"Yes," said Jeff. Suddenly he determined to tell the truth to Lydia. She looked worthy of it. He wouldn't save her pain that belonged to the tangle where they groped. He and she would share the pain together. "She guessed it. Nobody told her she was right."
"Then," said Lydia, "I must go away."
"Go away?"
"To save Farvie and Anne. They mustn't know it. I wanted to go this afternoon, just as soon as you took the necklace away from me and I realised what people would say. But I knew that would be silly. People can't run away and leave notes behind. But I can tell Anne I want to go to New York and get pupils. And I could get them. I can do housework, too."
She was an absolutely composed Lydia. She had forestalled him in her colossal common-sense.
"But, Lydia," said he, "you don't need to. Madame Beattie has her necklace. I gave it back into her hand. I daresay the old harpy will want hush money, but that's not your business. It's mine. I can't give her any if I would, and she knows it. She'll simply light here like a bird of prey for a while and harry me for money toshield Esther, to shield you, and when she finds she can't get it she'll sail peacefully off."
"Madame Beattie wouldn't do anything hateful to me," said Lydia.
"Oh, yes, she would, if she could get an income out of it. She wouldn't mean to be hateful. That night-hawk isn't hateful when it spears a mole."
"Do you mean," said Lydia, "that just because Madame Beattie has her necklace back, they couldn't arrest me? Because if they could I've certainly got to go away. I can't kill Farvie and Anne."
"Nobody will arrest anybody," said Jeff. "You are absolutely out of it. And you must keep your mouth tight and stay out."
"But you said Esther knew I did it."
"She guessed. Let her keep on guessing. Let Madame Beattie keep on. I have told them I did it and I shall keep on telling them so."
Lydia turned upon him.
"You told them that? Oh, I can't have it. I won't. I shall go to them at once."
She had even turned to fly to them.
"No," said Jeff. "Stay here, Lydia. That damnable necklace has made trouble enough. It goes slipping through our lives like a detestable snake, and now it's stopped with its original owner, I propose it shall stay stopped. It's like a property in a play. It goes about from hand to hand to hand, to bring out something in the play. And after all the play isn't about the necklace. It's about us—us—you and Esther and Choate and Madame Beattie and me. It's betraying us to ourselves. If it hadn't been for the necklace in the first place and Esther's coveting it, I might have been a greasy citizen of Addington instead of a queer half labourer and halfloafer; my father wouldn't have lost his nerve, Choate wouldn't have been in love with Esther, and you wouldn't have been doing divine childish things to bail me out of my destiny."
Lydia selected from this the fact that hit her hardest.
"Is Alston Choate in love with Esther?"
"He thinks he is."
"Then I must tell Anne."
"For God's sake, no! Lydia, I'm talking to you down here in the dusk as if you were the sky or that star up there. The star doesn't tell."
"But Anne worships him."
"Do you mean she's in love with Choate?"
"No," said Lydia, "I don't mean that. I mean she thinks he's the most beautiful person she ever saw."
"Then let her keep on thinking so," said Jeff. "And sometime he'll think that of her."
Lydia was indignant.
"If you think Anne——" she began, and he stopped her.
"No, no. Anne is a young angel. Only a feeling of that kind—Lydia, I am furious because I can't talk to you as I want to."
"Why can't you?" asked Lydia.
"Because it isn't possible, between men and women. Unless they've got a right to. Unless they can throw even their shams and vanities away, and live in each other's minds. I am married to Esther. If I tell you I won't ask you into my mind because I am married to her you'll think I am a hero. And if I do ask you in, you'll come—for you are very brave—and you'll see things I don't want you to see."
"You mean," said Lydia, "see that you know I am in love with you. Well, I'm not, Jeff, not in the way people talk about. Not that way."
His quick sense of her meanings supplied what she did not say: not Esther's way. She scorned that, with a youthful scorn, the feline domination of Esther. If that was being in love she would have none of it. But Jeff was not actually thinking of her. He was listening to some voice inside himself, an interrogatory voice, an irresponsible one, not warning him but telling him:
"You do care. You care about Lydia. That's what you're facing—love—love of Lydia."
It was disconcerting. It was the last thing for a man held by the leg in several ways to contemplate. And yet there it was. He had entered again into youth and was rushing along on the river that buoys up even a leaf for a time and feels so strong against the leaf's frail texture that every voyaging fibre trusts it joyously. The summer air felt sweet to him. There were wild perfumes in it and the smell of water and of earth.
"Lydia!" he said, and again he spoke her name.
"Yes," said Lydia. "What is it?"
She stood there apart from him, a slim thing, her white scarf held tight, actually, to his quickened sense, as if she kept the veil of her virginity wrapped about her sternly. For the moment he did not feel the despair of his greater age, of his tawdry past or his fettered present. He was young and the night air was as innocently sweet to him as if he had never loved a woman and been repulsed by her and dwelt for years in the anguish of his own recoil.
"Lydia," he said, "what if you and I should tell each other the truth?"
"We do," said Lydia simply. "I tell you the truth anyway. And you could me. But you don't understand me quite. You think I'd die for you. Yes, I would. But I shouldn't think twice about wanting to be happier with you. I'm happy enough now."
A thousand thoughts rushed to his lips, to tell her she did not know how happy they could be. But he held them back. All the sweet intimacies of life ran before him, life here in Addington, secure, based on old traditions, if she were his wife and they had so much happiness they could afford to be careless about it as other married folk were careless. There might not be daily banquets of delight, but cool fruits, the morning and the evening, the still course of being that seemed to him now, after his seething first youth, the actual paradise. But Lydia was going on, an erect slim figure in her enfolding scarf.
"And you mustn't be sorry I stole the necklace—except for Anne and Farvie, if she does anything to me." "She" was always Esther, he had learned. "I'm glad, because it makes us both alike."
"You and me?"
"Yes. You took something that makes you call yourself a thief. Now I'm a thief. We're just alike. You said, when you first came home, doing a thing like that, breaking law, makes you feel outside."
