Chapter 14

And she was, out of the door and down the walk. Anne, following helplessly a step, thought she must be running, she was so quickly lost. But Lydia was not running. With due respect, taught her by Anne, for the customs of Addington, she had put on her head the little white-rose-budded hat she had snatched from the hall and fiercely pinned it, and she was walking, though swiftly, in great decorum to Madison Street where the bank was and the post-office and the best stores, and upstairs in the great Choate building, the office of Alston Choate. Lydia tapped at the office door, but no one answered. Then she began to dislike her errand, and if it had not been for the confounding of Anne, perhaps she would have gone home. She tapped again and hurt her knuckles, and that brought her courage back.

"Come in," called a voice, much out of patience, it seemed. She opened the door and there saw Alston Choate, his feet on the table, reading "Trilby." Alston thought he had a right to at least one chapter; he had opened his mail and dictated half a dozen letters, and the stenographer, in another room, was writing them out. He looked up under a frowning brow, and seeing her there, a Phillis come to town, shy, rosy, incredible, threw his book to the table and put down his feet.

"I beg your pardon," said he, getting up, and then Lydia, seeing him in the attitude of conventional deference, began to feel proper supremacy. She spoke with a demure dignity of which the picturesque value was well known to her.

"I've come to engage you for our case."

He stared at her an instant as Anne had, and she sinkingly felt he had no confidence in her. But he recovered himself. That was not like Anne. She had not recovered at all.

"Will you sit down?" he said.

He drew forward a chair. It faced the light, and Lydia noted, when he had taken the opposite one, that they were in the technical position for inquisitor and victim. He waited scrupulously, and when she had seated herself, also sat down.

"Now," said he.

It was gravely said, and reconciled Lydia somewhat to the hardness of her task. At least he would not really make light of her, like Anne. Only your family could do that. She sat there charming, childlike even, all soft surfaces and liquid gleam of eyes, so very young that she was wistful in it. She hesitated in her beginning.

"I understand," she said, "that everything I say to you will be in confidence. O Mr. Choate!" she implored him, with a sudden breaking of her self-possession, "you wouldn't tell, would you?"

Alston Choate did not allow a glint to lighten the grave kindliness of his glance. Perhaps he felt no amusement; she was his client and very sweet.

"Never," said he, in the manner of an uncle to a child. "Tell me anything you like. I shall respect your confidence."

"I saw Madame Beattie last night," said Lydia; and she went on to tell what Madame Beattie had said. She warmed to it, and being of a dramatic type, she coloured the story as Madame Beattie might have done. There was a shade of cynicism here, a tang of worldliness there; and it sounded like the hardest fact. But when she came to Esther, she saw his glance quicken and fasten on hers the more keenly, and when she told him Madame Beattie believed the necklace had not been lost at all, he was looking at her with astonishment even.

"You say--" he began, and made her rehearse it all again in snatches. He cross-examined her, not, it seemed, as if he wished to prove she lied, but to take in her monstrous truth. And after they had been over it two or three times and she felt excited and breathless and greatly fagged by the strain of saying the same thing in different ways, she saw in his face the look she had seen in Anne's.

"Why," she cried out, in actual pain, "you don't believe me."

Choate didn't answer that. He sat for a minute, considering gravely, and then threw down the paper knife he had been bending while she talked. It was ivory, and it gave a little shallow click on the table and that, slight as it was, made her nerves jump. She felt suddenly that she was in deeper than she had expected to be.

"Do you realise," he began gravely, "what you accuse Mrs. Blake of?"

Lydia had not been used to think of her by that name and she asked, with lifted glance:

"Esther?"

"Yes. Mrs. Jeffrey Blake."

"She took the necklace," said Lydia. She spoke with the dull obstinacy that made Anne shake her sometimes and then kiss her into kindness, she was so pretty.

But Alston Choate, she saw, was not going to find it a road to prettiness. He was after the truth like a dog on a scent, and he didn't think he had it yet.

"Madame Beattie," he said, "tells you she believes that Esther--" his voice slipped caressingly on the word with the lovingness of usage, and Lydia saw he called her Esther in his thoughts--"Madame Beattie tells you she believes that Esther did this--this incredible thing."

