x.x.xII

The next morning, a sweet one of warmth and gently drifting leaves, Esther went to call on Lydia, and Madame Beattie, with a satirical grin, looked after her from the window. Madame Beattie's understanding of the human mind had given her a dramatic hold on the world when the world loved her, and it was mechanically serving her now in these little deeds that were only of a mean importance, though, from the force of habit, she played the game so hard. Esther was very fresh and pretty in her white dress with an artful parasol that cast a freshening glow. She had the right expression, too, the calmness of one who makes a commonplace morning call.

And it was not Lydia who saw her coming. It was Jeff, in his working blouse and shabby trousers, standing on a cool corner of the veranda and finishing his morning smoke before he went out to picking early apples.

Esther knew at precisely what instant he caught sight of her, and saw him knock out his pipe into the garden bed below the veranda and lay it on the rail. Then he waited for her, and she was almost amusedly prepared for his large-eyed wonder and the set of the jaw which betrayed his certainty of having something difficult to meet. It was not thus he had been used to greet her on sweet October mornings in those other days. Suddenly he turned with a quick gesture of the hand as if he were warning some one back, and Esther, almost at the steps, understood that he had heard Lydia coming and had tried to stop her. Lydia evidently had not understood and ran innocently out on some errand of her own.

Seeing Esther, she halted an appreciable instant. Then something as quickly settled itself in her mind, and she advanced and stood at the side of Jeff. Esther furled her parasol and came up the steps, and her face did not for an instant change in its sweet seriousness. She looked at Lydia with a faint, almost, it might seem, a pitying smile.

"I thought," said she, "after what I said, I ought to come, to rea.s.sure you."

Neither Jeff nor Lydia seemed likely to move, and Esther stood there looking from one to the other with her concerned air of having something to do for them. It was only a moment, yet it seemed to Lydia as if they had been communing a long time, in some hidden fashion, and learning amazingly to understand each other. That is, she was understanding Esther, and the outcome terrified her. Esther seemed more dangerous than ever, bearing gifts. But Lydia could almost always do the sensible thing in an emergency and keep emotion to be quelled in solitude.

"Come in," said she, "and sit down. Jeff, won't you move the chairs into the shady corner? We'd better not go into the library. Farvie's there."

Jeff awoke from his tranced surprise and the two women followed him to the seclusion of the vines. There Esther took the chair he set for her, and looked gravely at Lydia, as she said:

"I was very hasty. I told him--" She indicated Jeff with a little gesture. It seemed she found some significance in the informality of the p.r.o.noun--"I told him I had found out who took the necklace. I knew of course he would tell you. And I came to keep you from being troubled."

"Lydia," said Jeff, with the effect of stepping quickly in between them, "go into the house. This is something that doesn't concern you in the least."

Lydia, very pale now, was looking at Esther, in a fixed antagonism. Her hands were tightly clasped. She looked like a creature braced against a blow. But Esther seemed of all imaginable persons the least likely to deliver a blow of any sort. She was gracefully relaxed in her chair, one delicate hand holding the parasol and the other resting, with the fingers upcurled like lily petals, on her knee.

"No," said Lydia, not looking at Jeff, though she answered him, "I sha'n't go in. It does concern me. That's what she came for. She's told you so. To accuse me of taking it."

With the last words, a little scorn ran into her voice. It was a scorn of what Esther might do, and it warmed her and made her suddenly feel equal to the moment.

"No," said Esther, in her softest tone, a sympathetic tone, full of a grave concern. "It was only to confess I ought not to have said it.

Whatever I knew, I ought to have kept it to myself. For there was the necklace. You had sent it back. You had done wrong, but what better could you do than send it back? And I understand--" she glowed a little now, turning to Jeff--"I understand how wonderful it was of you to take it on yourself."

Jeff was frowning, and though facing her, looking no further than the lily-petalled hand. Esther was quite sure he was dwelling on the hand with inevitable appreciation. She had a feeling that he was frowning because it distracted him from his task of pleasing Lydia and at the same time meeting her own sympathetic tribute. But he was not. Esther knew a great many things about men, but she was navely unconscious of their complete detachment from feminine allurements when they are summoned to affairs.

"Esther," said Jeff, before Lydia could speak, "just why are you here?"

"I told you," said Esther, with a pretty air of pained surprise. "To tell Lydia she mustn't be unhappy."

Then Lydia found her tongue.

"I'm not unhappy," she said, with a brutality of incisiveness which offers the bare fact with no concern for its effect. "I took the necklace. But I don't know," said Lydia, with one of her happy convictions that she really had a legal mind and might well follow its inspirations, "I don't know whether it is stealing to take a thing away from a person who has stolen it herself."

"Lydia!" said Jeff warningly.

He hardly knew why he was stopping her. Certainly not in compa.s.sion for Esther; she, at this moment, was merely an irritating cause of a spoiled morning. But Lydia, he felt, like a careering force that had slipped control, must be checked before she did serious harm.