"It isn't only feeling outside," he made haste to tell her. "You are outside. You're outside the social covenant men have made. It's a good righteous covenant, Lydia. It was come to through blood and misery. It's pretty bad to be outside."
"Well," said Lydia, "I'm outside anyway. With you. And I'm glad of it. You won't feel so lonesome now."
Jeff's eyes began to brim.
"You little hateful thing," he said. "You've made me cry."
"Got a hanky?" Lydia inquired solicitously.
"Yes. Besides, it isn't a hanky cry, unless you make it worse. Lydia, I wish you and Anne would go away and let father and me muddle along alone."
"Do you," said Lydia joyously. "Then you do like me. You like me awfully. You think you'll tell me so if I stay round."
"Do I, you little prying thing?" He thought he could establish some ground of understanding between them if he abused her. "You're a good little sister, Lydia, but you're a terrifying one."
"No," said Lydia. "I'm not a sister." She let the enfolding scarf go and the breeze took its ends and made them ripple. "Anne's a sister. She likes you almost as well as she does Farvie. But she does like Farvie best. I don't like Farvie best. I like you best of all the world. And I love to. I'm determined to. You ought to be liked over and over, because you've had so much taken away from you. Why, that's what I'm for, Jeff. That's what I was born for. Just to like you."
He took a step toward her, and the rippling scarf seemed to beckon him on. Lydia stepped back. "But if you touched me, Jeff," she said, "if you kissed me, I'd kill you. I'm glad you did it once when you didn't think. But if we did it once more——"
She stopped and he heard her breath and then the click of her teeth as if she broke the words in two.
"Don't be afraid, Lydia," he said. "I won't."
"I'm not afraid," she flashed.
"And don't talk of killing."
"You thought I'd kill myself. No. What would it matter about me? If I could make you a little happier—not so lonesome—why, you might kiss me. All day long. But you'd care afterward. You'd say you were outside." There was an exquisite pity in the words. She was older than he in her passion for him, stronger in her mastery of it, and she loved him overwhelmingly and knew she loved him. "Now you see," said Lydia quietly."You know the whole. You can call me your sister, if you want to. I don't care what you call me. I suppose some sisters like their brothers more than anybody else in the world. But not as I like you. Nobody ever liked anybody as I like you. And when you put your arms down on the table and lay your head on them, you can think of that."
"How do you know I put my head on the table?" said Jeff. It was wholesome to him to sound rough to her.
"Why, of course you do," she said. "You did, one of those first days. I wish you didn't. It makes me want to run out doors and scream because I can't come in and 'poor' your hair."
"I won't do it again," said Jeff. "Lydia, I can't say one of the things I want to. Not one of them."
"I don't expect you to," said Lydia. "I understand you and me too. All I wanted was for you to understand me."
"I do," said Jeff. "And I'll stand up to it. Shake hands, Lydia."
"No," said Lydia, "I don't want to shake hands." She folded the scarf again about her, tighter, it seemed, than it was before. "You and I don't need signs and ceremonies. Now I'm going back and read to Farvie. You go to walk, Jeff. Walk a mile. Walk a dozen miles. If we had horses we'd get on 'em bareback and ride and ride."
Jeff stood and watched her while he could see the white scarf through the dusk. Then he turned to go along the river path, but he stopped. He, too, thought of galloping horses, devouring distance with her beside him through the night. He began to strip off his clothes and Lydia, on the rise, heard his splash in the river. She laughed, a wildlittle laugh. She was glad he was conquering space in some way, his muscles taut and rejoicing. Lydia had attained woman's lot at a bound. All she wanted was for him to have the full glories of a man.
Alston Choate went home much later consciously to his mother, and she comforted him though he could not tell her why he needed it. She and Mary were sitting on the back veranda, looking across the slope of the river, doing nothing, because it was dusk, and dropping a word here and there about the summer air and the night. Alston put down his hat and, as he sat, pushed up his hair with the worried gesture both women knew. Mary at once went in to get him a cool drink, her never-failing service, and his mother turned an instant toward him expectantly and then away again. He caught the movement. He knew she was leaving him alone.
"Mother," he said, "you never were disgusted through and through. With yourself."
"Oh, yes," said she. "It's more or less my normal state. I'm disgusted because I haven't courage. If I'd had courage, I should have escaped all the things that make me bad company for myself now."
Alston, in his quickened mood, wondered what it was she had wanted to escape. Was it Addington? Was it his father even, a courteous Addington man much like what Alston was afraid he might be in the end, when he was elderly and pottered down town with a cane? He hated to be what he was afraid he inevitably must. It came upon him with renewed impetus, now that he had left Esther with a faint disgust at her, and only a wearied acquiescence in the memory that she had once charmed him. He wished he were less fastidious even.How much more of a man he should have felt if he had clung to his passion for her and answered Jeffrey with the oath or blow that more elemental men found fitting in their rivalry.
"Mother," said he, "does civilisation rot us after all? Have we got to be savages to find out what's in us?"
"Something seems to rot us round the edges," said the mother. "But that's because there don't appear to be any big calls while we're so comfortable. You can't get up in the midst of dinner and give a war-cry to prove you're a big chief. It would be silly. You'd be surprised, dear, to know how I go seething along and can't find anything to burn up—anything that ought to be burned. Sometimes when Mary and I sit crocheting together I wonder whether she won't smell a scorch."
He thought of the night when she had lain in bed and told how she was travelling miles from Addington in her novel.
"You never owned these things before, mother," he said. "What makes you now?"
"That I'm a buccaneer? Maybe because you've got to the same point yourself. You half hate our little piffling customs, and yet they've bound you hand and foot because they're what you're used to. And they're the very devil, Alston, unless you're strong enough to fight against 'em and live laborious days."
"What's the matter with us? Is it Addington?"
"Good old Addington! Not Addington, any more than the world. It's grown too fat and selfish. Pretty soon somebody's going to upset the balance and then we shall fight and the stern virtues will come back."
"You old Tartar," said Alston, "have we really got to fight?"
"We've got to be punished anyhow," said his mother."And I suppose the only punishment we should feel is the punishment of money and blood."