The judicial aspect fell away from him, and the last words carried only the man's natural distaste. Lydia saw now that whether she was believed or not, she was bound to be most unpopular. But she stood to her guns.

"Madame Beattie knows it. Esther owned it, I told you."

"Owned it to Madame Beattie?"

"To Jeff, anyway. Madame Beattie says so."

"Do you think for a moment she was telling you the truth?"

"But that's just the kind of women they are," said Lydia, at once reckless and astute. "Esther's just the woman to take a necklace, and Madame Beattie's just the woman to tell you she's taken it."

"Miss Lydia," said Choate gravely, "I'm bound to warn you in advance that you mustn't draw that kind of inference."

Lydia lost her temper. It seemed to her she had been talking plain fact.

"I shall draw all the inferences I please," said she, "especially if they're true. And you needn't try to mix me up by your law terms, for I don't understand them."

"I have been particularly careful not to," said Choate rather stiffly; but still, she saw, with an irritating proffer of compassion for her because she didn't know any better. "I am being very unprofessional indeed. And I still advise you, in plain language, not to draw that sort of inference about a lady--" There he hesitated.

"About Esther?" she inquired viciously.

"Yes," said he steadily, "about Mrs. Jeffrey Blake. She is a gentlewoman."

So Anne had said: "Esther is a lady." For the moment Lydia felt more imbued with the impartiality of the law than both of them. Esther's being a lady had, she thought, nothing whatever to do with her stealing a necklace, if she happened to like necklaces. She considered herself a lady, but she could also see herself, under temptation, doing a desperado's deeds. Not stealing a necklace: that was tawdry larceny. But she could see herself trapping Esther in a still place and cutting her dusky hair off so that she'd betray no more men. For she began to suspect that Alston Choate, too, was caught in the lure of Esther's inexplicable charm. Lydia was at the moment of girlhood nearly done where her accumulated experience, half of it not understood, was prepared to spring to life and crystallise into clearest knowledge. She was a child still, but she was ready to be a woman. Alston Choate now was gazing at her with his charming smile, and Lydia hardened under it, certain the smile was meant for mere persuasiveness.

"Besides," he said, "the necklace wasn't yours. You don't want to bring Mrs. Blake to book for stealing a necklace which isn't your own?"

"But I'm not doing it for myself," said Lydia instantly. "It's for Jeffrey."

"But, Jeffrey--" Alston paused. He wanted to put it with as little offence as might be. "Jeffrey has been tried for a certain offence and found guilty."

"He wasn't really guilty," said Lydia. "Can't you see he wasn't? Esther stole the necklace, and Madame Beattie wanted it paid for, and Jeffrey tried to do it and everything went to pieces. Can't you really see?"

She asked it anxiously, and Alston answered her with the more gentleness because her solicitude made her so kind and fair.

"Now," said he, "this is the way it is. Jeffrey pleaded guilty and was sentenced. If everything you say is true--we'll assume it is--he would have been tried just the same, and he would have been sentenced just the same. I don't say his counsel mightn't have whipped up a lot of sympathy from the jury, but he wouldn't have got off altogether. And besides, you wouldn't have had him escape in any such conceivable way. You wouldn't have had him shield himself behind his wife."

Lydia was looking at him with brows drawn tight in her effort to get quite clearly what she thought might prove at any instant a befogged technicality. But it all sounded reasonable enough, and she gratefully understood he was laying aside the jurist's phraseology for her sake.

"But," said she, "mightn't Esther have been tried for stealing the necklace?"

He couldn't help laughing, she seemed so ingenuously anxious to lay Esther by the heels. Then he sobered, for her inhumanity to Esther seemed to him incredible.

"Why, yes," said he, "if she had been suspected, if there'd been evidence--"

"Then I call it a wicked shame she wasn't," said Lydia. "And she's got to be now. If it isn't my business, it's Madame Beattie's, and I'll ask her to do it. I'll beg it of her."

With that she seemed still more dangerous to him, like an explosive put up in so seemly a package that at first you trust it until you see how impossible it is to handle. He spoke with a real and also a calculated impressiveness.

"Miss Lydia, will you let me tell you something?"

