With these folk dances began what has been known ever since as the Dramatic Movement in Addington. On this first night the proudly despairing ticket-seller began to repeat by seven o'clock: "Every seat taken." Many stood and more were turned away. But the families of the sons and daughters who were dancing were clever enough to come early, and filled the body of the hall. Jeff was among them. He, too, had gone early, with Anne and Lydia, to carry properties and help them with the stage. And when he wasn't needed behind the scenes, he went out and sat among the gay contingent from Mill End, magnificent creatures by physical inheritance, the men still rough round the edges from the day's work, but the women gay in shawls and beads and shiny combs. Andrea was there and bent forward until Jeff should recognise him, and again Jeff realised that smiles lit up the place for him. Even the murmured name ran round among the rows. They were telling one another, here was The Prisoner. Whatever virtue there was in being a prisoner, it had earned him adoring friends.
He sat there wondering over it, and conventional Addington came in behind and took the vacant places. Jeff was glad not to be among them. He didn't want their sophisticated views. This wasn't a pageant for critical comment. It was Miss Amabel's pathetic scheme for bringing the East and the West together and, in an exquisite hospitality, making the East at home.
But when the curtain went up, he opened his eyes tothe scene and ceased thinking of philanthropy and Miss Amabel. Here was beauty, the beauty of grace and traditionary form. They were dancing the tarantella. Jeff had seen it in Italy, more than one night after the gay little dinners Esther had loved to arrange when they were abroad. She had refused all the innocent bohemianisms of foreign travel; she had taken her own atmosphere of expensive conventionalities with her, and they had seen Europe through that medium. In all their travelling they had never touched racial intimacies. They were like a prince and princess convoyed along in a royal progress, seeing only what is fitting for royal eyes to see. The tarantella then was no more than an interlude in a play. To-night it was no such spectacle. Jeff, who had a pretty imagination of his own, felt hot waves of homesickness for the beauties of foreign lands, and yet not those lands as he had seen them unrolled for the perusal of the traveller. He sat in a dream of the heaven of beauty that lies across the sea, and he felt toward the men who had left it to come here to better themselves a compassion in the measure of his compassion for himself. How bare his own life had been, even when the world opened before him her illuminated page! He had not really enjoyed these exquisite delights of hers; he had not even prepared himself for enjoying. He had kept his eyes fixed on the game that ensures mere luxury, and he had let Esther go out into the market and buy for them both the only sort of happiness her eyes could see. He loved this dancing rout. He envied these boys and girls their passion and facility. They were, the most ignorant of them, of another stripe from arid New Englanders encased in their temperamental calm, the women, in a laughable self-satisfaction, leading the intellectual life and their men set on "making good". The poorest child of the East andSouth had an inheritance that made him responsive, fluent, even while it left him hot-headed and even froward. There was something, he saw, in this idea of the melting-pot, if only the mingling could be managed by gods that saw the future. You couldn't make a wonder of a bell if you poured your metal into an imperfect mould. The mould must be flawless and the metal cunningly mixed; and then how clear the tone, how resonant! It wasn't the tarantella only that led him this long wandering. It was the quality of the dancers; and through all the changing steps and measures Anne and Lydia, too, were moving, Lydia a joyous leader in the temperamental rush and swing.
Mrs. Choate, stately in dark silk and lace and quite unlike the revolutionary matron who had lain in bed and let her soul loose with the "Mysteries of Paris," sat between her son and daughter and was silent though she grew bright-eyed. Mary whispered to her:
"Anne looks very sweet, doesn't she? but not at all like a dancer."
"Sweet," said the mother.
"Anne doesn't belong there, does she?" said Alston.
"No," said the mother. "Lydia does."
"Yes."
Alston, too, was moved by the spectacle, but he thought dove-like Anne far finer in the rout than gipsy Lydia. His mother followed his thoughts exactly, but while she placidly agreed, it was Lydia she inwardly envied, Lydia who had youth and a hot heart and not too much scruple to keep her from giving each their way.
When it was over, Jeff waited for Anne and Lydia, to carry home their parcels. He stood for a moment beside Andrea, and Andrea regarded him with that absurd devotion he exuded for The Prisoner. Jeff smiled at him even affectionately, though quizzically. He wished heknew what picture of him was under Andrea's skull. A sudden impulse seized him to make the man his confidant.
"Andrea," said he, "I want you fellows to act plays with me."
Andrea looked enchanted.
"What play?" he asked.
"Shakespeare," said Jeff. "In English. That's your language, Andrea, if you're going to live here."
Andrea's face died into a dull denial. A sort of glaze even seemed to settle over the surface of his eyes. He gave a perfunctory grunt, and Jeff caught him up on it.
"Won't she allow it?" he hazarded. "Madame Beattie?"
Andrea was really caught and quite evidently relieved, too, if Jeff understood so well. He smiled again. His eyes took on their wonted shining. Jeff, relying on Anne's and Lydia's delay, stayed not an instant, but ran out of the side door and along to the front where Madame Beattie, he knew, was making a stately progress, accepting greetings in a magnificent calm. He got to the door as she did, and she gave him the same royal recognition. She was dressed in black, her head draped with lace, and she really did look a distinguished personage. But Jeff was not to be put off with a mere greeting. He called her name.
"You may take me home," she said.
"I can't," said Jeff ruthlessly, when he had got her out of earshot. "I'm going to carry things for Anne."
"No, you're not." She put her hand through his arm and leaned heavily and luxuriously. "Good Lord, Jeff, why can't New Englanders dance like those shoemakers' daughters? What is it in this climate that dries up the blood?"
"Madame Beattie," said Jeff, "you've got to give awaythe game. You've got to tell me how you've hypnotised every man Jack of those people there to-night so they won't do a reasonable thing I ask 'em unless they've had your permission."
"What do you want to do?" But she was pleased. There was somebody under her foot.
"I want to rehearse some plays in English. And I gather from the leader of the clan—"
"Andrea?"
"Yes, Andrea. They won't do it unless you tell them to."
"Of course they won't," said Madame Beattie.
"Then why won't they? What's your infernal spell?"
"It's the spell of the East. And you can't tempt them with anything that comes out of the West."
"Their food comes out of the West," said Jeff, smarting.
"Oh, that! Well, that's about all you can give them. That's what they come for."
"All of them? Good God!"
"Not good God at all. Don't you know what a man is led by? His belly. But they don't all come for that. Some come for—" She laughed, a rather cackling laugh.
"What?" Jeff asked her sternly. He shook her arm involuntarily.
"Freedom. That's talked about still. And a lot of demagogues like your Weedon Moore get hold of 'em and debauch 'em and make 'em drunk."