"Let's run away, mother," said Alston. "Let's pick up Mary and run away to Europe."
"Oh, no," said she. "They're going to fight harder than we are. Don't you see there's an ogre over there grinning at them and sharpening his claws? They've got to fight Germany."
"England can manage Germany," said Alston, "through the pocket. Industrial wars are the only ones we shall ever see."
"If you can bank on that you're not so clever as I am," said his mother. "I see the cloud rising. Every morning it lies there thick along the east. There's going to be war, and whether we're righteous enough to stand up against the ogre, God knows."
Alston was impressed, in spite of himself. His mother was not given to prophecy or passionate asseveration.
"But anyhow," said she, "you can't run away, for they're going to ask you to stand for mayor."
"The dickens they are! Who said so?"
"Amabel. She was in here this afternoon, as guileless as a child. Weedon Moore told her they were going to ask you to stand and she hoped you wouldn't."
"Why?"
"Because Moore's the rival candidate, and she thinks he has an influence with the working-man. She thinks the general cause of humanity would be better served by Moore. That's Amabel."
"She needn't worry," said Alston, getting up. "I shouldn't take it."
"Alston," said his mother, "there's your chance. Go out into the rough-and-tumble. Get on a soap box. Tell the working-man something that will make him think youhaven't lived in a library all your life. It may not do him any good, but it'll save your soul alive."
She had at last surprised him. He was used to her well-bred acquiescence in his well-bred actions. She knew he invited only the choice between two equally irreproachable goods: not between the good and evil. Alston had a vague uncomfortable besetment that his mother would have had a warmer hope for him if he had been tempted of demons, tortured by doubts. Then she would have bade him take refuge on heights, even have dragged him there. But she knew he was living serenely on a plain. Alston thought there ought to be some sympathy accorded men who liked living on a plain.
"Good Lord!" said he, looking down at her and liking her better with every word she said. "You scare me out of my boots. You're a firebrand on a mountain."
"No," said his mother. "I'm a decent Addington matron with not a hundredth part of a chance of jolting the earth unless you do it for me. I can't jolt for myself because I'm an anti. There's Mary. Hear the ice clink. I'll draw in my horns. Mary'd take my temperature."
Alston stayed soberly at home and read a book that evening, his nerves on edge, listening for a telephone call. It did not come, but still he knew Esther was willing him to her.
Esther sat by the window downstairs, in the dusk, in a fever of desire to know what, since the afternoon, he was thinking of her, and for the first time there was a little fleeting doubt in her heart whether she could make him think something else. As to Alston, she had the hesitations of an imperfect understanding. There were chambers where he habitually dwelt, and these she never entered at all. His senses were keenly yet fastidiously alive. They could never be approached save through shaded avenues she found it dull to traverse, and where she never really kept her way without great circumspection. The passion of men was, in her eyes, something practically valuable. She did not go out to meet it through an overwhelming impetus of her own. It was a way of controlling them, of buying what they had to give: comforts and pretty luxuries. She would have liked to live like an adored child, all her whims supplied, all her vanities fed. And here in this little circle of Addington Alston Choate was the one creature who could lift her out of her barren life and give her ease at every point with the recognition of the most captious world.
And she was willing him. As the evening wore on, she found she was breathing hard and her wrists were beating with loathing of her own situation and hatred of those who had made it for her, if she could allow herself to think she hated. For Esther had still to preserve the certainty that she was good. Madame Beattie, up there with her night-light and her book, she knew she hated. Of Jeff she did not dare to think, he made her wrists beat so, and of Alston Choate she knew it was deliberately cruel of him not to come. And then as if her need of something kind and unquestioning had summoned him, a step fell on the walk, and she saw Reardon, and went herself to let him in. There he was, florid, large, and a little anxious.
"I felt," said he, "as if something had happened to you."
She stood there under the dim hall-light, a girlish creature in her white dress, but with wonderful colour blooming in her cheeks. He could not know that hate had brought it there. She seemed to him the flower of her own beauty, rich, overpowering. She held the door open for him, and when he had followed her into the library, she turned and put both her hands upon his arm, her softnearness like a perfume and a breath. To Reardon, she was immeasurably beautiful and as far as that above him. His heart beating terribly in his ears, he drew her to him sure that, in her aloofness, she would reprove him. But Esther, to his infinite joy and amazement, melted into his arms and clung there.
"God!" said Reardon. She heard him saying it more than once as if entirely to himself and no smaller word would do. "You don't—" he said to her then, "you don't—care about me? It ain't possible." Reardon had reverted to oldest associations and forgotten his verb.
She did not tell him whether she cared about him. She did not need to. The constraining of her touch was enough, and presently they were sitting face to face, he holding her hands and leaning to hear her whispered words. For she had immediately her question ready:
"Do you think I ought to live like this—afraid?"
"Afraid?" asked Reardon. "Of him?"
"Yes. He came this afternoon. There is nobody to stand between us. I am afraid."
Reardon made the only answer possible, and felt the thrill of his own adequacy.
"I'll stand between you."
"But you can't," she said. "You've no right."
"There's but one thing for you to do," said Reardon. "Tell what you're telling me to a lawyer. And I'll—" he hesitated. He hardly knew how to put it so that her sense of fitness should not be offended. "I'll find the money," he ended lamely.
The small hands stayed willingly in his. Reardon was a happy man, but at the same time he was curiously ashamed. He was a clean man who ate moderately and slept well and had the proper amount of exercise, and this excess of emotion jarred him in a way that irritated him.He did blame Jeff, who was at the bottom of this beautiful creature's misery. Still, if Jeff had not left her, she would not be sitting here now with the white hands in his. But he was conscious of a disturbing element of the unlawful, like eating a hurtful dish at dinner. Reardon had lived too long in a cultivating of the middle way to embark with joyousness on illicit possessing. As the traditions of Addington were wafting Alston Choate away from this primitive little Circe on her isle, so his acquired habits of safe and healthful living were wafting him. If his inner refusals could have been spoken crudely out they would have amounted to a miserable plea:
"Look here. It ain't because I don't want you. But there's Jeff."
