Part 21 (1/2)

He dropped her wrist.

”Oh, come into the library,” said Madame Beattie. ”I can't stand. My knees are creaking. Come, Esther, ask your husband in.”

Madame Beattie, billowing along in the witch-patterned silk and clicking on prodigiously high heels and Esther with her head haughtily up, led the way, and Jeff, following them, sat down as soon as they had given him leave by doing it, and looked about the room with a faint foolish curiosity to note whether it, too, had changed. Madame Beattie thrust out a pretty foot, and Esther, perched on the piano stool, looked rigidly down at her trembling hands. She was very pale. Suddenly she recovered herself, and turned to Madame Beattie.

”He had just come,” she said. ”He came in. I didn't ask him to. He had not--” a little note like fright or triumph beat into her voice--”he had not--kissed me.”

She turned to him as if for a confirmation he could not in honesty refuse her, and Madame Beattie burst into a laugh, one of perfect acceptance of things as they are, human frailties among the first.

”Esther,” she said, ”you're a little fool. If you want a divorce what do you give yourself away for? Your counsel wouldn't let you.”

The whole implication was astounding to Jeff; but the only thing he could fix definitely was the concrete possibility that she had counsel.

”Who is your counsel, Esther?” he asked her.

But Esther had gone farther than discretion bade.

”I am not obliged to say,” she answered, with a stubbornness equal to his own, whatever that might prove. ”I am not obliged to say anything.

But I do think I have a right to ask you to tell Aunt Patricia that I have not taken you back, in any sense whatever. Not--not condoned.”

She slipped on the word and he guessed that it had been used to her and that although she considered it of some value, she had not technically taken it in.

”What had you to condone in me, Esther?” he asked her gently. Suddenly she seemed to him most pathetic in her wilful folly. She had always been, she would always be, he knew, a creature who ruled through her weakness, found it an a.s.set, traded on it perhaps, and whereas once this had seemed to him enchanting, now, in the face of ill-fortune it looked pitifully inadequate and base.

”I was afraid of you,” she insisted. ”I am now.”

”Well!” said Jeff. He found himself smiling at Madame Beattie, and she was answering his smile. Perhaps it was rather the conventional tribute on his part, to conceal that he might easily have thrown himself back in his chair behind the shelter of his hands, or gone down in any upheaval of primal emotions; and perhaps he saw in her answer, if not sympathy, for she was too impersonal for that, a candid understanding of the little scene and an appreciation of its dramatic quality. ”Then,” said he, after his monosyllable, ”there is nothing left me but to go.” When he had risen, he stood looking down at his wife's beautiful dusky head.

Incredible to think it had ever lain on his breast, or that the fact of its cheris.h.i.+ng there made no difference to her embryo heart! A tinge of irony came into his voice. ”And I am willing to a.s.sure Madame Beattie,”

he proceeded, ”in the way of evidence, that you have not in any sense taken me back, nor have you condoned anything I may have done.”

As he was opening the outer door, in a confusion of mind that communicated itself disturbingly to his eyes and ears, he seemed to hear Madame Beattie adjuring Esther ruthlessly not to be a fool.

”Why, he's a man, you little fool,” he heard her say, not with pa.s.sion but a negligent scorn ample enough to cover all the failings of their common s.e.x. ”He's more of a man than he was when he went into that hideous place. And after all, who sent him there?”

Jeff walked out and closed the door behind him with an exaggerated care.

It hardly seemed as if he had the right, except in a salutary humbleness, even to touch a door which shut in Esther to the G.o.ds of home. He went back to his father's house, and there was Lydia singing as she dusted the library. He walked in blindly not knowing whether she was alone; but here was a face and a voice, and his heart was sore. Lydia, at sight of him, laid down her cloth and came to meet him. Neither did she think whether they were alone, though she did remember afterward that Farvie had gone into the orchard for his walk. Seeing Jeff's face, she knew some mortal hurt was at work within him, and like a child, she went to him, and Jeff put his face down on her cheek, and his cheek, she felt, was wet. And so they stood, their arms about each other, and Lydia's heart beat in such a sick tumult of rage and sorrow that it seemed to her she could not stand so and uphold the heavy weight of his grief. In a minute she whispered to him:

”Have you seen her?”

”Yes.”

”Was she--cruel?”

”Don't! don't!” Jeff said, in a broken voice.

”Do you love her?” she went on, in an inexorable fierceness.