She nodded, her eyes fixed on his.

"One thing my profession has taught me. It's so absolutely true a thing that it never fails. And it's this: it is very easy to begin a course of proceeding, but, once begun, it's another thing to stop it. Now before you start this ball rolling--or before you egg on Madame Beattie--let's see what you're going to get out of it."

"I don't expect to get anything," said Lydia, on fire. "I'm not doing it for myself."

"Let's take the other people then. Your father is a man of reputation. He's going to be horrified. Jeff is going to be broken-hearted under an attack upon his wife."

"He doesn't love her," said Lydia eagerly. "Not one bit."

Choate himself believed that, but he stared briefly at having it thrown at him with so deft a touch. Then he went on.

"Mrs. Blake is going to be found not guilty."

"Why is she?" asked Lydia calmly. It seemed to her the cross-questioning was rightly on her side.

"Why, good God! because she isn't guilty!" said Alston with violence, and did not even remember to be glad no legal brother was present to hear so irrational an explosion. He hurried on lest she should call satiric attention to its thinness. "And as for Madame Beattie, she'll get nothing out of it. For the necklace being lost, she won't get that."

"Oh," said Lydia, the more coolly, as she noted she had nettled him on the human side until the legal one was fairly hidden, "but we don't think the necklace is lost."

"Who don't?" he asked, frowning.

"Madame Beattie and I."

"Where do you think it is then?"

"We think Esther's got it somewhere."

"But you say she lost it."

"I say she said she lost it," returned Lydia, feeling the delight of sounding more accurate every minute. "We don't think she did lose it. We think she lied."

Alston Choate remembered Esther as he had lately seen her, sitting in her harmonious surroundings, all fragility of body and sweetness of feeling, begging him to undertake the case that would deliver her from Jeffrey because she was afraid--afraid. And here was this horribly self-possessed little devil--he called her a little devil quite plainly in his mind--accusing that flower of gentleness and beauty of a vulgar crime.

"My God!" said he, under his breath.

And at that instant Anne, flushed and most sweet, hatted and gloved, opened the door and walked in. She bowed to Alston Choate, though she did not take his outstretched hand. He was receiving such professional insult, Anne felt, from one of her kin that she could scarcely expect from him the further grace of shaking hands with her. Lydia, looking at her, saw with an impish glee that Anne, the irreproachable, was angry. There was the spark in her eye, decision in the gesture with which she made at once for Lydia.

"Why, Anne," said Lydia, "I never saw you mad before."

Tears came into Anne's eyes. She bit her lip. All the proprieties of life seemed to her at stake when she must stand here before this most dignified of men and hear Lydia turn Addington courtesies into farce.

"I came to get you," she said, to Lydia. "You must come home with me."

"I can't," said Lydia. "I am having a business talk with Mr. Choate. I've asked him to undertake our case."

"Our case," Anne repeated, in a perfect despair. "Why, we haven't any case."

She turned to Choate and he gave her a confirming glance.

"I've been telling your sister that, virtually," said he. "I tell her she doesn't need my services. You may persuade her."

"Well," said Lydia cheerfully, rising, for they seemed to her much older than she and, though not to be obeyed on that account, to be placated by outward civilities, "I'm sorry. But if you don't take the case I shall have to go to some one else."

"Lydia!" said Anne. Was this the soft creature who crept to her arms of a cold night and who prettily had danced her way into public favour?

Alston Choate was looking thoughtful. It was not a story to be spread broadcast over Addington. He temporised.

"You see," he ventured, turning again to Lydia with his delightful smile which was, with no forethought of his own, tremendously persuasive, "you haven't told me yet what anybody is to get out of it."

"I thought I had," said Lydia, taking heart once more. If he talked reasonably with her, perhaps she could persuade him after all. "Why, don't you see? it's just as easy! I do, and I've only thought of it one night. Don't you see, Madame Beattie's here to hound Jeffrey into paying her for the necklace. That's going to kill him, just kill him. Anne, I should think you could see that."

Anne could see it if it were so. But Lydia, she thought, was building on a dream. The hideous old woman with the ostrich feathers had played a satiric joke on her, and here was Lydia in good faith assuming the joke was real.