For Reardon was not only a good fellow, but he had gazed with a wistful awe on the traditions of Addington's upper class. He had tried honestly to look like the men born to it; he never owned even to himself that he felt ill at ease in it. Yet he did regard it with a reverence the men that made it were far from feeling, and he knew something was due it. He drew back, releasing gently the white hands that lay in his. He wanted to kiss them, but he was not even yet sure they were enough his to justify it. He cleared his throat.
"The man for you to go to," said he, "is Alston Choate. I don't like him, but he's square as a die. And if you can get yourself where it'll be possible to speak to you without knowing there's another man stepping between—" he hesitated, his own heart beating for her and the decencies of Addington holding him back. "Hang it, Esther," he burst forth, "you know where I stand."
"Do I?" said Esther.
She rose, and, looking wan, gave him her hand. And Reardon got out of the room, feeling rather more of asneak than Alston had when he went away. Esther stood still until she heard the door close behind him. Then she ran out of the room and upstairs, to hide herself, if she could, from the exasperated thought of the men who had failed her. She hated them all. They owed her something, protection, or cherishing tenderness. She could not know it was Addington that had got hold of them in one way or another and kept them doggedly faithful to its own ideals. As she was stepping along the hall, Madame Beattie called her.
"Esther, stop a minute. I want you."
Esther paused, and then came slowly to the door and stood there. She looked like a sulky child, with the beauty of the child and the charm. She hated Madame Beattie too much to gaze directly at her, but she knew what she should see if she did look: an old woman absolutely brazen in her defiance of the softening arts of dress, divested of every bewildering subterfuge, sitting in a circle of candlelight in the adequate company of her book.
"Esther," said Madame Beattie, "you may have the necklace."
Then Esther did glance quickly at her. She wondered what Madame Beattie thought she could get out of giving up the adored gewgaw into other hands.
"I don't want it," said Madame Beattie. "I'd much rather have the money for it. Get the money and bring it to me."
Esther curled her lip a little in the scorn she really felt. She could not conceive of any woman's being so lost to woman's perquisites as to confess baldly her need of money above trinkets.
"But you'd better go to the right man for it," said Madame Beattie. "It isn't Alston Choate. Jeff's the man, my dear. He's cleverer than the devil if you onceget him started. Not that I think you could. He's done with you, I fancy."
Esther, still speechless, wondered if she could. It was a challenge of precisely the force Madame Beattie meant it to be.
The next morning, a sweet one of warmth and gently drifting leaves, Esther went to call on Lydia, and Madame Beattie, with a satirical grin, looked after her from the window. Madame Beattie's understanding of the human mind had given her a dramatic hold on the world when the world loved her, and it was mechanically serving her now in these little deeds that were only of a mean importance, though, from the force of habit, she played the game so hard. Esther was very fresh and pretty in her white dress with an artful parasol that cast a freshening glow. She had the right expression, too, the calmness of one who makes a commonplace morning call.
And it was not Lydia who saw her coming. It was Jeff, in his working blouse and shabby trousers, standing on a cool corner of the veranda and finishing his morning smoke before he went out to picking early apples. Esther knew at precisely what instant he caught sight of her, and saw him knock out his pipe into the garden bed below the veranda and lay it on the rail. Then he waited for her, and she was almost amusedly prepared for his large-eyed wonder and the set of the jaw which betrayed his certainty of having something difficult to meet. It was not thus he had been used to greet her on sweet October mornings in those other days. Suddenly he turned with a quick gesture of the hand as if he were warning some one back, and Esther, almost at the steps, understood that he had heard Lydia coming and had triedto stop her. Lydia evidently had not understood and ran innocently out on some errand of her own. Seeing Esther, she halted an appreciable instant. Then something as quickly settled itself in her mind, and she advanced and stood at the side of Jeff. Esther furled her parasol and came up the steps, and her face did not for an instant change in its sweet seriousness. She looked at Lydia with a faint, almost, it might seem, a pitying smile.
"I thought," said she, "after what I said, I ought to come, to reassure you."
Neither Jeff nor Lydia seemed likely to move, and Esther stood there looking from one to the other with her concerned air of having something to do for them. It was only a moment, yet it seemed to Lydia as if they had been communing a long time, in some hidden fashion, and learning amazingly to understand each other. That is, she was understanding Esther, and the outcome terrified her. Esther seemed more dangerous than ever, bearing gifts. But Lydia could almost always do the sensible thing in an emergency and keep emotion to be quelled in solitude.
"Come in," said she, "and sit down. Jeff, won't you move the chairs into the shady corner? We'd better not go into the library. Farvie's there."
Jeff awoke from his tranced surprise and the two women followed him to the seclusion of the vines. There Esther took the chair he set for her, and looked gravely at Lydia, as she said:
"I was very hasty. I told him—" She indicated Jeff with a little gesture. It seemed she found some significance in the informality of the pronoun—"I told him I had found out who took the necklace. I knew of course he would tell you. And I came to keep you from being troubled."
"Lydia," said Jeff, with the effect of stepping quickly in between them, "go into the house. This is something that doesn't concern you in the least."
Lydia, very pale now, was looking at Esther, in a fixed antagonism. Her hands were tightly clasped. She looked like a creature braced against a blow. But Esther seemed of all imaginable persons the least likely to deliver a blow of any sort. She was gracefully relaxed in her chair, one delicate hand holding the parasol and the other resting, with the fingers upcurled like lily petals, on her knee.
"No," said Lydia, not looking at Jeff, though she answered him, "I sha'n't go in. It does concern me. That's what she came for. She's told you so. To accuse me of taking it."
With the last words, a little scorn ran into her voice. It was a scorn of what Esther might do, and it warmed her and made her suddenly feel equal to the moment.
"No," said Esther, in her softest tone, a sympathetic tone, full of a grave concern. "It was only to confess I ought not to have said it. Whatever I knew, I ought to have kept it to myself. For there was the necklace. You had sent it back. You had done wrong, but what better could you do than send it back? And I understand—" she glowed a little now, turning to Jeff—"I understand how wonderful it was of you to take it on yourself."