"Drunk?"
"No, no. Not on liquor. Better if they did. But they tell 'em they're gods and all they've got to do is to climb up on a throne and crown themselves."
"Then why won't you," said Jeff, in wrath, "let me knock something else into their heads. You can't do itby facts. There aren't many facts just now that aren't shameful. Why can't you let me do it by poetry?"
Madame Beattie stopped in the street and gazed up at the bright heaven. She was remembering how the stars looked in Italy when she was young and sure her voice would sound quite over the world. She seldom challenged the stars now, they moved her so, in an almost terrible way. What had she made of life, they austerely asked her, she who had been driven by them to love and all the excellencies of youth? But then, in answer, she would ask them what they had done for her.
"Jeff," said she, "you couldn't do it in a million years. They'll do anything for me, because I bring their own homes to them, but they couldn't make themselves over, even for me."
"They like me," said Jeff, "for some mysterious reason."
"They like you because I've told them to."
"I don't believe it." But in his heart he did.
"Jeff," said she, "life isn't a matter of fact, it's a matter of feeling. You can't persuade men and women born in Italy and Greece and Syria and Russia that they're happy in this little bare town. It doesn't smell right to them. Their hearts are somewhere else. And they want nothing so much in the world as to get a breath from there or hear a story or see somebody that's lived there. Lived—not stayed in apension."
"Do they feel so when they've seen their sisters and cousins and aunts carved up into little pieces there?" Jeff asked scoffingly. But she was hypnotising him, too. He could believe they did.
"What have you to offer 'em, Jeff, besides wages and a prospect of not being assassinated? That's something, but by God! it isn't everything." She swore quite simplybecause out in the night even in the straight street of a New England town she felt like it and was carelessly willing to abide by the chance of God's objecting.
"But I don't see," said Jeff, "why you won't let me have my try at it." He was waiting for her to signify her readiness to go on, and now she did.
"Because now, Jeff, they do think you're a god. If they saw you trying to produce the Merchant of Venice they'd be bored and they wouldn't think so any more."
"Have you any objection," said Jeff, "to my trying to produce the Merchant of Venice with English-speaking children of foreigners?"
"Not a grain," said Madame Beattie cordially. "There's your chance. Or you can get up a pageant, if you like-, another summer. But you'll have to let these people act their own historic events in their own way. And, Jeff, don't be a fool." They were standing before her door and Esther at the darkened window above was looking down on them. Esther had not gone to the dances because she knew who would be there. She told herself she was afraid of seeing Jeff and because she had said it often enough she believed it. "Tell Lydia to come to see me to-morrow," said Madame Beattie. Sophy had opened the door. It came open quite easily now since the night Madame Beattie had called Esther's name aloud in the street. Jeff took off his hat and turned away. He did not mean to tell Lydia. She saw enough of Madame Beattie, without instigation.
Lydia needed no reminder to go to Madame Beattie. The next day, in the early afternoon, she was taking her unabashed course by the back stairs to Madame Beattie's bedchamber. She would not allow herself to be embarrassed or ashamed. If Esther treated Madame Beattie with a proper hospitality, she reasoned when her mind misgave her, it would not be necessary to enter by a furtive way. Madame Beattie was dressed and in a high state of exhilaration. She beckoned Lydia to her where she sat by a window commanding the street, and laid a hand upon her wrist.
"I've actually done it," said she. "I've got on her nerves. She's going away."
The clouds over Lydia seemed to lift. Yet it was incredible that Esther, this charming sinister figure always in the background or else blocking everybody's natural movements, should really take herself elsewhere.
"It's only to New York," said Madame Beattie. "She tells me that much. But she's going because I've ransacked her room till she sees I'm bound to find the necklace."
Lydia was tired from the night before; her vitality was low enough to waken in her the involuntary rebuttal, "I don't believe there is any necklace." But she only passed a hand over her forehead and pushed up her hair and then drew a little chair to Madame Beattie's side.
"So you think she'll come back?" she asked drearily.
"Of course. She's only going for a couple of days. You don't suppose she'd leave me here to conspire with Susan? She'll put the necklace into a safe. That's all."
"But you mustn't let her, must you?"
"Oh, I sha'n't let her. Of course I sha'n't."
"What shall you do?"
"She's not going till night. She takes Sophy, of course."
"But what can you do?"
"I shall consult that dirty little man. He's a lawyer and he's not in love with her."
"Mr. Moore? You haven't much time, Madame Beattie. She'll be going."
"That's why I'm dressed," said Madame Beattie. "I shall go in a minute. He can give me a warrant or something to search her things."
Lydia went at once, with a noiseless foot. She felt a sudden distaste for the accomplished fact of Esther face to face with justice. Yet she did not flinch in her certainty that nemesis must be obeyed and even aided. Only the secrecy of it led her to a hatred of her own silent ways in the house, and as she often did, she turned to her right instead of to her left and walked to the front stairs. There at her hand was Esther's room, the door wide open. Downstairs she could hear her voice in colloquy with Sophy. Rhoda's voice, on this floor, made some curt remark. Everybody was accounted for. Lydia's heart was choking her, but she stepped softly into Esther's room. It seemed to her, in her quickened feeling, that she could see clairvoyantly through the matter that kept her from her quest. A travelling bag, open, stood on the floor. There was a hand-bag on the bed, and Lydia, as if taking a predestined step, went to it, slipped the clasp and looked. A purse was there, a tiny mirror, a book that might havebeen an address book, and in the bottom a roll of tissue paper. Nothing could have stopped her now. She had to know what was in the roll. It was a lumpy parcel, thrown together in haste as if, perhaps, Esther had thought of making it look as if it were of no account. She tore it open and found, with no surprise, as if this were an old dream, the hard brightness of the jewels.
"There it is," she whispered to herself, with the scant breath her choking heart would lend her. "Oh, there it is!"
She rolled the necklace in its paper and closed the bag. With no precaution she walked out of the room and down the stairs. The voices still went on, Esther's and Sophy's from the library, and she did not know whether Madame Beattie had already left the house. But opening the front door, still with no precaution, she closed it sharply behind her and walked along the street in sunshine that hurt her eyes.
Lydia went straight home, not thinking at all about what she had done, but wondering what she should do now. Suddenly she felt the unfriendliness of the world. Madame Beattie, her ally up to this moment, was now a foe. For whether justly or not, Madame Beattie would claim the necklace, and how could Lydia know Jeff had not already paid her for it? And Anne, soft, sweet Anne, what would she do if Lydia threw it in her lap and said, "Look! I took it out of Esther's bag." She was thinking very clearly, it seemed to her, and the solution that looked most like a high business sagacity made it likely that she ought to carry it to Alston Choate. He was her lawyer. And yet indeed he was not, for he did nothing for her. He was only playing with her, to please Anne. But all the while she was debating her feet carried her to the only person she had known they would inevitably seek. She wentdirectly upstairs to Jeffrey's room where he might be writing at that hour.