"And if we can get this cleared up," said Lydia calmly, feeling very mature as she scanned their troubled faces, "Madame Beattie can just have her necklace back, and Jeff, instead of thinking he's got to start out with that tied round his neck, can set to work and pay his creditors."

Alston Choate was looking at her, frowning.

"Do you realise, Miss Lydia, what amount it is Jeffrey would have to pay his creditors? Unless he went into the market again and had a run of unbroken luck--and he's no capital to begin on--it's a thing he simply couldn't do. And as to the market, God forbid that he should ever think of it."

"Yes," said Anne fervently, "God forbid that. Farvie can't say enough against it."

Lydia's perfectly concrete faith was not impaired in the least.

"It isn't to be expected he should pay it all," said she. "He's got to pay what he can. If he should die to-morrow with ten dollars saved toward paying back his debts--"

"Do you happen to know what sum of money represents his debts?" Alston threw in, as you would clutch at the bit of a runaway horse.

"I know all about it," said Lydia. She suddenly looked hot and fierce. "I've done sums with it over and over, to see if he could afford to pay the interest too. And it's so much it doesn't mean anything at all to me one minute, and another time I wake up at night and feel it sitting on me, jamming me flat. But you needn't think I'm going to stop for that. And if you won't be my lawyer I can find somebody that will. That Mr. Moore is a lawyer. I'll go to him."

Anne, who had been staring at Lydia with the air of never having truly seen her, turned upon Choate, her beautiful eyes distended in a tragical appeal.

"Oh," said she, "you'll have to help us somehow."

So Alston Choate thought. He was regarding Lydia, and he spoke with a deference she was glad to welcome, a prospective client's due.

"I think," said he, "you had better leave the case with me."

"Yes," said Lydia. She hoped to get out of the room before Anne saw how undone she really was. "That's nice. You think it over, and we'll have another talk. Come along, Anne. Mary Nellen wants some lemons."

XVIII

What Alston Choate did, after ten minutes' frowning thought, was to sit down and write a note to Madame Beattie. But as he dipped his pen he said aloud, half admiring and inconceivably irritated: "The little devil!" He sent the note to Madame Beattie by a boy charged to give it, if possible, into her hand, and in an hour she was there in his office, ostrich plumes and all. She was in high feather, not adequately to be expressed by the plumes, and at once she told him why.

"I believe that little wild-fire's been here to see you already. Has she? and talking about necklaces?"

Madame Beattie was sitting upright in the office chair, fanning herself and regarding him with a smile as sympathetic as if she had been the cause of no disturbing issue.

"You'll pardon me for asking you to come here," said Alston. "But I didn't know how to get at you without Mrs. Blake's knowledge."

"Of course," said Madame Beattie composedly. "She was there when the note came, and curious as a cat."

"I see," said Alston, tapping noiselessly with his helpful paper knife, "that you guess I've heard some rumours that--pardon me, Madame Beattie--started from you."

"Yes," said she, "that pretty imp has been here. Quite right. She's a clever child. Let her stir up something, and they may quiet it if they can."

"Do you mind telling me," said Alston, "what this story is--about a necklace?"

"I've no doubt she's told you just as well as I could," said Madame Beattie. "She sat and drank it all in. I bet ten pounds she remembered word for word."

"As I understand, you say--"

"Don't tell me I 'say.' I had a necklace worth more money than I dared tell that imp. She wouldn't have believed me. And my niece Esther is as fond of baubles as I am. She stole the thing. And she said she lost it. And it's my opinion--and it's the imp's opinion--she's got it somewhere now."

Alston tapped noiselessly, and regarded her from under brows judicially stern. He wished he knew recipes for frightening Madame Beattie. But, he suspected, there weren't any. She would tell the truth or she would not, as she preferred. He hadn't any delusions about Madame Beattie's cherishing truth as an abstract duty. She was after results. He made a thrust at random.

"I can't see your object in stirring up this matter. If you had any ground of evidence you'd have made your claim and had it settled long ago."

"Not fully," said Madame Beattie, fanning.

"Then you were paid something?"

