"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:

"I think you'd better go."

So he went out of the room and Esther was left between her two inquisitors.

XXIX

That she did look upon Jeff as her tormentor he could see. She took a darting step to the door, but he was closing it.

"Wait a minute," he said. "There are one or two things we've got to get at. Where did you find the necklace?"

She met his look immovably, in the softest obstinacy. It smote him like a blow. There was something implacable in it, too, an aversion almost as fierce as hate.

"This is the necklace," he went on. "It was lost, you know. Where did you find it, Esther?"

But suddenly Esther remembered she had a counter charge to make.

"You have broken into this house," she said, "and taken it. If it is Aunt Patricia's, you have taken it from her."

"No," said Aunt Patricia easily, "it isn't altogether mine. Jeff made me a payment on it a good many years ago."

Esther turned upon her.

"He paid you for it? When?"

"He paid me something," said Madame Beattie. "Not the value of the necklace. That was when you stole it, Esther. He meant to pay me the full value. He will, in time. But he paid me what he could to keep you from being found out. Hush money, Esther."

Queer things were going on in Jeff's mind. The necklace, no matter what its market price, seemed to him of no value whatever in itself. There it lay, a glittering gaud; but he had seen a piece of gla.s.s that threw out colours as divinely. Certainly the dew was brighter. But as evidence, it was very important indeed. The world was a place, he realised, where we play with counters such as this. They enable us to speak a language. When Esther had stolen it, the loss had not been so much the loss of the gems as of his large trust in her. When Madame Beattie had threatened him with exposing her he had not paid her what he could because the gems were priceless, but that Esther's reputation was.

And so he had learned that Madame Beattie was unscrupulous. What was he learning now? Nothing new about Madame Beattie, but something astounding about Esther. The first upheaval of his faith had merely caused him to adjust himself to a new sort of Esther, though only to the old idea of women as most other men had had the sense to take them: children, dest.i.tute of moral sense and its practical applications, immature mammals desperately in love with enhancing baubles. He had not believed then that Esther lied to him. She had, he was too sure for questioning, actually lost the thing. But she had not lost it. She had hidden it, with an inexplicable purpose, for all these years.

"Esther!" he said. She lifted her head slightly, but gave no other sign of hearing. "We'll give this back to Madame Beattie."

"No, you won't, Jeff," said Madame Beattie. "I'd rather have the money for it. Just as soon as you get into the swing again, you'll pay me a little on the transaction."

"Sell the d.a.m.ned thing then, if you don't want it and do want money,"

said Jeff. "You've got it back."

"I can't sell it." She had half closed her eyes, and her lips gave an unctious little relish to the words.

"Why can't you?"

"My dear Jeffrey, because, when the Royal Personage who gave it to me was married, I signed certain papers in connection with this necklace and I can't sell it, either as a whole or piecemeal. I a.s.sure you I can't."

"Very well," said Jeff. "That's probably poppyc.o.c.k, invented for the occasion. But you've got your necklace. There it is. Make the most of it. I never shall pay you another cent."

"Oh, yes, you will," said Madame Beattie. She was unclasping and clasping a bracelet on her small wrist, and she looked up at him idly and in a perfect enjoyment of the scene. "Don't you want to pay me for not continuing my reminiscences in that horrid little man's paper?

Here's the second chapter of the necklace. It was stolen. You come walking in here and say you've stolen it again. But where from? Out of Esther's hand-bag. Do you want the dirty little man to print that?