He was there. His day's work had gone well. He was beginning to have the sense the writer sometimes has, in a fortunate hour, of divine intention in his task. Jeff was enjoying an egoistic interlude of feeling that the things which had happened to him had been personally intended to bring him to a certain deed. The richness of the world was crowding on him, the bigness of it, the dangers. He could scarcely choose, among such diversities, what to say. And dominating everything he had to say in the compass of this one book was the sense of life, life at its full, and the stupidity of calling such a world bare of wonders. And to him in his half creative, half exulting dream came Lydia, her face drawn to an extremity of what looked like apprehension. Or was it triumph? She might have been under the influence of a drug that had induced in her a wild excitement and at the same time strung her nerves to highest pitch. Jeff, looking up at her, pushed his papers back.
"What is it?" he asked.
Lydia, for answer, moved up to his table and placed the parcel there before him. It was the more shapeless and disordered from the warm clutch of her despairing hand. He took it up and carelessly unrolled it. The paper lay open in his palm; he saw and dropped the necklace to the table. There it lay, glittering up at him. Lydia might have expected some wondering or tragic exclamation; but she did not get it. He was astonished. He said quite simply:
"Aunt Patricia's necklace." Then he looked up at her, and their eyes met, hers with desperate expectation and his holding her gaze in an unmoved questioning. "Did she give it to you?" he asked, and she shook her head witha negation almost imperceptible. "No," said Jeffrey to himself. "She didn't have it. Who did have it?"
He let it lie on the table before him and gazed at the bauble in a strong distaste. Here it was again, a nothingness coming between him and his vision of the real things of the earth. It seemed singularly trivial to him, and yet powerful, too, because he knew how it had moved men's minds.
"Where did you get it?" he asked, looking up at Lydia.
Something inside her throat had swollen. She swallowed over it with difficulty before she spoke. But she did speak.
"I took it."
"Took it?"
He got up, and, with a belated courtesy, pulled forward a chair. But Lydia did not see it. Her eyes were fixed on his face, as if in its changes would lie her destiny.
"You mean you found it."
"No. I didn't find it. I took it."
"You must have found it first."
"I looked for it," said Lydia.
"Where?"
"In Esther's bag."
Jeffrey stood staring at her, and Lydia unwinkingly stared at him. She was conscious of but one desire: that he would not scowl so. And yet she knew it was the effort of attention and no hostile sign. He spoke now, and gently because he saw how great a strain she was under.
"You'll have to tell me about it, Lydia. Where was the bag?"
"It was on her bed," said Lydia. "I went into the room and saw it there. Madame Beattie told me she was going to New York—"
"That Madame Beattie was?"
"No. Esther. To hide the necklace. So Madame Beattie shouldn't get it. And I saw the bag. And I knew the necklace must be in it. So I took it."
By this time her hands were shaking and her lips chattered piteously. Jeffrey was wholly perplexed, but bitterly sorry for her.
"What made you bring it here, dear?" said he.
Lydia caught at the endearing word, and something like a spasm moved her face.
"I had to," said she. "It has made all the trouble."
"But I don't want it," said Jeffrey. "Whatever trouble it made is over and done with. However this came into Esther's hands—"
"Oh, I know how that was," said Lydia. "She stole it. Madame Beattie says so."
"And whatever she is going to do with it now—that isn't a matter for me to meddle with."
"Don't you care?" said Lydia, in a passionate outcry. "Now you've got it in your hand, don't you care?"
"Why," said Jeff, "what could I do with it?"
"If you know it's Madame Beattie's, you can take it to her and tell her she can go back to Europe and stop hounding you for money."
"How do you know she's hounded me?"
"She says so. She wants you to get into politics and into business and pay her back."
"But that's what you've wanted me to do yourself."
"Oh," said Lydia, in a great breath of despairing love, "I want you to do what you want to. I want you to sit here at this table and write. Because then you look happy. And you don't look so any other time."
Jeff stood gazing at her in a compassion that brought a smart to his eyes. This, a sad certainty told him, was love, the love that is unthinking. She was suffocated bythe pure desire to give the earth to him and herself with it. What disaster might come from it to her or to the earth, her lulled brain did not consider. The self-immolation of passion had benumbed her. And now she looked at him beseechingly, as if to beg him only not to scorn her gift. Her emotion transferred itself to him. He must be the one to act; but disappointingly, he knew, with the mind coming in to school disastrous feeling and warn it not again to scale such heights or drop into such depths.
"Lydia," said he, "you must leave this thing here with me."
His hand indicated by a motion the hateful bauble that lay there glittering at them.
"Why, yes," said she. "I've left it with you."
"I mean you must leave it altogether, the decision what to do with it, even the fact of your having had anything whatever to do with it yourself."
Lydia nodded, watching him. It had not occurred to her that there need be any concealment. She had meant to indicate that to herself when she walked so boldly down the front stairs and clanged the door and went along the street with the parcel plainly in her hand. If there was a slight drop in her expectation now, she did not show it. What she had indeed believed was that Jeff would greet the necklace with an incredulous joy and flaunt it in the face of Esther who had stolen it, while he gave it back to Madame Beattie, who had preyed on him.
"Do you understand?" said he. "You mustn't speak of it."
"I shall have to tell," said Lydia, "if anybody asks me. If I didn't it would be—queer."
"It's a great deal more than queer," said Jeff.
He smiled now, and she drew a happy breath. And he was amused, in a grim way. He had been, for a longtime, calling himself plain thief, and taking no credit because his theft was what might have seemed a crime of passion of a sort. He had put himself "outside ", and now this child had committed a crime of passion and she was outside, too. Her ignorant daring frightened him. At any instant she might declare her guilt. She needed to be brought face to face, for her own safety, with the names of things.
"Lydia," said he, "you know what it would be called—this taking something out of another woman's bag?"
"No," said Lydia.
"Theft," said he. He meant to have no mercy on her until he had roused her dormant caution. "If you take what is not yours you are a thief."
"But," said Lydia, "I took it from Esther and it wasn't hers, either." She was unshaken in her candour, but he noted the trembling of her lip and he could go no further.
"Leave it with me," he said. "And promise me one thing. Don't speak to anybody about it."
"Unless they ask me," said Lydia.
