Part 29 (1/2)

”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 a.s.sault, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 grat.i.tude, 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 toupee, 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 eyegla.s.ses 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 G.o.d'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.