"Something? How far do you think 'something' would go toward paying for the loss of a diamond necklace? Evidently you don't know the history of that necklace. If you were an older man you would. The papers were full of it for years. It nearly caused a royal separation--they were reconciled after--and I was nearly garroted once when the thieves thought I had it in a hand-bag. There are historic necklaces and this is one. Did you ever hear of Marie Antoinette's?"

"Yes," said Alston absently. He was thinking how to get at her in the house where she lived. How would some of his novelists have written out Madame Beattie and made her talk? "And Maupassant's." This he said ruminatingly, but the lawyer in him here put down a mark. "Note," said the mark, "Maupassant's necklace. She rose to that." There was no doubt of it. A quick cross-light, like a shiver, had run across her eyes. "You know Maupassant's story," he pursued.

"I know every word of Maupassant. Neat, very neat."

"You remember the wife lost the borrowed necklace, and she and her husband ruined themselves to pay for it, and then they found it wasn't diamonds at all, but paste."

"I remember," said Madame Beattie composedly. "But if it had been a necklace such as mine an imitation would have cost a pretty penny."

"So it wasn't the necklace itself," he hazarded. "You wouldn't have brought a priceless thing over here. It was the imitation."

Madame Beattie broke out, a shrill staccato, into something like anger. But it might not have been anger, he knew, only a means of hostile communication.

"You are a rude young man to put words into my mouth, a rude young man."

"I beg your pardon," said Alston. "But this is rather a serious matter. And I do want to know, as a friend of Mrs. Jeffrey Blake."

"And counsel confided in by that imp," she supplied shrewdly.

"Yes, counsel retained by Miss Lydia French. I want to know whether you had with you here in America the necklace given you by--" Here he hesitated. He wondered whether, according to her standards, he was unbearably insulting, or whether the names of royal givers could really be mentioned.

"A certain Royal Personage," said Madame Beattie calmly.

"Or," said Alston, beginning after a safe hiatus, "whether you had had an imitation made, and whether the necklace said to be lost was the imitation."

"Well, then I'll tell you plainly," said Madame Beattie, in a cheerful concession, "I didn't have an imitation made. And you're quite within the truth with your silly 'said to be's.' For it was said to be lost. Esther said it. And she no more lost it than she went to New York that time to climb the Matterhorn. Do you know Esther?"

"Yes," said Alston with a calculated dignity, "I know her very well."

"Oh, I mean really know her, not enough to take her in to dinner or snatch your hat off to her."

"Yes, I really know her."

"Then why should you assume she's not a liar?" Madame Beattie asked this with the utmost tranquillity. It almost robbed the insult of offence. But Alston's face arrested her, and she burst out laughing. "My dear boy," said she, "you deal with evidence and you don't know a liar when you see her. Esther isn't all kinds of a liar. She isn't an amusing one, for instance. She hasn't any imagination. Now if I thought it would make you jump, I should tell you there was a tiger sitting on the top of that bookcase. I should do it because it would amuse me. But Esther never'd think of such a thing." She was talking to him now with perfect good-humour because he actually had glanced up at the bookcase, and it was tribute to her dramatic art. "She tells only the lies she has to. Esther's the perfect female animal hiding under things when there's something she's afraid of in the open and then telling herself she hid because she felt like being alone. The little imp wouldn't do that," said Madame Beattie admiringly. "She wouldn't be afraid of anything, or if she was she'd fight the harder. I shouldn't want to see the blood she'd draw."

Alston was looking at her in a fixed distaste.

"Esther is your niece," he began.

"Grandniece," interrupted Madame Beattie.

"She's of your blood. And at present you are her guest--"

"Oh, no, I'm not. The house is Susan's. Susan and I are step-sisters. Half the house ought to have been left to me, only Grandfather Pike knew I was worshipped, simply worshipped in Paris, and he wrote me something scriptural about Babylon."

"At any rate," said Alston, "you are technically visiting your niece, and you come here and tell me she is a thief and a liar."

"You sent for me," said Madame Beattie equably. "And I actually walked over. I thought it would be good for me, but it wasn't. Isn't that a hack out there? If it's that Denny, I think I'll get him to take me for a little drive. Don't come down."

But Alston went in a silence he recognised as sulky, and put her into the carriage with a perfect solicitude.