"Not even if they ask you. Go to your room and shut yourself in. And don't talk to anybody till I see you again."
She turned obediently, and her slender back moved him with a compassion it would have been madness to recognise. The plain man in him was in physical rebellion against the rules of life that made it criminal to take a sweet creature like this into your arms to comfort her when she most needed it and pour out upon her your gratitude and adoration.
Jeff took the necklace and its bed of crumpled paper with it, wrapped it up and, holding it in his hand as Lydia had done, walked downstairs, got his hat and went off toEsther's. What he could do there he did not fully know, save to fulfil the immediate need of putting the jewels into some hand more ready for them than his own. He had no slightest wish to settle the rights of the case in any way whatever. "Then," his mind was saying in spite of him, "Esther did have the necklace." But even that he was horribly unwilling to face. There was no Esther now; but he hated, from a species of decency, to drag out the bright dream that had been Esther and smear it over with these blackening certainties. "Let be," his young self cried to him. "She was at least a part of youth, and youth was dear." Why should she be pilloried since youth must stand fettered with her for the old wrongs that were a part of the old imagined sweetness? The sweetnesses and the wrongs had grown together like roots inextricably mingled. To tear out the weeds you would rend also the roots they twined among.
In a stern musing he was at Esther's door before he had decided what to say, had knocked and Sophy, large-eyed and shaken out of her specious calm, had admitted him. She did not question him nor did Jeffrey even ask for Esther. With the opening of the door he heard voices, and now the sound of an angry crying, and Sophy herself had the air of an unwilling servitor at a strange occasion. Jeffrey, standing in the doorway of the library, faced the group there. Esther was seated on a low chair, her face crumpled and red, as if she had just wiped it free of tears. The handkerchief, clutched into a ball in her angry fist, gave further evidence. Madame Beattie, enormously amused, sat in the handsome straight-backed chair that became her most, and unaffectedly and broadly smiled. And Alston Choate, rather pale in a sternness of judicial consideration, stood, hands in his pockets, and regardedthem. At Jeffrey's entrance they looked up at him and Esther instantly sprang to her feet and retreated to a position at the right of Choate, where he might be conceived of as standing in the position of tacitly protecting her. Jeff, the little parcel in his hand, advanced upon them.
"Here is the necklace," said he, in a perfectly commonplace tone. "I suppose that's what you are talking about."
Esther's eyes, by the burning force he felt in them, seemed to draw his, and he looked at her, as if to inquire what was to be done with it now it was here. Esther did not wait for any one to put that question. She spoke sharply, as if the words leaped to utterance.
"The necklace was stolen. It was taken out of this house. Who took it?"
Jeffrey had not for a moment wondered whether he might be asked. But now he saw Lydia as he had left her, in her childish misery, and answered instantly: "I took it."
Alston Choate gave a little exclamation, of amazement, of disgust. Then he drew the matter into his own judicial hands. "Where did you take it from?" he asked.
Jeffrey looked at him in a grave consideration. Alston Choate seemed to him a negligible quantity; so did Esther and so did Madame Beattie. All he wanted was to clear the slender shoulders of poor savage, wretched Lydia at home.
"Do you mind telling me, Jeffrey?" Alston was asking, in quite a human way considering that he embodied the majesty of the law. "You couldn't have walked into this house and taken a thing which didn't belong to you and carried it away."
His tone was rather a chaffing one, a recall to the intercourse of everyday life. "Be advised," it said. "Don't carry a dull joke too far."
"Certainly I took it," said Jeffrey, smiling at Alston broadly. He was amused now, little more. He saw how his background of wholesale thievery would serve him in the general eye. Not old Alston's. He did not think for a moment Alston would believe him, but it seemed more or less of a grim joke to ask him to. "Don't you know," he said, "I'm an ex-convict? Once a jailbird, always a jailbird. Remember your novels, Choate. You know more about 'em than you do about law anyway."
Then he saw, with a shock, that Alston really did believe him. He also knew at the same instant why. Esther was pouring the unspoken flood of her persuasion upon him. Jeff could almost feel the whiff and wind of the temperamental rush. He knew how Esther's belief set upon you like an army with banners when she wanted you also to believe. And still he held the little crumpled packet in his hand.
"Will you open it?" Alston asked him, with a gentleness of courtesy that indicated he was sorry indeed, and Jeffrey laid it on the table, unrolled the paper and let the bauble lie there drinking in the light and throwing it off again a million times enhanced. Alston advanced to it and gravely looked down upon it without touching it. Madame Beattie turned upon it a cursory gaze, and gave a nod that seemed to accept its identity. But Esther did not look at all. She put her hand on the table to sustain herself, and her burning eyes never once left Alston's face. He looked round at her.
"Is this it?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Are you sure?"
"Of course I'm sure," said Esther.
She seemed to ask how a woman could doubt the identity of a trinket she had clasped about her neck a thousand times, and pored over while it lay in some hidden nest.
"Ask her," said Madame Beattie, in her tiniest lisp, "if the necklace is hers."
There flashed into Alston Choate's mind the picture of Lydia, as she came to his office that day in the early summer, to bring her childish accusation against Esther. The incident had been neatly pigeonholed, but only as it affected Anne. It could not affect Esther, he had known then, with a leap at certainty measured by his belief in her. The belief had been big enough to offset all possible evidence.
"Ask her," said Madame Beattie, with relish, "where she got it."
When Esther had cried a little at the beginning of the interview, the low lamenting had moved him beyond hope of endurance, and he had wondered what he could do if she kept on crying. But now she drew herself up and looked, not at him, but at Madame Beattie.
"How dare you?" she said, in a low tone, not convincingly to the ears of those who had heard it said better on the stage, yet with a reproving passion adequate to the case.
But Alston asked no further questions. Madame Beattie went amicably on.
"Mr. Choate, this matter of the necklace is a family affair. Why don't you run away and let Jeffrey and his wife—and me, you know—let us settle it?"
Alston, dismissed, forgot he had been summoned and that Esther might be still depending on him. He turned about to the door, but she recalled him.
"Don't go," she said. The words were all in one breath. "Don't go far. I am afraid."
He hesitated, and Jeffrey said equably but still with a grim amusement:
"I think you'd better go."
So he went out of the room and Esther was left between her two inquisitors.
That she did look upon Jeff as her tormentor he could see. She took a darting step to the door, but he was closing it.
"Wait a minute," he said. "There are one or two things we've got to get at. Where did you find the necklace?"
She met his look immovably, in the softest obstinacy. It smote him like a blow. There was something implacable in it, too, an aversion almost as fierce as hate.
"This is the necklace," he went on. "It was lost, you know. Where did you find it, Esther?"
