Part 34 (1/2)

”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 s.n.a.t.c.h your hat off to her.”

”Yes, I really know her.”

”Then why should you a.s.sume 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 wors.h.i.+pped, simply wors.h.i.+pped 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.

”I must ask you,” he said stiffly before he closed the carriage door, ”not to mention this to Mrs. Blake.”

”Bless you, no,” said Madame Beattie. ”I'm going to let you stir the pot, you and that imp. Tell him to drive out into the country somewhere for half an hour. I suppose I've got to get the air.”

But he was not to escape that particular coil so soon. Back in his office again, giving himself another ten minutes of grave amused consideration, before he called the stenographer, he looked up, at the opening of the door, and saw Anne. She came forward at once and without closing the door, as if to a.s.sure him she would not keep him long. There was no misreading the grave trouble of her face. He met her, and now they shook hands, and after he had closed the door he set a chair for her. But Anne refused it.

”I came to tell you how sorry I am to have troubled you so,” she began.

”Of course Lydia won't go on with this. She won't be allowed to. I don't know what could stop her,” Anne admitted truthfully. ”But I shall do what I can. Farvie mustn't be told. He'd be horrified. Nor Jeff. I must see what I can do.”

”You are very much troubled,” said Alston, in a tone of grave concern.

It seemed to him Anne was a perfect type of the gentlewoman of another time, not even of his mother's perhaps, but of his grandmother's when ladies were a mixture of fine courage and delicate reserve. That type had, in his earliest youth, seemed inevitable. If his mother had escaped from it, it was because she was the inexplicable wonder of womankind, unlike the rest and rarer than all together.

Anne looked at him, pleading in her eyes.