Jeff was frowning, and though facing her, looking no further than the lily-petalled hand. Esther was quite sure he was dwelling on the hand with inevitable appreciation. She had a feeling that he was frowning because it distracted him from his task of pleasing Lydia and at the same time meeting her own sympathetic tribute. But he was not. Esther knew a great many things about men, but she was naïvely unconscious of their complete detachment from feminine allurements when they are summoned to affairs.
"Esther," said Jeff, before Lydia could speak, "just why are you here?"
"I told you," said Esther, with a pretty air of pained surprise. "To tell Lydia she mustn't be unhappy."
Then Lydia found her tongue.
"I'm not unhappy," she said, with a brutality of incisiveness which offers the bare fact with no concern for its effect. "I took the necklace. But I don't know," said Lydia, with one of her happy convictions that she really had a legal mind and might well follow its inspirations, "I don't know whether it is stealing to take a thing away from a person who has stolen it herself."
"Lydia!" said Jeff warningly.
He hardly knew why he was stopping her. Certainly not in compassion for Esther; she, at this moment, was merely an irritating cause of a spoiled morning. But Lydia, he felt, like a careering force that had slipped control, must be checked before she did serious harm.
"You know," said Lydia, now looking Esther calmly in the eye, "you know you were the first to steal the necklace. You stole it years ago, from Madame Beattie. No, I don't know whether it's stealing to take it from you when you'd no business to have it anyway. I must ask some one."
Lydia was no longer pale with apprehension. The rose was on her cheek. Her eyes glowed with mischief and the lust of battle. Once she darted a little smiling look at Jeff. "Come on," it seemed to say. "I can't be worse off than I am. Let's put her through her paces and get something out of it—fun, at least."
Esther looked back at her in that pained forbearancewhich clothed her like a transfiguring atmosphere. Then she drew a sharp breath.
"Jeff!" she said, turning to him.
The red had mounted to his forehead. He admired Lydia, and with some wild impulse of his own, loved her bravado.
"Oh, come, Lydia," he said. "We can't talk like that. If Esther means to be civil—"
Yet he did not think Esther meant to be civil. Only he was hard pushed between the two, and said the thing that came to him. But it came empty and went empty to them, and he knew it.
"She doesn't mean to be civil," said Lydia, still in her wicked enjoyment. "I don't know what she does mean, but it's not to be nice to me. And I don't know what she's come for—" here her old vision of Jeff languishing unvisited in the dungeon of her fancy rose suddenly before her and she ended hotly—"after all this time."
Again Esther turned to Jeff and spoke his name, as if summoning him in a situation she could not, however courageous, meet alone. But Lydia had thought of something else.
"I don't know what you can do to me," she said, "and I don't much care. Except for Farvie and Anne. But I know this. If you can arrest me for stealing from you something you'd stolen before, why then I shall say right off I did it. And when I do it, I shall tell all I know about the necklace and how you took it from Madame Beattie—and oh, my soul!" said Lydia, rising from her chair and putting her finger tips together in an unconsidered gesture, "there's Madame Beattie now."
Esther too rose, murder in her heart but still a solicitous sadness in her eyes, and turned, following Lydia'sgaze, to the steps where Denny had drawn up and Madame Beattie was alighting from the victoria. Jeff, going forward to meet her, took courage since Denny was not driving away. Whatever Madame Beattie had come to do, she meant to make quick work of it.
"Jeff," said Esther, at his elbow, "Jeff, I must go. This is too painful for everybody. I can't bear it."
"That's right," said Jeff in the kindness of sudden relief. "Run along."
Madame Beattie had decided otherwise. At the top of the steps in her panoply of black chiffon, velvet, ostrich feathers—clothes so rich in the beginning and so well made that they seemed always too unchanged to be thrown away and so went on in a squalid perpetuity—she laid a hand on Esther's wrist.
"Come, come, Esther," said she, "don't run away. I came to see you as much as anybody."
Esther longed to shake off the masterful old hand, but she would not. A sad passivity became her best unless she relinquished every possible result of the last ten minutes. And it must have had some result. Jeff had, at least, been partly won. Surely there was an implied intimacy in his quick undertone when he had bade her run along. So Madame Beattie went on cheerfully leading her captive and yet, with an art Esther hated her for, seeming to keep the wrist to lean on, and Lydia, who had brought another chair, greeted the new visitor with an unaffected pleasure. She still liked her so much that it was not probable anything Madame Beattie could say or do would break the tie. And Madame Beattie liked her: only less than the assurance of her own daily comfort. The pure stream of affection had got itself sadly sullied in these later years. She hardly thought now of the way it started among green hills under a morning sun.
She seated herself, still not releasing Esther until she also had sunk into a chair by her side, and refreshed herself from a little viniagrette. Then she winked her eyes open in a way she had, as if returning from distant considerations and said cheerfully:
"I suppose you're talking about that stupid necklace."
Lydia broke into a little laugh, she did not in the least know why, except that Madame Beattie was always so amusing to her. Madame Beattie gave her a nod as if in acknowledgment of the tribute of applause, continuing:
"Now I've come to be disagreeable. Esther has been agreeable, I've no doubt. Jeff, I hope you're being nice to her."
A startled look came into Lydia's eyes. Why should Madame Beattie want Jeff to be nice to her when she knew how false Esther had been and would always be?
"Esther," continued Madame Beattie, "has been a silly child. She took my necklace, years ago, and Jeff very chivalrously engaged to pay me for it and—"
"That will do," said Jeff harshly. "We all know what happened years ago. Anyhow Esther does. And I do. We'll leave Lydia out of this. I don't know what you've come here to say, Madame Beattie, but whatever it is, I prefer it should be said to me. I'm the only one it concerns."
"No, you're not," said Lydia, swelling with rage at everybody who would keep her from him. "I'm concerned. I'm concerned more than anybody."
Esther glanced up at her quickly and Madame Beattie shook her head.
