouldn't let me. It's stopped—stopped short. A man knows when he's done for. I'm absolutely and entirely done. All I hope for is to keep father from finding it out. He seems to be getting his nerve back, and if he really does that I may be able to go away and do something besides dig. But it won't be anything spectacular, Lydia. It isn't in me."
Lydia turned away from him, and he could fancy the bright tears dropping as she walked. "Oh, dear!" he heard her say. "Oh, dear!"
"Lydia!" he called, in an impatience of tenderness and misery. "Come back here. Don't you know I'd do anything on earth I could for you? But there's nothing I can do. You wouldn't ask a lame man to dance. There!that shows you. When it comes to dancing you can understand. I'm a cripple, Lydia. Don't you see?"
She had turned obediently, and now she smeared the tears away with one small hand.
"You don't understand," she said. "You don't understand a thing. We've thought of it all this time, Anne and I, how you'd come out and be proved not guilty—"
"But, Lydia," he said gravely, "I was guilty. And besides being guilty of things the courts condemned me for, I was guilty of things I had to condemn myself for afterward. I wasn't a criminal merely. I was a waster and a fool."
"Yes," said Lydia, looking at him boldly, "and if you were guilty who made you so? Who pushed you on?"
She had never entirely abandoned her theory of Reardon. He and Esther, in her suspicion, stood side by side. Looking at him, she rejoiced in what she thought his confirmation. The red had run into his face and he looked at her with brightened eyes.
"You don't know anything about it," he said harshly. "I did what I did. And I got my medicine. And if there's a decent impulse left in me to-day, it was because I got it."
Lydia walked away through the soft dirt and felt as if she were dancing. He had looked guilty when she had asked him who pushed him on. He and she both knew it was Esther, and a little more likelihood of Madame Beattie's blackguarding Esther in print must rouse him to command the situation.
Jeffrey finished his row, and then hurried into the house. It was the late afternoon, and he went to his room and dressed, in time for supper. Lydia, glancing at him as he left the table, thought exultantly: "I've stirred him up, at least. Now what is he going to do?"
Jeffrey went strolling down the drive, and quickened his steps when the shrubbery had him well hidden from the windows. Something assured him it was likely Weedon Moore lived still in the little sharp-gabled house on a side street where he had years ago. His mother had been with him then, and Jeff remembered Miss Amabel had scrupulously asked for her when Moore came to call. The little house was unchanged, brightly painted, gay in diamond trellis-work and picked out with scarlet tubs of hydrangea in the yard. A car stood at the gate, and Weedon, buttoning his coat, was stepping in. The car ran past, and Jeff saw that the man beside Moore was the interpreter of that night at the old circus-ground.
"So," he thought, "more ginger for the labouring man."
He turned about and walking thoughtfully, balked of his design, reflected with distaste that grew into indignation on Moore's incredible leadership. It seemed monstrous. Here was ignorance fallen into the hands of the demagogue. It was an outrage on the decencies. And then Madame Beattie waved to him from Denny's hack, and he stepped into the road to speak to her.
"I was going to see you," she said. "Get in here."
Jeff got in and disposed his length as best he might in the cramped interior, redolent now of varied scents, all delicate but mingled to a suffocating potency.
"Tell him to drive along outside the town," she bade. "Were you going to see me?"
"No," said Jeffrey, after executing her order. "I've told you I can't go to see you."
"Because Esther made that row? absurd! It's Susan's house."
"I'm not likely to go into it," said Jeff drily, "unless I am summoned."
"She's a fool."
"But I don't mind telling you where I was going," said Jeff. "I was going to lick Weedon Moore—or the equivalent."
"Not on account of my interview?" said Madame Beattie, laughing very far down in her anatomy. Her deep laugh, Jeff always felt, could only have been attained by adequate support in the diaphragm. "Bless you, dear boy, you needn't blame him. I went to him. Went to his office. Blame me."
"Oh, I blame you all right," said Jeff, "but you're not a responsible person. A chap that owns a paper is."