But suddenly Esther remembered she had a counter charge to make.
"You have broken into this house," she said, "and taken it. If it is Aunt Patricia's, you have taken it from her."
"No," said Aunt Patricia easily, "it isn't altogether mine. Jeff made me a payment on it a good many years ago."
Esther turned upon her.
"He paid you for it? When?"
"He paid me something," said Madame Beattie. "Not the value of the necklace. That was when you stole it, Esther. He meant to pay me the full value. He will, in time. But he paid me what he could to keep you from being found out. Hush money, Esther."
Queer things were going on in Jeff's mind. The necklace, no matter what its market price, seemed to him of novalue whatever in itself. There it lay, a glittering gaud; but he had seen a piece of glass that threw out colours as divinely. Certainly the dew was brighter. But as evidence, it was very important indeed. The world was a place, he realised, where we play with counters such as this. They enable us to speak a language. When Esther had stolen it, the loss had not been so much the loss of the gems as of his large trust in her. When Madame Beattie had threatened him with exposing her he had not paid her what he could because the gems were priceless, but that Esther's reputation was. And so he had learned that Madame Beattie was unscrupulous. What was he learning now? Nothing new about Madame Beattie, but something astounding about Esther. The first upheaval of his faith had merely caused him to adjust himself to a new sort of Esther, though only to the old idea of women as most other men had had the sense to take them: children, destitute of moral sense and its practical applications, immature mammals desperately in love with enhancing baubles. He had not believed then that Esther lied to him. She had, he was too sure for questioning, actually lost the thing. But she had not lost it. She had hidden it, with an inexplicable purpose, for all these years.
"Esther!" he said. She lifted her head slightly, but gave no other sign of hearing. "We'll give this back to Madame Beattie."
"No, you won't, Jeff," said Madame Beattie. "I'd rather have the money for it. Just as soon as you get into the swing again, you'll pay me a little on the transaction."
"Sell the damned thing then, if you don't want it and do want money," said Jeff. "You've got it back."
"I can't sell it." She had half closed her eyes, and her lips gave an unctious little relish to the words.
"Why can't you?"
"My dear Jeffrey, because, when the Royal Personage who gave it to me was married, I signed certain papers in connection with this necklace and I can't sell it, either as a whole or piecemeal. I assure you I can't."
"Very well," said Jeff. "That's probably poppycock, invented for the occasion. But you've got your necklace. There it is. Make the most of it. I never shall pay you another cent."
"Oh, yes, you will," said Madame Beattie. She was unclasping and clasping a bracelet on her small wrist, and she looked up at him idly and in a perfect enjoyment of the scene. "Don't you want to pay me for not continuing my reminiscences in that horrid little man's paper? Here's the second chapter of the necklace. It was stolen. You come walking in here and say you've stolen it again. But where from? Out of Esther's hand-bag. Do you want the dirty little man to print that? Necklace found in Mrs. Jeffrey Blake's hand-bag?"
Jeff was looking at her sharply.
"I never said I took it from a hand-bag," he rejoined.
Madame Beattie broke down and laughed. She gave the bracelet a final snap.
"You're quite a clever boy," said she. "Alston Choate wouldn't have seen that if he'd hammered at it a week. Yes, it was in Esther's bag. I don't care much how it got out. The question is, how did it get in? How are you going to shield Esther?"
He was aware that Esther was looking at him in a breathless waiting. The hatred, he knew, must have gone out of her face. She was the abject human animal beseeching mercy from the stronger. That she could ask him whom she had repudiated to stand by her in her distress, hurt him like a personal degradation. But he wassorry for her, and he would fight. He answered roughly, at a venture, and he felt her start. Yet the roughness was not for her.
"No. I shall do nothing whatever," he said, and heard her little cry and Madame Beattie's assured tone following it, with an uncertainty whether he had done well.
"You're quite decided?" Madame Beattie was giving him one more chance. "You're going to let Esther serve her time in the dirty little man's paper? It'll be something more than publicity here. My word! Her name will fly over the globe."
He heard Esther's quick breathing nearer and nearer, and then he felt her hand on his arm. She had crept closer, involuntarily, he could believe, but drawn by the instinct to be saved. He felt his own heart beating thickly, with sorrow for her, an agonising ruth that she should have to sue to him. But he spoke sharply, not looking at her, his eyes on Madame Beattie's.
"I shall not assume the slightest responsibility in the matter. I have told you I took the necklace. You can say that in Weedon Moore's paper till you are both of you—" he paused.
The hand was resting on his arm, and Esther's breathing presence choked him with a sense of the strangeness of things and the poignant suffering in mere life.
"I sha'n't mention you," said Madame Beattie. "I know who took the necklace."
"What?"
His movement must have shaken the touch on his arm, for Esther's hand fell.
"You don't suppose I'm a fool, do you?" inquired Madame Beattie. "I knew it was going to happen. I saw the whole thing."
"Then," said Esther, slipping away from him a pace, "you didn't do it after all."
If he had not been so shaken by Madame Beattie's words he could have laughed with the grim humour of it. Esther was sorry he had not done it.
"So," said Madame Beattie, "you'd better think twice about it. I'll give you time. But I shall assuredly publish the name of the person who took the necklace out of Esther's bag, as well as the fact that it had to be in Esther's bag or it couldn't have been taken out. Two thieves, Jeff. You'd better think twice."
"Yes," said Jeff. "I will think. Is it understood?" He walked over to her and stood there looking down at her.
She glanced pleasantly up at him.
"Of course, my dear boy," she said. "I shouldn't dream of saying a word—till you've thought twice. But you must think quick, Jeff. I can't wait forever."
"I swear," said Jeff, "you are—" Neither words nor breath failed him, but he was afraid of his own passion.
Madame Beattie laughed.
"Jeff," said she, "I've no visible means of support. If I had I should be as mild—you can't think!"
He turned and, without a look at Esther, strode out of the room. Esther hardly waited for the door to close behind him before she fell upon Madame Beattie.
"Who did it?" she cried. "That woman?"
Madame Beattie was exploring a little box for a tablet, which she took composedly.
"What woman?" she asked.
"That woman upstairs."
"Rhoda Knox? God bless me, no! Rhoda Knox wouldn't steal a button. She's New England to the bone."
"Sophy?"
"Esther, you're a fool. Why don't you let me manage Jeff in my own way? You won't manage him yourself." She got up with a clashing of little chains and yawned broadly. "Don't forget Alston Choate sitting in the dining-room waiting like a messenger boy."
"In the dining-room?"
