Chapter 13

"You don't think your father's working too hard, planting?"

"Oh, no! It's good for him. He gets frightfully tired. They both do. But Farvie sleeps and eats and smokes. And laughs! That's Jeffrey. He can always make Farvie laugh." She said the last rather wonderingly, because she knew Jeffrey hadn't, so far as she had seen him, much light give and take and certainly no hilarity of his own. "But I suppose," she added wisely, as she had many times to herself, "Farvie's so pleased even to look at him and think he's got him back."

Miss Amabel disposed a pillow more invitingly on the old sofa that had spacious hollows in it, and Lydia obeyed the motion and lay down. It was not, she thought, because she was tired. Only it would please Miss Amabel. But the heart had gone out of her. If she looked as she felt, she realised she must be wan. But it takes more than the sorrows of youth to wash the colour out of it. She felt an impulse now to give herself away.

"It's only," she said, "we're not getting anywhere. That worries me."

"With your work?" Miss Amabel was waving a palm-leaf fan, from no necessity but the tranquillity induced by its rhythmic sway.

"Oh, no. About Jeffrey. Didn't you know we meant to clear him, Anne and I?"

"Clear him, dear? What of?"

"Why, what he was accused of," said Lydia.

"But he had his trial, you know. He was found guilty. He pleaded guilty, dear. That was why he was sentenced."

"Oh, but we all know why he pleaded guilty," said Lydia. "It was to save somebody else."

"Not exactly to save her," said Miss Amabel. "She wouldn't have been tried, you know. She wasn't guilty in that sense. Of course she was, before the fact. But that's not being legally guilty. It's only morally so."

Lydia was staring at her with wide eyes.

"Do you mean Esther?" she asked.

"Why, yes, of course I mean Esther."

"But I don't. I mean that dreadful man."

She put her feet to the floor and sat upright, smoothing her hair with hurried fingers. At least if she could talk about it with some one who wasn't Anne with whom she had talked for years knowing exactly what Anne would say at every point, it seemed as if she were getting, even at a snail's pace, upon her road. But Miss Amabel was very dense.

"My dear," said she, "I don't know what you mean."

"I mean the man that was in the scheme with him, in a way, and got out and sold his shares while they were up, and let the crash come on Jeffrey when he was alone."

"James Reardon?"

Lydia hated him too much to accept even a knowledge of his name.

"He was a promoter, just as Jeffrey was," she insisted, with her pretty sulkiness. "He was the one that went West and looked after the mines. And if there was nothing in them, he knew it. But he let Jeffrey go on trying to--to place the shares--and when Jeffrey went under he was safely out of the way. And he's guilty."

Miss Amabel looked at her thoughtfully and patiently.

"I'm afraid he isn't guilty in any sense the law would recognise," she said. "You see, dear, there are things the law doesn't take into account. It can't. You believe in Jeffrey. So do I. But I think you'll have to realise Jeffrey lost his head. And he did do wrong."

"Oh, how can you say a thing like that?" cried Lydia, in high passion. "And you've known him all your life."

Miss Amabel was not astute. Her nobility made it a condition of her mind to be unsuspecting. She knew the hidden causes of Jeffrey's downfall. She was sure his father knew, and it never seemed to her that these two sisters were less than sisters to him. What she herself knew, they too must have learned; out of this believing candour she spoke.

"You mustn't forget there was the necklace, and Madame Beattie expecting to be paid."

Lydia was breathless in her extremity of surprise.

"What necklace?" asked she.

"Don't you know?"

Miss Amabel's voice rose upon the horror of her own betrayal.

"What do you mean?" Lydia was insisting, with an iteration that sounded like repeated onslaughts, a mental pounce, to shake it out of her. "What do you mean?"

Miss Amabel wore the dignified Addington aloofness.

"I am very sorry," said she. "I have been indiscreet."

"But you'll tell me, now you've begun," panted Lydia. "You'll have to tell me or I shall go crazy."

"We must both control ourselves," said Miss Amabel, with a further retreat to the decorum of another generation. "You are not going crazy, Lydia. We are both tired and we feel the heat. And I shall not tell you."