"You know," said Lydia, now looking Esther calmly in the eye, "you know you were the first to steal the necklace. You stole it years ago, from Madame Beattie. No, I don't know whether it's stealing to take it from you when you'd no business to have it anyway. I must ask some one."

Lydia was no longer pale with apprehension. The rose was on her cheek.

Her eyes glowed with mischief and the l.u.s.t of battle. Once she darted a little smiling look at Jeff. "Come on," it seemed to say. "I can't be worse off than I am. Let's put her through her paces and get something out of it--fun, at least."

Esther looked back at her in that pained forbearance which clothed her like a transfiguring atmosphere. Then she drew a sharp breath.

"Jeff!" she said, turning to him.

The red had mounted to his forehead. He admired Lydia, and with some wild impulse of his own, loved her bravado.

"Oh, come, Lydia," he said. "We can't talk like that. If Esther means to be civil--"

Yet he did not think Esther meant to be civil. Only he was hard pushed between the two, and said the thing that came to him. But it came empty and went empty to them, and he knew it.

"She doesn't mean to be civil," said Lydia, still in her wicked enjoyment. "I don't know what she does mean, but it's not to be nice to me. And I don't know what she's come for--" here her old vision of Jeff languishing unvisited in the dungeon of her fancy rose suddenly before her and she ended hotly--"after all this time."

Again Esther turned to Jeff and spoke his name, as if summoning him in a situation she could not, however courageous, meet alone. But Lydia had thought of something else.

"I don't know what you can do to me," she said, "and I don't much care.

Except for Farvie and Anne. But I know this. If you can arrest me for stealing from you something you'd stolen before, why then I shall say right off I did it. And when I do it, I shall tell all I know about the necklace and how you took it from Madame Beattie--and oh, my soul!" said Lydia, rising from her chair and putting her finger tips together in an unconsidered gesture, "there's Madame Beattie now."

Esther too rose, murder in her heart but still a solicitous sadness in her eyes, and turned, following Lydia's gaze, to the steps where Denny had drawn up and Madame Beattie was alighting from the victoria. Jeff, going forward to meet her, took courage since Denny was not driving away. Whatever Madame Beattie had come to do, she meant to make quick work of it.

"Jeff," said Esther, at his elbow, "Jeff, I must go. This is too painful for everybody. I can't bear it."

"That's right," said Jeff in the kindness of sudden relief. "Run along."

Madame Beattie had decided otherwise. At the top of the steps in her panoply of black chiffon, velvet, ostrich feathers--clothes so rich in the beginning and so well made that they seemed always too unchanged to be thrown away and so went on in a squalid perpetuity--she laid a hand on Esther's wrist.

"Come, come, Esther," said she, "don't run away. I came to see you as much as anybody."

Esther longed to shake off the masterful old hand, but she would not. A sad pa.s.sivity became her best unless she relinquished every possible result of the last ten minutes. And it must have had some result. Jeff had, at least, been partly won. Surely there was an implied intimacy in his quick undertone when he had bade her run along. So Madame Beattie went on cheerfully leading her captive and yet, with an art Esther hated her for, seeming to keep the wrist to lean on, and Lydia, who had brought another chair, greeted the new visitor with an unaffected pleasure. She still liked her so much that it was not probable anything Madame Beattie could say or do would break the tie. And Madame Beattie liked her: only less than the a.s.surance of her own daily comfort. The pure stream of affection had got itself sadly sullied in these later years. She hardly thought now of the way it started among green hills under a morning sun.

She seated herself, still not releasing Esther until she also had sunk into a chair by her side, and refreshed herself from a little viniagrette. Then she winked her eyes open in a way she had, as if returning from distant considerations and said cheerfully:

"I suppose you're talking about that stupid necklace."

Lydia broke into a little laugh, she did not in the least know why, except that Madame Beattie was always so amusing to her. Madame Beattie gave her a nod as if in acknowledgment of the tribute of applause, continuing:

"Now I've come to be disagreeable. Esther has been agreeable, I've no doubt. Jeff, I hope you're being nice to her."

A startled look came into Lydia's eyes. Why should Madame Beattie want Jeff to be nice to her when she knew how false Esther had been and would always be?

"Esther," continued Madame Beattie, "has been a silly child. She took my necklace, years ago, and Jeff very chivalrously engaged to pay me for it and--"

"That will do," said Jeff harshly. "We all know what happened years ago.

Anyhow Esther does. And I do. We'll leave Lydia out of this. I don't know what you've come here to say, Madame Beattie, but whatever it is, I prefer it should be said to me. I'm the only one it concerns."

"No, you're not," said Lydia, swelling with rage at everybody who would keep her from him. "I'm concerned. I'm concerned more than anybody."

Esther glanced up at her quickly and Madame Beattie shook her head.

"You've been a silly child, too," she said. "You took the necklace to give it back to me. Through Jeff, I understand."

"No, I didn't," said Lydia, in a pa.s.sion to tell the truth at a moment when it seemed to her they were all willing, for one result or another, to turn and twist it. "I gave it back to Jeff so he could carry it to you and say, 'Here it is. I've paid you a lot of money on it--'"