Part 62 (1/2)

”Who told you that?” flashed Esther. She had forgotten her patient calm.

”I told her,” said Madame Beattie. ”Don't be jealous, Esther. Jeff never would have told her in the world. He's as dumb as a fish.”

”And so he could say to you,” Lydia went on breathlessly, ”'Here's the horrid thing. And now you've got it I don't owe you money but'”--here one of her legal inspirations came to her and she added triumphantly--”'if anything, you owe me.'”

”You're a good imp,” said Madame Beattie, in careless commendation, ”but if everybody told the truth as you do there wouldn't be any drama. Now I'm going to tell the truth. This is just what I propose doing, and what I mean somebody else shall do. I've got the necklace. Good! But I don't want it. I want money.”

”I have told you,” said Jeff, ”to sell it. If it's worth what you say--”

”I have told you,” said Madame Beattie, ”that I can't. It is a question of honour,” she ended somewhat pompously. Yet it was only a dramatic pomposity. Jeff saw that. ”When it was given me by a certain Royal Personage,” she continued and Jeff swore under his breath. He was tired of the Royal Personage--”I signed an agreement that the necklace should be preserved intact and that I would never let it go into other hands.

We've been all over that.”

Jeff moved uneasily in his chair. He thought there were things he might say to Madame Beattie if the others were not present.

”But,” said Madame Beattie dramatically, ”Esther stole it. Lydia here, from the sweetest and most ridiculous of motives, stole it from Esther.

n.o.body knows that but us three and that cold-blooded fish, Alston Choate. He won't tell. But unless Jeff--you, Jeff dear--unless Jeff makes himself responsible for my future, I propose to tell the whole story of the necklace in print and make these two young women wish I hadn't. Better protect them, Jeff. Better make yourself responsible for Aunt Patricia.”

”You propose telling it in print,” said Jeff slowly. ”You said so yesterday. But I ought to have warned you then that Weedon Moore won't print it--not after I've seen him. He knows I'd wring his neck.”

”There are plenty of channels,” said Madame Beattie, with an unmoved authority. ”Journals here, journals abroad. Why, Jeff!” suddenly her voice rose in a shrill note and startled them. Her face convulsed and a deeper hue ran into it. ”I'm a personage, Jeff. The world is my friend.

You seem to think because I've lost my voice I'm not Patricia Beattie.

But I am. I am Patricia Beattie. And I have power.”

Lydia made a movement toward her and laid her hands together, impetuously, in applause. Whether Madame Beattie were willing, as it had seemed a second ago, to sacrifice her for the sake of squeezing money out of Jeff, she did not care. Something dramatic in her discerned its like in the other woman and responded. But Jeff, startled for an instant, felt only the brutal impulse to tell Madame Beattie if the world were so much her friend, it might support her. And here appeared the last person any of them desired to see if they were to fight matters to a finish: the colonel in his morning calm, his finger, even so early, between the leaves of a book. As the year had waned and there was not so much outside work to do he had betaken himself to his gentler pursuits, and in the renewed health of his muscles felt himself a better man. He had his turn of being startled, there was no doubt of that.

Esther here! his eyes were all for her. It meant something significant, they seemed to say. Why, except for an emphatic reason, should she, after this absence, have come to Jeff? He even seemed to be ignoring Madame Beattie as he stepped forward to Esther, with outstretched hand.

There was a welcome in his manner, a pleasure it smote Lydia's heart to see. She knew what the scene meant to him: some shadowy renewal of the old certainties that had made Jeff's life like other men's. For an instant under the spell of the colonel's belief, she saw Jeff going back and loving Esther as if the break had never been. It seemed incredible that any one could look at her as the colonel was looking now, with warmth, even with grat.i.tude, after she had been so hateful. And Esther was receiving it all with the prettiest grace. She might even have been pinning the olive leaf into her dress.

”Well,” said he. ”Well!”

Lydia was maliciously glad that even he could find nothing more to say.

”What a pleasant morning,” he ended lamely yet safely, and conceived the brilliant addition, ”You'll stay to dinner.” As he said it he was conscious, too late, that dinner was several hours away. And meantime Esther stood and looked up in his eyes with an expression for which Lydia at once mentally found a name: soulful, that was what it was, she viciously decided.

Madame Beattie gave a little ironic crow of laughter.

”Sit down, Esther,” she said, ”and let Mr. Blake shake hands with me.

No, I can't stay to dinner. Esther may, if she likes, but I've business on my hands. It's with that dirty little man Jeff's got such a prejudice against.”

”Not Weedon Moore,” conjectured the colonel. ”If you've any law business, Madame Beattie, you'd far better go to Alston Choate. Moore's no kind of a man.”

”He's the right kind for me,” said Madame Beattie. ”No manners, no traditions, no scruples. It's a dirty job I've got for him, and it takes a dirty man to do it.”

She had risen now, and was smiling placidly up at the colonel. He frowned at her, involuntarily. He was ready to accept Madame Beattie's knowing neither good nor evil, but she seemed to him singularly unpleasant in flaunting that lack of bias. She was quite conscious of his distaste, but it didn't trouble her. Unproductive opinions were nothing to her now, especially in Addington.

”You're not going, too,” said the colonel, as Esther rose and followed her. ”I hoped--” But what he hoped he kept himself from saying.