Lydia ran out of the room. There was no other word for the quickness of her going. She fled like running water, and having worn no hat, she found herself bareheaded in the street, hurrying on to Esther's. An instinct told her she could only do her errand, make her assault, it seemed, on those who knew what she did not, if she never paused to weigh the difficulties: her hatreds, too, for they had to be weighed. Lydia was sure she hated Madame Beattie and Esther. She would not willingly speak to them, she had thought, after her last encounters. But now she was letting the knocker fall on Esther's door, and had asked the discreet maid with the light eyelashes, who always somehow had an air of secret knowledge and amusement, if Madame Beattie were at home, and gave her name. The maid, with what seemed to Lydia's raw consciousness an ironical courtesy, invited her into the library and left her there in its twilight tranquillity. Lydia stood still, holding one of her pathetically small, hard-worked hands over her heart, and shortly, to her gratitude, Sophy was back and asked her to go up to Madame Beattie's room.

The maid accompanying her, Lydia went, with her light step, afraid of itself lest it turn coward, and in the big dark room at the back of the house, its gloom defined by the point of light from a shaded reading candle, she was left, and stood still, almost wishing for Sophy whose footfalls lessened on the stairs. There were two bits of light in the room, the candle and Madame Beattie's face. Madame Beattie had taken off her toupée, and for Lydia she had not troubled to put it on. She lay on the bed against pillows, a down quilt drawn over her feet, regardless of the seasonable warmth, and a disorder of paper-covered books about her. One she held in her ringed hand, and now she put it down, her eyeglasses with it, and turned the candle so that the light from the reflector fell on Lydia's face.

"I wasn't sure which girl it was," she said, in a tone of mild good-nature. "It's not the good one. It's you, mischief. Come and sit down."

Madame Beattie did not apologise for giving audience in her bedchamber. In the old royal days before the downfall of her kingdom she had accorded it to greater than Lydia French. Lydia's breath came so fast now that it hurt her. She stepped forward, but she did not take the low chair which really had quite a comfortable area left beyond Madame Beattie's corset and stockings. She stood there in the circle of light and said desperately:

"What was it about your necklace?"

She had created an effect. Madame Beattie herself gasped.

"For God's sake, child," said she, "what do you know about my necklace?"

"I don't know anything," said Lydia. "And I want to know everything that will help Jeff."

She broke down here, and cried bitterly. Madame Beattie lay there looking at her, at first with sharp eyes narrowed, as if she rather doubted whose emissary Lydia might be. Then her face settled into an astonished yet astute calm and wariness.

"You'll have to sit down," said she. "It's a long story." So Lydia sank upon the zone left by the corset and stockings. "Who's been talking to you?" asked Madame Beattie: but Lydia looked at her and dumbly shook her head. "Jeff?"

"No. Oh, no!"

"His father?"

"Farvie? Not a word."

Madame Beattie considered.

"What business is it of yours?" she asked.

Lydia winced. She was used to softness from Anne and the colonel. But she controlled herself. If she meant to enter on the task of exonerating Jeffrey, she must, she knew, make herself impervious to snubs.

"Anne and I are doing all we can to help Jeffrey," she said. "He doesn't know it. Farvie doesn't know it. But there's something about a necklace. And it had ever so much to do with Jeffrey and his case. And I want to know."

Madame Beattie chuckled. Her worn yellowed face broke into satirical lines, hateful ones, Lydia thought. She was like a jeering unpleasant person carved for a cathedral and set up among the saints.

"I'll tell you about my necklace," said she. "I'm perfectly willing to. Perhaps you can do something about it. Something for me, too."

It was a strange, vivid picture: that small arc of light augmenting the dusk about them, and Lydia sitting rapt in expectation while Madame Beattie's yellowed face lay upon the obscurity, an amazing portraiture against the dark. It was a picture of a perfect consistency, of youth and innocence and need coming to the sybil for a reading of the leaves of life.

"You see, my dear," said Madame Beattie, "years ago I had a necklace given me--diamonds." She said it with emotion even. No one ever heard her rehearse her triumphs on the lyric stage. They were the foundation of such dignity as her life had known; but the gewgaws time had flung at her she did like, in these lean years, to finger over. "It was given me by a Royal Personage. He had to do a great many clever things to get ahead of his government and his exchequer to give me such a necklace. But he did."

