Part 46 (1/2)

”She'd rather give you the diamonds,” said Lydia.

”My dear, she sets her life by them. Do you know what she's doing when she goes to her room early and locks the door? She's sitting before the gla.s.s with that necklace on, cursing G.o.d because there's no man to see her.”

”You can't know that,” said Lydia.

She was trembling all over.

”My dear, I know women. When you're as old as I am, you will, too: even the kind of woman Esther is. That type hasn't changed since the creation, as they call it.”

”But I don't like it,” said Lydia. ”I don't think it's fair. She hates Jeff--”

”Nonsense. She doesn't hate any man. Jeff's poor, that's all.”

”She does hate him, and yet you're going to make him pay money so she can keep diamond necklaces she never ought to have had.”

”Make him pay money for anything,” said the old witch astutely, ”money he's got or money he hasn't got. Set his blood to moving, I tell you, and before he knows it he'll be tussling for dear life and stamping on the next man and getting to the top.”

Lydia didn't want him to tussle, but she did want him at the top. She had not told Madame Beattie about the ma.n.u.script growing and growing on Jeff's table every night. It was his secret, his and hers, she reasoned; she hugged the knowledge to her heart.

”That's all,” said Madame Beattie, in that royal way of terminating interviews when she wanted to get back to literature. ”Only when he begins to address his workingmen you tell me.”

Lydia, on her way downstairs, pa.s.sed Esther's room and even stood a second breathlessly taking in its exquisite order. Here was the bower where the enchantress slept, and where she touched up her beauty by the secret processes Lydia, being very young and of a pollen-like freshness, despised. This was not just of Lydia. Esther took no more than a normal care of her complexion, and her personal habits were beyond praise.

Lydia stood there staring, her breath coming quick. Was the necklace really there? If she saw it what could she do? If the little bag with the necklace inside it sat there waiting to be taken to New York, what could she do then? She fled softly down the stairs.

Addington was a good deal touched when Jeffrey Blake took the old town hall and put a notice in the paper saying he would give a talk there on American History in the administration of George Was.h.i.+ngton. He would speak in English and parts of the lecture would be translated, if necessary, by an able interpreter. Ladies considered seriously whether they ought not to go, to encourage him, and his father was sure it was his own right and privilege. But Jeff choked that off. He settled the matter at the supper table.

”Look here,” said he, ”I'm going down there to make an a.s.s of myself.

Don't you come. I won't have it.”

So the three stayed at home, and sat up for him and he told them, when he came in, at a little after ten, that there had been five Italians present and one of them had slept. Two ladies, deputed by the Woman's Club, had also come, and he wished to thunder women would mind their business and stay at home. But there was the fighting glint in his eye.

His father remembered it, and Lydia was learning to know it now. He would give his next lecture, he said, unless n.o.body was there but the Woman's Club. He drew the line. And next day Lydia slipped away to Madame Beattie and told her the second lecture would be on the following Wednesday night.

That night Jeff stood up before his audience of three, no ladies this time. But Andrea was not there. Jeff thought a minute and decided there was no need of him.

”Will you tell me,” said he, looking down from the shallow platform at his three men, ”why I'm not talking in English anyway? You vote, don't you? You read English. Well, then, listen to it.”

But he was not permitted to begin at once. There was a stir without and the sound of feet. The door opened and men tramped in, men and men, more than the little hall would hold, and packed themselves in the aisles and at the back. And with the foremost, one who carried himself proudly as if he were extremely honored, came Madame Beattie in a long-tailed velvet gown with a s.h.i.+ning gold circlet across her forehead, and a plethora of jewels on her ungloved hands. She kept straight on, and mounted the platform beside Jeff, and there she bowed to her audience and was cheered. When she spoke to Jeff, it was with a perfect self-possession, an implied mastery of him and the event.

”I'll interpret.”

After all, why not fall in with her, old mistress of guile? He began quite robustly and thought he was doing very well. In twenty minutes he was, he thought, speaking excellently. The men were warmly pleased. They sat up and smiled and glistened at him. Once he stopped short and threw Madame Beattie a quick aside.

”What are they laughing at?”

”I have to put it picturesquely,” said Madame Beattie, in a stately calm. ”That's the only way they'll understand. Go on.”

It is said in Addington that those lectures lasted even until eleven o'clock at night, and there were pet.i.tions that The Prisoner should go to the old hall and talk every evening, instead of twice a week. The Woman's Club said Madame Beattie was a dear to interpret for him, and some of the members who had not studied any language since the seventies, when they learned the rudiments of German, to read Faust, judged it would be a good idea to hear her for practice. But somebody told her that, and she discouraged it. She was obliged, she said, to skip hastily from one dialect to another and they would only be confused; therefore they thought it better, after all, to remain undisturbed in their respective calm. Jeff sailed securely on through Lincoln's administration to the present day, and took up the tariff even, in an elementary fas.h.i.+on. There he was obliged to be drily technical at points, and he wondered how Madame Beattie could accurately reproduce him, much less to a response of eager faces. But then Jeff knew she was an old witch. He knew she had hypnotised wives that hated her and husbands sworn to cast her off. He knew she had sung after she had no voice, and bamboozled even the critics, all but one who wrote for an evening paper and so didn't do his notice until next day. And he saw no reason why she should not make even the tariff a primrose path.