"You've been a silly child, too," she said. "You took the necklace to give it back to me. Through Jeff, I understand."
"No, I didn't," said Lydia, in a passion to tell the truthat a moment when it seemed to her they were all willing, for one result or another, to turn and twist it. "I gave it back to Jeff so he could carry it to you and say, 'Here it is. I've paid you a lot of money on it—'"
"Who told you that?" flashed Esther. She had forgotten her patient calm.
"I told her," said Madame Beattie. "Don't be jealous, Esther. Jeff never would have told her in the world. He's as dumb as a fish."
"And so he could say to you," Lydia went on breathlessly, "'Here's the horrid thing. And now you've got it I don't owe you money but'"—here one of her legal inspirations came to her and she added triumphantly—"'if anything, you owe me.'"
"You're a good imp," said Madame Beattie, in careless commendation, "but if everybody told the truth as you do there wouldn't be any drama. Now I'm going to tell the truth. This is just what I propose doing, and what I mean somebody else shall do. I've got the necklace. Good! But I don't want it. I want money."
"I have told you," said Jeff, "to sell it. If it's worth what you say—"
"I have told you," said Madame Beattie, "that I can't. It is a question of honour," she ended somewhat pompously. Yet it was only a dramatic pomposity. Jeff saw that. "When it was given me by a certain Royal Personage," she continued and Jeff swore under his breath. He was tired of the Royal Personage—"I signed an agreement that the necklace should be preserved intact and that I would never let it go into other hands. We've been all over that."
Jeff moved uneasily in his chair. He thought there were things he might say to Madame Beattie if the others were not present.
"But," said Madame Beattie dramatically, "Esther stole it. Lydia here, from the sweetest and most ridiculous of motives, stole it from Esther. Nobody knows that but us three and that cold-blooded fish, Alston Choate. He won't tell. But unless Jeff—you, Jeff dear—unless Jeff makes himself responsible for my future, I propose to tell the whole story of the necklace in print and make these two young women wish I hadn't. Better protect them, Jeff. Better make yourself responsible for Aunt Patricia."
"You propose telling it in print," said Jeff slowly. "You said so yesterday. But I ought to have warned you then that Weedon Moore won't print it—not after I've seen him. He knows I'd wring his neck."
"There are plenty of channels," said Madame Beattie, with an unmoved authority. "Journals here, journals abroad. Why, Jeff!" suddenly her voice rose in a shrill note and startled them. Her face convulsed and a deeper hue ran into it. "I'm a personage, Jeff. The world is my friend. You seem to think because I've lost my voice I'm not Patricia Beattie. But I am. I am Patricia Beattie. And I have power."
Lydia made a movement toward her and laid her hands together, impetuously, in applause. Whether Madame Beattie were willing, as it had seemed a second ago, to sacrifice her for the sake of squeezing money out of Jeff, she did not care. Something dramatic in her discerned its like in the other woman and responded. But Jeff, startled for an instant, felt only the brutal impulse to tell Madame Beattie if the world were so much her friend, it might support her. And here appeared the last person any of them desired to see if they were to fight matters to a finish: the colonel in his morning calm, his finger, even so early, between the leaves of a book. As the year hadwaned and there was not so much outside work to do he had betaken himself to his gentler pursuits, and in the renewed health of his muscles felt himself a better man. He had his turn of being startled, there was no doubt of that. Esther here! his eyes were all for her. It meant something significant, they seemed to say. Why, except for an emphatic reason, should she, after this absence, have come to Jeff? He even seemed to be ignoring Madame Beattie as he stepped forward to Esther, with outstretched hand. There was a welcome in his manner, a pleasure it smote Lydia's heart to see. She knew what the scene meant to him: some shadowy renewal of the old certainties that had made Jeff's life like other men's. For an instant under the spell of the colonel's belief, she saw Jeff going back and loving Esther as if the break had never been. It seemed incredible that any one could look at her as the colonel was looking now, with warmth, even with gratitude, after she had been so hateful. And Esther was receiving it all with the prettiest grace. She might even have been pinning the olive leaf into her dress.
"Well," said he. "Well!"
Lydia was maliciously glad that even he could find nothing more to say.
"What a pleasant morning," he ended lamely yet safely, and conceived the brilliant addition, "You'll stay to dinner." As he said it he was conscious, too late, that dinner was several hours away. And meantime Esther stood and looked up in his eyes with an expression for which Lydia at once mentally found a name: soulful, that was what it was, she viciously decided.
Madame Beattie gave a little ironic crow of laughter.
"Sit down, Esther," she said, "and let Mr. Blake shake hands with me. No, I can't stay to dinner. Esther may,if she likes, but I've business on my hands. It's with that dirty little man Jeff's got such a prejudice against."
"Not Weedon Moore," conjectured the colonel. "If you've any law business, Madame Beattie, you'd far better go to Alston Choate. Moore's no kind of a man."
"He's the right kind for me," said Madame Beattie. "No manners, no traditions, no scruples. It's a dirty job I've got for him, and it takes a dirty man to do it."
She had risen now, and was smiling placidly up at the colonel. He frowned at her, involuntarily. He was ready to accept Madame Beattie's knowing neither good nor evil, but she seemed to him singularly unpleasant in flaunting that lack of bias. She was quite conscious of his distaste, but it didn't trouble her. Unproductive opinions were nothing to her now, especially in Addington.
"You're not going, too," said the colonel, as Esther rose and followed her. "I hoped—" But what he hoped he kept himself from saying.
"I must," said Esther, with a little deprecatory look and another significant one at Madame Beattie's back. "Good-bye."
She threw Lydia, in her scornful silence there in the background, a smile and nod.
"But—" the colonel began. Again he had to stop. How could he ask her to come again when he was in the dark about her reason for coming at all?
"I have to go," she said. "I really have to, this time."
Meantime Jeff, handing Madame Beattie into the carriage, had had his word with her.
"You'll do nothing until I see you."
"If you see me moderately soon," said Madame Beattie pleasantly. "Esther, are you coming?"
"No," said Esther, with a scrupulous politeness. "No, thank you. I shall walk."