"Why did he?" Lydia asked.

It was an innocent question designed to keep the sybil going. Madame Beattie's eyes narrowed slightly. You could see what she had been in the day of her power.

"He had to," said she, with an admiringly dramatic simplicity. "I wanted it."

"But--" began Lydia, and Madame Beattie put up a small hand with a gesture of rebuttal.

"Well, time went on, and he needed the necklace back. However, that doesn't belong to the story. Some years ago, just before your Jeff got into trouble, I came over here to the States. I was singing then more or less." A concentrated power, of even a noble sort, came into her face. There was bitterness too, for she had to remember how disastrous a venture it had been. "I needed money, you understand. I couldn't have got an audience over there. I thought here they might come to hear me--to say they'd heard me--the younger generation--and see my jewels. I hadn't many left. I'd sold most of them. Well, I was mistaken. I couldn't get a house. The fools!" Scorn ate up her face alive and opened it out, a sneering mask. They were fools indeed, she knew, who would not stir the ashes of such embers in search of one spark left. "I'm a very strong woman. But I rather broke down then. I came here to Esther. She was the only relation I had, except my stepsister, and she was off travelling. Susan was always ashamed of me. She went to Europe on purpose. Well, I came here. And Esther wished I was at the bottom of the sea. But she liked my necklace, and she stole it."

Esther, as Lydia had seen her sitting in a long chair and eating candied fruit, had been a figure of such civilised worth, however odious, that Lydia said involuntarily, in a loud voice:

"She couldn't. I don't believe it."

"Oh, but she did," said Madame Beattie, looking at her with the coolness of one who holds the cards. "She owned she did."

"To you?"

"To Jeff. He was madly in love with her then. Married, you understand, but frightfully in love. Yes, she owned it. I always thought that was why he wasn't sorry to go to jail. If he'd stayed out there was the question of the necklace. And Esther. He didn't know what to do with her."

"But he made her give it back," said Lydia, out of agonised certainty that she must above all believe in him.

"He couldn't. She said she'd lost it."

Lydia stared at her, and her own face went white. Now the picture of youth and age confronting each other was of the sybil dealing inexorable hurts and youth anguished in the face of them.

"She said she'd lost it," Madame Beattie went on, in almost chuckling enjoyment of her tale. "She said it had bewitched her. That was true enough. She'd gone to New York. She came back by boat. Crazy thing for a woman to do. And she said she stayed on deck late, and stood by the rail and took the necklace out of her bag to hold it up in the moonlight. And it slipped out of her hands."

"Into the water?"

"She said so."

"You don't believe it." Lydia read that clearly in the contemptuous old face.

"Well, now, I ask you," said Madame Beattie, "was there ever such a silly tale? A young woman of New England traditions--yes, they're ridiculous, but you've got to reckon with them--she comes home on a Fall River boat and doesn't even stay in her cabin, but hangs round on decks and plays with priceless diamonds in the moonlight. Why, it's enough to make the cat laugh."

Madame Beattie, in spite of her cosmopolitan reign, was at least local enough to remember the feline similes Lydia put such dependence on, and she used this one with relish. Lydia felt the more at home.

"But what did she do with it?" she insisted.

"I don't know," said Madame Beattie idly. "Put it in a safety deposit in New York perhaps. Don't ask me."

"But don't you care?" cried Lydia, all of a heat of wonder--terror also at melodramatic thieving here in simple Addington.

"I can care about things without screaming and sobbing," said Madame Beattie briefly. "Though I sobbed a little at the time. I was a good deal unstrung from other causes. But of course I laid it before Jeff, as her husband--"

"He must have been heartbroken."

"Well, he was her husband. He was responsible for her, wasn't he? I told him I wouldn't expose the creature. Only he'd have to pay me for the necklace."

The yellow-white face wavered before Lydia. She was trying to make her brain accept the raw material Madame Beattie was pouring into it and evolve some product she could use.

"But he couldn't pay you. He'd just got into difficulties. You said so."