"Yes. Did you think he'd go? He's waiting there to hear Jeff assault you, and come to the rescue. You told him you were afraid." She was on her way to the door, but she turned. "I may as well take this," she said idly, and swept the necklace into her hand. She held it up and shook it in the light, and Esther's eyes, as she knew they would, dwelt on it with a hungry passion.
"You are taking it away," said Esther. "You've no right to. He said he had paid you money on it when it was lost. If he did, it belongs to him. And I'm his wife."
"I might as well take it with me," said Madame Beattie. "You don't act as if you were his wife."
A quick madness shot into Esther's brain and overwhelmed it, anger, or fright, she could not tell what. She did not cry out because she knew Alston Choate was in the next room, but she spoke sobbingly:
"He did take it out of my bag. You have planned it between you to get it back into your hands."
Madame Beattie laughed pleasantly and went upstairs. And Esther crossed the little hall and stood in the dining-room door looking at Alston Choate. As she looked, her heart rose, for she saw conquest easy, in his bowed head, his frowning glance. He had not wanted to stay, his attitude told her; he was even yet raging against staying. But he could not leave her. Passion in him was fighting side by side with feminine implacability in her against the better part of him. She went forward and stood before him droopingly, a most engaging picture of the purelyfeminine. But he did not look at her, and she had to throw what argument she might into her voice.
"You were so good to stay," she said, with a little tired sigh. "They've gone. Come back into the other room."
He rose heavily and followed her, but in the library he did not sit down. Esther sank into a low chair, leaned back in it and closed her eyes. She really needed to give way a little. Her nerves were trembling from the shock of more than one attack on them; fear, anger, these were what her husband and Madame Beattie had roused in her. Jeffrey was refusing to help her, and she hated him. But here was another man deftly moved to her proximity by the ever careful hand of providence that had made the creatures for her.
Alston stood by the mantel, leaning one elbow on it, with a strange implication of wanting to put his head down and hide his face.
"Esther!" said he. There was no pretence now of being on terms too distant to let him use her name.
She looked up at him, softly and appealingly, though he was not looking at her. But Esther, if she had played Othello, would have blacked herself all over. Alston began again in a voice of what sounded like an extreme of irritation.
"For God's sake, tell me about this thing."
"You know all I do," she said brokenly.
"I don't know anything," said Choate. "You tell me your husband——"
"Don't call him that," she entreated.
"Your husband entered this house and took the necklace. I want to know where he took it from."
"She told you," said Esther scornfully.
He gained a little courage now and ventured to look at her. If she could repel Madame Beattie's insinuation, itmust mean she had something on her side. And when he looked he wondered, in a rush of pity, how he could have felt anything for that crushed figure but ruth and love. So when he spoke again his voice was gentler, and Esther's courage leaped to meet it.
"I am told the necklace was in your bag. How did it get there?"
"I don't know," said Esther, in a perfect clarity.
His new formed hope crumbled. He could hear inexorably, like a counter cry, Lydia's voice, saying, "She stole it." Had Esther stolen it? But Esther did not know Lydia had said it, or that it had ever been said to him at all, and she was daring more than she would have dared if she had known of that antagonist.
"It is a plot between them," she said boldly.
"Between whom?"
"Aunt Patricia and him."
"What is the plot?"
"I don't know."
"If you think there was a plot, you must have made up your mind what the plot was and what they were to gain by it. What do you believe the plot to have been?"
This was all very stupid, Esther felt, when he might be assuring her of his unchanged and practical devotion.
"Oh, I don't know," she said irritably. "How should I know?"
"You wouldn't think there was a plot without having some idea of what it was," he was insisting, in what she thought his stupid way. "What is your idea it was?"
This was really, she saw, the same question over again, which was another instance of his heavy literalness. She had to answer, she knew now, unless she was to dismiss him, disaffected.
"She put the necklace in my bag," she ventured, with uncertainty as to the value of the statement and yet no diminution of boldness in making it.
"What for?"
"To have him steal it, I suppose."
"To have him steal her own necklace? Couldn't she have given it to him?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Esther. "She is half crazy. Don't you see she is? She might have had a hundred reasons. She might have thought if he tried to steal it he'd get caught, and she could blackmail him."
"But how was he to know she had put it in the bag?"
"I don't know." Esther was settling into the stolidity of the obstinate when they are crowded too far; yet she still remembered she must not cease to be engaging.
"Why was it better to have him find it in your bag than anywhere else in the house?" he was hammering on.
"I don't know," said Esther again, and now she gave a little sigh.
That, she thought, should have recalled him to his male responsibility not to trap and torture. But she had begun to wonder how she could escape when the door opened and Jeff came in. Alston turned to meet him, and, with Esther, was amazed at his altered look. Jeff was like a man who had had a rage and got over it, who had even heard good news, or had in some way been recalled. And he had. On the way home, when he had nearly reached there, in haste to find Lydia and tell her the necklace was back in Madame Beattie's hands, he had suddenly remembered that he was a prisoner and that all men were prisoners until they knew they were, and it became at once imperative to get back to Esther and see if he could let her out. And the effect of this was to make his face to shine as that of one who was already released from bondage. To Esther he looked young, like the Jeff she used to know.
"Don't go, Choate," he said, when Alston picked himself up from the mantel and straightened, as if his next move might be to walk away. "I wanted to see Esther, but I'd rather see you both. I've been thinking about this infernal necklace, and I realise it's of no value at all."
Choate's mind leaped at once to the jewels in Maupassant's story, and Madame Beattie's quick disclaimer when he ventured to hint the necklace might be paste. Did Jeff know it was actually of no value?
Jeff began to walk about the room, expressing himself eagerly as if it were difficult to do it at all and it certainly could not be done if he sat.
"I mean," said he, "the only value of anything tangible is to help you get at something that isn't tangible. The necklace, in itself, isn't worth anything. It glitters. But if we were blind we shouldn't see it glitter."
"We could sell it," said Choate drily, "or its owner could, to help us live and support being blind."
Esther looked from one to the other. Jeffrey seemed to her quite mad. She had known him to talk in erratic ways before he went into business and had no time to talk, but that had been a wildness incident to youth. But Choate was meeting him in some sort of understanding, and she decided she could only listen attentively and see what Choate might find in him.
"It's almost impossible to say what I want to," said Jeff. The sweat broke out on his forehead and he plunged his hands in his pockets and stood in an obstinate wrestling with his thought. "I mean, this necklace, as an object, is of no more importance, really, than that doorstone out there. But the infernal thing has captured us. It's made us prisoner. And we've got to free ourselves."
Now Esther was entirely certain he was mad. Being mad, she did not see that he could say anything she need combat. But her own name arrested her and sent the blood up into her face.
