Part 54 (1/2)

”The necklace was stolen. It was taken out of this house. Who took it?”

Jeffrey had not for a moment wondered whether he might be asked. But now he saw Lydia as he had left her, in her childish misery, and answered instantly: ”I took it.”

Alston Choate gave a little exclamation, of amazement, of disgust. Then he drew the matter into his own judicial hands. ”Where did you take it from?” he asked.

Jeffrey looked at him in a grave consideration. Alston Choate seemed to him a negligible quant.i.ty; so did Esther and so did Madame Beattie. All he wanted was to clear the slender shoulders of poor savage, wretched Lydia at home.

”Do you mind telling me, Jeffrey?” Alston was asking, in quite a human way considering that he embodied the majesty of the law. ”You couldn't have walked into this house and taken a thing which didn't belong to you and carried it away.”

His tone was rather a chaffing one, a recall to the intercourse of everyday life. ”Be advised,” it said. ”Don't carry a dull joke too far.”

”Certainly I took it,” said Jeffrey, smiling at Alston broadly. He was amused now, little more. He saw how his background of wholesale thievery would serve him in the general eye. Not old Alston's. He did not think for a moment Alston would believe him, but it seemed more or less of a grim joke to ask him to. ”Don't you know,” he said, ”I'm an ex-convict?

Once a jailbird, always a jailbird. Remember your novels, Choate. You know more about 'em than you do about law anyway.”

Then he saw, with a shock, that Alston really did believe him. He also knew at the same instant why. Esther was pouring the unspoken flood of her persuasion upon him. Jeff could almost feel the whiff and wind of the temperamental rush. He knew how Esther's belief set upon you like an army with banners when she wanted you also to believe. And still he held the little crumpled packet in his hand.

”Will you open it?” Alston asked him, with a gentleness of courtesy that indicated he was sorry indeed, and Jeffrey laid it on the table, unrolled the paper and let the bauble lie there drinking in the light and throwing it off again a million times enhanced. Alston advanced to it and gravely looked down upon it without touching it. Madame Beattie turned upon it a cursory gaze, and gave a nod that seemed to accept its ident.i.ty. But Esther did not look at all. She put her hand on the table to sustain herself, and her burning eyes never once left Alston's face.

He looked round at her.

”Is this it?” he asked.

She nodded.

”Are you sure?”

”Of course I'm sure,” said Esther.

She seemed to ask how a woman could doubt the ident.i.ty of a trinket she had clasped about her neck a thousand times, and pored over while it lay in some hidden nest.

”Ask her,” said Madame Beattie, in her tiniest lisp, ”if the necklace is hers.”

There flashed into Alston Choate's mind the picture of Lydia, as she came to his office that day in the early summer, to bring her childish accusation against Esther. The incident had been neatly pigeonholed, but only as it affected Anne. It could not affect Esther, he had known then, with a leap at certainty measured by his belief in her. The belief had been big enough to offset all possible evidence.

”Ask her,” said Madame Beattie, with relish, ”where she got it.”

When Esther had cried a little at the beginning of the interview, the low lamenting had moved him beyond hope of endurance, and he had wondered what he could do if she kept on crying. But now she drew herself up and looked, not at him, but at Madame Beattie.

”How dare you?” she said, in a low tone, not convincingly to the ears of those who had heard it said better on the stage, yet with a reproving pa.s.sion adequate to the case.

But Alston asked no further questions. Madame Beattie went amicably on.

”Mr. Choate, this matter of the necklace is a family affair. Why don't you run away and let Jeffrey and his wife--and me, you know--let us settle it?”

Alston, dismissed, forgot he had been summoned and that Esther might be still depending on him. He turned about to the door, but she recalled him.

”Don't go,” she said. The words were all in one breath. ”Don't go far. I am afraid.”

He hesitated, and Jeffrey said equably but still with a grim amus.e.m.e.nt: