Part 68 (1/2)

Madame Beattie was still not moved except by mild amus.e.m.e.nt. Anne left the chair and took a step nearer.

”Madame Beattie,” she said, ”you don't believe a word I say. But I mean it. You've got to go out of this house, or I shall put you out of it with my hands. With my hands, Madame Beattie--and I'm very strong.”

Madame Beattie was no coward, but she was not young and she had a sense of physical inadequacy. About Anne there was playing the very spirit of tragic anger, none of it for effect, not in the least gauged by any idea of its efficiency. Those slender hands, gripping each other until the knuckles blanched, were ready for their act. The girl's white face was lighted with eyes of fire. Madame Beattie rose and slowly a.s.sumed her cloak.

”You're a silly child,” she said. ”When you're as old as I am you'll have more common-sense. You'd rather risk a scandal than tell Jeff he has a debt to pay. By to-morrow you'll see it as I do. Come to me in the morning, and we'll talk it over. I won't act before then.”

She walked composedly to the door and Anne scrupulously held it for her.

They went through the hall, Anne following and ready to open the last door also. But she closed it without saying good-bye, in answer to Madame Beattie's oblique nod over her shoulder and the farewell wave of her hand. For an instant Anne felt like slipping the bolt lest her adversary should return, but she reflected, with a grimness new to her gentle nature, that if Madame Beattie did return her own two hands were ready. She stood a moment, listening, and when the carriage wheels rolled away down the drive, she went to the big closet under the stairs and caught at her own coat and hat. She was going, as fast as her feet would carry her, to see Alston Choate.

x.x.xVII

Alston Choate was working, and he was alone. Anne, bright-eyed and anxious, came in upon him and brought him to his feet. Anne had learned this year that you should not knock at the door of business offices, but she still half believed you ought, and it gave her entrance something of deprecation and a pretty grace.

”I am so troubled,” she said, without preliminary. ”Madame Beattie has just been to see me.”

Alston, smiling away her agitation, if he might, by a kind a.s.sumption that there was no conceivable matter that could not be at once put right, gave her a chair and himself went back to his judicial seat.

Anne, not loosening her jacket, looked at him, her face pure and appealing above the fur about her throat, as if to beg him to be as kind as he possibly could, since it all involved Lydia.

”I've no doubt it's Madame Beattie,” said Alston carelessly, even it might have been a little amused at the possibilities. ”If there's a ferment anywhere north of Central America she's pretty certain to have set it brewing.”

Anne told him her tale succinctly, and his unconcern crumbled. He frowned over the foolishness of it, and considered, while she talked, whether he had better be quite open with her, or whether it was sufficient to take the responsibility of the thing and settle it like a swaggering G.o.d warranted to rule. That was better, he concluded.

”I'll go to see Madame Beattie,” he said. ”Then I'll report to you. But you'd better not speak to Lydia about it. Or Jeff. Promise me.”

”Oh, I'll promise,” said Anne, a lovely rose flush on her face. ”Only, if Lydia is in danger you must tell me in time to do something. I don't know what, but you know for Lydia I'd do anything.”

”I will, too,” said Alston. ”Only it won't be for Lydia wholly. It'll be for you.”

Then for an instant, though so alive to her, he seemed to withdraw into remote cogitation, and she wondered whether he was really thinking of the case at all. Because she was in a lawyer's office she called it a case, timorously; that made it much more serious. But Alston, in that instant, was thinking how strange it was that the shabby old office, witness of his unwilling drudgery and his life-saving excursions into the gardens of fiction, should be looking now on her, seated there in her earnestness and purity, and that he should at last be recognising her. She was a part of him, Alston thought, beloved, not because she was so different but so like. There was no a.s.sault of the alien nature upon his own, irresistible because so piquing. There were no unexplored tracts he couldn't at least fancy, green swards and clear waters where a man might be refreshed. Everything he found there would be, he knew, of the nature of the approaches to that gentle paradise. What a thing, remote, extraordinary to think of in his office while she brought him the details of a tawdry scandal. Yet the office bore, to his eyes, invisible traces of past occupancy: men and women out of books were there, absolutely vivid to his eyes, more alive than half the Addingtonians. The walls were hung with garlands of fancy, the windows his dreaming eyes had looked from were windows into s.p.a.ce beyond Addington. No, these were no common walls, yet unfitting to gaze on while you told a client you loved her. After all, on rapid second thought, it might not seem so inapt seen through his mother's eyes, as she was betraying herself now in more than middle age. ”Ask her wherever you find yourselves,” he fancied his mother saying. ”That is part of the adventure.”

Alston looked at Anne and smiled upon her and involuntarily she smiled back, though she saw no cause for cheerfulness in the dismal errand she had come on. She started a little, too, for Alston, in the most matter of fact way, began with her first name.

”Anne,” said he, ”I have for a long time been--” he paused for a word.

The ones he found were all too dignified, too likely to be wanted in a higher cause--”bewitched,” he continued, ”over Esther Blake.”

The colour ran deeper into Anne's face.

”You don't want,” she said, ”to do anything that might hurt her? I shouldn't want to, either. But it isn't Esther we're talking about. It's Madame Beattie.”

”I know,” said Alston, ”but I want you to know I have been very much--I've made a good deal of a fool of myself over Mrs. Blake.”

Still he obstinately would not say he had been in love. Anne, looking at him with the colour rising higher and higher, hardly seemed to understand. But suddenly she did.

”You don't mean--” she stammered. ”Mr. Choate, she's married, you know, even if she and Jeff aren't together any more. Esther is married.”

”I know it,” said Alston drily. ”I've wished they weren't married. I've wished I could ask her to marry me. But I don't any longer. You won't understand at all why I say it now. Sometime I'll tell you when you've noticed how I have to stand up against my cut and dried ways. Anne, I'm talking to you.”