"Esther," said he, "you're a prisoner to it because you've fallen in love with its glitter, and you think if you wore it you'd be lovelier. So it's made you a prisoner to the female instinct for adornment."
Alston was watching him sharply now. He was wondering whether Jeff was going to accuse her of appropriating it in the beginning.
"Choate is a prisoner," said Jeff earnestly and with such simplicity that even Choate, with his fastidious hatred of familiarity, could not resent it. "He's a prisoner to your charm. But here's where the necklace comes in again. If he could find out you'd done unworthy things to get it your charm would be broken and he'd be free."
This was so true that Choate could only stare at him and wish he would either give over or brutally tell him whether he was to be free.
"Madame Beattie uses the necklace as a means of livelihood," said Jeff. He was growing quite happy in the way his mind was leading him, because it did seem to be getting him somewhere, where all the links would hold. "Because she can get more out of it, in some mysterious way I haven't fathomed, than by selling it. And so she's prisoner to it, too."
"I shall be able to tell what the reason is," said Choate, "before long, I fancy. I've sent for the history of the Beattie necklace. I know a man in Paris who is getting it for me."
"Good!" said Jeff. "Now I propose we all escape from the necklace. We're prisoners, and let's be free."
"How are you a prisoner?" Alston asked him.
Jeff smiled at him.
"Why," said he, "if, as I told you, I took the necklace from this house, I'm a criminal, and the necklace has laid me by the heels. Who's got it now?"
This he asked of Esther and she returned bitterly:
"Aunt Patricia's got it. She walked out of the room with it, shaking it in the sun."
"Good!" said Jeff again. "Let her have it. Let her shake it in the sun. But we three can escape. Have we escaped? Choate, have you?"
He looked at Choate so seriously that Choate had to take it with an equal gravity. He knew how ridiculous the situation could be made by a word or two. But Jeff was making it entirely sane and even epic.
"We know perfectly well," said Jeff, "that the law wouldn't have much to do if all offenders and all witnesses told the truth. They don't, because they're prisoners—prisoners to fear and prisoners to selfishness and hunger. But if we three told each other the truth—and ourselves, too—we could be free this instant. You, Esther, if you would tell Choate here how you've loved that necklace and what you've done for it, why, you'd free him."
Esther cried out here, a little sharp cry of rage against him.
"I see," said she, "it's only an attack on me. That's where all your talk is leading."
"No, no," said Jeff earnestly. "I assure you it isn't. But if you owned that, Esther, you'd be ashamed to want glittering things. And Choate would get over wanting you. And that's what he'd better do."
The impudence of it, Choate knew, was only equalled by its coolness. Jeff was at this moment believing so intently in himself that he could have made anybody—but an angry woman—believe also. Jeff was telling him thathe mustn't love Esther, and virtually also that this was because Esther was not worthy to be loved. But if Choate's only armor was silence, Esther had gathered herself to snatch at something more effectual.
"You say we're all prisoners to something," she said to Jeffrey. Her face was livid now with anger and her eyes glowed upon him. "How about you? You came into this house and took the necklace. Was that being a prisoner to it? How about your being free?"
Choate turned his eyes away from her face as if it hurt him. The taunt hurt him, too, like unclean words from lips beloved. But he looked involuntarily at Jeff to see how he had taken them. Jeff stood in silence looking gravely at Esther, but yet as if he did not see her. He appeared to be thinking deeply. But presently he spoke, and as if still from deep reflection.
"It's true, Esther. I'm a prisoner, too. I'm trying to see how I can get out."
Choate spoke here, adopting the terms of Jeff's own fancy.
"If you want us all to understand each other, you could tell Esther why you took the necklace. You could tell us both. We seem to be thrown together over this."
"Yes," said Jeff. "I could. I must. And yet I can't." He looked up at Alston with a smile so whimsical that involuntarily Alston met it with a glimmer of a smile. "Choate, it looks as if I should have to be a prisoner a little longer—perhaps for life."
He went toward the door like a man bound on an urgent errand, and involuntarily Alston turned to follow him. The sight hurt Esther like an indignity. They had forgotten her. Their man's country called them to settle man's deeds, and the accordance of their going lashed her brain to quick revolt. It had been working, that shrewd,small brain, through all their talk, ever since Madame Beattie had denied Jeff's having taken the necklace, and now it offered its result.
"You didn't take it at all," she called after them. "It was that girl that's had the entry to this house. It's Lydia French."
At the words Alston turned to Jeff in an involuntary questioning. Jeff was inscrutable. His face, as Alston saw it, the lines of the mouth, the down-dropped gaze, was sad, tender even, as if he were merely sorry. They walked along the street together and it was Choate who began awkwardly.
"Miss Lydia came to me, some weeks ago, about these jewels."
Here Jeff stopped him, breaking in upon him indeed when he had got thus far.
"Alston, let's go down under the old willow and smoke a pipe."
Alston was rather dashed at having the tentative introduction of Lydia at once cut off, and yet the proposition seemed to him natural. Indeed, as they turned into Mill Street it occurred to him that Jeff might be providing solitude and a fitting place to talk. As they went down the old street, unchanged even to the hollows worn under foot in the course of the years, something stole over them and softened imperceptibly the harsh moment. There was Ma'am Fowler's where they used to come to buy doughnuts. There was the house where the crippled boy lived, and sat at the window waving signals to the other boys as they went past. At the same window a man sat now. Jeff was pretty sure it was the boy grown up, and yet was too absorbed in his thought of Lydia to ask. He didn't really care. But it was soothing to find the atmosphere of the place enveloped him like a charm. Itwasn't possible they were so old, or that they had been mightily excited a minute before over a foolish thing. Presently after leaving the houses they turned off the road and crossed the shelving sward to the old willow, and there on a bench hacked by their own jackknives they sat down to smoke. Jeff remembered it was he who had thought to give the bench a back. He had nailed the board from tree to tree. It was here now or its fellow—he liked to think it was his own board—and he leaned against it and lighted up. The day's perturbation had taken Choate in another way. He didn't want to smoke. But he rolled a cigarette with care and pretended to take much interest in it. He felt it was for Jeff to begin. Jeff sat silent a while, his eyes upon the field across the flats where the boys were playing ball. Yet in the end he did begin.
"That necklace, Choate," said he, "is a regular little devil of a necklace. Do you realise how much mischief it's already done?"
Between Esther's asseverations and Lydia's theories Choate's mind was in a good deal of a fog. He thought it best to give a perfunctory grunt and hope Jeff would go on.