But before she went, and well in the rear of the carriage, so that even Denny should not see, she gave Jeff one look, a suffused, appealing look that bade him remember how unhappy she was, how unprotected and, most of all, how feminine. She and the carriage also had in the next instant gone, and Jeff went stolidly back up the steps. There was sweat on his forehead and he drew his breath like a man dead-tired.
"My son," began the colonel.
"Don't," said Jeff shortly. He knew what his father would like to do: ask, in the sincerest sympathy, why Esther had come, discuss it and decide with him whether she was to come again and stay, whether it would be ill or well for him. The red mounted to the colonel's forehead, and Jeff put a hand on his shoulder. He couldn't help remembering that his father had called him "son" in a poignancy of sympathy all through the trials of the past, and it hurt to hear it now. It linked that time with this, as Madame Beattie, in her unabashed self-seeking, linked it. Perhaps he was never to escape. A prisoner, that was what he was. They were all prisoners, Madame Beattie to her squalid love of gain, Esther to her elementary love of herself, Lydia—he looked at her as she stood still in the background like a handmaid waiting. Why, Lydia was a prisoner, as he had thought before, only not, as he had believed then, to the glamour of love, but love, actual love for him, the kind that stands the stress of all the homely services and disillusioning. A smile broke over his face, and Lydia, incredulously accepting it, gave a little sob that couldn't be prevented in time, and took one dancing step. She ran up to the colonel, and pulled him away from Jeff. It seemed as if she were about to make him dance, too.
"Don't bother him, Farvie," said she. "He's out of prison! he's out of prison!"
She had said it, the cruel word, and Jeff knew she could not possibly have ventured it if she did not see in him something fortunate and free.
"Jeff!" said the colonel. Esther's coming seemed so portentous that he could not brook imperfect knowledge of it. "Jeff, did Esther come to—" He paused there. What could Esther, in the circumstances, do? Make advances? Ask to be forgiven?
But Jeff was meeting the half question comprehensively.
"I don't quite know what she came for."
"Couldn't you have persuaded her," said the colonel, hesitating, "to stay?"
"No," said Jeff. "Esther doesn't want to stay. We mustn't think of that."
"I am sorry," said the colonel, and Lydia understood him perfectly. He was not sorry Esther had gone. But he was sorry the whole business had been so muddled from the start, and that Jeff's life could not have moved on like Addington lives in general: placid, all of a piece. Lydia thought this yearning of his for the complete and perfect was because he was old. She felt quite capable of taking Jeff's life as it was, and fitting it together in a striking pattern.
"Come in, Farvie," she said. "You haven't corrected Mary Nellen's translation."
Jeff was being left alone for his own good, and he smiled after the kind little schemer, before he took his hat and went down town to find Weedon Moore. As he went, withdrawn into a solitariness of his own, so that he only absently answered the bows of those he met, he thought curiously about his own life. And he was thinking as hisfather had: his life was not of a pattern. It was a succession of disjointed happenings. There was the first wild frothing of the yeast of youth. There was the nemesis who didn't like youth to make such a fool of itself. She had to throw him into prison. While he was there he had actually seemed to do things that affected prison discipline. He was mentioned outside. He was even, because he could write, absurdly pardoned. It had seemed to him then desirable to write the life of a gentleman criminal, but in that he had quite lost interest. Then he had had his great idea of liberty: the freedom of the will that saved men from being prisoners. But the squalid tasks remained to him even while he bragged of being free: to warn Moore away from meddling with women's names, no matter how Madame Beattie might invite him to do her malicious will, to warn Madame Beattie even, in some fashion, and to protect Lydia. Of Esther he could not think, save in a tiring, bewildered way. She seemed, from the old habit of possession justified by a social tie, somehow a part of him, a burden of which he could never rid himself and therefore to be borne patiently, since he could not know whether the burden were actually his or not. And he began to be conscious after that morning when Esther had looked at him with primitive woman's summons to the protecting male that Esther was calling him. Sometimes it actually tired him as if he were running in answer to the call, whether toward it or away from it he could not tell. All the paths were mazes and the lines of them bewildering to his eyes. He would wake in the night and wish there were one straight path. If he could have known that at this time Reardon and Alston Choate had also, in differing ways, this same consciousness of Esther's calling it could not have surprised him. He would not have known, in his own turmoil, whether to urgethem to go or not to go. Esther did not seem to him a disturbing force, only a disconcerting one. You might have to meet it to have done with it.
But now at Weedon's office door he paused a moment, hearing a voice, the little man's own, slightly declamatory, even in private, and went in. And he wished he had not gone, for Miss Amabel sat at the table, signing papers, and he instantly guessed the signatures were not in the pursuance of her business but to the advantage of Weedon Moore. Whatever she might be doing, she was not confused at seeing him. Her designs could be shouted on the housetops. But Moore gave him a foolishly cordial greeting mingled with a confused blotting of signatures and a hasty shuffling of the papers.
"Sit down, sit down," he said. "You haven't looked me up before, not since—"
"No," said Jeff. "Not since I came back. I don't think I ever did. I've come now in reference to a rather scandalous business."
Miss Amabel moved her chair back. She was about to rise.
"No, please," said Jeff. "Don't go. I'd rather like you to know that I'm making certain threats to Moore here, in case I have to carry them out. I'd rather you'd know I have some grounds. I never want you to think the worst of me."
"I always think the best of you," said Miss Amabel, with dignity yet helplessly. She sat there in an attitude of waiting, her grave glance going from one to the other, as she tried to understand.
"Madame Beattie," said Jeff curtly to Moore, "is likely to give you some personal details of her life. If you print them you'll settle with me afterward."
"O Jeffrey!" said Miss Amabel. "Why put it so unpleasantly? Mr. Moore would never print anything which could annoy you or any one. We mustn't assume he would."
Moore, standing, one fat and not overclean hand on the table, looked a passionate gratitude to her. He seemed about to gush into protest. Of course he wouldn't. Of course he would publish only what was of the highest character and also what everybody wanted him to.