"Bless you, he hadn't got into any difficulty until Esther pushed him in by helping herself to my necklace. He turned crazy over it. He hadn't enough to pay for it. So he went into the market and tried a big _coup_ with all his own money and the money he was holding--people subscribed for his mines, you know, or whatever they were--and that minute there was a panic. And the courts, or whatever it was, got hold of him for using the mails for fraudulent purposes or whatever, and he lost his head. And that's all there was about it."

Lydia's thoughts were racing so fast it seemed to her that she--some inner determined frightened self in her--was flying to overtake them.

"Then you did it," she said. "You! you forced him, you pushed him--"

"To pay me for my necklace," Madame Beattie supplied. "Of course I did. It was a very bad move, as it proved. I was a fool; but then I might have known. Old Lepidus told me the conjunction was bad for me."

"Who was Lepidus?"

"The astrologer. He died last month, the fool, and never knew he was going to. But he'd encouraged me to come on my concert tour, and when that went wrong I lost confidence. It was a bad year, a bad year."

A troop of conclusions were rushing at Lydia, all demanding to be fitted in.

"But you've come back here," she said, incredulous that things as they actually were could supplement the foolish tale Madame Beattie might have stolen out of a silly book. "You think Esther did such a thing as that, and yet you're here with her in this house."

"That's why I'm here," said Madame Beattie patiently. "Jeff's back again, and the necklace hasn't been fully paid for. I've kept my word to him. I haven't exposed his wife, and yet he hasn't recognised my not doing it."

The vision of Jeffrey fleeing before the lash of this implacable taskmaster was appalling to Lydia.

"But he can't pay you," said she. "He's no money. Not even to settle with his creditors."

"That's it," said Madame Beattie. "He's got to make it. And I'm his first creditor. I must be paid first."

"You haven't told him so?" said Lydia, in a manner of fending her off.

"It isn't time. He hasn't recovered his nerve. But he will, digging in that absurd garden."

"And when you think he has, you'll tell him?"

"Why, of course." Madame Beattie reached for her book and smoothed the pages open with a beautiful hand. "It'll do him good, too. Bring him out of thinking he's a man of destiny, or whatever it is he thinks. You tell him. I daresay you've got some influence with him. That's why I've gone into it with you."

"But you said you promised him not to tell all this about Esther. And you've told me."

"That's why. Get him to work. Spur him up. Talk about his creditors. Now run away. I want to read."

XVII

Lydia did run away and really ran, home, to see if the dear surroundings of her life were intact after all she had heard. Since this temporary seclusion in a melodramatic tale, she almost felt as if she should never again see the vision of Mary Nellen making cake or Anne brushing her long hair and looking like a placid saint. The library was dim, but she heard interchanging voices there, and knew Jeffrey and his father were in tranquil talk. So she sped upstairs to Anne's room, and there Anne was actually brushing her hair and wearing precisely that look of evening peace Lydia had seen so many times.

"I thought I'd go to bed early," she said, laying down the brush and gathering round her hair to braid it. "Why, Lyd!"

It was a hot young messenger invading her calm. Anne looked like one who, the day done, was placidly awaiting night; but Lydia was the day itself, her activities still unfinished.

"I've found it out," she announced. "All of it. She made him do it."

Then, while Anne stared at her, she sat down and told her story, vehemently, with breaks of breathless inquiry as to what Anne might think of a thing like this, finally with dragging utterance, for her vitality was gone; and at the end, challenging Anne with a glance, she turned cold: for it came over her that Anne did not believe her.

Anne began braiding her hair again. During Lydia's incredible story she had let it slip from her hand. And Lydia could see the fingers that braided were trembling, as Anne's voice did, too.

"What a dreadful old woman!" said Anne.

"Madame Beattie?" Lydia asked quickly. "Oh, no, she's not, Anne. I like her."

"Like her? A woman like that? She doesn't even look clean."

Lydia answered quite eagerly.

"Oh, yes, Anne, I really like her. I thought I didn't when I heard her talk. Sometimes I hated her. But I understand her somehow. And she's clean. Really she is. It's the kind of clothes she wears." Lydia, to her own surprise at this tragic moment, giggled a little here. Madame Beattie, when in full fig, as she had first seen her, looked to her like pictures of ancient hearses with plumes. "She's all right," said Lydia. "She's just going to have what belongs to her, that's all. And if I were in her place and felt as she does, I would, too."