"And after all," said Jeff, "as I said, the devilish thing isn't of the slightest real value in itself. It can, in an indirect way, send a fellow to prison. It can excite an amount of longing in a woman's mind colossal enough to make one of the biggest motives possible for any sort of crime. Because it glitters, simply because it glitters. It can cause another woman who has done caring for glitter, to depend on it for a living."
"You mean Madame Beattie," said Alston. "If it's her necklace and she can sell it, why doesn't she do it? Royal personages don't account for that."
But Jeff went on with his ruminating.
"Alston," said he, "did it ever occur to you that, with the secrets of nature laid open before us as they are now—even though the page isn't even half turned—does it occur to you we needn't be at the mercy of sex? Any of us, I mean, men and women both. Have we got to get drunk when it assaults us? Have we got to be the cave man and carry off the woman? And lie to ourselves throughout? Have we got to say, 'I covet this woman because she is all beauty'? Can't we keep the lookout up in the cockloft and let him judge, and if he says, 'That isn't beauty, old man'—believe him?"
"But sometimes," said Alston, "it is beauty."
He knew what road Jeff was on. Jeff was speaking out his plain thought and at the same time assuring them both that they needn't, either of them, be submerged by Esther, because real beauty wasn't in her. If they ate the fruit of her witchery it would be to their own damnation, and they would deserve what they got.
"Yes," said Jeff, "sometimes it is real beauty. But even then the thing that grows out of sex madness is better than the madness itself. Sometimes I think the only time some fellows feel alive is when they're in love. That's what's given us such an idea of it. But when I think of a man and woman planking along together through the dust and mud—good comrades, you know—that's the best of it."
"Of course," said Alston stiffly, "that's the point. That's what it leads to."
"Ah, but with some of them, you'd never get there; they're not made for wives—or sisters—or mothers. And no man, if he saw what he was going into, would dance their dance. He wouldn't choose it, that is, when he thinks back to it."
Alston took out his match-box, and felt his fingersquiver on it. He was enraged with himself for minding. This was the warning then. He was told, almost in exact words, not to covet his neighbour's wife, cautioned like a boy not to snatch at forbidden fruit, and even, unthinkably, that the fruit was, besides not being his, rotten. And at his heart he knew the warning was fair and true. Esther had dealt a blow to his fastidious idealities. Her deceit had slain something. She had not so much betrayed it to him by facts, for facts he could, if passion were strong enough, put aside. But his inner heart searching for her heart, like a hand seeking a beloved hand, had found an emptiness. He was so bruised now that he wanted to hit out and hurt Jeff, perhaps, at least force him to naked warfare.
"You want me to believe," he said, "that—Esther—" he stumbled over the word, but at such a pass he would not speak of her more decorously—"years ago took Madame Beattie's necklace."
Jeff was watching the boys across the flats, critically and with a real interest.
"She did," he said.
Alston bolstered himself with a fictitious anger.
"And you can tell me of it," he blustered.
"You asked me."
"You believe she did?"
"It's true," said Jeff, with the utmost quietness. "I never have said it before. Not to my father even. But he knows. He did naturally, in the flurry of that time."
"Yet you tell me because I ask you."
Alston seemed to be bitterly defending Esther.
"Not precisely," said Jeff. "Because you're bewitched by her. You must get over that."
The distance wavered before Choate's eyes, He hated Jeffrey childishly because he could be so calm.
"You needn't worry," he said. "She is as completely separated from me as if—as if you had never been away from her."
"That's it," said Jeff. "You can't marry her unless she's divorced from me. She's welcome to that—the divorce, I mean. But you can't go drivelling on having frenzies over her. Good God, Choate, don't you see what you're doing? You're wasting yourself. Shake it off. You don't want Esther. She's shocked you out of your boots already. And she doesn't know there's anything to be shocked at. You're Addington to the bone, and Esther's a primitive squaw. You've nothing whatever to do with one another, you two. It's absurd."
Choate sat looking at the landscape which no longer wavered. The boys ran fairly straight now. Suddenly he began to laugh. He laughed gaspingly, hysterically, and Jeff regarded him from time to time tolerantly and smoked.
"I know what you're thinking," he said, when Alston stopped, with a last splutter, and wiped his eyes. "You're thinking, between us we've broken all the codes. I have vilified my wife. I've warned you against her and you haven't resented it. It shows the value of extreme common-sense in affairs of the heart. It shows also that I haven't an illusion left about Esther, and that you haven't either. And if we say another word about it we shall have to get up and fight, to save our self-respect."
So Alston did now light his cigarette and they went on smoking. They talked about the boys at their game and only when the players came down to the scow, presumably to push over and buy doughnuts of Ma'am Fowler, did they get up to go. As they turned away from the scene of boyish intimacies, involuntarily they stiffened into another manner; there was even some implication of mutualdislike in it, of guardedness, one against the other. But when they parted at the corner of the street Alston, out of his perplexity, ventured a question.
"I should be very glad to be told if, as you say, you took the necklace out of Esther's bag, why you took it."
"Sorry," said Jeff. "You deserve to be told the whole business. But you can't be."
So he went home, knowing he was going to an inquiring Lydia. And how would an exalted common-sense work if presented to Lydia? He thought of it all the way. How would it do if, in these big crises of the heart, men and women actually told each other what they thought? It was not the way of nature as she stood by their side prompting them to their most picturesque attitude, that her work might be accomplished, saying to the man, "Prove yourself a devil of a fellow because the girl desires a hero," and to the girl, "Be modesty and gentleness ineffable because that is the complexion a hero loves." And the man actually believes he is a hero and the girl doesn't know she is hiding herself behind a veil too dazzling to let him see her as she is. How would it be if they outwitted nature at her little game and gave each other the fealty of blood brothers, the interchange of the true word?
Lydia came to the supper table with the rest. She was rather quiet and absorbed and not especially alive to Jeff's coming in. No quick glance questioned him about the state of things as he had left them. But after supper she lingered behind the others and asked him directly:
"Couldn't we go out somewhere and talk?"
"Yes," said he. "We could walk down to the river."
They started at once, and Anne, seeing them go, sighed deeply. Lydia was shut away from her lately. Anne missed her.
Lydia and Jeff went down the narrow path at the backof the house, a path that had never, so persistent was it, got quite grown over in the years when the maiden ladies lived here. Perhaps boys had kept it alive, running that way. At the foot and on the river bank were bushes, alder and a wilderness of small trees bound by wild grape-vines into a wall. Through these Lydia led the way to the fallen birch by the waterside. She turned and faced Jeffrey in the gathering dusk. He fancied her face looked paler than it should.
"Does she know it?" asked Lydia.
"Who?"
"Esther. Does she know I stole it out of the bag?"