"That's all," said Jeff. He, too, was standing and he now turned to go.
"I wish—" said Miss Amabel impulsively. She got on her feet and stood there a minute, a stately figure in spite of her blurred lines. "I wish we could have your cooperation, Jeff. Mr. Moore is going to run for mayor."
"So I hear," said Jeff, and his mind added, "And you are financing his campaign, you old dear, and only a minute ago you were signing over securities."
"It means so much," said Miss Amabel, "to have a man who is a friend of labour. We ought to combine on that. It's enough to heal our differences."
"Pardon me," said Jeff. "I have to go. But mayn't I take you home?"
"No," said Amabel; "I've another bit of business to settle. But think it over, Jeff. We can't afford to let personal issues influence us when the interest of the town is at stake."
"Surely not," said Jeff. "Addington forever!"
As he went down the stairs he smiled a little, remembering Weedie had not spoken a word after his first greeting. But Jeff didn't waste much thought on Weedie. He believed, at the crisis, Weedie could be managed. Miss Amabel had startled his mind broad awake to what she called the great issues and what he felt were vital ones. He went on over the bridge, and up the stairs of the oldChoate Building to Alston's office, and, from some sudden hesitancy, tapped on the door.
"Come in," called Alston, and he went.
Alston sat at the table, not reading a novel as Lydia and too many of his clients had found him, but idle, with not even a book at hand. There were packets of papers, in a methodical sequence, but everything on the table bore the aspect of an order not akin to work. Choate looked pale and harassed. "You?" said his upward glance. "You, of all the people I've been thinking of? What are you here for?"
There was though, in the look, a faint relief. Perhaps he thought something connected with the harassing appeal of Esther, the brutalising stir of her in the air, could be cleared up. Jeff was to surprise him.
"Choate," said he, "have you been asked to run for mayor?"
Choate frowned. He wasn't thinking of public office.
"I've been—approached," he said, as if the word made it the more remote.
"What did you say?"
"Said I wouldn't. Jeff, I believe you started the confounded thing."
"I've talked a lot," said Jeff. "But any fool knows you've got to do it. Choate, you're about the only hope of tradition and decency here in Addington. Don't you know that?"
"I'm a weak man," said Alston, looking up at him unhappily. "I don't half care for these things. I like the decent thing done, but, Jeff, I don't want to pitch into the dirty business and call names and be called names and uncover smells. I'd rather quit the whole business and go to Europe."
"And let Addington go to pot? Why, we'd all rathergo to Europe, if Addington could be kept on her pins without us. But she can't. We've got to see the old girl through."
"She's gone to pot anyway," said Choate. "So's the country. There aren't any Americans now. They're blasted aliens."
"Ain't you an American?" asked Jeff, forgetting his grammar. "I am. And I'm going to die in my tracks before I'm downed."
"You will be downed."
"I don't care. I don't care whether in a hundred years' time it's stated in the history books that there was once a little tribe called New Englanders and if you want to learn about 'em the philologists send you to the inscriptions of Mary Wilkins and Robert Frost."
(This was before Robert Frost had come into his fame, but New England had printed a verse or two and then forgotten them.)
"I didn't know you were such a fellow," said Choate, really interested, in an impersonal way. "You go to my head."
"Sometimes I think," said Jeff, not half noticing him, "that what really was doing in me in jail was country—country—patriotism, a kind of irrational thing—sort of mother love applied to the soil—the thing men die for. Call it liberty, if you want to, but it's all boiled down now to Addington. Choate, don't you see Addington took hold on eternal things? Don't you know how deep her roots go? She was settled by English. You and I are English. We aren't going to let east of Europe or south of Europe or middle Europe come over here and turn old Addington into something that's not Anglo-Saxon. O Choate, wake up. Come alive. Stop being temperate. Run for mayor and beat Weedie out of his skin."
"Dear fellow," said Choate, looking at him as if for an instant he too were willing to speak out, "you live in a country where the majority rules. And the majority has a perfect right to the government it wants. And you will be voted down by ten aliens this year and a hundred next, and so on, because the beastly capitalist wants more and more aliens imported to do his work and the beastly politician wants them all thrown into citizenship neck and heels, so he can have more votes. You're defeated, Jeff, before you begin. You're defeated by sheer numbers."
"Then, for God's sake," said Jeff, "take your alien and make an American of him."
"You can't. Could I take you to Italy and make an Italian of you, or to Germany and make a German? You might do something with their children."
"They talk about the melting-pot," said Jeff rather helplessly.
"They do. It's a part of our rank sentimentalism. You can pour your nationalities in but they'll no more combine than Tarquin's and Lucretia's blood. No, Jeff. America's gone, the vision, as she was in the beginning. They've throttled her among them."
Jeff stood looking at him, flushed, dogged, defiant. He had a vivid beauty at the moment, and Alston woke to a startled sense of what the young Jeff used to be. But this was better. There was something beaten into this face finer far than youth.
Jeff seemed to be meeting him as if their minds were at grapples.
"The handful of us, old New England, the sprinkling of us that's left, we've got to repel invasion. The aliens are upon us."
"They've even brought their insect pests," put in Alston.
"Folks," said Jeff, "that know no more about the passions and faithfulnesses this government was founded on than a Hottentot going into his neighbour's territory."
"Oh, come," said Alston, "give 'em a fair show. They've come for liberty. You've got to take their word for it."
"Some of 'em have come to avoid being skinned alive, by Islam, some to get money enough to go back with and berentiers. The Germans have come to show us the beatitude of their specially anointed way of life."
"Well," said Alston curtly, "we've got 'em. And they've got us. You can't leaven the whole lump."
"I can't look much beyond Addington," said Jeff. "I believe I'm dotty over the old girl. I don't want her to go back to being Victorian, but I want her to be right—honest, you know, and standing for decent things. That's why you're going to be mayor."
Alston made no answer, but when, in a few weeks' time, some citizens of weight came to ask him again if he would accept the nomination, he said, without parley, that he would. And it was not Jeff that had constrained him; it was the look in his mother's eyes.