Anne, with an air of now being ready for bed, threw the finished braid over her back. She was looking at Lydia with her kind look, but, Lydia could also see, compassionately.

"But, Lyd," she said, "the reason I call her a dreadful old woman is that she's told you all this rigmarole. It makes me quite hot. She sha'n't amuse herself by taking you in like that. I won't have it."

"Anne," said Lydia, "it's true. Don't you see it's true?"

"It's a silly story," said Anne. She could imagine certain things, chiefly what men and women would like, in order to make them comfortable, but she had no appetite for the incredible. "Do you suppose Esther would have stolen her aunt's diamonds? Or was it pearls?"

"Yes, I do," said Lydia stoutly. "It's just like her."

"She might do other things, different kinds of things that are just as bad. But stealing, Lyd! Why, think! Esther's a lady."

"Ladies are just like anybody else," said Lydia sulkily. She thought she might have to consider that when she was alone, but at this moment the world was against her and she had to catch up the first generality she could find.

"And for a necklace to be so valuable," said Anne, "valuable enough for Jeff to risk everything he had to try to pay for it--"

Lydia felt firmer ground. She read the newspapers and Anne did not.

"Now, Anne," said she, "you're 'way off. Diamonds cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and so do pearls."

"Why, yes," said Anne, "royal jewels or something of that sort. But a diamond necklace brought here to Addington in Madame Beattie's bag--"

Lydia got up and went over to her. Her charming face was hot with anger, and she looked, too, so much a child that she might in a minute stamp her foot or scream.

"Why, you simpleton!" said she.

"Lydia!" Anne threw in, the only stop-gap she could catch at in her amaze. This was her "little sister", but of a complexion she had never seen.

"Don't you know what kind of a person Madame Beattie is? Why, she's a princess. She's more than a princess. She's had kings and emperors wallowing round the floor after her, begging to kiss her hand."

Anne looked at her. Lydia afterward, in her own room, thought, with a gale of hysterical laughter, "She just looked at me." And Anne couldn't find a word to crush the little termagant. Everything that seemed to pertain was either satirical, as to ask, "Did she tell you so?" or compassionate, implying cerebral decay. But she did venture the compassion.

"Lydia, don't you think you'd better go to bed?"

"Yes," said Lydia promptly, and went out and shut the door.

And on the way to her room, Anne noted, she was singing, or in a fashion she had in moments of triumph, tooting through closed lips, like a trumpet, the measures of a march. In half an hour Anne followed her, to listen at her door. Lydia was silent. Anne hoped she was asleep.

In the morning there was the little termagant again with that same triumph on her face, talking more than usual at the breakfast table, and foolishly, as she hadn't since Jeffrey came. It had always been understood that Lydia had times of foolishness; but it had seemed, after Jeffrey appeared among them clothed in tragedy, that everything would be henceforth on a dignified, even an austere basis. But here she was, chaffing the colonel and chattering childish jargon to Anne. Jeffrey looked at her, first with a tolerant surprise. Then he smiled. Seeing her so light-hearted he was pleased. This was a Lydia he approved of. He need neither run clear of her poetic emotions nor curse himself for calling on them. He went out to his hoeing with an unformulated idea that the tension of social life had let up a little.

Lydia did no dusting of tables or arranging of flowers in a vase. By a hand upon Anne's arm she convoyed her into the hall, and said to her:

"Get your hat. We're going to see Mr. Alston Choate."

"What for?" asked Anne.

"I'm going to tell him what Madame Beattie told me." Lydia's colour was high. She looked prodigiously excited, and as if something was so splendid it could hardly be true. And then, as Anne continued to stare at her with last night's stare, she added, not as if she launched a thunderbolt, but as giving Anne something precious that would please her very much: "I'm going to engage him for Jeffrey's case. Get your hat, Anne. Or your parasol. My nose doesn't burn as yours does. Come, come."

She stood there impatiently tapping her foot as she used to, years ago, when mother was slow about taking her out in the p'ram. Anne turned away.

"You're a Silly Billy," said she. "You're not going to see Mr. Choate."

"Won't you go with me?" Lydia inquired.

"No, of course I sha'n't. And you won't go, either."

"Yes, I shall," said Lydia. "I'm gone."